Whispers in the Mist

by Lisa Alber

  “That Maggie, such a kind nurse,” Malcolm continued. “It never takes me long to draw people out, and I did ask about Ellen, obviously. Maggie was only too empathetic and as a family friend she didn’t see the harm in telling me what she’d heard.”

  “Did you just say ‘family friend’?” Danny leapt off the bed, ready to head butt the smarmy bastard into next century. In the nick of time, the doctor in question came abreast of Malcolm.

  “Mr. Ahern, I’m glad I’ve caught you. We need to talk.”

  FORTY-NINE

  A KNOCK STARTLED MERRIT. Milk spilled down Gemma’s chin. But, like a doll, Gemma was impervious to the inconvenience and mess. The knock sounded again, louder. Merrit waited, hoping for a reaction out of Gemma, but when none came at the third knock, she rose. She opened the front door to find Danny in his black trench with cockeyed collar. He looked like a drowned man, face puffy and pale and blurry.

  She blinked in surprise. He blinked in surprise. A thousand questions flitted through her brain, but he preempted her. “Why aren’t you on the plaza with Liam?”

  “Liam is fine for today. I needed a breather from the festival.” She opened the door wide to let him pass. If he noticed her swollen lip, he didn’t let on. Merrit returned to feeding Gemma. “I sent Dermot out for a break. He might be at your house packing up his and Gemma’s stuff, if you want to talk to him.”

  Danny paced around the couch a few times before throwing off his coat. He crowded in next to Merrit on the couch. She stiffened at the unaccustomed proximity of him, his smell like lavender and antiseptic, the press of warmth.

  “I need Gemma to wake up,” he said. “I need her to remember John McIlvoy.”

  Merrit slipped a spoon with one milk-soaked corn flake on it into Gemma’s mouth. A hair curl swung forward and blocked her mouth. Danny moved it out of the spoon’s way.

  “With McIlvoy out there, Gemma is still in danger.” It may have been Merrit’s imagination, but she thought she saw a spasm of fear deep within the blank depths of Gemma’s eyes. “How come no one’s talking to Malcolm? He knows the man.”

  Danny snorted. The puff of air tickled Merrit’s ear. “Oh, I’m doing my best when it comes to that, but Superintendent Clarkson has his own ideas. Nathan Tate’s the one looking at a charge for assault while Malcolm”—Merrit glanced up when Danny spat out his name—“is in his good graces.”

  Danny leaned around Merrit to catch hold of Gemma’s chin. A gentle nudge turned her head. Danny stared into her near-black eyes. “What will bring you out of there, Gemma McNamara?”

  He let go of Gemma’s chin at the sound of a car braking to a halt outside the door. “That will be Nathan. I told him to meet me here.”

  “The guards let him go?”

  “For now. He’s all right. He dislikes Malcolm even more than I do.” Danny hooked her gaze, studying her. “You must know what I’m talking about.”

  She did. Malcolm’s affair with Ellen. Liam heard everything through the Lisfenora grapevine.

  Merrit opened the door to see Nathan’s fist about to knock on her forehead. Despite the chill, he only wore a baggy sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, displaying powerful forearms.

  Nathan faltered when he caught sight of Danny. “No disrespect intended but you look like skewered shite.”

  “Nice of you.” Danny rolled to standing. “Did you bring it?”

  Nathan shifted his head toward Merrit.

  “Hardly matters, does it?” Danny said. “We’re all of us outcasts at the moment. And Merrit doesn’t have anyone around the village to confide in anyhow, except Liam, and he’s okay.”

  “Gee, thanks.” It was the truth but he didn’t need to be so matter-of-fact about it. Merrit settled a blanket over Gemma’s shoulders. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “This.” Nathan pulled a chain out of his jeans pocket, at the end of which dangled a shimmering blue stone.

  “Where did that come from?” she said.

  “This is the necklace that was found on my dad’s body. It came back to me as next of kin.”

  He rehashed the story in a few quick sentences. Nathan held a Firebird Designs necklace found on dead John McIlvoy, who wasn’t John McIlvoy but Sean Tate, and, logically—if any logic existed—the necklace shouldn’t have come within miles of a down-and-out Limerick man.

  “Dermot identified the necklace as his mother’s,” Danny said, “stolen off her corpse by John McIlvoy.”

  “If he wants it back, it’s his,” Nathan said. “It’s nothing to me.”

  “Now we need to find the matching earrings, the ones that disappeared off Toby Grealy.”

  “Oh.” Merrit stirred uneasily. “Gemma told me about the matching set. You’re sure this is her mother’s necklace?”

  “Yes,” Danny said.

  Merrit plucked the necklace from Nathan’s fingers, still unnerved, but now certain about one thing, a thing that Danny might have noticed if he wasn’t a typically clueless male when it came to jewelry.

  But she needed to be sure before she said anything, because what she was thinking wasn’t good. Not good at all.

  FIFTY

  DANNY LEANED AGAINST THE wall, fatigue and the ever-present burble of anger making him limp. A skimpy patch of light lit the necklace that Merrit held up in front of her. She made a noise, a pensive click of the tongue, and turned away to burrow into a pile of clothes draped over the rocking chair that stood in the corner of the room. The floorboards creaked when the chair swung into motion, sounding eerily female and sad. Ellen flashed through his head.

  “Could you stop that thing rocking?” he said.

  Merrit nodded and unfurled a quilted, waterproof jacket. “Gemma’s,” she said. She rifled its pockets until she found what she was looking for and showed it to him. The black box with the earrings that Danny wished he’d never seen.

  Merrit retreated into the kitchen, saying the light was better there. Danny followed with Nathan fast on his heels. By the time he entered, Merrit had the black box opened and sitting on the kitchen table beside the necklace. The pendant sparkled with the same luminous blue hue as the earrings.

  Merrit picked up one of the earrings and squinted at its backing. The stone was set into what Danny would describe as a backless silver frame that allowed light to play through the stone.

  “There it is, but we knew that already,” she said.

  “You need a microscope to see,” Nathan said.

  “The jeweler stamped in his signature beside where he soldered on the post. Something that looks like an F. For Firebird.” Merrit turned over the necklace Nathan had brought. “Same here.”

  Merrit held an earring up to the light, then the pendant. She squinted at the pendant’s silver backing, then back at the earring. “These are a set, made to be worn together. We don’t need Dermot to confirm that both these pieces were his mother’s. Which means—”

  “Show me your proof,” Danny said.

  She handed him the opal jewelry and directed his gaze to where she pointed on the back of the pendant and also on the back of one of the earrings.

  Merrit had good eyes. It took Danny several seconds of blinking to bring three lines into focus. The same three lines in the same configuration on each piece. He wouldn’t have noticed them, and if he had, he would have taken them for a scraggly backwards N, some kind of artistic signature. But now he deciphered a 1/1.

  “One-slash-one. So?”

  “So, according to what Malcolm taught me when I brought my necklace in for repair, this means that this design was a one-off. The only one of its kind. These earrings and this necklace are a matching pair. They were designed together.”

  The ramifications hit Danny like an ax buried into his brain. “This whole bloody time these earrings were staring me in the face? In my house? Pointing the way?”

  Danny banged open a cupboard, pulled down the Glenfiddich, and swallowed a mouthful straight from the bottle. The whiskey burned ri
ght back to his optic fibers, sending fireworks through his vision. Whatever scant objectivity he’d maintained had just evaporated. McIlvoy. He’d entered Danny’s life, dared to make jewelry that insinuated itself into his family, jewelry that Malcolm had given Ellen.

  He wasn’t sure whom he wanted to nail more, Malcolm or McIlvoy.

  Merrit was explaining to Nathan that if the necklace used to belong to Siobhan McNamara—which it had, according to Dermot—then the earrings had also. And since the earrings were Siobhan’s, then these were also the earrings that Toby Grealy was wearing when he died, and if these were the earrings he was wearing, which they were, then somehow Malcolm had gotten his hands on them, given them to Ellen, who’d given them to Gemma, bringing them full circle back into the McNamara family.

  “That’s twisted,” Nathan said. “So that must mean Malcolm offed Toby Grealy because how else—”

  “He has an alibi,” Danny said.

  “So then McIlvoy.”

  “Perhaps so. The talented Mr. McIlvoy.” Danny swigged again and let the dizziness ride through him, welcoming it. Sublime chaos, that was what it was, full stop. He banished the image of Toby’s infected earlobes. Those tender bits of skin carrying all the boy’s hope by way of a pair of opal earrings.

  “Hold on there,” Nathan said. “Why didn’t Gemma recognize her own mother’s earrings?”

  “Somewhere inside her, she did,” Merrit said. “She recognized something about my necklace also, so I expect it was the generalities of the look rather than the specifics, you know what I mean?”

  “Near enough,” Nathan said.

  Danny set the whiskey aside. “Near enough isn’t good enough. Never is. Ellen is near enough to life to be called alive, yet we won’t be getting any insights from her about Malcolm and the timing of their rendezvous the night Toby died. She’s not near enough to consciousness for that. In fact, she may never be again. Ellen may never wake up. Ever.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  DANNY STOOD IN THE dark breathing through his mouth. A part of him observed himself from afar with something between shame and surprise. He hadn’t known that he cared about his marriage to this extent, much less that he could be moved by rage and jealousy. He’d held back on his emotions for too long—especially when it came to Ellen—and now here he stood in Malcolm’s flat with lock picks and a metaphorical ax of loathing to grind.

  And he felt grand. Like a maverick cowboy from a classic John Wayne film. He’d hear about this break-in from Clarkson, but Danny was on compassionate leave. A civilian—kind of. A civilian who had gone around the bend.

  So be it.

  He’d vetoed his own idea to interrupt Malcolm’s fancy date at the fancy French restaurant. He’d pictured the lilies that Malcolm had brought Ellen, the way he’d avoided looking at her. No, not avoided. Avoidance implied some kind of emotional reaction. Malcolm had simply not cared enough to see her.

  Danny felt along the wall through the kitchen area. The endless fog had retracted its tendrils and moonlight glanced off the spit-shined countertops. A faint glow from streetlights saved him from knocking over the scalloped Waterford vase located pride of place in the center of a sideboard. Malcolm owned plenty of expensive bits and pieces, no doubt bought at his wholesale discount.

  A set of bookshelves displayed classics bound in creamy leather. Gold-embossed lettering announced Beckett, Faulkner, Dickens, and the rest of the usual literary canon. Danny pulled out Shakespeare and opened it at random. The book spine creaked. A new-book smell of glue and paper and tooled leather wafted up at him.

  Cervantes, Rilke, and Tolstoy proved to be in the same immaculately unused condition. Danny stepped away from the books, admiring how well they appeared next to the reading chair and lamp with a tulip-shaped shade.

  Continuing on, he reached the bathroom. He closed the door and turned on the light. A contact lens case, along with an electric toothbrush, sat on the counter. Malcolm was proud of his teeth, wasn’t he? He liked to flash them around.

  Inside the medicine cabinet Danny found colognes, deodorant, aspirin, dental floss. The usual, but Danny was expecting more for some reason. He backed out of the bathroom, turning out the light, and let his fingers trail over the wall until he came to the closet. A quick look confirmed that Malcolm loved his fancy suits to go with his fancy dates at fancy French restaurants.

  Danny hovered near the bed, gazing out at stars and church spires, trying to absorb the essence of the man who lived here. Elusive, but he was here, somewhere.

  From the bed, Danny retraced his steps to the kitchen area.

  One of the cabinets held a bottle of Calvados brandy. Malcolm was true to his word when he said he wasn’t one to drink alone. To maintain a trim figure, he said. The man was obsessed with his trim figure and dapper appearance.

  Once again, Danny’s mind ricocheted back to Ellen, pale and limp in her hospital bed, the massive bandage encasing her head, the feeding tube chafing her nostrils, the catheter bag dangling beside the bed. Malcolm had fooled her with his charm.

  But then, she’d been ripe for the fooling. Danny had left her to wander her own sad orbit alone.

  Continuing where he’d left off with the Glenfiddich at Fox Cottage, Danny chugged a mouthful of Calvados, sputtering at its burn. He peered at a bulletin board hung beside the refrigerator. Snapshots showed Malcolm in the midst of his Lisfenoran life, smiling on the threshold of his shop, smiling on a plaza bench with newspaper folded over his knee, smiling at what looked to be a committee meeting for some local event, smiling in Alan’s pub.

  The images centered on Malcolm and only Malcolm amidst random arms and legs. The star of his own Malcolm Show.

  Danny tipped back a long, lingering sip of Calvados, now savoring its initial harshness and noting the earthy apple and cinnamon aftertaste. He decided that Ellen would like it.

  He emailed John McIlvoy from his mobile. Come out of hiding and meet me at Malcolm’s flat. I dare you.

  Within five minutes he had his answer: Tempting, but I’m more for disappearing. —The Talented Mr. McIlvoy

  Danny tried the door to Malcolm’s workroom—double-locked—and settled himself on a rolling chair to gaze at the play of streetlight through the Waterford vase. The Calvados glided down this throat, stinging less than the nagging sense that he was missing a crucial connection.

  FIFTY-TWO

  MERRIT ROUSED HERSELF WITH a jerk and stumbled out to the living room where Gemma slept on the couch next to the fireplace. She surveyed the lamp she’d left on as a nightlight, the banked peat fire, and Gemma curled under three blankets. All as it should be.

  She checked her mobile. Dermot had texted. He’d decided to drive to Dublin in the middle of the night to fetch his Aunt Tara back to Lisfenora. Arrival sometime in the morning.

  “Shoot.”

  Returning to the bedroom, she sank onto the bed and tossed around for a while. But it was no use. There was no way she was falling back asleep now. She turned on the bedside lamp. A framed photo of the Ahern family in happier times stood next to the lamp. Laughing Mandy and Petey with a hugely pregnant Ellen. Merrit angled the picture toward the lamplight for a closer look.

  Ah, jeez. She closed her eyes, pressing the picture against her chest. How much could a man like Danny take?

  He had crashed out of the house hours earlier. She’d felt a peculiarly male steam coming off him, a mix of impotence and recklessness and determination. If he was thinking clearly, he hadn’t shown it.

  And here she was, in his bed, precisely where the villagers had thought she’d been cavorting all along. How perfectly ironic.

  A faint creak settling into the sound of the wind rattling the casement windows drew her out of bed again. Merrit peeked out the curtains but saw nothing but darkness. The inactivity, the waiting, the expectation of an answer gnawed at her. Gemma lay in the living room like a totemic cipher, inviting the rest of them to circle around her in prayerful desire for her to bequeath her secrets unto
them.

  In the living room, Merrit poked at the peat pellets until they glowed orange. There had to be food in the house besides the cereal she’d brought. A draft slithered around her ankles as she entered the kitchen. She froze at the sight of the back door creaking on its hinges. A long line of night stared back at her. Grey Man, she thought. Could be it was about to ooze inside and flip her off her feet and drag her away into the murk.

  “Oh, stop it.”

  She pushed the door to slam it good and shut, but the wood pushed back. Hard. Her face exploded in pain. She bent over and cupped her nose as footsteps shambled past her, none too steady, stealthy, or fast.

  Catching her breath, she ran into the living room. She gasped at the sight of a man with hands encircling Gemma’s throat.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled. “Seamus, stop!”

  She grabbed Seamus around the shoulders and used her body weight to pull him away from Gemma. He fell on top of her in a fug of unwashed grief and struggled like a stuck beetle before rolling off her. Merrit scrambled to her feet, but as quickly as the violence had occurred, it died.

  Seamus approached Gemma again. He raised his hands, but this time his shaking fingers grabbed at air before landing on Gemma’s shoulders. Gemma opened her eyes and stared into space.

  Merrit despaired of her. If Seamus’s hands around her neck weren’t enough to wake her up, then what would?

  Merrit grabbed Seamus by the arm. He almost went down again, but she managed to prop him up and push him toward the bedroom, picking up a wrought iron fire poker on the way. She let go of Seamus and pointed the poker at him.

  Seamus buried his face in his hands. His Hail Marys and Holy Fathers lacked conviction, as if he knew it was too late for him.

  “Have you gone insane?” Merrit said.

  Seamus was too caught up in misery to heed her, now muttering that he didn’t know where it had all gone wrong.