Path into Darkness

by Lisa Alber

  “Come through,” came the response. “I’m on the deck.”

  The deck was the shining accomplishment of the place. It hung over the hillside with a view of the cottages below, Doolin village, and the ocean.

  “Brilliant, isn’t it?” Sid sat on a folding deck chair with a bottle of beer in hand and a bag of crisps on his lap. He pointed to the second chair with a second beer on the seat. “Thanks for humoring my request.”

  Perplexed, but willing to be entertained by this stellar example of humanity, Danny lowered himself into the seat. “Your father insisted that if you like a person you wouldn’t raise a finger to shake at them, but fair warning, Detective O’Neil knows where I am and is expecting me to call him in an hour.”

  “Of course,” Sid said. “I would expect nothing less.”

  “You killed Elder Joe. We both know it.”

  “I did.” Sid spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “Despite what you might think, I’m not proud that I let my emotions take over.”

  “It was premeditated,” Danny said. “You had to sneak the sleán out of Alan’s pub.”

  Sid slouched with knees spread and beer held loosely over his crotch. He wore baggy old-man shorts with two jumpers. His spindly white legs stuck out like bleached bones in the sunshine. “My anger smolders, I suppose,” he said. “Go on then, have the beer.”

  Danny popped open the beer and drank. Sid passed him the bag of crisps and picked up a pair of binoculars. He surveyed the sun-drenched scene, pausing for a moment on a cottage below them.

  “Why am I here?” Danny said. “You got what you wanted. Zoe Tate is likely to be convicted, and you once again worked the system like a pro.”

  Sid ducked his head in gracious acknowledgment and lowered the binoculars. “You’ll see. Thought I’d treat you to some fun. I began my nefarious career in crime as a Peeping Tom. Did the paterfamilias tell you that?”

  Danny shook his head. “Cecil said you were trouble from the start, though.”

  “True enough. I know you scoff, but therapy has helped me over the years. Zoe didn’t have the benefit of anyone to check her proclivities. Believe me, if you had to make a choice, you’re glad she’s the one inside the penal system.” He shook his head and whistled. “Bloody hell, man, that lassie is more cracked than one of Nathan’s ceramic vases. Poor thing.”

  Danny held his tongue. Sid was no doubt a good arbiter of cracked-ness, being personally experienced on the topic.

  Sid checked his watch. “Looks like we’re running late today. What shall we talk about until my wee surprise? I know you still have questions, which is the other reason I invited you to visit with me. I knew you couldn’t resist.”

  “And you get to gloat about cheating the system again,” Danny said.

  “Also true.”

  “Tell me about the night Annie died. You told me you didn’t pass by her house that night, but, of course, you did. Did you pinch her medications along with the journal and mobile?”

  “Oh yes. I hoped to confound and delay the investigation for a few days so I could think through my own situation with Elder Joe’s death.” Grinning, Sid tilted his beer toward Danny. “I know what you’re after.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You want to know what I provided your lot in exchange for not pursuing me for that bugger’s death—not that you had enough evidence anyhow. But I wanted to be clear of it—unequivocally. First of all, I staged meeting Zoe in the pub that night.”

  “Right, you met Zoe for the first time the night Annie died. I remember that well enough.”

  “I’d seen Annie with Nathan and wasn’t keen on them as a couple. Thought I could learn something through Zoe. I sniffed out her daddy sickness within five minutes and decided to follow her back to her house to peep for a while, but what happened instead? She drove to Annie’s house.” Sid peered through the binoculars and lowered them again. “Long story short, I was right there with my binocs and then I closed in to snap photos with my phone.”

  “Your prowess as a Peeping Tom and stalker,” Danny said.

  “I would have made a great spy.”

  “You could have saved Annie’s life.”

  Sid’s usual bland smile dipped toward sorrow. “I ran in as soon as Zoe left, but I was too late.”

  Danny didn’t bother to point out that Sid could have stopped Zoe before she injected the insulin. It probably hadn’t occurred to Sid, probably never would.

  “Here’s an easy question,” Danny said. “How did you smuggle the sleán out of the pub?”

  “You may have noticed that I’m the invisible type. It’s a quality I cultivate. One night, late, I walked out the back door with it. I liked the looks of it. Made the task of killing Elder Joe more interesting. Stylistically, I mean.”

  Danny downed the rest of his beer. Sid handed him another one out of a small cooler beside his chair. “I figured it was something like that. The most puzzling aspect to me—”

  “Now we’re on.” Sid trained the binoculars on an SUV passing by on the unpaved road below them. A moment later, he lowered them again. “False alarm. Cross your fingers routines hold up today. You’ll like this, I promise.”

  Danny stretched out his legs. “Which came first, visiting Cecil or revisiting Annie?” he said. “Did you know Annie was going to relocate herself to your childhood stomping ground?”

  “Annie, to be sure,” Sid said. “Imagine my surprise and delight when I tracked her down here. In our sessions, I’d talked about Clare and my family and Ballyhinch House. My childhood. The typical therapeutic topics. Speaking of which, what did you think about the ‘niggle’ she wrote about in the journal?”

  Danny took a long draw on his beer. “My theory? From the news or local gossip, your father’s name rang a bell with her. Cecil Wallace, victim of elder abuse found in the murder victim’s—Joseph Macy’s—home.”

  “Brilliant deduction, Detective. That was my thought, too. Imagine, if she’d made the connection back to me one day sooner, I would have gone under investigation and not followed Zoe to Annie’s house. Zoe would still be out here infiltrating everyone’s lives, and in some future time—weeks, months, or years from now—you’d be arresting Nathan for Zoe’s murder. He’d have cracked worse than he’s cracked now. At least now he has a chance.”

  “You helped Nathan,” Danny said. “Is that it?”

  “Without a doubt.” Sid drew his eyebrows together as if pondering the mysteries of the universe. “I started off wanting to grind him into dust, but I discovered he’s similar to my father. A man who doesn’t deserve harm. A good man. There are few enough of them out there. How could anyone harm Nathan Tate?”

  Sid Gibson had to be the most sideways man Danny had ever met. “Yet you sent him on a course to kill his own daughter.”

  “If successful, he’d have been found not guilty by reason of insanity. No harm done.”

  “Jesus, man,” Danny said, “you love your convenient answers. What did you hope to achieve by helping Nathan?”

  “Gratitude is always nice. Another question?”

  “Ay, were you harassing Elder Joe in the weeks before his death? Peeping, letting out his chickens?”

  Sid smiled and grabbed another beer. “To answer your previous question, I returned to Clare for Annie and checking in on dear old Dad was an added bonus.” A slow flush saturated his cheeks. “Imagine my horror.”

  “If you were so horrified, why didn’t you move Cecil out of Elder Joe’s right then?”

  “And risk him knowing I was about? Might as well sling up my balls and squeeze.”

  “You left him to die anyhow.”

  “You take me for a total and utter tit, don’t you? I’d have found a way to get my father help. I thought it best to keep my presence hidden from him since I still planned to meet up with Annie.”

  “You’re a brilliant stage manager, even to using Annie’s death to your benefit.”

  “Ah …” Sid peered through the bino
culars again. “Here we go. At last.” He continued speaking while following another SUV through the glasses. “Whatever you say about me, I’ll make a great witness for the prosecution during Zoe’s trial.”

  “If it gets that far. You bring a lot of baggage with you.” Danny sipped his beer, thinking about it. “Nathan will be asked to testify, too. What would it take for a father to bear witness against his child?”

  Sid dropped the glasses for a second to glance at him. “Depends on the father, I suppose.” He returned to his view through the binoculars. “Blessed be, you are in for a mighty treat now.”

  Danny rose. Two cars pulled up at the summer cottage below them. The cottage blocked his view of the drivers as they got out of their vehicles and went through the front door.

  Sid passed the binoculars to Danny. “Second bedroom on the left.”

  It took several seconds for Danny to zero in on the correct spot. He adjusted the glasses until a bare room with a dingy mattress on the floor came into focus. “I’m not sure I want to know,” he muttered.

  “The vision might scar you for life, fair warning.”

  Through the glasses, shadows darkened the wall inside the room. Joe Junior stepped into the room backwards, holding the hand of a portly woman who remained out of view.

  “Joe Junior?” Danny said. “What’s your interest in him?”

  Sid’s voice held a smile. “I was curious about Joe Junior because he looked perfect to go in for Elder Joe’s death instead of me. I did what any enterprising man would do and found out as much as I could about him.”

  Through the glasses, the second shadow on the wall moved into view. Danny dropped the glasses. “For the love of Christ.”

  Sid guffawed long and hard. “You should see your bloody face! This is beyond priceless.”

  Danny raised the glasses again, unable to stop himself from confirming the woman Joe Junior pulled toward the mattress.

  “You see?” Sid said. “It’s addictive.”

  Danny shoved the glasses at Sid. “That’s a sight to scorch the eyeballs.”

  Sid hadn’t stopped chuckling. “These cottages? The O’Briens invested in them.”

  Danny recalled his trip to Lahinch Golf Course and Mrs. O’Brien’s strange reaction when he’d asked if she knew where Joe Junior could be found. Puzzlement turned to understanding. “His secret alibi for the evening of Elder Joe’s death. I wondered why he kept repeating that he was alone.”

  “You’ve seen it for yourself. Uppity Mrs. O’Brien is shagging the groundskeeper in one of her husband’s summer cottages.” Sid dropped into his seat. “Life is good, that it is.”

  He tipped his beer bottle toward Danny, and after a hesitation, Danny sat down and tipped back. They drank, now blessedly out of view of the randy encounter.

  “Your hour is up,” Sid said. “You’d best check in. You could say you were on the job. Last puzzle piece in place, eh?”

  Not quite. Nathan still wavered on the edge of Danny’s comprehension, where he would probably remain.

  eighty-six

  A wave of relief swept over Merrit as Dr. Murphy excused himself from the room. “You’re cancer-free. I can’t believe it.”

  Liam sat in the second visitor’s chair with a smug expression plastered all over his face. “I told you we didn’t need a second opinion.”

  Merrit had insisted they visit a practitioner in private practice rather than return to the oncologist assigned to them by the public health care system. Dr. Murphy had come recommended by Mrs. O’Brien. Merrit had figured that begging for Mrs. O’Brien’s superior knowledge on the topic would lessen the ongoing sting of Merrit’s blunder about the showiness of the festival. Might be it helped, but Merrit questioned for how long. In any case, Merrit had been correct in her assumption that the O’Brien family used the private sector for their medical care.

  “You were sick,” she said. “That wasn’t nothing.”

  “I was sick. Now I’m not.”

  Dr. Murphy stepped back into the room carrying the images from several MRIs. He snapped one of them into a light box alongside an older image of Liam’s lungs. In the older image, he pointed to a black smudgy area in Liam’s left lung—the cancerous area—and pointed to the same spot in the latest MRI.

  Nothing. Wiped clean, as if by a magical eraser.

  “I don’t understand,” Merrit said.

  “You don’t want to understand,” Liam said.

  Dr. Murphy, a short man with a full head of silver hair, looked like everyone’s favorite uncle, and the indulgent smile he aimed at them solidified him in Merrit’s eye. “There’s a story here.” He snapped a third MRI up on the light box. “This is Liam’s left femur. I decided on an image after I examined his leg.”

  “I have arthritis in my left hip, I know that much,” Liam said.

  “The arthritis hasn’t changed. You’ll continue to have problems with your hip.” Dr. Murphy sat down. “Has the leg been worse in the last six months?”

  “Yes,” Merrit interjected. “Definitely. Last fall into winter.”

  “That makes sense. You never got tested for cancer again, you said.”

  “Why bother?” Liam pointed to the image of his lung. “The MRI tells the story. That’s how the cancer appeared the first time, before they cut out part of my right lung. As soon as I saw a repeat in my left lung, I said no more chemo, no more anything. It looks like I don’t need it anyhow.”

  “You’re correct about that.” Dr. Murphy swiveled his chair to study the images on the lighted wall again. “It’s good you opted out of chemo. My theory is that you never had cancer the second time. Granted, this is only a theory. We’ll run more tests—”

  “No more tests,” Liam said. “I don’t need tests.”

  “What’s your theory?” Merrit said.

  “Pulmonary embolism.”

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “It starts as a blood clot in a limb, such as your leg, called a deep vein thrombosis. When the clot dislodges and settles in the lung, it becomes a pulmonary embolism. Your symptoms do correlate.”

  “He could have died,” Merrit said.

  “Yes, PEs are serious.”

  Liam’s gloating smile returned. “So, you’d say it’s miraculous that I recovered from it, if an embolism is what I had. We still don’t know; it could have been cancer.”

  Dr. Murphy negated that with a brusque head shake. “Cancer doesn’t disappear—not in your case, with your history—which is why we’re here, correct? For a second opinion. You now have my opinion.”

  “But it’s a miracle,” Liam insisted. “Do these pulmonary embolisms just go away?”

  “Yes, they can dissolve after some months, but until that point they can cause pulmonary infarction, cardiac arrest, death. You were lucky, Mr. Donellan, very lucky, indeed. We should put you on a blood thinner to help prevent future clots.”

  “No medications,” Liam said. “I’m fine.”

  Dr. Murphy looked dubious. Merrit could tell that Liam’s attitude confused him. No, she wanted to say, he’s not senile. It’s worse than that; he’s under the spell of a murderous, self-proclaimed healer.

  “He still coughs,” Merrit said.

  “He’s still healing,” Dr. Murphy said. “If Liam experiences the same series of symptoms again—leg pain and tenderness, shortness of breath, fever, back pain—bring him back to me. PEs can recur.”

  “But it won’t,” Liam said.

  Dr. Murphy raised his eyebrows as if to say, We’ll see. I’m the expert here. He rose and shook their hands.

  Back in her car, Merrit beamed her own gloating smile toward Liam. “Thank goodness, a logical explanation. You can’t really think Zoe healed you.”

  “You’re not the one in my body, missy. I can tell the difference between a sudden turnaround and a slow improvement.”

  Merrit started to argue with him but stopped herself. It was no use. Liam believed what he wanted, like most people did, logic be
damned. He must have been feeling better anyhow but didn’t realize it until Zoe came along and gave him permission to be better.

  She started the engine. To the north of them, a grey mass of clouds spat down rain. Between the rain and her car rose yet another Irish rainbow. She laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of life sometimes.

  “What now?” Liam said.

  “Nothing and everything. Life. We all make-believe our lives in an attempt to achieve happiness.”

  “Or to remain sane,” Liam said.

  She sobered up. “That’s the same goal.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Liam said. “If you’re fighting for sanity or to keep a grip on what you think is sane, happiness is the least of your concerns.”

  Merrit thought of Zoe, the happy girl. “About Zoe—what did she want from you in exchange for playing the healer? She wanted something, right?”

  “Oh yes. She wanted me to never match Nathan to another woman.” Liam’s voice grew lighter, trying to distract her, Merrit knew. “Speaking of matchmaking, you’re not off the hook because I’ve received a clean bill of health. I plan to use you. Maybe I’ll work half-time at the festival this year.”

  To Merrit’s surprise, she found she didn’t mind, after all. She thought about Nathan, gaunt and haunted, and the insight that had glimmered through the drugs and mental disturbance. When it came to matchmaking, all she had to do was be herself. That would have to be enough. No more performing. No more comparing herself to Liam and finding herself wanting.

  She needed her own friends, she realized, apart from Liam’s inner circle. Liam wouldn’t be here forever, and whether or not she stayed in Ireland, she knew that for now, she needed to build a whole life here. A full life here wouldn’t stop her from returning to California if that was what her heart mandated. That was a possibility for later, but her moments were now, in Ireland.

  “Hung for a sheep as a lamb,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Nothing but a new mantra I’m trying on for size.” Her mobile dinged and displayed Simon’s name. She let the call go to voicemail but looked forward to a quiet moment to return his call.

  “You’re smiling,” Liam said. “You don’t fool me.”