by Catie Murphy
CHAPTER 11
Jessie’s friend Flynn had, it turned out, gone there after all, and sat huddled in a corner with the expression of a lost puppy. Jessie froze when she came in, gaze skittering around the cozy little space like she was trying to find somewhere safe to sit, while the locals all looked up from their coffee and soup and chips and made no pretense of not watching. Flynn shrank even farther into his corner, and Jessie, with an act of deliberate defiance, tossed her hair, marched over to him, and said, “Sorry about all that out there. Want to join us?”
He turned so pink his blond hair looked like the flame on top of a match. “That’d be grand, if you really don’t mind.” He got his coffee cup and shuffled to the table Raquel had claimed, shoulders hunched and eyes wide, as if he expected to be kicked. The whole café—Megan thought everybody in town who wasn’t otherwise occupied with work or family might have come down for lunch today, in hopes of getting in on the drama unfolding in their midst—watched him eagerly.
Jessie, a little too loudly, said, “Of course we don’t mind. This is my boyfriend, Reed. Reed, this is my friend Flynn, the one I was just telling you about.”
The young men shook hands, neither appearing to try to crush the other’s, which surprised Megan a little. Raquel, trying to act like everything was normal, gave Flynn a determined smile and gestured to the chairs. “Take any one you like. You can hold the table for us while we get our lunch.”
“Thanks.” Flynn sat down with his back to as much of the café as he could, which Megan felt was a good call. He had to know everyone was watching. At least he didn’t have to meet any of their gazes, that way, or have to see the suspicious scowls Reed kept throwing at him. Hiding her own smile, Megan went up to the counter with the others, looking over the buffet-style offerings. Loads of Irish cafés worked on that principle, and after almost three years in the country, Megan still found it strange enough to be uncomfortable.
“I keep thinking I’ve adapted,” she admitted to the Williamses, who stared at the café counter with a wariness not unlike Megan’s own her first year or so in Ireland. “But then it turns out I’m still awfully American. Try the soup. It’ll be pureed, but it’ll be good.”
All three sisters looked skeptical, but the soup—carrot, chickpea, and coconut milk—was, as Megan had warned, both delicious and pureed to a consistent smooth texture. Megan, at the end of the line, got a chunk of brown soda bread and extra butter to go with it, and by the time she joined the others at the table, an impassioned discussion had burst to life. Sondra, sounding exasperated, was saying, “I remember you poring over them when we were kids, like you’d found the door to Narnia or something. You talked about them incessantly,” as Megan sat.
“And if you’d ever listened to anything I said you might remember something useful,” Raquel said with a tired bitterness that obviously went back decades. “It was the story of why Great-Geepaw Patrick left Ireland, and how he and Great-Geemaw met and fell in love. I loved it because it was like a fairy tale. Our very own fairy tale, with an evil king and everything.” She went silent a moment, staring at her soup. “I guess that’s what you were talking about, Sonny. The landlords taking the farmers’ lands and letting them starve. I never really imagined it was real. It was a fairy tale,” she said again, unhappily. “Gigi Elsie wrote about how Patrick had wanted away from his family because of the evil king who had died before he was born. He was afraid the king’s legacy would poison them all. But I guess it was probably an earl, not a king, and I just didn’t know the difference.”
Megan, gently, said, “I read a little about the family in the twentieth century. The next earls did better by the people. One of those was Patrick’s father, and the other was his brother. So the old earl didn’t poison them all, after all.”
“So he left Ireland for nothing, and we didn’t get to grow up as nobility.”
“We wouldn’t have anyway,” Sondra said impatiently. “We wouldn’t be us if we’d grown up rich Irish kids. Patrick would have married someone else and had different children and we’d be four generations of cumulative changes. We’d have been other people entirely.”
Reed, who’d sat through it all, ignoring his food and glaring at Flynn, took Jessie’s hand and focused a contrived gaze of loyalty on her. “I’d love you anyway, Jess, no matter who you were.”
“I bet, because I’d be rich.”
Reed looked wounded, and Flynn, who had kept his eyes on his plate until that point, looked up. “You wouldn’t even know her. I’d have grown up with her in school like, and we might be best mates, but you wouldn’t even know her.”
To Megan’s surprise, Jessie gave Flynn a rather soppy smile that almost literally raised Reed’s hackles. He huffed, aggrieved, and Megan accidentally caught Sondra and Raquel’s eyes with an ill-concealed smirk of Oh my god, twenty-somethings. All three of them lost the plot as one, smirks turning to giggles and then, as Jessie, offended, looked between them, into full-on belly laughs. Even Sondra ended up clutching the edge of the table and wheezing with laughter. Raquel pushed her soup bowl away so she could put her head on the table to muffle her laughter, and Megan, gradually getting hold of herself, wiped her eyes and didn’t dare look at the older Williams sisters again for fear of setting herself off again. The three younger people hunched together in shared insult, aware they were being laughed at without quite understanding why.
Finally Raquel lifted her head again, her face strained with contained sobs. Sondra scooted her chair closer and put her arms around Raquel, sharing the tears that laughter had brought on. Jessie’s eyes welled up with confused anger and sorrow. Megan’s heart went out to her, and she was glad when Reed hugged the younger woman, even if it left Megan and Flynn awkwardly on the outside of their grief. Megan glanced around the café, finding most of Mohill’s denizens unabashedly watching the antics at the Williams table. A couple of young mothers had the decency to skitter their gazes away, faintly embarrassed, when Megan met their eyes, but they looked back again as soon as they thought it was safe, and most of the older people just kept right on watching.
Megan rose, stepping between the sisters and the biggest chunk of viewers that she could, and settled into a parade rest. She wasn’t particularly tall or broad-shouldered for her size, but the black chauffeur’s uniform lent her a bit of authority, and the expressionless gaze she met onlookers with lent her a lot more. Within a few seconds the café patrons had decided their lunches were more interesting than gawking, and from then on any time someone looked their way, their attention bounced off Megan and returned to their food. A surprising number of people finished their coffees and left in the next five minutes.
After a while, Sondra, somewhat recovered, said, “Thank you, Megan. I think you can sit back down with us now.”
“You finish up.” Megan glanced over her shoulder to see Flynn gaping at her with something akin to hero worship. “I’ll eat on the walk back to the car.”
“This isn’t part of your job,” Raquel objected.
Megan permitted herself the ghost of a smile. “Sometimes it is, ma’am.”
Somehow the formality made all three sisters smile a little in return, and allowed them go to back to their lunches without feeling like they needed to insist on Megan joining them. She listened while they talked, and watched how, when others came into the café, she drew their attention and then, with her stoic presence, sent it elsewhere. Even the most curious didn’t dare do more than steal a glance or two when Megan’s gaze kept finding theirs as they peered toward the Williamses.
“There were drawings of the grounds,” Raquel said as she finished her soup. “Not ones that Gigi Elsie did, but ones from Patrick that she’d tucked into the book. Even when I was a kid they were fragile, so I didn’t open them very often. And I had a hard time reading his handwriting. It was old-fashioned and pencil on paper so it’d gone all yellow and faded and there were cracks and holes from it being folded. I never thought to copy them. I wish I had.”
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“I always liked maps,” Reed said. “I used to think about being a surveyor, when I was a kid. My grandpa was one.” The last was defensive, like he had to explain himself.
Sondra, sourly, said, “And you ended up an itinerant musician?” which explained to whom he’d felt he owed the explanation. Megan worked to keep her face straight, knowing a crack in her demeanor would make the other café patrons feel like they could return to spying on the strangers.
“I’m not itinerant!”
“Oh my god, can we not,” Jessie said tiredly. “Do you remember anything about the maps, Raq?”
The middle sister shook her head. “Just the house and the lake.”
“There’s loads more up there,” Flynn put in. Even Megan glanced at him, and he shrank in his seat. “We weren’t supposed to go messing about, but everybody did after the family moved away. They’ve a groundskeeper who’s there enough that the old house isn’t much damaged even though it’s been empty since my mam was a girl, and they keep the land from going all to seed, but there’s hundreds of acres to mess about on like. We used to go and piss on the grav—” Megan looked again in time to see him go white, and allowed herself a one-sided grin as she settled back to parade rest while the kid tried to find a non-incriminating way to finish that sentence.
Jessie helped by skipping over the confessional aspect of it. “There’s a graveyard? I thought they were all buried at that church in Dublin. Why don’t we just go dig one of them up?”
“Well, that’s horrible,” said Raquel.
“And apparently urine-stained,” Sondra said more sharply. “Who would do that?”
“Lads whose ancestors were starved by those landholders and died or fled the country to find a new life,” Flynn said almost as sharply, and to Megan’s surprise, Sondra subsided. “I could take you around, anyway,” Flynn said. “Show you all the old bits, if you wanted.”
“Let’s,” Jessie said decisively. “Megan, you should eat before the soup is totally cold and then we’ll go. The place has mostly cleared out anyway.”
Megan assessed the café, then nodded, said, “Thanks,” and sat to eat her lukewarm soup, which was still pretty good. She spread butter thickly onto the bread and ate that on the way back to the car, licking her fingers before she opened the car doors, because she’d forgotten a napkin. The dogs made sleepy sounds as the doors opened, but even they couldn’t really be bothered to wake all the way up as Sondra climbed in beside them. Everyone hesitated momentarily, trying to figure out the logistics of Flynn joining them, and Reed offered, “He can ride with me.”
Jessie paused at the Bentley door, eyeing her two would-be suitors uncertainly. “Uh.”
“It’s five miles and we’ll be driving right behind them,” Sondra said. “He’s not going to run him off the road.”
“I could cycle,” Flynn said to Jessie. “It’d take longer, but . . .”
“For God’s sake.” Reed tossed his keys to Flynn. “There, you drive. Does that make everyone happy?”
Flynn threw the keys back. “It would if I drove, but I don’t. And did you sign a waiver for a second driver on the rental? You’d be in for loads of trouble if I crashed.”
Megan, who hadn’t been asked, said, “I think they’ll be fine,” and, as if her word was gospel, everyone got into the appropriate cars to drive up to the old Williams property.
* * *
The old cast-iron gates to the Lough Rynn House property were, in the strictest sense of the word, open. There were no chains holding them closed, and the heavy bolt that would normally bar them was not actually settled in the bolt-holder. Consequently, the two sides of the gate stood perhaps two inches apart, not exactly an inviting distance.
Flynn, with a youthful disregard for consequences, got out of Reed’s car, shoved the gates all the way open, indicated that the two vehicles should drive through, and then, with a peculiar nod toward niceties, returned the gates to almost closed before getting back into the car. Megan drove ahead of them, not wanting to speed but also very much wanting to get the gates out of her rearview mirror, as if not seeing them would absolve her of trespassing.
The driveway had an air of benign negligence, with sharp yellow and white gravel clearly having been laid down deliberately at some point. Even now it stayed within the road’s boundaries rather than melting into a mess at the shoulders, but tufts of grass grew up in sparse rows between the gravel too, and pothole incursions had developed over the years. All of the Williams women fell into a hush as they crept up the road toward the house itself, and Megan, amused, felt her own heart rate accelerating, as if a wonderful surprise awaited them.
A few minutes later a curve in the road revealed the old house, and Megan had to hold her breath to keep from having an opinion before the sisters could come to terms with what they saw. She pulled the car into a parking spot and got the doors for the sisters, who got out with unabashed awe brightening their faces. Even Sondra’s tension faded as they gazed at the glorious old building.
Megan couldn’t tell, at a glance of the building’s front face, what had stood for two centuries and what had been built, or restored, more recently. Under the changing winter light and dripping rain, the bricks looked grey or gold or white, set on absolute acres of wilding lawn and framed by thick leafless trees that nestled the old building comfortably into its surrounds. Slate roofs with more chimneys than Megan could count in one go rose toward the clouds, peaking over windows with complex wooden frames. Megan wondered if any of them held the original glass, and if it wobbled and shaped the view of the endless gardens stretching around the house. It wasn’t a castle the way Americans thought of one, with turrets and towers, but a magnificent, multistory manor house that looked as though it had slowly grown into its position, like the dark trees around it.
Sondra bleated something like a laugh. “I guess it would have been all right.”
They were all suddenly in tears, regrets and loss and maybe a certain sense of the absurd overwhelming them. Megan stepped away, giving them the space they needed to mourn and recover, and when Reed and Flynn drove up, shooed them away with a protective ferocity. They both made as if to get out of Reed’s vehicle and she gave them a warning look, since she didn’t want their company right then herself. Especially since she needed to text Detective Bourke, although—inevitably—the signal out in the hinterlands of Ireland ranged between one bar and none. She typed up a text anyway, describing the diary and explaining its absence, and spent several minutes pressing send again until the message finally went through.
The sisters seemed to have almost collected themselves by then, and Reed and Flynn were sort of sulking inside the rental like they couldn’t decide whether to get out or not. Megan wondered if they would keep being cowed by her gimlet glares, or if they’d overcome their own indecision to act. Maybe Jessie drew indecisive men to her, or maybe it was just that they were in their twenties and hadn’t figured it all out yet.
Not that Megan herself, in her forties, had figured much out either, given that less than forty-eight hours earlier she’d been begging for a couch to crash on if her life went any more haywire. And honestly, between Brian, Jelena, and Niamh’s often-empty apartment, she probably wouldn’t have ever needed to flee all the way back to the States, but for a minute it had seemed a genuinely viable option.
Sondra, more or less composed, waved at Megan, beckoning her over. “We don’t know what to do next. It seems so . . .”
“Rude,” Jessie put in, when Sondra didn’t finish her sentence. “To just go stomping all over the place. On the other hand, it’s kind of what we came to do, right? And nobody is here to stop us.”
Raquel murmured, “We should have worn different shoes,” and Sondra, still in tall heels, gave her a look that fell somewhere between rueful agreement and total irritation.
Flynn and Reed finally got out of their car, joining the women at the edge of the house’s formal grounds. Like the driveway, the acres of lawn suffer
ed from benign—or perhaps something less benevolent than benign—neglect. Under the gray January sky, yellow hay that Megan suspected were summertime wildflowers met brambles and saplings at the lawn’s farthest edges. Tremendous older trees sprang up suddenly at those edges, though, with no gradient between the knee-high little trees and their vastly taller brethren. The groundskeeper Flynn mentioned apparently worked at keeping the forest from eating the lawn, but if they didn’t return soon, it would be a lost battle.
The house itself, set an easy couple hundred metres from where they’d parked, had the same kind of feeling to it. The doors were sealed tightly and it somehow gave the impression of resting until life returned to it, but a few windows were broken, and Megan imagined the whole place could fall in on itself with just a little more neglect.
“C’mon,” Flynn said. “Nobody’s around to give out to us, so we might as well have a look around.” He cast Jessie a quick look to see if he’d impressed her, then struck off for the house as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Reed, not to be outdone, followed hard on his heels while the women exchanged glances.
“Jessie’s right,” Sondra said with a shrug. “Megan, you might as well get the dogs and let them stretch their legs, too.”
“Oh. Yeah, good idea. Thanks.” Megan hurried back to the car and released the hounds, or at least the terriers, and clipped their leads on them before they could go surging off after the Williams women. “No way. There’s too much land for you to get lost on out here and I’ll need to drive everybody home in a couple hours, not chase puppies all over kingdom come.” All three dogs strained at their leashes, wanting to catch up with the others.
