Habit of Fear
Page 27
When he paused, Julie realized she had been all but holding her breath. Her neck was stiff, her nerves taut.
“I knocked around a bit without an anchor,” the priest went on, “latching on, where they’d let me, to the literary wing of the republicans. When the cause was lost, or in abeyance, as I’ve come to believe it still to be—until union is achieved—I came back to the Franciscans. Because I wanted an education, I convinced myself and others that I had a religious calling. The Lord is not particular whether you enter by the back or the front door. I was on my way to become a priest. I had gotten as far as subdeacon orders when I was sent to Rome for a year. It might have been to Rome or New York, but I went to Rome, and do you know who it was there who taught me—and in Latin, mind you—Christian ethics? A Franciscan brother, the forgotten republican hero of my youth.”
Fact or fable? Both. Julie drew a deep breath. Her mind teemed with questions, but before she could frame the first of them, the old priest rose from his chair, responding to a bell he said was for vespers.
In the end all she said was, “Thank you, Father Daniel.”
IT WAS A WARM DAY, Indian summer, and as soon as she found a bench along the Liffey quays, she took her notebook from her carryall and entered the story almost exactly as he had told it. She had a good memory and she knew what she had heard … Rome or New York.
Was her search ended, and if it was, would it ever be truly ended? And must it be? This was much the question Edna O’Shea had asked her: what would we know of him if we knew the truth that would be better than what we know now?
FORTY-SEVEN
IT WAS HER SECOND DAY back in Dublin, and having decided to return to New York within the week, she phoned Tim Noble. He seemed less than excited at the prospect. New York was going to seem very dull to her, he suggested. Then he asked, “What about the character who was shot in your bed? The boss thought you’d file something on that. Where were you when it happened?”
“At a funeral.”
“Lucky it wasn’t your own.” Amazingly, no word seemed to have reached New York on what had happened to her and Seamus McNally. “Are you going to bring me a present?” Now he was trying to sound cheerful.
“Of course.”
“Are you sure you have the right size?”
“Bastard.”
“Julie, the priest at Saint Malachy’s called with a message for you. … Wait now till I dig it out of my drawer. …”
She waited, something like fear in her throat. But Tim would have said outright if it concerned Kincaid and Donahue.
He came on the phone again. “Here we are. He said you’d know what he was talking about and you might want to know it while you were over there: the information you hoped to get from the Chancery Office doesn’t exist. The transaction simply could not have occurred. Does it make sense to you?”
“I do know what he’s talking about. Thank you, Tim.”
The whole annulment legend was pure fantasy. Perhaps there was a divorce somewhere down the years. It was one more thing she did not have to know.
In the early afternoon she phoned Roy Irwin’s home. His wife answered.
“Where are you?” She sounded surprised to hear Julie’s voice.
“Back in Dublin.”
“Ach, and Roy in Donegal. He went down this morning with the Murder Team to Slievetooey. …”
“Slievetooey,” Julie repeated, searching her memory for why the place name was familiar.
“The bodies of two men were found in a cave where there’d been an explosion,” Eileen went on. “They’re thought to be Americans. Another reason Roy went down; he was hoping to find you.”
“Tell him I’m back in the Greer Hotel if you hear from him,” Julie said. “They were killed in an explosion?”
“No, love. The explosion occurred days ago, but Special Branch found the bodies when they went to further examine the site. Each with a bullet in the back of his head. Where will it end, you wonder, where and when will it end?”
FORTY-EIGHT
AND WHAT’S TO BECOME of the old woman in her bed with the curtains drawn? Julie’s first thought. Her legs were rubbery when she went out from the public phone in the Trinity College lodge after talking to Eileen Irwin. She had expected that something might happen to those two—and not for an instant did she doubt they were Kincaid and Donahue—but not this. They were not that important. Except to one man, a New York gangster who didn’t know they intended not to show up to testify against him.
She did not find a bench in Parliament Square and she very much needed to sit down. Students everywhere. Laughter and earnest conferences on matters nearer to life than to death. She would not have wanted them to die. Not that way. Christ! It was that old woman she was thinking of. Why not of Missy Glass? Why not of their mothers waiting for word much like this, but not from Ireland? She thought of Kincaid’s letter she had wanted to throw away but hadn’t. Finding no place to sit down, she followed a young couple who went, hand in hand, up the steps and into the chapel. At the altar an afternoon service was in progress—High Church Anglican. In which she herself had been baptized. She entered a far pew and sat wondering why her feeling was primarily of grief.
When she returned to the hotel, Detective Sergeant Lawrence Carr was waiting in the lobby. Her first fear was that he was going to ask her to go north with him, possibly to identify the bodies.
“Just talk,” he said. “We can use your room if you like and leave the door open for propriety’s sake.”
When they had settled in, he said, “They’re your buckos, all right. A man named Devlin came forward and identified them. There will be some notification of kin going on before their names are given out, but I’m afraid you’ll be in for it, Mrs. Hayes. The whole story may break out into the open. What I’m to ask you here is whether you saw them again in Donegal.”
“Yes.”
When she had finished telling of her encounter with Kincaid and Donahue, he said, “The silly fools.” Then: “But they were caught between the devil and the sea, weren’t they? Isn’t it remarkable, the similarity in hit techniques between terrorists and gangsters? But sure, what is one but the other?”
Julie said nothing.
“Our lot try for the poetic symbol as well: Aengus’s Cave.”
She felt the chill run down her back, and of course that was what had most grieved her, the desecration of her father’s place, which she had wanted to keep a shrine. No. Be honest, Julie: what you’re grieving for is the death of a dream. Then she thought about what the detective had said—the poetic symbol—and remembered instantly her session with him and Special Branch Inspector Costello, in which one of them had said that the ONI were a younger lot, to whom the name Aengus would mean little. “Sergeant Carr, do you know who killed Kincaid and Donahue?”
Carr rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not like the IRA, now, is it, them being so close to Quinlan? But I don’t think the IRA would have embraced them if, as they told you, they intended to stay in Ireland.”
“And the ONI?”
“There has to be a reason. We said it before of Donavan’s death: even our terrorists don’t kill without reason.”
“An exchange of favors, then, with Sweets Romano. We said that before too,” Julie said.
Carr merely nodded, an uncertain gesture toward affirmation. “When do you plan to return to the States, Mrs. Hayes?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Julie said.
Carr smiled, almost wistfully. “There’s an Aer Lingus flight in the morning. Both Inspector Duffy and Inspector Superintendent Fitzgerald feel that it would be in your best interests if we could get you aboard the earliest possible flight. They both sent you their warmest regards and directed me to particularly thank you for your cooperation.”
“Yeah,” Julie said and got up. “I’ll pack as soon as you leave, Sergeant Carr.”
“I daresay you’ll be glad to get home.” “I daresay.”
FORTY-NINE
IT WAS THE QUESTIONS he had not asked that Julie mulled during the long flight home, chief among them whether or not she had found further trace of her father. She read her notes from the beginning. There was a terrible ending to one of the articles she had yet to write for the Sunday magazine, the story of rape and vengeance.
And of the search? Afterward she was sure she had known in her soul the—for her—heartbreaking story that appeared in the New York newspapers the next day with the dateline, Ballymahon, Ire.
An internationally known artist, Edna O’Shea, was arrested yesterday as the leader of the outlawed Irish extremist group known as the ONI. Miss O’Shea had been under suspicion as a member of the Provisional IRA for some years. It is now suspected that she led the split from the parent group. The ONI, which stands for One Nation Indivisible, takes the intransigent position on the union of north and south, and is known to have ties with international terrorism. What led to Miss O’Shea’s arrest was the confession of a suspected ONI member that he had taken part, on her orders, in the killing of two Americans hiding out in Ireland and under indictment in New York for felonious assault.
About the Author
Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.
Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-6046-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY
DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia