by Dorien Kelly
Liam could sense Vi spooling out the rope by which he was to hang. Last night, when she’d dropped him at Muir House and then told him that she needed some time to herself, he’d not argued. Neither had he shown the foresight to negotiate detailed terms. “Some time” had already eaten into the waking hours he had left in Ballymuir.
After breakfast and a raft of business calls he’d had to make, Liam rang both Vi’s house and her studio, but didn’t raise her. Jenna assured him that phone-unplugging was standard Kilbride behavior. Just past noon, he set himself on Vi’s trail. The studio was empty, and despite his insistent pounding, her house’s door was going unanswered. He knew by the car out front and the dog peering through the window at him that she was there.
Frustrated, he pounded again. “Dammit, Vi, come let me in!”
“I’m thinking she doesn’t want to see you,” called a voice from across the street. Liam looked over to see an elderly man, eyeglasses perched low on his nose, standing on the opposite stoop.
“She just requires some persuading,” Liam answered, then knocked up the door again and shouted even more loudly. All he got in response was Roger’s gruff bark.
“Five euros says you can’t convince her to let you in,” the neighbor called, pulling a billfold from his back pocket.
“You’re on,” Liam yelled back, then rubbed his cold hands together for at least a little warmth.
Despite what he’d said to Vi’s neighbor, Liam knew that she wasn’t the sort to succumb to persuasion once her mind was set. And he damn well couldn’t reason his way to her though a locked door. His best hope was to raise her ire.
He knocked again, and inside Roger’s barking grew more agitated. Liam smiled, for the dog’s irritation was his inspiration.
Drawing a deep breath, he tipped back his head and let loose a long, loud, mournful howl. It was convincing enough that on the other side of the window Roger joined in, and across the way, Vi’s neighbor gave a hoot of laughter. Liam stretched the sound as far as he could. Wind exhausted, he paused, then started again.
Vi’s front door flew open, and he stopped mid-howl.
“Are you mad?” She looked up and down the street at the tightly-set houses. “You’ve got everyone to their windows. What am I to do with you?”
“You could always let me inside,” Liam suggested.
“I’m working.”
He took in her clothing—a too-large men’s shirt and a faded and tattered pair of paint-smeared denims—and then her face, the side of which was also smudged with green paint.
“So I see, but I’m afraid the isolated, suffering artist bit is going to have to wait. We need to talk, Vi.”
“Tomorrow, then. I’m tired.” She went to close her door, but he wedged his shoulder into the gap.
“No, you don’t. I’ve got five euros on the line.” And one hell of a lot more than that, but he’d made the mistake of trying to bare his heart to her last night, and he’d not do it again. At least not until he was back from the States and had the time to learn what was making her pull away. “Just let me in, Vi.”
“Put away your money, Mr. Hanratty,” Vi said to her neighbor, who now stood on the walk, five-euro note in hand.
“So you’ll not be letting him in?” the man asked, hope in his voice.
“Sorry, but I will.”
“Then it’s his.”
Liam accepted the five-note, for this was a matter of a man’s honor. Vi pinched it from his fingers before he could pocket it, though.
“It’s going to charity, for neither of you deserve it,” she said.
Laughing, Mr. Hanratty crossed to his side of the street, and Liam worked his way into Vi’s house before she changed her mind. The smell of paint was thick in the air, and the place wasn’t much warmer than the outdoors.
Vi walked toward the kitchen, and Liam followed, wondering why the hell he hadn’t spent at least part of the morning deciding how to broach matters. Ah, well, it was improvise now…or die.
“I’ve—” he began to say, but halted, trying to grasp what was taking place in her kitchen. The floor was littered with balled-up pieces of paper, but that was the least of it.
She’d just recently painted the chairs to her table a green that matched her nan’s wild cupboard, which at least explained the paint fumes and the open kitchen window. Among the other items on her table sat a fat jar of strawberry preserves with a knife beside it. Judging by the plate with nibbled crusts nearby, some of the preserves must have made it onto toast. A fair amount more was spread like a lumpy single-hued rainbow across a white sheet of paper, too.
“Do I want to know what that’s about?” he asked, pointing at the paper.
“Just considering the color.”
He decided not to ask for what.
“I’m guessing you wanted to talk about something more than the mess in my kitchen,” she said as she picked up a pencil and a sketchpad from the cluttered table.
“I do.” Uncomfortable, he looked around for a place to sit, but that would be impossible unless he wished to be green-arsed. “I’ve mentioned Alex, my former business partner, haven’t I?”
“You have,” Vi said, her hand flying across the sketchpad.
“Well, it seems he’s gotten the attention of some law enforcement types, and by extension, they’re interested in me.”
“But you’ve done nothing wrong…right?” She glanced away from her pad long enough to give him a guarded look.
“Only if fool complacency is criminal.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, thinking that he was getting nowhere dancing around this. “The problem is, I have to go back to America. In fact, you might say that my presence has been compelled.”
She set down the pad and pencil. “You’ve got a dangerous fondness for springing this sort of thing, don’t you? When are you leaving?”
“Early tomorrow.” He’d said the words quickly, rather like one extracted a sliver.
“Tomorrow,” she repeated with at least a surface calm. “And how long have you known this was to happen?”
Liam hedged. “I know it doesn’t look good, me waiting until now to tell you, but—”
“How long?”
“A while.”
She signaled her dislike of his answer with a frown. “Care to be more specific?”
Actually, he didn’t, but he saw no way out.
“That it would happen eventually…weeks, now. But I didn’t have the details until a few days ago. And I want you to come along,” he said, the last bit of inspiration just coming to him.
“Well then,” she said, “at least I should be honored you’ve asked me…this time.”
He’d known that she would allude to their last parting, and he’d also known that it would be a stab to both his heart and pride.
“See?” he said. “This is why I waited to tell you. I damn well knew you’d find some way to bring a summer fifteen years gone into this.”
She might be carrying those memories like chains dragging behind her, but he was, too. He stalked closer, angry enough that he wanted his face in hers.
“You knew I was with no other girl that last night,” he said. “You knew deep inside that it was Brian you’d seen leaving with the tourist, and yet you used it as one more reason to claim you’d been betrayed. If anyone did the betraying, it was you, Vi.”
“I betrayed no one,” she said flatly.
“You betrayed us. All I wanted was to get out of Duncarraig and make something of myself. It was no sin against you. Yet you turned your back on me so hard that even Nan couldn’t get you to sway. I told you I’d be back for you when I was through with school, and still you acted like a damn child.”
She took a step backward and gripped the edge of the table. “Of course I did. I was seventeen!”
“You were. But now you’re in your thirties and too old to be feeling wronged over events that were as much your fault as mine. I forgave you. I’d think since you were hurt far less—”
Adrenaline surged, yet shock kept him in his spot, trying to understand what had just happened.
“Jesus, Violet. And here you’ve been calling yourself a pacifist all these years. What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Vi was whiter than he’d ever seen her, which was saying much. Her chest heaved, and she looked as though she might either cry or launch herself at his throat. Liam felt as though he faced a stranger. Perhaps he did.
She spun away from him. “Get out.”
“Do you at least want to tell me why I deserved that?”
“I said, get out!”
Liam stood there a moment more, deciding what to do. Vi had wrapped her arms about her midsection, as though hugging herself. Despite his anger, he wanted to hold her. She clearly felt nothing the same about him.
“I’m leaving, if that’s what you want,” he said.
Fool optimist to the end, he waited for her reply, but none came. She didn’t even turn back to look at him.
“I’ll be at Muir House tonight,” he said. “And I’ll be sure to leave my Boston numbers with Jenna. I’m hoping to be gone less than a month. When I return…and don’t be thinking I won’t…we’ll get to the bottom of whatever has you aiming for my head.”
He stepped around the jammy mess on the floor. The sight started his anger simmering all over again.
“And Vi, I love you, but you throw like a girl.”
As Liam walked to the front door, Roger trotted behind him.
“Keep an eye on her, my friend,” Liam said, then left.
All things considered, it was a marginally better parting than the one fifteen years ago. Last time, she’d ripped out his heart. This time, at least he’d managed to keep his head.
Cleaning could be cathartic. At least that was what Vi attempted to persuade herself as she readied to attack her kitchen. Cleaning was also the nearest to wielding a brush as she’d come in the week since Liam had left. And even a scrub brush was a step closer to sanity.
She’d been mad, throwing that jar at him. She wouldn’t eat meat, for it meant the harm of another creature, yet she’d aimed for his head with every intention of knocking him senseless. It had been as though her self-control had been obliterated when he’d claimed she’d been the less hurt of the two of them.
Lucky man he was, indeed, that she threw like a girl. And luckier woman she was that the sound of the jam jar shattering had startled her out of her rage. She’d managed to at least guard her tongue and not rashly blurt out what he needed to be told carefully and quietly.
He’d called in the past week, of course. While she’d quickly apologized for throwing the preserves at him, she’d avoided any discussion of why she’d done so, for that was best done face-to-face. She’d instead told him that she’d already received an offer from a couple to purchase Nan’s property, and how word had it that Duncarriag’s treasure hunters were beginning to find more productive pastimes. He’d said little of his interviews with the authorities, but had mentioned that he’d agreed to sell what was left of his business. They were tiptoeing across the surface of matters, but it was a start.
Vi looked about the kitchen and decided that top down seemed a reasonable approach to cleaning. She wet a rag, wrung it out until it was just damp, and then carried it to Nan’s cupboard.
“You’re one grand dust-gatherer,” she said to the piece.
She wasn’t sure the statement Nan had been trying to make by attaching such an array of found items. No matter what their shapes, all were decorated with varying patterns of concentric rings and shields of knot-work. The end result of all the attachments was a surface so rife with nooks and crannies that even Kylie in nesting mode couldn’t have cleaned it well.
Smiling at a passing thought of baby Maggie, who already ran her parents’ house and had stolen the entire family’s hearts, Vi reached up on tiptoe to wipe the cupboard’s top rim. When she brought the rag back down to refold it to a clean surface, she winced. It carried small dollops of the strawberry preserves she’d flung. To be sure, Vi touched her fingertip to one bit, and it was sticky.
“Soap’s in order,” she said, as was a boost so that she could see what she was doing. Vi rinsed and readied the rag, then dragged her sturdiest chair to the cupboard. One thorough pass over the top of the cupboard’s face wasn’t enough. It seemed the jam had bonded with the paint’s surface.
Vi scrubbed more vigorously. This had been Nan’s, and Vi wanted it perfectly tended. Determined to have this right, she concentrated on the outer perimeter of one of five round pieces on the rail.
“Not there yet,” she said to herself, then started as a small wave of numbness rippled through her hand, up her wrist, and nearly to her elbow. The sensation was the same as when her iron had once shorted out while she was ironing. She’d tossed the evil appliance and quit wearing clothing that had required its services. She could hardly do the same with Nan’s piece.
Vi checked the rag to see if perhaps it was a sliver that had nipped her.
“Bloody hell.”
There was no sliver, but she’d cleaned the finish right off Nan’s work. Flecks of the cupboard’s green base paint speckled the rag. She stepped off the chair and stood at the kitchen sink, water running as she rinsed the cloth and fought down a wave of remorse. Had she not thrown the jam in the first place and had she not been so concerned about having the cupboard perfect, it would be intact. Instead, she’d ruined it.
Danny came wandering into the kitchen, just home from work.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You look as though someone’s kidnapped Roger, but he’s snoring on the sofa.”
“Can you see anything wrong with the cupboard?”
Danny glanced over at it. “Other than it’s green, which I hate, and one of the ugliest things Nan ever painted, no.”
Vi hauled him closer and pointed. “Up top. Can’t you see where the paint’s flaked down to the wood?”
“No.”
“It is, and I just did it while cleaning.”
“So then you have a distressed finish. Michael’s got customers who pay extra for those.” Danny shook his head. “You scare me sometimes, Vi. If it weren’t for the fact that you’re still a bloody slob about the house, I’d be afraid you’re turning into Mam, the way everything has to be just so.”
“I’m nothing like Mam. I’m so not like Mam that I’m the anti-Mam.”
He laughed. “You’re more like her than you think. You’re both crazed perfectionists.”
“I’m not!”
Danny snorted. “Aye, and I’m not wanting a beer.” He went to the fridge, pulled one out, then said, “The cupboard looks fine. Find something else to obsess over.”
He left the room before she could tell him to get stuffed. With nothing else to do, she glared toward the sound of his feet as he pounded upstairs. Bloody elephant.
“Obsess. Right,” Vi muttered, trying to brush off the comment. It wouldn’t leave, though, for he’d hit too close to her secret fear—that she’d be anything like her rigid, “all must be perfect or it might as well be trash” mam.
Vi pulled a chair away from the table and sat. She thought back to Liam pushing her to sell her work when she was sure it wasn’t ready. And then she considered her behavior the night of Maggie’s birth, which naturally then led to thoughts of her own physical flaws—damned imperfections—that made her unable to have a babe of her own. And when she reexamined her actions in each instance, what she saw was a woman so immobile that she might as well be encased in amber.
Could her raw, large-footed, and often emotionally oblivious brother be seeing things she’d missed? Was she so obsessed with having things right that she’d stopped moving forward altogether?
A voice—not from Nan or the spirits, but from deep inside Vi—was whispering yes. She was harder on herself than Mam had ever been.
Vi’s palms grew clammy and her stomach unsettled. She would think no more about the way her inadequacies circled in on themselves like the knot-work her nan had painted on the cupboard. It was too personal. Too painful.
Vi stood, then stepped back onto the chair she’d been using as a stepstool and ran her hand across the area she’d been scrubbing. Again that feeling zipped though her hand. She tried to pull away, but it was as though she couldn’t. She slid her hand to the cupped and painted metal disc to her far left, the largest of the objects Nan had added. Immediately, her heart began to slam.
She was hearing that low, primal buzz of voices she’d last heard in Dublin.
At the museum.
While near ancient gold.
She pressed harder with her hand, which was shaking now. The sound grew. She couldn’t be imagining this.
Vi began to pick at disc’s surface, seeking loose paint flakes. She didn’t want to harm it, but she needed to know. Finally, she caught a poorly adhered spot, and the metal she exposed was gold.
She leapt from the chair with about the same grace that Danny and Pat showed in climbing stairs. Vi riffled through the cupboard’s drawers. God, what she wished for was a well-stocked kitchen where she’d have countless tools from which to choose. At least she had a butter knife.
It was slow work, gently winnowing the knife’s blade beneath the edge of the disc, but she was a determined woman. In time, the disc popped free. From behind it fell a small, folded wedge of paper. Rather than risk bumping the piece in her hand, Vi let the paper drop to the floor.
Holding her potential treasure in her right hand, she stepped more carefully from the chair this time, then sat before examining what she’d found. The nervous tremble in her hands became an excited shake.
“God in heaven.”
The backside of the disc hadn’t been painted and it was decidedly gold!
“Slow now,” she counseled herself. Gold in color didn’t necessarily mean gold in fact. Recalling the bit of paper that had dropped, she set the disc on the cupboard’s broad base shelf, then bent down and retrieved it.
