by Catie Murphy
“Because—I don’t exactly know yet. There’s something I think I’m missing. I’ll tell you when I’ve figured it out, all right? I’m so sorry for asking.” Megan retreated, feeling like an utter heel, and worse, not knowing what to do with what she’d learned. It had to fit together somehow, the puzzle pieces all laid out before her but their edges blurring and shifting instead of creating reliable shapes.
She walked the hundred metres up to the Luas and tagged on, taking a seat and pulling her crumpled notes from her pocket to spread on her lap. Simon and Liz and Martin, money laundering and drugs and—“Shoot.”
She’d forgotten to write down the blog posts, and tore one of the napkins in half so she could do that. Blog posts and Cíara, who probably wasn’t really missing but also hadn’t been seen in two days, which was missing enough for Megan’s tastes, just then. If Liz and Cíara hadn’t been having an affair, or at least a friendship, there had to be some other connection, unless Niamh’s gossip was all wrong. In Megan’s experience, Nee’s gossip was often exaggerated but rarely entirely mistaken.
She took out her phone and tried “O’Donnell Liz Darr” as a search combination and, for the first time, got a hit.
Four months ago, just weeks in to the Darrs’ Irish tour, Elizabeth Darr had written a scathing review of the Sea & Sky restaurant in Bray, owned and operated by Joseph O’Donnell. In May, just over a month ago, the restaurant had closed permanently, citing poor reviews and declining clientele as its reason for closure.
Megan, heart rate accelerating until she felt like she’d been running, gathered her notes and lurched to her feet as the tram reached her stop. The sunshine pounding on the sidewalk radiated heat that made her realize her trembling hands were so cold, she was having trouble holding her belongings. She shuffled under the tram stop’s glass-and-metal shelter to sit on a narrow, slanted bench long enough to get her notes back into her pockets, and to grip her phone in both hands while she read the article again.
There were no pictures of Joseph O’Donnell or his family, nor any mention of their names, just an estate agent’s photo of a beautiful little building on the Bray waterfront, white paint and blue shutters making it look rustic and welcoming.
Hair stood up on Megan’s arms, chilling her despite the heat. Shivering against it, she walked home with her attention on the phone as she read more about the restaurant. It had opened late in Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years, barely long enough to establish itself before the boom collapsed and Ireland’s economy fell to pieces. Since then, it seemed to have been touch-and-go until Liz’s review put the final nail in its coffin.
Reading the articles over the years, Megan wondered at the fortitude of anyone willing to try running a restaurant as a business. Fionnuala deserved an evening out and heaps of admiration, particularly if she pulled Canan’s through its current mess.
Everyone, Mama and puppies alike, was asleep when Megan arrived home; Mama didn’t even twitch an ear in response to the door opening and closing. Megan tiptoed to Liz’s computer and went into her blogging software, copying the IP address that the last vlog had posted from, and pasting it into a search window.
The IP came back as a Bray address, and all the breath rushed from Megan’s lungs.
* * *
Cíara O’Donnell might not come up on an internet search, but Joseph O’Donnell, proprietor of the Sea & Sky restaurant, did. Megan didn’t have the resources to nail down whether the IP address correlated to the O’Donnells’ home, but they were both in Bray, which was a lot more than she’d had half an hour earlier.
And Martin Rafferty was from Bray. Knowing that made her fingers twitch. There had to be a way to connect him to the O’Donnells, though for a few long moments of staring at her computer screen, Megan couldn’t figure out how. Then she opened a new search window and started typing, more as if her twitching fingers had plans of their own than through any really conscious thought. She’d typed in “canan’s restaurant investors” and opened yet another window for “sea & sky restaurant investors” before she fully understood what she was doing. Once she did, a thrill of nerves zinged through her and she had to take a couple of deep breaths before checking the search results.
Most of them were predictable: different banks, mostly Irish but one in Canada on Canan’s behalf, some family money, some personal savings—it astonished Megan, what detail could be found in news articles and financial reports—and a general variety of angel investors, none of whom meant anything to her as names. Both restaurants did have an investor in Bray, but the company names weren’t the same. Megan sank back in the couch, glowering at the computer screen, then, arms stretched so she could type, she put in both the Bray companies to see what there was to learn about them.
Nothing helpful: one had been established in the ‘90s; the other was much newer, part of the late teens economic recovery that mostly seemed to be rich people getting richer. The older company was run by a man whose picture indicated he’d been middle-aged then and was presumably old by now; the newer, by a young-ish woman. Megan put both their names into the search and wasn’t surprised to come up with hits, since she figured investors usually had internet presences. The man had been in business for decades and the woman had inherited some family money she’d decided to put to good use.
Megan, skimming both of their biographies, felt like hitting her head on a wall. Investigations—even real-life investigations—looked exciting on TV, but she supposed they’d been edited to remove all the tedious bits, or at least had been given voice-overs to add some drama to the moment. She clicked the woman’s bio shut, eyes flickering over something that twitched in her mind as she did, and had to open it back up again to figure out what had set off a warning.
Nothing really: a connection to a Lynch, was all. Megan had connections like that of her own, which was probably what had made her notice. Then, out loud, not caring that the dogs were asleep, she said, “Oh, dang, Meg, come on already,” and called Rabbie.
“Don’t tell me you need another lawyer,” Rabbie said sternly upon answering the phone. “I’ve sorted one out for you already, and he’s none too happy with being handed a confessed drug dealer as a client.”
“He’ll still get paid,” Megan replied. “No, I don’t need a lawyer. I just wondered if you know anything about, uh . . . Cora Kelly, in Bray? Or Micheál Hayes? He’s about your age.”
“Micheál Hayes is a man you want to stay away from,” Rabbie said without hesitation. “If he his own self wasn’t involved in the Troubles, you can bet his father was, and there’s not a penny that family’s got that wasn’t made off the blood and heartache of others. Even today, you’d tug your cap if you saw the man in the street and never breathe a word of where the money they made went.”
Megan, fascinated, said, “Where did it go?”
“You never heard it from me, but between you, me, and the wall, I’d say you can look to the cocaine and heroin on the streets and see a path leading straight back to Micheál Hayes.”
“Straight back? Really? Then why isn’t he in jail?”
“Well, it might be a twisty path, at that. Nobody’s proven anything, though they’ve been looking to for decades. After the Good Friday Agreement, all that gun-running money got cleaned up somehow, but you don’t stop knowing how to smuggle just because peace has broken out. Watch what you say, though, Megan.” Rabbie’s voice was as serious as it could be. “There’s slander laws here like you haven’t got in America. Now, that girl, what did you say her name was? Cora Byrne?”
“Kelly.”
“No, that’s wrong,” Rabbie said decisively. “Cora Byrne was Micheál’s niece who went off to America in the eighties when she was just a wee thing. Her mother was his wife’s sister and her husband died in the Troubles. Nelly Byrne wouldn’t have a thing to do with Ireland after that, said the whole lot could murder each other in the streets and she’d never say a prayer for any of them, and her sister, Micheál’s wife, Anne that she was, died in 19
93 without ever having heard from Nelly again.”
Megan, both incredulous and delighted, said, “How do you know so much?” and Rabbie gave a deep chuckle.
“It’s not such a big country as all that, my love, and when you see the wee girl and her mother off at the port and watch them looking their last on the auld country, it’s not a thing you forget.”
“I think you’ve got a heart as big as the world, to remember everything like that. So Hayes’s niece, Cora Byrne, left as a little girl, and Cora Kelly is running an investment company out of Bray now. It’s probably coincidence.”
“Probably,” said Rabbie cheerfully, “unless it’s not. What are you after, Megan?”
Megan said, “Answers,” absently, typing a search query into her computer. “I’ll give you a ring back later. Thanks, Rabbie.”
“Be good,” Rabbie admonished, and Megan hung up to read a Wikipedia variation on Cora Kelly’s biography. Born in Ireland and educated in America. Well, that could mean almost anything. Megan snapped her computer shut and decided she’d go figure it out for herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
God—or more to the point, Orla—forbid Megan should borrow a car from the car service. She hired it, paperwork and all, and got on the road to Bray at about a quarter past five, which was a terrible time, even on a weekday, to look for an investor. Ireland’s white-collar businesses tended to close at five on the dot, or six at the latest.
There were two roads down to Bray: the scenic route along the water, which Megan much preferred, and the M50, which was as close as Ireland got to a freeway system. The latter took less than half the time, and—not being Irish-born, and unable to embrace the mañana-but-without-such-a-terrible-sense-of-urgency aspect of Irish life, Megan took that, getting into the south-Dublin town just before six.
Bray’s waterfront still had the seaside resort air it had developed almost two centuries earlier, with pretty Victorian buildings dominating the entire shore from the northerly end all the way down to the hill called Bray Head at its southerly end. She parked at the DART station and, after a longer walk than expected, found the O’Donnells’ restaurant just on the south side of Bray Head, both the mountain and the derelict hotel of the same name. The restaurant was a comparatively new building, probably from the 1970s, before it was decided that the waterfront’s Victorian charm had more tourist-trapping value than new builds. Consequently, it looked badly out of place, especially with its blue-shuttered windows boarded up and a heavy, steel security door in front of the original front door. An estate agent’s information hung on a board outside the building, and Megan took a picture of it in case she needed the number later.
Then, with her phone’s mapping software turned on, she walked up into the town proper. Literally up—Bray itself was set above the waterfront—and she slowly found her way to Cora Kelly’s office. She spent the entire walk trying to remember what “estate agents” were called in the States, struggling with it even though she knew she’d known it as recently as yesterday. The word realtors finally dropped into her head, awakening a bloom of triumph and amusement. She’d had friends in school and the military whose first language wasn’t English and who would occasionally find themselves unable to remember a word in their native tongues. Doing the same thing with words in her native language fell somewhere between embarrassing and laughable.
Aware there was no way someone would be in the office at 6:15 on a Sunday evening, Megan knocked anyway, waited a few seconds, and backed up to look regretfully at the building. Once upon a time it had been a standard “two up two down” Victorian home but had clearly undergone extensive changes since.
All investigative curiosity aside, Megan always liked seeing the insides of old buildings, even when they’d been completely refurbished with modern interiors. She liked it better still when they hadn’t been modernized, or when they’d been “renovated sympathetically,” as the housing shows said, with the high ceilings and cornicing and old window sashes left in place.
A little regretful, she paused on the sidewalk, trying to decide which way to go, and to her surprise, a woman’s voice behind her said, “Sorry, did you knock?”
Cora Kelly looked very like her website picture, if a few years older: nicely highlighted auburn hair that probably didn’t grow out of her head that colour, an intelligent brown gaze, and a carefully calculated smile that spoke of both curiosity and caution.
Megan, genuinely surprised, said, “Oh!” and came back up the walk to stand a comfortable distance away. “I did, yes, hi. I’m sorry, I figured no one would be at work. It’s a Sunday and such a long shot, but—” She stopped herself, cleared her throat, and said, “Sorry. My name is Megan Malone. I’m looking for some information on an acquaintance of mine.” She offered her hand, and Cora, after a moment’s hesitation, shook it.
“Cora Kelly. I actually live above the offices, so you caught me somewhere between home and work.” Cora sounded like Megan’s friend Brian Showers but more so: her accent was a complete mess of Irish and American, as if it had no idea where to settle. “What can I help you with?”
“A friend of mine—an acquaintance—has gone—” Megan wrinkled her face. “I don’t know if she’s gone missing or if I just can’t get hold of her, if that makes sense. I’ve only just met her, so I don’t have her number, but there were a couple of deaths recently and I’m just . . .” Cora’s eyes had widened progressively as Megan spoke, and she ended up finishing, “I’m just making a mess of this, aren’t I?”
Cora lifted one hand to hold her thumb and middle finger an inch apart, mouthing, “Maybe just a little,” with obvious humor. “Want to try again?”
“I’m looking for a girl named Cíara O’Donnell,” Megan tried, and Cora’s expression cleared.
“Oh. Joe and Edna’s daughter?”
“Oh my God, you know her?” Megan’s voice shot up and she tried to claw it back down into its normal register. “Yes, that’s her. Her father ran the Sea & Sky restaurant?”
“Well.” Another pinch of humor darted across Cora’s face. “I’d say it was Edna who ran it, but yes, I know them.” Concern replaced the humor. “Wait, what’s happened to Cíara? Why don’t you come in for a moment?” She stepped out of the doorway, inviting Megan into a clean, fresh, modern office off a hall that emphasized Megan’s impression of the original two-up-two-down layout of the house: stairs to one side, a hall along them, two rooms front and back, though the back had long since been extended, and extended again. Megan counted two more doorways leading into what had probably been a large garden, 150 years ago and were now more office space and probably a toilet.
The initial office, fronted by an old, curved bay window, was lit by filtered sunlight through a lace privacy curtain over the bay window, and retained a number of its period features, including the fireplace that would have once warmed the room. A sofa, probably custom-built to fit the curve of the bay window, sat in front of a radiator that did half of the heating job now; another radiator sat in the space beside the fireplace, nearer to the back wall. Cora’s desk, with a computer and phone on it, had a couple of nice-quality chairs facing it, and two framed pictures, one of which was presumably her family, and another that Megan couldn’t see at a glance.
The walls and the fireplace mantel displayed a dozen or more photographs of businesses on their opening days: ribbon-cutting ceremonies, cornerstones being laid, someone smashing a bottle of champagne on a building’s front steps. Cora was in a few of them, alongside beaming business owners, and—judging from a mid-range-quality Nikon DSLR camera half-hidden by the computer screen on her desk—Megan bet she’d taken a number of the others. There were art prints as well, photographs taken around Bray, and Megan paused to ask, “Are these yours? They’re beautiful.”
“Oh, thank you. Yes, it’s a hobby. But what’s wrong with Cíara?” Cora gestured to the sofa and sat at one end of it herself, a frown wrinkling her forehead.
Megan, sighing, sat as well. �
�Maybe nothing. It’s just—did you read about the food critic’s death? Elizabeth Darr?”
Cora’s face went solemn. “I did.”
“Well, Cíara knew her, and it turned out that Liz’s review had been the—”
“The final nail in the Sea and Sky restaurant’s coffin,” Cora said with a sigh. “Yes. That was an investment that paid off. I was sorry to see it close.”
“Right,” Megan said, relieved she didn’t have to explain it all. “But I haven’t seen Cíara since right after Liz’s death, and then yesterday the owner of Canan’s, the restaurant Liz died at, was murdered.”
“Jesus!”
“I know. So it’s probably nothing, but I’m worried about Cíara. And—I’m sorry, it seems a little stalker-ish now, but—I looked up people who might have been involved in the restaurants and found your name and hoped you might be willing to tell me where Cíara lived, or where her parents lived, so I could check on her.”
“Sea and Sky is the only restaurant I’ve invested in. You said restaurants,” Cora said to Megan’s confused blink.
“Oh. Yeah, I’d looked up people in Bray who invested in Martin’s restaurant, too. In Bray, because this is where he was from, and I thought—you know, the hometown thing? I thought maybe people here would know more than some random investor in Canada or something. And I could drive to Bray,” Megan admitted with a quick smile. “If I hadn’t been able to find you, I guess I would have tried the other guy—Michael Hayes, I think his name was.”
“Mee-hall,” Cora said, correcting Megan’s pronunciation to Micheál, the Irish version of Michael, almost absently. Megan’s stomach tightened, but she only nodded, brushing it off as Cora went on. “It would be a little unorthodox of me to give you the O’Donnells’ address or contact details, but . . . I hate to think of anything happening to Cíara, too.”
