by Catie Murphy
“Well,” Megan said as gently as she could, as she got into the Lincoln’s front seat, “I suppose we’d have to think about how we would feel if someone wanted to just take a finger bone from our grandfather’s hand.”
“That’s just it!” Mrs. Williams proclaimed. “He is my grandfather! Or one of them is. The last earl was my great-granduncle, so it’s his father who was my direct ancestor.”
“But your immediate grandpa. The one who was married to Grandma Elsie.” Megan pulled out into traffic, albeit not much of it. The River Liffey lay off to their right, beyond the light-rail Luas tracks, and she forbore to mention that Mrs. Williams would probably get to Rathmines, where her appointment with the vital statistics office was, faster on the tram than in Megan’s car.
“No one would want Granddaddy’s finger!” Mrs. Williams replied, shocked. “What a horrible idea, Ms. Malone. What on earth could you be thinking, suggesting somebody go and steal Granddaddy’s finger!”
“My apologies, Mrs. Williams,” Megan said, straight-faced. “I can’t imagine what got into me.” She drove them across the tracks and pulled onto the quays (a word she still had trouble saying keys), offering bits of information about the scenery when Cherise Williams had to pause for breath while scolding her for the imaginary sin of violating the sanctity of her poor sainted grandfather’s body. “Here’s Ha’penny Bridge. It was the first bridge across the Liffey, and cost a ha’penny to cross—up there is Trinity College, I suppose it’s possible the earls of Leitrim were educated there—entering the old Georgian center of Dublin, made popular when the Duke of Leinster moved to the unfashionable southern side of the city—”
“To be a duchess,” Mrs. Williams sighed. “Now wouldn’t that be something?”
“Countess is more than most of us can hope to aspire to.” Megan smiled at the woman in the rearview mirror, and Mrs. Williams, evidently assuaged, listened to the rest of Megan’s tour-guide spiel in comparative silence. Half a block from the clunky-looking statistics office building, Megan broke off to say, “Now, I just want to verify, Mrs. Williams, that I’ll be bringing Ms. Williams back to your hotel, and you’ll be meeting us there? You’re certain you don’t need me to collect you here at the office?”
“I’m sure, honey. You go get Raquel and I’ll see you tomorrow morning when we drive up to Lyetrum.”
Megan, wincing, said, “Leitrim,” under her breath and pulled in under the ugly statistics building to let Mrs. Williams out. “You have the company’s number if you decide you need a lift. Don’t be afraid to use it.”
“Thanks, honey. Oh! And you take my extra room key, so Ray-ray can go right in.” Mrs. Williams handed the key over, despite Megan’s protestations, and disappeared inside the building. Megan, letting out a breath of relief, drove out to the airport in blissful silence, not even turning the radio on. Raquel Williams’s flight was almost an hour late, so Megan got a passingly decent coffee and a truly terrible croissant from one of the airport cafés, and sat beside arrivals to wait for her client.
She would have known Raquel as Cherise’s daughter even if Raquel hadn’t waved when she saw Megan’s placard. She was taller than her mother, with rich auburn hair that didn’t match her eyebrows, but with the same strong facial shape that Cherise had. Her hair was worn in a much looser, more modern style than Cherise’s hair-sprayed football helmet, but otherwise she was her mother’s younger doppelgänger, down to the pronunciation of Leitrim. She swept up to Megan, said, “Hi, I’m Raquel Williams, the heir apparent to Lyetrum, and I just can’t wait to see this whole darn gorgeous Emerald Isle.”
“Megan Malone. It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Williams. I’ve dropped your mother off at—”
“Oh my gosh, you’re American too! Are you from Texas?” Raquel leaned across the barrier to hug Megan, who stiffened in surprise and found an awkward smile for the other woman.
“I am, yes. From Austin. And here’s your room key, from your mother.”
“Oh, wasn’t that nice of her? And woo-hoo! Keep Austin weird, honey! I live there now myself, but Mama’s from El Paso. Who’d have ever thought an earl would settle in Texas, huh?” Raquel Williams tucked the key in a pocket and came around the barrier rolling a suitcase large enough to pack three-quarters of a household into and wrangling a huge purse along with a carry-on. “Not that he did right away, of course. It was New York first, but when his son died in the war, he took sick and Gigi Elsie—that’s his daughter-in-law, our great-great-grandma Elsie—took him down to El Paso, where she’d always wanted to live, and heck fire, here we are. How’s Mama?”
Megan smiled. “She’s just fine. Visiting the statistics office now in hopes of getting permission to get a DNA test done on one of the mummies. I’ll take this, if you like, ma’am.” She nodded toward the enormous suitcase.
“Oh heck fire, sure thing, but you’d better call me Raquel or you’ll have me feeling old as sin.” Raquel swung the suitcase Megan’s way and smiled. “I’ve never been out of Texas before, this is all a big old adventure for me. How did you end up here?”
“I had citizenship through my grandfather, so they couldn’t keep me out.” Megan smiled again and gestured for Raquel to walk along with her as they headed for the hired cars parking lot. “Not quite as fancy as a connection to the earls of Leitrim, but it’s worked for me.”
“Leetrim? Oh my gosh, is that how they say it here? We’ve had it all wrong all this time! Won’t Mama have a laugh!” Raquel chattered merrily, her Texan accent washing over Megan in a more familiar, friendly way than her mother’s did, as they reached the car and drove back to Dublin. Raquel peppered her with questions about the scenery, Leitrim’s history—Megan wasn’t much help there—and whether the Irish were really as superstitious as she’d heard.
“It’s not that they’re superstitious,” Megan said with a smile. “It’s that you wouldn’t really want to build a road through a fairy ring, would you?”
Laughter pealed from the back seat. “Gotcha, right. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but are we almost there? I forgot to use the ladies’ before I left the airport.”
“Just a few more minutes, and you can run right in to use the toilets in the lobby while I get your luggage,” Megan promised.
Raquel breathed, “Thank goodness,” and, a few minutes later when they arrived, did just that. She met Megan at the hotel’s front doors, an apologetic smile in place, afterward. “Thank goodness for public restrooms. Would you mind helping me bring the luggage up? I hate to bother—” She nodded at the bustling lobby, full of people already doing jobs.
“I don’t mind at all. It’s room four-oh-three.” They took the lifts up, Raquel in the lead as they entered a narrow hall with dark blue carpeting.
“Oh, isn’t this terrific, it’s so atmospheric, isn’t it?”
“A lot of Dublin is. Old buildings, lots of history. It’s one of the reasons I love it.”
“I can see why.” Raquel slipped the key in the door, and, pushing it open, smashed the corner into her dead mother’s hip.
CHAPTER 2
Raquel screamed, the sound bouncing off concrete wall to come back at her full-force. She dropped to her knees, grabbing Cherise Williams’s body, and Megan swayed as the screams’ echoes bounced around the small bones of her ears. There were a few words in Raquel’s cries—Mama? Mama? Mama, wake up! Mama, no!—but mostly they were heart-wrenching sounds of loss.
Megan, cool with shock, stepped over both the Williamses, knelt on Cherise’s far side, and felt for a pulse. The woman’s skin had lost enough heat to be noticeable, and Megan could find no sign of a heartbeat, or breath. She whispered, “I’m sorry,” and rose to walk to the other side of the room, where windows overlooked O’Connell Street. A group of teenagers were horsing around four floors below, and people in everything from business-wear to sweatpants made their way along the thoroughfare. A child had just dropped their ice cream cone and was rigid with horror, while their distressed father fluttered beside the
m helplessly. Everything was absolutely normal down there, while up here in Cherise Williams’s hotel room, tragedy had struck. Raquel’s screams had brought hotel staff to the room and babbling sound filled smallish space.
Megan took her phone from inside her uniform’s inner pocket. With hands so cold she had to try several times for the phone’s sensors to recognize her fingers, she called Detective Paul Bourke of An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. He picked up with a rather cheery, “Megan? What’s the story? You always text unless you’ve found a body.” His self-satisfied chuckle faded into worried silence when she didn’t respond, and when he spoke again all trace of humor had fled from his voice. “Megan?”
“I’m okay.” Megan cleared her throat, trying to sound less like she’d swallowed a frog. “I mean . . . I’m okay. But my client is dead.”
“Jayzu—” Bourke seized the curse back by the skin of his teeth and lowered his volume considerably. “What in hell, Megan?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! I dropped her off at vital stat—uh, no, sorry, I mean the Central Statistics Office—about three hours ago and got her daughter at the airport and we just got back to the hotel and she’s—” Megan swallowed her own volume as hotel staff noticed her. One, a brisk woman in managerial clothing, strode over and thrust a hand out, obviously expecting Megan to hand over the phone.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you not to discuss the particulars of occurrences at the hotel with—”
Megan snapped, “I’m talking to the police,” and the woman altered between pale and flushed beneath the dark gold of her skin tones.
“I’m sure that’s not necess—”
“Believe me,” Megan said grimly, “it is.”
Detective Bourke was talking in her other ear, the short breaks in his speech sounding like a man pulling on his suit jacket, his coat, finding his hat, heading out the garda station door. He would be there in ten minutes; Pearse Street garda station was just across the Liffey from the hotel, and most days walking was faster than trying to get a car through Dublin’s congested streets.
The hotel manager still had her hand out, as if expecting Megan to give in like a toddler suddenly too tired to fight anymore. Megan turned toward the window, looking down at the bright, cold January afternoon. The abandoned ice cream wasn’t even melting on the sidewalk, and Megan, seeking them with her gaze, found the defeated father hurrying after the child, whose skip and hop suggested they’d been promised a new ice cream to replace the fallen soldier. Raquel’s sobs had taken on the harsh, throat-grating sounds of worn-down screams. Megan, who might have normally related the Williams story to Bourke with a laugh over a pint, reported what she knew of their visit to Ireland while he crossed the river in the Luas. She could hear the tram’s imperious bing bing! in the background, and its prerecorded, RTÉ-Irish-accent customer service voice telling people what to do, as if nothing untoward had happened anywhere in the city. She thought she kept her voice quiet enough that the hotel manager couldn’t hear what she had to say, much less Raquel Williams.
She watched Bourke exit the Luas just outside the hotel at the O’Connell Street Upper stop. He glanced at oncoming traffic and sprinted across the road ahead of it, narrowly missing stepping in the bereft blob of ice cream. He still had his phone to his ear, hearing the last of the details Megan could share, when he arrived in the Williamses’ hotel room door. She looked at the duration of the call—seven and a half minutes, faster than she’d thought he would get there—and hung up as Bourke’s gaze went from Cherise Williams’s body, down the length of the room to her, and back again. Then, all professionalism, he crouched at Raquel’s side, not quite touching her shoulder to gain her attention. “Forgive me, ma’am. I’m Detective Paul Bourke. Can you tell me what happened here?”
The hotel manager rallied, shooing her employees out ahead of her as she tried to make her way down to the detective without intruding on Raquel’s grief. “Detective, I appreciate your coming so quickly, but it is not . . . unprecedented. . . for a guest to die on the premises, only very unfortunate. We do not require—”
“Mama was fine!” Raquel burst out. “This can’t be natural! She’s just been in for her checkup, right before she came here, the doctor said she’s healthy as a horse. Detective, I want a—I want a—” The passion dumped out of her as quickly as it had come, leaving her in tears again.
Bourke looked up, meeting Megan’s eyes. He looked tired, she thought, ginger hair in disarray and his blue eyes dismayed. As well they might be, when she kept dragging murders, or at least unexpected bodies, into his life. Not, she supposed, that there were often expected bodies in his line of work. Unexpected ones were presumably more common.
“We’ll do whatever is necessary to learn what happened to your mother,” he promised Raquel. “My forensics team is on its way. In the meantime, Ms. Williams, would you step out into the hall with me? I’m afraid I’ve some questions to ask you.”
Raquel stood at his prompting, looking rather small and bewildered beside Bourke’s tall, slender self. The room door, which had been held open by Raquel kneeling in front of it, finally began to swing closed as Bourke guided her out into the hall. Megan made her way forward to catch the door, ostensibly to hold the door so Raquel would be able to enter again, but, more honestly, so she could listen in. A sharp-jawed young man in a suit came bustling up and the hotel manager said, “Doctor,” in relief, ushering him into the room. Megan ended up stepping out to make way, because Cherise Williams’s body sat propped against the bathroom doorframe, which was barely an arm’s length from the room door. So far at least six people, including Megan, had stepped over her.
A glitter in Bourke’s eye said he knew she’d come out after them, though he didn’t actually look at her as she moved an unobtrusive distance down the hall, where, she admitted to herself, unobtrusive meant “just far enough to be polite, but close enough to overhear.” Raquel Williams was in bewildered tears, shaking her auburn head. “Of course Mama doesn’t have any enemies. Not unless you count Peggy Ann Smithers, who always hated her.”
“And why did Ms. Smithers hate your mother?”
“Well, she thought she would have been prom queen if Mama hadn’t stolen her boyfriend, but Daddy says he wasn’t her boyfriend to begin with and that nobody was going to put a crown on that bottle-blond head anyway after the way she treated Cliff Johnson at the rodeo after the car crash—”
Bourke cast a slightly wide-eyed glance at Megan, who sucked her cheeks in and focused hard on a carpet seam as she fought a troubled smile. She could have told half-a-dozen stories like that about her own high school years, and they would have all sounded as fraught and overwrought to a stranger’s ears, even if they’d been the height of importance in her teen life. She imagined Bourke had similar tales of his own, although probably none of his featured a rodeo. He returned his attention to Raquel, noting down her commentary as if it might be relevant to her mother’s death while she said, “But I don’t think Peggy Ann has talked to Mama in fifteen years, and I don’t know why she’d come to Ireland to hurt her.”
“It seems unlikely,” Bourke agreed, “but we’ll look into it. And it could be it was just the excitement of being here that put a strain on her heart, ma’am. An autopsy will hopefully tell us more. But it’s quite a story, the one that brought you here. Who knew about that? About your family’s belief that you’re heirs to an Irish title?”
“Oh, gosh, I guess we told everybody,” Raquel said miserably. “Wouldn’t you? Mama might have put on a few airs, but that was all back home. Why would anything follow her here? She hasn’t even been here long enough to meet anyone!”
Megan thinned her lips on a response to that, thinking of the number of people she knew Cherise Williams had spoken to about her noble connections in the past two days. Dublin was a small town, for a big city, and Megan could imagine word spreading about an American thinking she could lay claim to a British title on Irish soil. She
couldn’t push that far enough to imagine it could end in murder, but Mrs. Williams had introduced herself at Leprechaun Limos as Countess Williams. Word would have gotten around.
The doctor exited the Williamses’ hotel room and Raquel surged forward, seizing his hand. “What did you learn? Anything? Oh, God, what happened to my mommy?”
Regret spilled across the young man’s face. “I’m afraid I can’t tell anything from a cursory investigation, ma’am. There are no obvious signs of violence, which initially suggests cardiac arrest, but more information might emerge from a more thorough look. I’m sorry. I wish I could give you an answer now.” He hesitated. “I can offer you a prescription for something to help you sleep for the next few nights, if you want. I imagine these next days will be hard.”
“Oh, God, please, yes.” Raquel seized the prescription paper he offered—Megan wondered if on-call physicians for hotels carried prescription pads as a matter of course—and he, with his apologies, left as Bourke’s forensics team arrived. Megan, glancing at her phone, was surprised to find it had barely been half an hour since they’d found Cherise’s body.
The lead forensics person, a solid woman in her mid-fifties, began speaking with the hotel manager about who had been in and out of the room. Megan, dismayed, realized she could count at least eight—Bourke, herself, Raquel, four members of the hotel staff, and the doctor— which had to contaminate the crime scene, if that’s what it was. At this news, the forensics leader nodded grimly and put her team to work. Megan wondered if she should introduce herself, given this was the third body she’d come across in eight months, but it had been a different forensics team every time. Bourke had only been the lead detective on all the cases because she knew him, and even so she wondered what his superiors had to say about the American who kept finding dead people.
