by Alber, Lisa
“Steady on, magpie,” Liam said. “Stave off that Joe. He’d as soon report the truth as turn down a pint.”
“Let him rot,” Kevin said.
“Go on now. Get rid of him.”
Kevin longed to kick Kate’s stilettos out from under her. Instead, he stumbled toward the reporter. Around him, tourists stood about like moony eejits, crows argued from the rooftops, and clouds flitted in front of the sun. The normality of it all sickened him now that his world had tilted off its axis. He clamped down on questions, only too aware that he knew less than nothing; that he couldn’t let himself feel the shock until later; that this was a moment he’d lose sleep over for months to come.
Kevin clasped Joe’s bony elbow to maneuver him out of earshot yet still within view of Liam and Kate—Liam’s daughter, his sister—fucking hell he needed a pint. He forced a just-one-of-the-lads tone into his voice. “You’re after the gossip, I know it. If this is the start, I’m slobbering for what’s to come. Something in the air this year, eh?”
Joe nodded. “And here I was thinking the same thing. Your candor does you proud.”
“If I don’t have it out with you now, next thing I’ll read about is Liam’s lover’s spat with a lassy half his age.”
Joe’s gaze stroked up and down Kate’s body at the same moment she tapped Liam’s bad hand, which curled in on itself like an anemone. Their similarities were eerie and obvious: the same attenuated height, the same in-your-face stance, the same slight Roman curve to the nose. Here was Liam’s true bloodline staring them down, and Kevin could do nothing but distract Joe the Journalist before he jumped to the correct conclusion.
“Liam with that skirt?” Joe said. “Might do the old fella well enough, mind. The readers like that kind of thing.” He paused. “But that’s not what I—”
“No news here. Just a woman who’s about to be banned from the festival.”
“Yes, yes.” Joe’s pencil jittered to release its lead onto paper. “What’s your thinking on Lonnie’s death now?”
Kevin wrested his gaze away from Kate and Liam. A tourist sauntered past with a dripping Guinness, and Kevin thirsted after a sip to lessen the edge. The festival’s unofficial logo—Liam’s leather-bound tomb of a book—emblazoned the glass stein. Other tourists wore T-shirts festooned with the same image. Matchmaking Festival, Lisfenora, 2008.
“You don’t know the latest news about the case?” Joe asked.
“Apparently not. But you need to talk to the Garda like the rest of your lot.”
“Come on now, give your local lad a scoop over the Dublin bastards. They’ll find you quick enough anyhow.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I have it from the source, old Sheedy herself, that earlier this morning she unlocked her bin for the collector, opened it up, and discovered a bloodied-up blanket.”
Kevin couldn’t keep his mind straight with Kate hovering so close to Liam. But now, thank Christ, she stepped away from him, her gaze leaking its iciness into her smile. Liam sagged but regained his composure with a chest-expanding breath. He returned to the divan and aimed a reassuring nod at his waiting guest.
Kevin regained Joe’s eye and not a moment too soon. “What was the question?”
“What about the blanket? Off the record.”
Kevin walked toward his truck, clutching his keys until they bit into his palm. Joe kept pace with him. “How the hell do I know? Besides, you think I’d trust you to sniff my shit and call it stinking after last year?”
Joe affected a wounded look. “What else could I do? There was no evidence to support Emma’s allegations.”
“Fucking hell if there wasn’t. I saw the photos myself. I talked to her doctor. Lonnie raped her after last year’s birthday party.”
“Why didn’t she press charges? Why didn’t the DPP?”
Kevin slammed his keys into the truck, felt them dig into his palm a little more. Last year, Joe’s impeccable logic had him suggesting that perhaps Kevin was the one trumping up the charge against Lonnie out of spurned jealousy. And perhaps Kevin later beat the living shite out of Lonnie to further his claim that Lonnie was a rapist.
“Not my fault Emma wasn’t convincing,” Joe said.
Kevin poked the man’s chest with his keys. “The O’Briens had her so cowed she could barely talk—or were you too thick to grasp that? She took their money rather than face the shame in public. Certifiable, she was. Lonnie raped her because he could, and he did so to get back at me. Why else did he all of a sudden show interest in her and ask her out to Liam’s party last year?”
“Yes, and there you were talking to her at the party this year, none too happy, and neither was she, looked to me. You think others aren’t wondering about you? You were that lucky not to get jail time for the assault, full stop.” Joe held up an arm as if to ward off a blow. “All I’m saying is that you’re already the favorite, so give us some pleasure then. A quote about the blanket, no more.”
“The O’Briens pointed the finger my way before Lonnie’s body was cold. Nothing has changed. He gets away with rape, and I’m the sorry bowsie again a year later. There’s your quote.”
Kevin pulled the truck door open so fast it caught Joe in the thigh. He accelerated away before the urge to rip off Joe’s writing hand overtook him. The booth would just have to stand empty for a while.
The rest of the day saw him stopping for a pint on his way to the first construction site out Doolin way. From there to the second site, another pint. From there back to Lisfenora to fetch Liam, a third. By that time, all he felt was bewildered and lost, a remnant of his little-boy self, the boy who’d shuffled toward candle glow that shivered with the exhalation of nuns’ voices lifted in hymn. He’d squirmed under the hand that nudged him toward an echoing room redolent of candle wax, damp wool, and wood polish. “You’re a big boy now, ready to join the others in the pews.”
But he was never ready for change. Not then, not now. The alcohol wasn’t enough to numb the sting of betrayal that assailed him at the thought of Liam entertaining not one long-lost daughter, but two, and of Liam secreting away his mystery letter all these weeks.
Back at the plaza at four, Kevin ushered Liam into the car for the drive home. “Don’t talk to me, old troll. I might implode.”
“I know it, but just so you know, Kate has some of her facts wrong.”
“But not the orphanage. She was there too.”
Liam didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. Not long after Kevin’s first visit to the sanctuary, he’d heard Liam’s voice for the first time. Liam had clutched a plaster cast to his chest, the same cast that Kevin would later decorate with crayon squiggles in rainbow colors. Cradling his broken hand, Liam gazed around the orphanage playroom. “Who’s the patron saint of feck-all situations?” he’d asked, earning an admonishment from Sister Ignatius. Even now, Kevin recalled the answer: St. Jude, patron saint of desperate circumstances.
Liam Donellan’s journal
Timing is everything, my boy, and the timing back in 1975 was abysmal. My poor Julia, she of the diabolical allure, carefree laugh, and sincere—and ultimately futile—attempts at objectivity. She didn’t know what surrounded us until it was too late.
First, that pompous ass, Andrew McCallum. I never told Julia that he’d ordered me to match them together the night she pushed him at me for the sake of her article. Just like that, he’d decided on her. I denied his request—if for no other reason than because requests go against my festival rules—and assumed that would be the end of his impertinence. Little did I know that he was a man who loved nothing so much as winning the deal, out-strategizing the opponent, cutting out the middleman. He was money-making scum who chose the woman to best fit his lifestyle. No doubt she ended up an asset inside his gilded cage, God rest her.
Andrew and I were chemically repulsed at first sight, much like you and Lonnie. We’d have avoided each other with the territorial instinct of the great cats if not for Julia.
<
br /> And there’s more. As these things go, there usually is.
• 22 •
Later that evening, still smarting from the day’s revelations, Kevin stared at the bowl fighting to emerge from a prime piece of imported manzanita root burl. It spun on the lathe at a decelerating rate while he sucked on a finger. He’d been too distracted to take care with the chisel, and now the bowl’s profile was irretrievably lopsided.
Sisters, two of them. The fact of them gnawed at him.
He loosened the screws that anchored the wood to the horizontally rotating faceplate and lobbed the block toward the rejects pile in the corner of the studio. It ricocheted off the closest set of shelves, causing Liam’s plaster cast to fall. As automatic as a football goalie, Kevin leapt sideways and caught the ragged memento in midair before crashing to the floor.
He lay there still catching his breath when a footstep landed on the outside stoop. He turned over, expecting—no one, in reality, and certainly not Danny looking as wan as John the Baptist before the beheading.
“Sweeping the floor with your clothes?” he said.
Kevin held up the plaster cast. Danny had once asked him what it meant to him, this sad-sack souvenir that was nothing but a soiled tube of plaster in the shape of a skinny wrist. Answer: home.
“How goes the investigation?” Kevin said as Danny pulled him up.
“Tsk, against the rules to ask, but since you’re asking”—he flashed his mocking grin of old—“I’ll answer. Shittier than a backed-up bowel.”
“Your men find anyone who saw me when I left the party? I was probably out back pissing with the other drunks. Better than waiting for the loo anyhow.”
“There’s nothing but alcoholic fuzziness so far. It will take weeks to talk to everyone who was at the party. It’s bloody chaos. Walked through the village to check the crime scene, and I’ve never been more popular. And the tourists are photographing themselves in front of the café. Love, lust, and murder, what more could the skivers want?”
“Wish I could help you, truly.”
“You’re in luck. I’m meant to fetch you in for questioning, with your permission of course. Clarkson wants to watch the interview live.”
“Now?”
“Riding us all hard.”
Kevin twisted his torso back and forth with a back-cracking groan. “We’ll have to drop Liam off at the pub first. He’s on dinner break just now.”
They trudged to Liam’s house. Liam sat innocently enough at the dining table with its neat piles of mail. His matchmaking ledger sat before him. He’d already ticked off a few names with colored tabs. Under his elbow, a legal pad displayed other notes.
“I don’t like the looks of you two,” he said.
“Clarkson wants Kevin in so he can tell the O’Briens we’re making progress,” Danny said.
“Surely you have a better suspect by now,” Liam said.
“Merrit Chase for reasons I’m not saying.”
Liam’s expression turned inward. After an unusual delay, he responded with, “Ah, I see,” and went back to scanning his ledger.
Kevin almost laughed at Liam’s disinterested act. If Kevin could lay a wager, he’d have thought Kate the sister with the killer instinct. But then, what did he know? Merrit was the poster child for still waters and deep reservoirs and all that bollocks.
“No treating Merrit with the family-friendly touch then,” Kevin said to Danny but with an eye on Liam, who frowned.
Danny waved his recorder toward Liam. “I need another round with you before we take off. Kev, take note so you don’t fall all over your sorry self with Clarkson.”
Kevin collapsed onto a dining chair. They ought to be laughing over stupid tourist antics and eating Kevin’s specialty eggs with pork and parsley. Instead, Danny turned on the recorder, introduced the interview with Liam, and pulled a photo from his pocket. The image showed a wood-handled knife stained with blood. Kevin opened his mouth then closed it at a glare from Liam. Danny passed on his own silent warning. Shut up and pay attention.
“Mr. Donellan,” Danny said for the benefit of the recording, “do you recognize this object?”
“I wondered where that had got to,” Liam said. “I rather like that old knife. I bought it from a Galway man years ago. Fine work, isn’t it?”
“This is the murder weapon.”
“I assumed that, my dear boy. I used it to cut gift ribbon as you well know, and before you ask, yes, dozens of people saw me. Ask Sean and Brendan and Martin and Seamus and Raymond—the Harkin brothers. They gave me a blow-up doll, the tossers.”
“So you or your son brought this knife to the party—”
“No surprise there. Kevin grabbed it off my desk before we left. Alan never gives up his bar knives. The man’s so stingy he wouldn’t give you steam off his piss.”
Danny rubbed a smile off his face. “Let’s return to the provenance of this knife. It’s well known that your son works wood. In fact, I wondered myself when I saw it at the scene. Was this hilt designed by your son, Kevin Donellan?”
“No, as I said, that’s my knife, from Galway.”
Relief passed over Danny’s features, nevertheless, he continued with, “Some might say the woodwork bares a remarkable resemblance to your son’s work before he began wood turning.”
“Kevin used this old thing as a model, that’s all. Mimicry, you know, that’s how artists get started. In fact, I’ll wager he designed dozens of such hilts in an effort to perfect his technique, then either tossed or gave them away.”
“When did you notice this knife go missing at the party?”
“When indeed?” Liam frowned, thinking. “It was after eleven thirty by the time I unwrapped the last gift. After that, I don’t know. The crowd was obliterated by then. No one was paying me any mind.”
“So your son could have picked up the knife without your knowledge.”
“By Christ, anyone could have picked it up without my knowledge. That’s hardly a significant point against my son.”
***
“End interview.” Danny clicked off the recorder. A headache throbbed behind his eyeballs. “I’m walking a tightrope here, gents. I was supposed to bring O’Neil with me tonight for protocol’s sake, and that’s just the beginning of it.”
Kevin fidgeted, then rose to pace around the dining table.
“Whatever else you do,” Danny continued, “keep your temper with Clarkson. You hear me, Kev?”
“Oh, that’s rich. Let’s see you keep your temper—oh never mind—I need a drink.”
Kevin disappeared into the kitchen. Oaths and slamming cabinet doors followed.
Liam closed the ledger and picked up his velvet coat. “At least he’ll know how to answer your questions about the knife when you get him to the station. Bless you for that, good Danny. It does look similar to some he’s made in the past, but it’s my knife, and I’ll swear to it again if I have to.”
Danny stroked the leather cover that protected Liam’s matchmaking lists. The giant book looked like a hand-me-down from Merlin the Magician, and it hadn’t changed since Danny’s childhood. The same cracked leather in dark green, the same binding that Liam unfastened as required, the same specialty paper stock with shredded edges and a vellum hue. Liam made it all seem so simple.
“He’ll be all right,” Liam said. “We’ll see to it, won’t we now?”
“Remember the tightrope.”
They sank into silence, listening to Kevin stomp around the kitchen. Finally, he returned with flushed cheeks. Liam handed him a roll of breath mints from his pocket.
After dropping off Liam, Danny drove Kevin to the Garda station through a twilight that softened rock walls and turned silage bundles into silhouettes. From the backseat, Kevin’s irate grumblings lifted into actual words. “It’s no coincidence, you know. Lonnie’s death. My sisters arrive at the same time but separately, and he dies not long afterwards. And Merrit Chase, your suspect. She’s one sister.”
; Danny braked in surprise. “As in Liam’s biological daughter?”
“Thought you’d like that.” Kevin waved fingers through the air. “The wondrous symmetry of it all, like a macabre dance. We’re pawns to the jig Merrit and some cow named Kate—the other daughter—are ringing around the lot of us.”
“Merrit mentioned a Kate, but I haven’t had a chance to follow up on her yet.”
“There you go—things aren’t what they seem. This Kate, she’s a gem, believe me, and her gaze about shriveled me up to nothing.” Kevin’s voice whispered like a loss of faith. “There’s no mistaking her resemblance to Liam.”
A few minutes later Danny pulled into the Garda station parking area. The building stood on the noncoastal about a half mile from the plaza and with nothing to mark it as Garda except a small blue sign. The men sat while the engine ticked and dusky clouds lined up along the horizon. The wind was up, a sign of summer’s passing.
Danny called O’Neil, who appeared a minute later from the pub around the corner from the Garda station. “You owe me one,” O’Neil said with a good-natured grin. “Shall I do the honors?”
O’Neil positioned himself behind Kevin and propelled him forward by the elbow. Danny followed. Once inside, they passed through a door that unlocked with a code and dropped them into a realm of messy desks, stale coffee, ringing telephones, and on-duty guards. Clarkson loitered within the incident room, where whiteboards filled the walls and that morning’s leftover pastries dried out on the conference table. He waved Danny to a stop and ordered O’Neil to escort Kevin to an interview room.
“How goes the investigation?” Clarkson said.
“Steady on all fronts.”
Clarkson tapped a pen against the conference table. “Two days with exactly no progress in other words. Worse yet, today I learned from the O’Briens that you and our suspect are best mates in the pints.”
“Which is not hampering the investigation.”
“Is that so?” He waved a stapled sheaf of papers in Danny’s face. “You mind explaining this then?”
