The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  Leave, when she had that tantalizing list hidden by Lily Gallagher? When she didn’t yet know what the writing on the tower walls said? She met his eyes steadily and told the exact truth. “Murder doesn’t scare me.” Not since I was four years old.

  “Really.” Aidan stared at her. “Someday, I’d like you to tell me why.”

  “Someday I will. Not today.” Carragh hesitated, feeling odd about asking a favor after declining to explain herself. But she felt a pressing need to get to Dublin and follow whatever clue linked Lily Gallagher to her grandmother. “Aidan, would you mind if I took the evening train to Dublin? There are a few things I need to see to, but I’ll be back here by dinnertime tomorrow.”

  He didn’t answer for such a long time that she almost apologized and retracted her request. Finally, he said, “No, that’s fine. Things are so unsettled just now, I’m having a hard time focusing on the library. I’ve even thought about calling the National Trust and putting off the acquisition date.”

  “I’ll work up until the last minute today,” she rushed to assure him. “Is there anything specific you’d like done before I go? Or anything at all I can do for you?”

  Had it been Philip, she expected she would have gotten a leer and been the recipient of various suggestive comments. Aidan merely said, “Just keep on as you’re going. You seem to know what you’re doing.”

  Which only proved how little qualified he was to hire an archivist. She was about to tell him so when he unexpectedly added, “Just promise you’ll come back.”

  It sounded remarkably like a personal appeal. If he was less gorgeous, less sexy, less titled, and less often in the tabloids, Carragh would have thought he wanted her company for something other than the library. But men like Aidan, the seventeenth Viscount Gallagher, did not look twice at half-Chinese adopted daughters of middle-class Irish American families. It was only shock and grief speaking.

  Nonetheless…“I promise,” Carragh said firmly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Carragh fell asleep on the train before it finished pulling out of Rathdrum. Waking an hour later in Dublin, she thought groggily, was a little like a time traveler returning home or a cloistered nun leaving a convent. She hadn’t realized the all-encompassing weight of Deeprath Castle and its history until she stood blinking on the pavement outside Heuston Station, ears assaulted by engines and horns and locust-like crowds, every other person in loud conversation on a mobile. She had planned to take the bus home, but instead grabbed the first cab she saw.

  Merrion Square had the virtue of belonging half to the Georgian past, so it was less jarring than the city center. But if the outside was all red brick and white stone and glossy front doors, stepping into her grandmother’s house was a suffocating embrace from the sixties. The first thing she did was run upstairs to check on the bathroom. She groaned at the state of it, unchanged despite the contractor’s promises, and wished she’d managed a bath before she’d left the castle.

  She threw the backpack on her bed and rummaged through drawers for a clean pair of leggings and a sweatshirt from her years at Boston College. Just how many sweatshirts did she own? She’d always thought that the best part of living alone—no one to dress up for. But maybe when she returned to the castle she’d pack something other than jeans and T-shirts.

  It was a luxury to use her laptop for more than note-taking. She felt days of tension drain from her shoulders as the Internet welcomed her in as though she’d never been away. The first thing she did was send the tower room photos by email to her friend Duncan, along with a careful mix of flattery and begging. She’d seen him do magical things with computer programs she didn’t understand, and crossed her fingers for good results as she pressed Send.

  Sadly, there were plenty of unpleasant things waiting for her in this real world that also demanded attention. Bank statements, contractor bills, emails from the temp agency with some office administrative jobs on offer, and belated Easter cards from her nephews in New York containing bunny confetti and personalized crayon art.

  For all that she’d missed having a mobile signal, she only turned on her mobile now with great reluctance. Sure enough, in five days she had missed nineteen calls from her parents’ house. Only her father had left a voicemail, and it consisted of just three sentences: “Francis told us about the castle library. I imagine you’re in Heaven. Call your mother.”

  She would have ignored it if she hadn’t just come from a man who was so clearly suffering the loss of his parents. She had already lost one mother in her lifetime—she shouldn’t allow resentment to alienate her from the one who’d loved her since she was four.

  But as usually happens, she steeled herself to call and reached only a message. Probably her mother was at work. She could at least send her a text before she changed her mind.

  Hi, Mom! Hope the criminals are giving you a break this week. Having an amazing time in the Deeprath Castle library. You know me—where there are books and old buildings, I’ll always be happy. I can’t get a mobile signal there, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for another week or two. Love you!

  With that, she switched her phone off again, determined not to think any more tonight about her mother and their last argument, and that wretched, dangerous letter hid away in this house. To distract herself, she did the sensible thing: she pulled out the list Lily Gallagher had made decades ago.

  1. Dublin Weekly and Wicklow People archives

  2. Baptismal records

  3. Father Hennessy

  4. Bride painting

  5. Chase’s literary agent

  6. Eileen Ryan

  What connection had Lily made with Eileen Ryan?

  The obvious answer was that—somehow—Lily had discovered that Eileen, with her magpie-like tendencies to gather up bangles and baubles on subjects that intrigued her, had collected some Evan Chase memorabilia. Carragh had only been allowed to see a couple of items over the years—usually her grandmother claimed she couldn’t dig them out from wherever they were—and what she recalled wasn’t terribly personal. Mostly copies of letters from Chase’s publisher, some of them referencing Chase only in passing. But for Lily Gallagher, had her grandmother been able to dig out something more critical?

  There was only one logical place to look: the attic. Carragh climbed all the way up to the space she had ignored since her grandmother’s death three months ago. This was why she wore things like sweats and trainers—because she could hardly wear designer clothes to root around in dirty, spider-infested attics.

  Her grandmother had an enormous trunk in which she’d kept her most “precious” items: an ancient, battered thing that had sat in the maids’ attic bedroom for as long as Carragh could remember. It was latched but not locked, and she wrestled a moth-eaten brocaded wingback chair next to it since she wouldn’t be able to reach inside if she sat on the floor.

  She held her breath as she opened the creaky top…and let it out in a sigh of exasperation. Why had she expected her grandmother to have stored anything in order? Hoping there wasn’t anything alive in the accumulated detritus within, she resigned herself to being filthy and began to pull out items one at a time.

  Newspapers, magazines, dress patterns, a stack of gorgeous brocade fabric samples that had faded almost into neutrality, a tarnished silver box that held photos from as far back as the 1920s. Someday, when she had time, she resolved to spend a few satisfying hours trawling through all of it.

  Beneath a stack of genealogical charts she found a wooden box carved on all four sides with the chevron and shamrocks of Eileen’s Lynch heritage. Reverently, she lifted it out. As long as she could remember, this box had stood on her grandmother’s desk, a piece of polished symmetry amongst the normal chaos. She had never been allowed to open it, but spent hours of her childhood staring at the fluid grain of black walnut and the intricate shapes of the young Irish clovers.

  Gladly leaving the attic, Carragh took it with her to the dining table where she’d set up
her laptop and turned on a Tiffany lamp with a cracked shade for better light.

  The lid was a single piece that she had to cautiously wiggle off, swollen as it was by months, maybe years, of damp. The box was filled with envelopes tied together with string and a single, folded sheet atop them with CARRAGH dashed across the front in her grandmother’s sloping handwriting.

  Maybe it was the days spent in Deeprath’s evocative atmosphere that made her fingertips tingle and the back of her neck crawl. It was almost as if her grandmother stood behind her, speaking the words of the message she’d left her one and only granddaughter.

  Darling girl, how long have I been dead? If I were a betting woman, I’d lay odds you either came up here before even my funeral…or have put it off until months and months later. I rather hope it’s the latter, as that would mean you’ve managed to hang onto this house against all good sense.

  Either way, I thought you might need a little project. You know I was a collector of Evan Chase memorabilia. Years and years ago—when you were just a tiny lass—a member of the Gallagher family contacted me, trying to track down information about Evan, his wife Jenny, and the missing story of the Darkling Bride.

  Lily Gallagher and I corresponded for some time, and met once in person. Tragically, just weeks after that meeting, both Lily and her husband were killed. I held onto her letters out of—well, who knows? I hold onto a lot of things for a lot of reasons. But when you got older and I introduced you to Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt and Daphne du Maurier and Evan Chase—and you became a dedicated fantasist yourself—I thought one day I would give you her letters so that you might know what a member of the Gallagher family knew or guessed about the tragedy in 1882. Consider this my last gift to the girl whom God sent to us by such crooked paths to bless our family.

  With all my love,

  GRANDMOTHER

  Just as she finished reading, the lamp sparked and went out. Though Carragh knew it was simply the bulb dying, she shuddered. It felt like a hand had reached out from the past and extinguished the light in order to prove its presence. Whether that presence was her grandmother or Lily Gallagher or the long-ago Jenny…Maybe it was all three. Maybe Heaven was a place where anyone could meet anyone else and the three of them were playing games with her, giving her information little by little, seducing her with Deeprath’s library, teasing her with Chase’s missing manuscript, taunting her with both a man she wished she’d never met and a man she was beginning to devoutly wish to know better.

  “Just stop it!” she commanded, and didn’t know if she was addressing interfering ghosts or her own runaway imagination.

  By this time she had an irritable headache and knew she would have to sleep before attempting to make sense of Lily’s letters. But she allowed herself to untie them at least, and pulled out the letter from the last envelope, dated ten days before the murders.

  It was brief, agreeing to a time and place to meet in Dublin on the following Saturday.

  My husband will be in Italy for business, so I need not make excuses. What a surprise I hope to present him with on his return! I cannot wait to show you the letter I found from Chase to his publisher. I am quite sure that, with your help, it will lead me to what I seek. Without your help, I would never have found it.

  After that long, draining, and event-filled day, the last thing Carragh thought of as she slid into sleep wasn’t her grandmother’s unusual prescience or the possibility of actually locating Chase’s missing book…

  It was the vulnerability in Aidan’s eyes when he’d said, “Just promise you’ll come back.”

  * * *

  —

  Sibéal did not return to Dublin that night. Instead, she took a room at the Glendalough Hotel and grimly set herself to defending her case from those who might try to poach it. It wasn’t a scenario she’d anticipated when accepting promotion to Serious Crimes Review—the very definition of cold cases was that no one wanted to touch them. But the Gallaghers were as much a part of Wicklow as the mountains, and the local force felt proprietary.

  She’d had a discussion with a Rathdrum officer that swiftly moved from cautious probing to political threats to—from her—insults. Though more than two decades since the murders, Inspector Burke was still a sub-district garda, just as he’d been when handed the Gallagher case.

  “Why would anyone let your men near this case again?” she shouted, temper snapping. “I’ve found nothing in your records but sloppy police work and social pandering. There is only the briefest possible statement from the witness who discovered the viscount’s body, and you seem to have written off the entire household as suspects solely because, and I quote: ‘Such violence is doubtless the mark of an outsider.’ ”

  For a minute she thought the man would have a heart attack, considering his purple face and popping eyes. “I don’t need you to tell me how to conduct a proper investigation,” Burke finally replied. “I’ve been solving crimes in Wicklow since you were guzzling at your mother’s breast, and I don’t like girls with no name and no proper history messing about with my district and my families.”

  Sibéal had left before she might be tempted to hit him, deciding instantly not to return to Dublin until forced to. So she called Josh, talked to May, and bought the necessary toiletries for a night in a hotel. She also picked up leggings and a hoodie that said EIRE across the chest in block letters and—after checking into the Glendalough Hotel, showering and changing—sat at the small desk and began to study Superintendent O’Neill’s notes from 1992.

  There were two types—those taken during the interviews, and those he’d written a little later, a mix of commentary on what had passed and questions to consider in the future. Sadly, no one had paid the new Garda officer enough attention, or it might have been a different case. At least, a lot more questions would have been asked.

  Even through the medium of pen and paper, ten-year-old Aidan Gallagher’s distress remained evident all these years later. His distress, as well as his attempts to control it and be helpful. An intelligent child, clearly, and one used to pleasing adults.

  Sibéal was accustomed to the difference between notes taken during an interview and the cleaned-up formal statements that followed. Mostly what she noted in this particular case was the lack of follow-up by the investigating officer.

  I came home for tea. I was at Glendalough. I asked Mrs. Bell where my father was.

  How long were you at Glendalough? Why did you go there? Did you talk to other people there? Did you see anyone on the way home? Did you go straight to the library? O’Neill had tried to prompt one or two of those questions but was slapped down by either his boss or Nessa, who sat in on the interview. No need to distress the boy more than necessary his great-aunt had insisted.

  With Kyla, Nessa had apparently been just as watchful if not quite as sympathetic. O’Neill’s asides on the lady, scribbled in one or two word phrases during the interview, were things like Wary and Protective—of the children? or reputation?

  The other interviews—the Bells, Winthrop, Philip Grant—had been more straightforward, if not as probing as Sibéal would have liked. Which would have been fine if there had been follow-up interviews later on. But there hadn’t, except for a few cursory conversations with the solicitor about Lord Gallagher’s business that seemed more leading than probing. Definitely pushing for outside involvement from the first. Which, granted, with the theft of the antiquities, might have seemed reasonable. But follow-ups with those who had known of their temporary storage at the castle yielded nothing useful, at which point the Rathdrum police had more or less thrown up their hands and allowed a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.

  When she had finished, Sibéal found two items of note, details that were not offered in the original case file.

  First, the day after the funerals, Kyla Gallagher had asked Constable O’Neill how she could get her mother’s journal back. The same missing journal that Aidan had gone to his solicitor about just days ago? The o
ne the police didn’t possess—and never had? Definitely worth following up.

  Second, even more curious for its oddity, Maire Bell had described Aidan’s return from Glendalough thus: “He asked where his parents were and dashed off in that direction when I said the library. All dirty and rumply like lads get when they’re outdoors, and gripping some of the late roses he’d brought back with him in his fist.”

  Roses. That detail had not appeared in the formal statement. It probably meant nothing—but it was odd, and the odd should always be followed up. She made a note to ask Aidan Gallagher what he’d been doing with wild roses the day of his parents’ murders.

  With that fizzing sense of interesting work ahead, Sibéal fell asleep, with the hotel window open to whatever night sounds might drift from the Glendalough ruins.

  * * *

  —

  Carragh had planned to spend the morning working at home. But when she woke up to a bedroom that was more chilly and damp than even the Bride Tower at Deeprath, she threw on jeans and a red jumper and went to the nearest café with Wi-Fi and hot tea. She’d put the letters from Lily into a legal envelope, since she couldn’t fit the entire wooden box in her bag, and after fortifying herself with caffeine and oatmeal, took out her notebook and began to read the letters of a dead woman.

  Lily Gallagher had a distinctive voice, with the kind of personality and energy that leaped off the page and made her words a portrait as much as a written record. Though they focused mainly on the subject of Evan Chase and Jenny Gallagher, there were some scattered references to her family: I really think fifteen-year-old girls should be locked up until they’re stable. A temporary convent would stand Kyla in good stead just now. Of her husband, she wrote in terms of great affection, which made it hard for even a stranger to believe that she would have had cause or inclination to murder him. And there at last was the name Carragh had been half consciously searching for: Aidan is such a solemn child, but with the sweetest temper, which makes Kyla’s tantrums bearable. Please tell me he won’t be so different at fifteen as he is at ten! I should hate to say goodbye to my dearest boy.