The Man on the Cliff

by Janice Macdonald

  Wide-awake now, she got out of bed and wandered over to the window, stared out at the dark night. The turrets of the castle had disappeared in the blackness. Why did no one else share her belief? Even Patrick, who had previously dismissed the gossip about Moruadh, now saw Niall as the most likely suspect in Elizabeth’s death.

  Back on the bed, she sat cross-legged, gnawing at her thumbnail as she tried to think. Why hadn’t she asked him about the locket? Should she report it to the Gardai anyway? Regardless of her feelings. As if they needed more ammunition against him. Tomorrow, she thought. She would definitely ask him about it tomorrow. The cynic scoffed. Sure, he’s bound to have a great explanation. Lots of men carry lockets around in their pockets. Just a coincidence that a murdered girl happened to be missing hers. But you’ll buy whatever he says, of course. One question, though. Would you be such a staunch believer in his innocence if he weighed three hundred pounds and had a glass eye?

  THE QUESTION KEPT KATE awake for much of the night. And by the time watery gray light filtered through her bedroom window, she still couldn’t answer it. Bleary-eyed, she pulled on her navy UCLA sweatshirt and jeans and went downstairs. As usual, the smell of bacon frying greeted her, but in the kitchen, she found Annie weeping at the stove.

  “Annie.” Kate came to stand beside her, put her arm around Annie’s shoulders. “What can I do?”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do short of bringing Elizabeth back,” Annie said. “All we can hope is that they bring him in before he does it again.”

  Kate went still. Bring him in. Annie hadn’t needed to say Niall’s name. Kate knew exactly who she meant. Annie obviously had no doubt about who had murdered Elizabeth. Kate watched the steam rising from the blue-and-white kettle on the stove, saw Niall’s face as he’d stood at the door to the castle last night. She took two cups from the cupboard, reached into the refrigerator for milk. It struck her that this bright kitchen with its blooming daffodils and baking aromas felt more like home than her own kitchen in Santa Monica. “We were worried about you,” Annie had said last night. Just before she’d accused Kate of taking leave of her senses.

  The image of Annie and Patrick, both in their dressing gowns, drinking mugs of cocoa as they stood at the window watching for her car, clogged her throat with tears. In just over a week, Kate reflected, Annie had managed to fill the spot in Kate’s heart that had been vacant since her mother’s death.

  Annie. Niall. Two people who had suddenly become the center of her world. Did loving one mean betraying the other? The phone rang, and Annie went off to answer it.

  “That was Michael,” Annie said a few moments later. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but they’ve found another piece of evidence that links Mr. Maguire to Elizabeth. A film box up there on the cliff, right where the detectives say Elizabeth was pushed. It’s only a matter of time, Katie, before they bring him in.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NIALL MAGUIRE IS JUST another interview subject, Kate told herself as she pulled into the harbor to meet him. Ultimately, his guilt or innocence isn’t your problem. Either way, you’ve still got a story to write. A paycheck to earn, bills to pay. Objective, detached, that’s the attitude du jour. Objective, detached. She kept saying the words in her head like a mantra. Objective, detached. Objective, detached. They rang as hollow as the feeling in her stomach.

  Engine idling, she waited for a truck, loaded with bales of hay, to pull out then drove into the empty spot and turned off the ignition. Spots of rain splashed on the windshield. Huge purple clouds, bruised and sodden, massed over the ocean. On the car’s hood, a couple of gulls fought over an orange peel. According to the dashboard clock, it wasn’t quite twelve.

  She pulled down the driver’s mirror and peered at her reflection. Frizzed-out hair and freckles in basrelief. With a sigh, she dug in her purse for lipstick and a compact, did a quick repair job. Okay, maybe he wasn’t exactly just another interview subject, but there would be no long, lingering looks and she absolutely would not kiss him. And, somewhere in the far recesses of her mind, she would try to accept the idea that his innocence had not been entirely established.

  Rain spattered down on the roof of the car. The windows began to steam. Where was her brush? She dug it out, dragged it through her hair. The green numerals on the dashboard clock clicked over to 12:05. He was late. She folded her arms across her chest, unfolded them, opened the sack of raisin buns she’d bought at the bakery in Cragg’s Head. Picked three raisins out of one of them. Checked the time by her watch. Seven minutes past.

  One of the gulls on the hood flew off. Objective, detached. Objective, detached. Even if he explained everything. Even if he removed every single doubt about his innocence. She pulled down the mirror again. Checked her teeth. Two schoolboys in green uniforms raced by the car, laughing as they swatted each other with their schoolbags. Objective, detached. A tap on the window made her start.

  Niall. Looking through the glass at her. Eyes exactly the same color as the ocean. Gray eyes from now on would always remind her of Ireland.

  She rolled down the window. A burst of cool, damp air hit her face. He wore the same sheepskin jacket he’d had on the first night she’d seen him. In the damp air, his hair curled slightly. Objective, detached.

  “You’re late,” she said. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “The time? I do.” He didn’t look at his watch. “Between noon and one exactly.”

  “It’s twelve-ten.” A womanizer, she told herself. As soon as you’re gone, there’ll be someone else. “Twelve-ten,” she repeated. “Which means you’re ten minutes late. Fifteen minutes is my limit. For anyone.”

  “D’you know the Irish philosophy on time?”

  “No, I don’t.” He had nicked himself shaving. Just above his lip. Objective, detached.

  “God made plenty of it, so it doesn’t hurt to waste a little.”

  “Time is money,” she retorted. “That’s the American philosophy. I make sixty bucks an hour, which means you owe me about seven dollars.”

  “Will Irish currency do?”

  “I’ll send you a bill.”

  “Right.” A drop of water trickled down the side of his face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Am I to stand out here in the rain then?”

  She unlocked the door, pushed it open and scooted back against the driver’s door as he climbed inside. All arms and blue-jeaned legs, he grinned and shook off water, filling the small space with the sort of barely restrained exuberance that made her think of a schoolboy in a stuffy parlor.

  “Uh-oh.” He reached beneath him, pulled out the bakery bag and peered inside. “I think I’ve squashed your buns a bit. Sorry.”

  “It won’t affect the taste, I’m sure.” She offered him the bag. “Lunch is on me.”

  “Thanks.” He took one, held it in his hand. “Hello, Kate.”

  “Hi.” As she met his eyes, the charge that zipped through her body told her that the front seat of a small car with fogged-up windows was not the best place for an interview. Objective, detached. She brushed a crumb from her lap, sifted among the ashes of her resolve. Tried to fan them into flame. Thinks he’s going to charm you into bed. Bad news. Don’t look at him again.

  “Did I warn you I’d come armed with questions? If I didn’t, I should have.” To demonstrate that she meant business, she reached into the back seat for her notebook. As she did, her arm brushed his shoulder. She took a quick breath. “There’s a lot of talk in Cragg’s Head. About Elizabeth’s murder. Actually, that’s an understatement. The village is consumed by it.”

  “I’m sure that’s true.”

  “Almost everyone seems convinced you did it.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “Tell me about Elizabeth.”

  “What specifically about Elizabeth?”

  “Was she more to you than a student?”

  He broke the bun in half, studied the two pieces for a moment. “If you’re asking whether
I slept with her, I didn’t.”

  Her head lowered, Kate stared at the notebook on her knees. Words blurred into meaningless scribble. In her peripheral vision, she could see the knees of his jeans, the sleeve of his jacket. The air in the car seemed to have congealed. She moved in the seat to screen the notebook from his view. Drew a square and then an interlocking square.

  “So she was just a beautiful young girl that you were supposed to meet Monday night? A date, you might say?”

  “Elizabeth was a student in my class who showed some promise,” he said quietly. “I offered to help her with a new camera she’d bought. Looking back, I can see that it probably wasn’t a wise thing to do, but I’m not always a very good judge of things like that.”

  “Meaning.”

  “Meaning that I should have recognized that her motives for meeting me might not have been the same as my own.”

  “She had a crush on you, you mean?”

  “She might have. If she did, I didn’t recognize it.”

  “The locket she always wore was missing when they recovered her body.” She drew another square. “I happened to see a necklace drop from your pocket Monday night.” She looked at him. “Just a coincidence?”

  “No, Kate. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was probably Elizabeth’s necklace. I turned it in to the Gardai when I went to the station yesterday. As I told them, I found it on the cliffs.”

  “And did they buy it?”

  “If you’re asking whether they believed me, I don’t know. They’ve got a new superintendent who seems eager to prove his worth. I’m their star suspect. Small wonder.”

  She met his eyes for a moment.

  “Sure, it’s the constant stream of women I have up to the castle day and night, not to mention the suspicious similarity to Moruadh’s death. It’s a miracle I’m out walking the streets.”

  Kate stared very hard at the frayed patch on the knee of her jeans. When she was ten, she’d been falsely accused of taking a school friend’s lunch money. Later, the girl discovered that she’d mislaid the money and apologized. Even now, Kate realized, she could feel the stinging sense of shame. She looked up at him. In the car’s shadowy interior, he looked pale and a little weary.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Do?”

  “Have you spoken to an attorney?”

  “It will all blow over,” he said. “There’ll be a bit of a witch-hunt for a few days, as there was after Moruadh, but it will blow over.”

  “Speaking of Moruadh…”

  “What about her?”

  “Why won’t you discuss her?”

  “Because I’ve no interest in reading anything more about her in print.”

  “Even if it helps to clear your name?”

  He shrugged. “My conscience is clear,” he said, an edge to his voice now. “It’s enough.”

  “Someone described you as overprotective of Moruadh.” She flipped through the pages of her notebook for Fitzpatrick’s quote. “‘An intrusive presence in her life.’ Any thoughts on that?”

  He said nothing, sat facing the windshield, his expression unreadable.

  “Why did you feel she needed protection?” She thought of Rory McBride’s bizarre tale of Moruadh stretched out, naked, in the flowers. “Was she mentally unstable?”

  He rolled down the window and flung out the crumbled remains of the bun. Immediately, a flock of gulls swooped down. Their raucous cries filled the air. After a moment, he closed it. Shut out the damp chill, the bird sounds.

  “One of Moruadh’s friends called her ‘mercurial.’” Again Kate consulted her notes. “‘Had her ups and downs,’ was the way she put it.”

  His face remained completely blank.

  “Did you love her, Niall? Did she love you?”

  He said nothing. He remained completely still.

  “I came to Ireland because I wanted to know for sure how she died. I thought you’d killed her. I absolutely can’t buy that now. I don’t care what people say. So that takes me back to another possibility. Suicide. Did she kill herself because of a man? Was it you?”

  “Who’s asking, Kate?” He looked directly at her. “You or the journalist wanting to fill in the blanks of her article?”

  “Maybe both. What difference does it make?”

  “All the difference in the world. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but it’s between the two of us, because I want you to know. It’s not for your article.”

  “What if I use it?”

  “You won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ll trust you.”

  She looked at him, and neither of them spoke. His eyes, pale as the sky, fixed on her face. His words— I’ll trust you, he’d said—lingered in the air. Her nose prickled with tears, and she stared at her notebook, not trusting herself to speak. A moment later she looked up and met his eyes again.

  “God, Niall…” She swallowed, tried to speak and then all pretense at objectivity fled. Her arms went around him, and they sat holding each other, her face buried in his collar. Through his open coat, she felt the warmth of his body, his heart beating against her chest. She closed her eyes, pressed her mouth and nose into the sheepskin, breathed in the smells of wool and rain and ocean. She wanted not to think. The hell with reason and logic and everything else. All she wanted was the feeling she had when she was with him. He pulled away, looked at her for a moment.

  “Moruadh killed herself. I hid her suicide note from the Gardai.” He sighed. “It’s a long story…”

  THEY WERE MARRIED in Paris. He was on assignment; Moruadh, touring throughout Europe. He’d found an ancient flat near the Pompidou Center. Three flights up over a Chinese restaurant. The whole flat reeked of chop suey. It was April and, as he walked home along the Rue de Bouberg, he found himself humming. Life felt good, full of promise. Plans to go down to Provence for a week, an upcoming exhibit. The one cloud was Moruadh. He’d not seen or heard from her since she’d left almost a month earlier. Typical, but hardly the relationship he’d once envisioned. Still, he’d long ago resigned himself to the fact that the weather around Moruadh would never be calm.

  As he turned the corner to his street, he saw a line of dustbins along the curb and, alongside them, what he first thought was a bundle of old clothes. It wasn’t until he brushed past to press the security code on the front door that he saw something move. Then he looked down and did a double take.

  “My God. Moruadh.” He hardly recognized her. Strands of matted, unwashed hair poked out from under the dirty blue scarf she’d tied around her head. Her face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed. He pulled her to her feet. “What happened? I’ve been trying to reach you—”

  “No. Don’t speak.” Weeping, she clutched his arm, fell against him. “Just hold me. Please.”

  They stood in the middle of the narrow street, his arms around her as she sobbed on his shoulder. Through her clothes, her body felt boneless, limp with grief. Eventually, he grabbed her small bag and managed to get her up the flights of stairs. Inside the flat, whatever reserves she had briefly drawn upon disappeared. She collapsed facedown onto the bed.

  “I’m pregnant.” Her voice was muffled by the pillow. “He went back to his wife.” Her body shook. “I thought he loved me, but he lied.” In a sudden movement, she was up from the bed, pacing the room, her eyes wild and darting. “He said he loved me, but he lied to me. God, I can’t stand this. Why? Why?”

  He said nothing. He had no answers. The only thing to do, he knew from past experience, was to let it play out. So he sat in the filtered late-afternoon light as the woman he loved hurled herself about the room. A wild bird who had accidentally flown in through an open window and was trapped. The light faded and the room grew dark and, in the way it had happened so many times before, Moruadh finally exhausted herself and fell asleep.

  He woke the next morning to find her sitting on the edge of the bed watching him. Her hair still damp from the shower, her e
yes the clear blue of the sky after a storm. They left the flat and walked down to the Seine.

  “Sorry.” Her back against the railing, she smiled up at him. She wore a long red dress with pearl buttons down the front and flat black shoes like ballerina slippers. “Can you forgive me?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Moruadh. We’ve been down this same road too many times before. You’re a storm that swoops into my life every so often, tears it all apart and then you’re gone.”

  “Until the next time I show up.” She turned to face the water. A moment later, she looked directly at him. “Something has changed, hasn’t it?”

  He felt a stab of impatience. “I don’t hear from you for God knows how long and then suddenly you’re back as though nothing’s amiss. How could you not expect things to change?”

  “It’s the spells.”

  “You’ve stopped taking the medicine.”

  “It was making me fat.”

  “My God, Moruadh.” Exasperated, he shook his head at her. “Couldn’t you have just spoken to the doctor?”

  “You don’t love me anymore.”

  “I’ll always love you.”

  “But not as you did.”

  “I want a life of my own. I’d prefer that it be with you, but I can’t go on this way. I hate this sense I have of myself as some sort of self-sacrificing saint with nothing more to do than to be swept up into your vortex.”

  “That’s not the way I see you.”

  “It’s the way I feel. Something in me dies every time you leave.”

  “If I could undo it all, I would.” Tears filled her eyes. “All that I’ve done to make you unhappy.”

  He said nothing.

  “I love you.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “When I’m feeling all right—like myself, you know—there’s no one I want in my life but you. But then something comes over me. It’s like a wave that sweeps all inhibitions away.”

  “Reason, too,” he said with a wry smile.