by Catie Murphy
* * *
Cillian caught her eye as she slipped out, and Megan made an exaggeration of sneaking away. He cast a smirk toward Orla in the office, and Megan scurried down the street, caught between amusement and disgust with her own behavior. Orla Keegan didn’t actually scare her—not much did, after a tour in Iraq—but she certainly bowed and scraped to the short-tempered Irishwoman. It was partly that Orla was both Megan’s boss and her landlord, but more that there were half a dozen other immigrants working for the company. All of them treated Orla with obvious deference. They didn’t necessarily have Megan’s advantages—Irish citizenship, English as a first language—and Megan had noticed that if she back talked, the rest of them got a little tense. More, she’d noticed that if Orla wanted someone to work a particularly awful shift, or clean up after a job that had turned gross—usually teenagers sicking up in a car after their debs—she never went to any of the English speakers first. Since all the other English speakers were Irish-born, Megan didn’t know if they were aware, or cared, about that, but she was, and did, so she’d stayed late a couple of times to help on some of those nasty cleaning jobs. Orla had made it clear she wouldn’t pay her for that time, and Megan had never pushed it. She just did her best to help out, and tried not to rock the boat for the others.
Besides, she’d rocked it enough for herself. That dour line of thought turned to a smile as she anticipated the greeting, and the source of the boat-rocking, within her apartment. She unlocked the street-level door and took the stairs two at a time to her second floor flat. First floor, she reminded herself for the hundredth time. Two and a half years in Ireland and she still hadn’t adapted to the fact that they didn’t consider the ground floor to be the first floor of a building. You had to go up a flight of stairs to get to the first floor in Ireland. Anyway, whether it was the first or second floor, there were puppies and an increasingly lazy mama dog waiting on the other side of her apartment door. She pushed it open to a rush of wiggles and Dip, the larger of the two pups, making a break for the outside world.
Megan scooped him up and rubbed her nose against his. “No, you don’t, you little monster. Besides, even if you did, there’s another door down there, and you’re never going to be tall enough to open it on your own.” She scooted Thong back inside with her feet, got the door closed behind her, and sank down, wrinkling her face to accept puppy kisses of greeting. The two little dogs had gone from barely a palmful to small armsful, but unless there was some crossbreeding hidden in their genetics, they would never be more than about a foot tall. Their mama, although she’d proven chipless—unwanted and uncared for—was a purebred Jack Russell, and she barely came to Megan’s calf.
She, more dignified than the puppies, came to lean on Megan’s shin and accept rubs while her offspring became increasingly squirmy. Megan, in what she had come to realize was a fruitless ritual, said, “I’m not keeping you,” to all three of them, then plunked down on her butt so the puppies could climb on her more easily. A small, scratchy foot immediately went up her nose and, eyes watering, Megan put Dip back on the floor. “Ow. I’m not keeping you if you’re going to do that to me.”
Had they been any bigger, she never would have convinced Orla to let her keep them, extra pet deposit put down or not. Animals were strictly forbidden, according to Megan’s lease, and Orla did not have a meltable heart of gold behind her steely gaze. She could, however, be paid off, and Megan was out nine hundred quid—three hundred for each dog, which was both outrageous and beyond the letter of the law—as well as an affidavit promising a deep professional clean of the apartment when she moved out. An actual affidavit: Orla had made her get it notarized and everything. On Megan’s own dime, of course. Or, rather, on her own ten cent piece, because they didn’t technically have dimes in Ireland, and had nothing like quarters at all.
Megan picked Thong up, kissed the top of her head, and said, “I miss quarters” into the short, fluffy fur. “Okay, who wants to go for a walk?”
Even Mama Dog hopped into action at that, although Megan stopped to grab an apple before herding the three animals out the door. She’d always thought puppies required long walks and lots of exercise, but it turned out they couldn’t take more than a ten- or fifteen-minute walk at once at their tender age. It was, Megan had discovered, exactly enough time to take her to any one of half a dozen takeaway restaurants. Her meal planning, since becoming a dog parent, had gone out the window. On the other hand, the falafel guys knew her order by heart now. So did the kofta place, and two different Indian restaurants, and the regular staff at the chipper knew she didn’t like vinegar on her French fries, but that the puppies did. That probably counted for something, although not for enough, as far as the dogs were concerned. Megan had looked it up, and cooked potatoes weren’t bad for dogs, but they weren’t great for them, either, so they were never allowed more than one fry each.
They got samosas and the spiciest lamb karahi Megan could handle and stopped for a pint of milk on the way home. Once there, Megan spread her feast at her kitchen table and ate with three sets of tragic brown eyes watching every motion with patient hope. “Oo wldnt lkk igh,” she promised the dogs. “Igsh shoo shhaishy.” They would, though, like the rice and naan, and she didn’t share those with them either. Finally, full to the gills, she leaned back in her chair—a dangerous proposition, as the slender legs were prone to tipping her over backward—and surveyed her domain through half-lidded eyes.
It had been a fine little apartment before the dogs moved in, but she thought it had become friendlier in the months since. Homier. The window that her tiny dining table sat under overlooked Rathmines Road, one of Dublin’s busiest thoroughfares. Megan could just, if she craned her neck right, see the copper-domed church that dominated this section of the city through the window. The sadly neglected kitchen was functional, if somewhat scattered with dog food right now, as keeping meals in bowls were not among Dip and Thong’s strong suits.
The other half of the open space made up her living room, with a couch and a comfortable chair, and a television that she resentfully paid the licensing fee for. Beyond that lay an en-suite bedroom where she could see a pair of jeans dangling over the end of the bed. She didn’t usually leave clothes out, or her bed unmade, or dog food on the floor, for that matter.
“You kids are bad influences,” she told the puppies, who scooted closer with their attention entirely on the leftover naan. Megan chuckled and tilted the chair back down so she could scritch them, then filled a two-litre water bottle from the tap and went to stretch out on the couch with her computer balanced on her lap. Dip tried to climb up on the couch with her and fell off enough times that she took pity and lifted him, whereupon Thong lay down on her foot and whined pathetically. Mama came over and lay down with Thong, and, peace established, Megan web searched Martin Walsh and Lou MacDonald.
A minute later, her phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her back pocket, glanced at the caller name, and put it to her ear, saying, “Hey, Nee.”
“I’m looking at your ear, Megan.”
“Oh.” Megan pulled the phone away again to smile sheepishly at Niamh’s image on the video call. Vone call, Niamh called it: video phone. The terrible thing was, Megan had started using the ridiculous term. “Hey, babe. What are you doing, calling me from California? Aren’t you on set? Isn’t it . . .” She glanced at the time. “Eleven a.m. there. Never mind, that’s not an unreasonable time to call. What’s up?”
“What’s the story,” Niamh corrected. “How will I ever get you sounding properly Irish if you won’t pick up the lingo?”
Megan made a face and Niamh laughed, proving the worth of video calls all by itself. Niamh O’Sullivan’s laugh would have, in Megan’s opinion, made her famous one day even if no one had ever come to appreciate her broader skills as a performer. Her star had already been on the rise when Megan met her, and it had recently gone meteoric. Afro-Caribbean and Irish in heritage, her brown skin, kinky curled black hair, and broad Kerry acc
ent had made her one of the actors breaking down international ideas of what being and looking Irish meant. Right now, her hair fluffed around a gaudily colored headband and backed enormous gold loop earrings, and her on-point makeup glittered green and gold around her eyes in flawless 1970s fashion. Nee could make the look work any day of the week and twice on Sundays, but wore it now for a film laden with enough big names that Megan had nearly hyperventilated as Niamh dropped them. “All right, all right, what’s the story?” Megan demanded, and Niamh’s brown eyes sparkled.
“What’s this I hear about you getting involved in another murder?”
“What?! That was in the middle of the night your time! Who told you?”
Niamh, gleefully, said, “So it’s true? It’s all over RTÉ. They’re saying Martin Walsh had something to do with it and won’t talk to the press. What’s the story, Meg?!”
“You’re watching local Irish news in California?” Megan asked, surprised.
“Sure I’ve got the RTÉ Player.” Niamh sounded a little offended. “Why wouldn’t I? So what happened?”
“Walsh didn’t have anything to do with it, but it was a friend of his and they were supposed to be in a game tomorrow for a Ryder Cup wild card, so I’m sure the media is all over it.”
“It’s never Lou MacDonald?” At Megan’s nod, Niamh gasped. “What a shame, he was so lovely! I knew his wife,” she said before Megan could ask. “She died in a car wreck a long while back, when I was only doing local theatre and commercials. The two of them had bad luck with wives. Martin and Lou, not Lou and his wife. Martin’s been married two or three times. One divorce, one died—”
“One beheaded?” Megan asked dryly. Niamh startled, then laughed again, the bright sound pealing across the phone’s speakers.
“God, I hope not.”
“Me too, since I’m driving the third wife around with him. She golfs, too.”
“Does she?” Niamh sounded supremely uninterested. “Martin must be devastated. He and Lou were thick as thieves. Kimberly—Lou’s wife—used to say theirs was the only long-term relationship Martin had ever managed.”
“He seemed all right,” Megan said dubiously. “Upset, but not wrecked.”
“But he would, wouldn’t he. An Irishman of his generation—”
“He’s my generation, Niamh.”
Niamh passed it off with a wave. “You’re American, and a woman, and not Catholic. Repression is the default emotional state of the Irish male born before 1980.”
“You understand that that statement coming from someone in your costume seems really bizarre?”
Niamh glanced down at herself and burst out laughing. “And you’ve only seen the hair. Wait, take a look.” She lifted the phone up high so Megan could see that she wore a green, long-sleeved, mostly unbuttoned, flowery blouse tied just beneath her breasts, and hip-hugging jeans with a leather belt nearly as wide as her arm. “And check out the shoes.” The phone swung down to show off platform sandals with chunky heels big enough to knock somebody out with. “So speaking as a blast from the past, I can promise I’m not wrong about the repressed state of the average Irish man,” Niamh said as she brought the phone back up again.
“Are we talking repressed or repressed? I mean, if Lou was his only successful long-term relationship . . .”
“Oh. Huh. I don’t think so? I never got a hint of it, but then again, I might not. Either way, even if he’s being stoic, he’ll probably need a friend, Megan.”
“Or at least a driver he can’t get rid of?”
“He’s a golfer. I’d guess he’s got a lot of drivers.”
“Oh my God, you did not.” Megan actually hung up in laughing horror, and a few seconds later got a text: I did too, and you love me for it. I’ve got to go wear the face off your favorite Chris now, so I’m not calling back, but keep me posted.
Dear God, Megan texted back, keep me posted! And pics or it didn’t happen!
Niamh sent back kissy-faces and Megan, grinning, spent the rest of the evening trying to get the internet to tell her if anybody thought Martin Walsh and Lou MacDonald had been lovers.
CHAPTER SIX
Despite Rule 34—a decades-old internet “rule” that if a thing existed, there was a sexualized version of it available online—Megan couldn’t even find real-person fan fiction suggesting the two golfers had been lovers, although she stayed up much too late looking. At ten, her usual bedtime—because she was old and boring, as she usually informed her younger friends who wanted to leave to go out dancing at that hour—the puppies, who were better trained than she was, stretched, wiggled, and trotted over to their bed to sleep. Mama Dog gave her a scathing look at eleven and went to join the puppies, and Megan, guiltily, tiptoed past them at about one in the morning to fall into bed herself.
The alarm went off at ten to six anyway, and through long habit developed in military service, Megan rolled out of bed and into her gym clothes before her brain could wake up enough to object. Her apartment lay across the road from one of the few gyms in Dublin that opened at six a.m., and even the splash of rain that hit her as she ran across the street didn’t quite wake her all the way up. She got into the gym and onto a treadmill, where she could move without thinking for half an hour. The Irish were not, generally speaking, early risers, and there were still only a handful of people in the gym by the time she staggered off the treadmill, sweaty but awake.
To her disappointment, Jelena of the heart-shaped face and aquamarine eyes wasn’t there that morning. Megan kept the free weights lower than she might have without the other woman there to spot her, but got enough of a workout that her arms were trembling and her legs felt numb as she tripped back home forty-five minutes later. She had to be in Clontarf, six miles across town, by eight thirty, and it was already seven fifteen, which was cutting it close with morning traffic. She took the world’s fastest shower, brought the puppies on the world’s shortest walk, and slid into the Continental at half seven, which earned her a warning look from Orla, who seemed to be at the garage 24/7. Megan caroled, “I’ll make it” out the window with more confidence than she felt, and gave the dashboard leprechaun a rub for good luck toward picking Martin Walsh up on time.
The leprechaun must have done his trick, because she pulled into the rain-glistened hotel parking lot with two minutes to spare. Megan had just decided to risk running into the restaurant to get a cup of coffee when Martin appeared, wearing a long mackintosh raincoat and carrying a golf umbrella that dripped rain from its ribs. He looked dapper and incredibly Irish in argyle socks shown off by khaki, knee-length golfing trousers, a subtle green and gold jumper that matched both the socks and the colors of his saddle shoes, and a tweed flat cap. The whole ensemble should have been garish, but the colors were just muted enough to make it work. Megan got out of the car, looking beyond him for Heather, but he shook his head. “She’ll be there by tee time, but she didn’t feel up to the media before the game.”
“I guess I can’t blame her. You’re looking good, Mr. Walsh.” Megan took his umbrella and opened the door for him.
He gave her a brief smile in response, but up close, she could see that the cap helped disguise the hollowness of his bloodshot eyes, and that the jumper’s color did his haggard skin tones a favor. As he got into the car, she noticed someone had hand embroidered a small, dusky green shamrock onto the back of the cap and outlined it with dull gold thread. The understated effect was hardly noticeable against the brown-green tweed wool, but Megan bet it showed up beautifully on TV. A lot of effort had clearly been put into Martin Walsh’s branding, and today it gave him something to hide behind. She shook rain off the umbrella, tucked it into the boot, and eyed the scrolling traffic report on her phone as she got back into the car. “Shouldn’t take us more than ten or fifteen minutes to get there.”
Martin nodded. Megan glanced at him a couple of times in the rearview mirror, trying to gauge his state of mind as they drove. The third time, he caught her eye and offered another shallow
smile. “Go ahead, you can ask.”
“How are you doing?” She put a subtle emphasis on the second word, as if she’d asked the question before and gotten a rote response, but now had the privacy to pursue the reality instead of the polite fiction.
“Quite terribly.” Walsh turned his gaze out the window. “I told the hotel not to put any calls through last night, but there were nearly thirty messages waiting for me this morning, and that didn’t include my mobile. Even my ex-wife called.”
Divorced, beheaded, died, popped into Megan’s head, and she bit her tongue to keep from asking which wife it had been. The divorced one, obviously, rather than the one who had died. “Pardon me for asking, but have you eaten anything?”
Martin chuckled, a low sound with more weariness than humor in it. “That’s what Jennifer wanted to know, too. Among other things. I have. A full Irish, the same thing I always have on a game day. It didn’t taste like much,” he admitted to the window, “but I suppose superstition made me eat it. The weather’s good for me today. I’m only little, compared to some of the lads out there these days. It means I haven’t the height for those long drives some of them do, but I don’t sink into the earth on a wet day like today, either, and I’ve practiced in the rain all me life.”
“I never thought of that.”
Walsh’s smile flickered. “The rain can throw off some of the best golfers in the world. Lou, now, he was like me. Played in the rain all his life. Knew how to deal with sinking an extra centimetre or two into the green. And the island’s a sandbar, so the ground can be soft. It’s all to my advantage today. Lou would have been happier in the sun, because of the size of him. We were like Laurel and Hardy, we were. Laurel and Hardy, sinking in the quicksand.” He fell silent a moment. “I have to get that wild card position. For him.”
“I know.” Rain splattered the right side of the car as they drove down the old wooden bridge linking Bull Island to the mainland. A proper line of traffic followed them, cars already parked along the island’s southern wall and a few hardy kitesurfers out on the water in their wet suits, taking advantage of the gusts. “Will the wind affect you?”
