by Catie Murphy
It only took a moment to do so. Megan’s shoes were comfortable and flat and easy to both drive and walk in. Sondra, on the other hand, had to keep to the gravel-paved walkway that led toward the house’s front doors, her weight tipped forward a little to keep her heels from sinking in. Raquel had hurried to offer Sondra her arm, and Jessie ran to catch up. They looked momentarily happy, like a family just out to do something silly together. They slowed a little as they reached the house, nerves overtaking them, but Jessie gave a firm nod and they split up, everybody beginning to peer through windows and try doors.
Reed shouted that he was going around to the back to do the same. He disappeared around the side, which looked like enough of a hike to get his ten thousand steps in for the day. Flynn followed soft of half-heartedly, like he felt he needed to be a bold explorer in order to impress Jessie. Megan made a cup of her hands and peered in one of the windows, trying to see through the gloom and grime that had built up on them.
Even through the muck, it was clear the interior had been magnificent in its day. Although it had been abandoned decades ago, it retained its stateliness, and the detailing—heavy-weighted cornices, window frames swollen with age and water, broken-tiled floors—cried out with their former glory. Jessie walked along the windows, peeking in as silently as a ghost, while Raquel kept her fingers pressed against her mouth, eyes large above them. Even Sondra looked pained, as if seeing what the old building had become was more than she could bear. Megan heard her murmur, “We couldn’t restore it,” and knew she was trying to convince herself.
Megan couldn’t imagine how much it would cost to restore it. The property had been largely empty since the last of the family had moved away from it in the 1970s, and decades of neglect had to take an impossibly pricey toll. But even overgrown and forgotten, its bones were still good. Megan didn’t know how much longer they’d stay that way, if the estate continued on without residents, but letting the old manor fall into total disrepair seemed like an actual crime.
In fact, she thought it might literally be, given the laws about restoring and maintaining listed buildings. There were ruined castles held up by scaffolding all over the country, preventing them from becoming any more ruined than they already were, but without the cost and effort of restoring them. A manor like the Lough Rynn House, still just on this side of dereliction, had to be a site of interest for the heritage groups.
“We couldn’t restore it,” Sondra murmured again, and Raquel sighed.
“Do you think . . . if we proved we were the heirs . . . they wouldn’t give it to us, would they. It doesn’t work that way.” She hesitated. “Does it?”
“It still belongs to somebody,” Jessie said unhappily. “They must not want it anymore, but it still belongs to them. And honestly, what would we do with it?”
“Turn it into a hotel,” Sondra said, suddenly brisk and businesslike. “It would cost a fortune and we could never do it, but that’s what you’d do.”
“Shut your mouth,” Raquel said primly. “Can you imagine what Mama would say if she heard you talking about turning her ancestral home into a hotel?”
“If it meant her ancestral home didn’t crumble into dust, I think she’d have been all for it. She didn’t have any sense when it came to money anyway.”
Raquel, genuinely shocked, gasped, “Sondra!” and her older sister exhaled noisily.
“Ray, it’s God’s own truth, whether you like it or not. If somebody came along and said, ‘Here, Cherise, I want you to pour every penny you’ve got into restoring a building that will never love you back, and might bankrupt you before you finish,’ she’d have been signing her name on the dotted line before they were even finished talking.”
“Sondra! She’s our mama! And she’s dead! You can’t speak ill of the dead!”
“Believe me, if I was speaking ill, you’d know it.”
Before it devolved any more toward an argument, the manor’s broad front door suddenly banged open. Reed, dusty and cobwebbed, stood in its frame. “Come in,” he said hoarsely. “I think you’d better see.”
CHAPTER 12
Not even Sondra put up more than a pro forma protest, a combination of curiosity and inborn conviction that they had some slight birthright to be poking around the crumbling manor, allowing them the mental latitude necessary to do a little more invasive trespassing. Even Megan and the dogs, on their leashes, went in. “In the name of reporting back to Paul,” she murmured to Thong, who took the trouble to sit down, tilt her head, and cock an ear dubiously at Megan.
“Yeah,” Megan whispered, “yeah, okay, it’s total bull, but we’re running with it anyway, okay?”
Thong, evidently satisfied that Megan had thought this through, gave a soft whine of agreement, rose, and trotted up to her brother, who had been obliged to stop at the ends of his leash while Megan had a conversation with his sister. They hurried to catch up with Reed and the Williams sisters—they could be a band, phrased like that—who had all gone upstairs, walking in each others’ footprints so the dust was hardly disturbed. The dogs were less concerned about that, and small paw prints appeared in a wide swath, wiping out another set of Reed’s footprints, presumably from his first exploration.
The old house had over a dozen bedrooms, and even after decades of disuse, some of them retained their grandiosity. Megan saw four equally deep impressions in the wood floor of one of the rooms, as if a heavy bed had once sat there. A flowery ceiling above the empty bed space must have once held a candle-laden chandelier. Hairs rose on Megan’s arms as she thought of the age and glamour of that era. Then, more pragmatically, she also imagined being the housemaid who had to climb up and scrub that intricate cornicing free of wax and smoke, and some of the romance faded.
“Careful of the floor here,” Reed said. “I found a weak spot the hard way.” Boards softened with age had clearly taken too much weight, splinters jabbing up from a divot just shy of being a hole.
“I always wondered what would happen if somebody stepped all the way through floorboards,” Raquel said with a kind of macabre interest. “I used to be afraid that would happen to me and I’d fall all the way into the basement.”
“Does this place even have a basement?” Jessie asked.
“Probably cellars,” Sondra replied. “Not basements like at home.”
Raquel, irritably, said, “I didn’t mean falling through this house, anyway,” and Reed said, “Shh,” as he pushed open a door that had clearly been broken through at some point in its history.
The room beyond it didn’t even have windows, light coming only from the torch on the phone Reed held as they entered. The walls were awkward; some short, some long, all of them angled, as if the room had been built as an afterthought, taking space out of the rest of the house for this space. It made it the innermost room, as protected from the elements as could be possible, and as her eyes adjusted, Megan understood why it had been built that way.
Whatever history the family had, whatever memories and heirlooms had been worth keeping, but not keeping close to hand, had been packed into the odd little space. One by one the other torches came on, illuminating the room. Hope chests were crammed together, curving cedar tops holding the weight of portraits above them. Other boxes, much more modern in make, were stacked in tall piles, someone’s neat handwriting labeling the fronts and sides with information about what they contained: photographs, papers, books, letters. One, near the top, simply had Patrick written on it. Raquel went to that one, shifting boxes away to take it from the pile, and knelt to open it. Everyone gathered around, even the dogs. Thong put her nose over the edge of the box and blew into it, then backed up and sneezed violently.
It released a string of tension that had entered the room, allowing everybody to laugh. Raquel took a few pieces of newspaper out, gingerly, and turned them over, searching through the pages. “They’re the last earl’s search for Geepaw Patrick.” She put them aside, lifting envelopes and letters out. Jessie lost interest and began
looking around, lifting sheets off portraits and peeking beneath them. Reed paced after her to the degree it was possible in the little room: They came close to bumping into one another as they each looked through different boxes. Megan backed up, tugging the dogs with her, and watched Sondra never quite touch anything, her hands drifting above boxes and chests and portraits as if encountering a force field that kept her from making contact. Aside from the box Raquel had opened, no one else intruded on the material that much. Megan thought the permission they’d granted themselves to enter the house had a hard limit, one that they probably weren’t fully aware of hitting.
“Jess.” Raquel’s voice broke in little more than a whisper, but they were all so quiet the shock of it sent chills up Megan’s spine. Jessie went back to Raquel as she lifted a 120-year-old photograph from near the bottom of the box.
Jessie said, “Oh, shit,” and stepped back.
Her own face, or near enough as to make no difference, gazed up at them from Raquel’s hands. Their great-to-the-third grandfather’s eyes were narrower, perhaps, and his mouth less full than Jessie’s. The faded sepia tones of the photograph washed away comparisons of hair or eye colour, but the jaw structure, the shape of the nose, and the set of the eyes were direct echoes of the young woman standing at Raquel’s shoulder. “He’s even got your eyebrows, Jess.”
Jessie, offended, said, “My eyebrows are nowhere near that thick,” and even Sondra chuckled quietly.
“No, but the shape is the same. Look at his hairline.” She reached over to smooth Jessie’s hair back, showing the same strongly triangular hairline on her sister as their grandfather had. She let Jessie’s hair fall and spread her hands as if admitting defeat. “I believe it now, at least.”
“People can look like people they’re not related to,” Raquel murmured, “but yeah. This is . . .”
“Freaking weird.” Jessie stepped forward again, staring at the photo. “Gigi Elsie had some pictures of him, but they were all older. I never thought I looked like him or anything. He must have been . . . he must have been about my age, when this was taken?”
Raquel turned the picture over, looking for a date. “Nineteen-oh-four. He was a little younger than you are now.” She put the photograph down, faceup, and took a picture of it over Sondra’s sound of wordless objection.
Jessie proclaimed, “Fuh-reaky,” and shivered. “Look, I think we should put this all away. It’s not . . . it’s not really ours, is it.”
“Aww. I thought you’d want to . . .” Reed gestured. “Root through it all. There’s got to be some good dirt in here. Family secrets. Ghosts. Buried treasure. Something.”
“Something that might explain why Mother was murdered?” Sondra squatted and took the papers from Raquel, beginning to put them away. “Maybe, but Jessie’s right. We don’t have any real right to be going through these things. Not without permission. And I don’t think anybody imagined there was buried treasure on the land anyway.”
“Geepaw Patrick used to bury treasures,” Raquel said, sounding surprised. “Gigi’s diaries talked about it. He’d take things from the house and bury them for his brother to hunt for and dig up. He drew maps, like I said.” She put her hand on Sondra’s arm, stopping her from packing anything else up, and went through the papers again, finally shaking her head. “None of them are here, though. That’s too bad. There might have been some that weren’t folded up, that I wouldn’t be as afraid to touch. I know they wouldn’t have led to anything except maybe some old crockery, but they’d be wonderful to look at. We could see how the land had changed since he was a child. There—” Raquel’s breath caught. “Oh. Oh, Sonny. Flynn said there was a graveyard.”
Sondra, lit by the hard white light of the phones’ torches, looked especially unforgiving and uncomprehending. “So?”
“What if... do you think Mama would like to be buried here?”
Strains of conflict shot through Sondra’s expression, her initial impulse to reject the notion clear, and then the idea of her mother’s romantic notions obviously displacing that impulse. “I don’t know, Raq,” she finally said, wearily. “I think she might love it, but would we want it? And we still can’t prove we’re related, even if we had the diary. Even with that picture. Which we’re not supposed to have seen. You can’t show anybody that picture, Raquel.”
Raquel looked inclined to be stubborn, then, as quickly, let it go. “I’ll keep it, though. For us.”
“Fine.” Sondra finished putting things away and put the box back where they’d taken it from. “Let’s go look for the graveyard. It’s probably in too much disrepair to be used anyway. And weren’t they all actually buried in that church in Dublin anyway?”
“Just the earls themselves,” Flynn volunteered from the doorway. Everybody startled, looking toward him, and he set his jaw defensively. “I was looking around and you all disappeared. I just caught up. It’s only the earls who were buried at the church. The rest of their family was buried at the chapel on the family land.”
“That’s too bad. Mama would love being a mummy,” Jessie muttered.
Raquel hissed, “Jess!” although Megan thought Jessie might be right. “Anyway,” Raquel went on as if the mummy idea hadn’t been floated, “I bet she would like being buried in the ancestral graveyard.”
“Don’t get your heart set on it,” Sondra warned. “Do you know where it is, though, Flynn?”
“I do so.” He cast a look at Sondra’s shoes. “The path out to it might just be solid enough yet for you to walk, Ms. Williams. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else, wearing those shoes.”
“Is there anything around that we can look at, even with Sonny’s shoes?” Jessie asked.
“Not much,” Flynn said dubiously. “You’d want hiking boots for loads of it.”
Sondra gave an enormous sigh. “Is there really anything out here we’d need to see? Aside from curiosity?”
Flynn cast an uncertain look at Reed, then Megan, as if they might somehow have the answers. “I’d say no? The house is the grand bit, and the rest is just land going to wrack and ruin. You might fancy the druid’s altar, but it’s not . . .” He waved his hand. “It could be a thousand years old like, but it’s probably just a lump of old stone somebody dropped there a couple hundred years ago for gas.”
“For gas?” Raquel blinked. “Were they drilling for natural gas?”
“It means for fun,” Megan murmured. Raquel’s expression cleared, while Flynn’s went through a visible struggle not to laugh. “Tell you what,” Megan offered. “It’s going to be dark soon and we’re not going to want to be tromping around out here in the dark, especially if it starts to rain. How about I take the dogs for a walk to this druid circle, and see if it looks like something cool enough for you to come back and see, and you go see if there’s anything left of the chapel and graveyard?”
Gratitude flashed across Sondra and Raquel’s faces while Jessie looked a little disappointed. She looked at her own feet, though—Birkenstock sandals, with bare feet already bluish with cold—and reluctantly went to stand with her sisters. Megan, satisfied, said, “Okay, which way is the druid’s circle?” and looked skeptically at Flynn when he pointed southeast and said, “It’s a ten-minute walk.”
“An Irish ten minutes or a real ten minutes?”
He looked mildly bewildered. “Ten minutes.”
“Right. I’ll be back within an hour,” Megan said dryly to the sisters, who frowned at her in confusion. “I never met an Irish ten minutes that wasn’t at least twenty,” she explained, and set off with Reed sort of edging after her.
Flynn, cheerfully, said, “Go on, mate, I’ll bring the ladies to the chapel my own self,” and when Megan looked back, Reed, scowling deeply, was stomping after the Williamses. Megan grinned, and as soon as they were out of earshot, said, “All they need is a quirky best friend to be a rom-com, huh, pups? Who do you think she’ll choose? Who would you choose, hm? Yeah? Not me. I’d take a year or two off from dating and reconsid
er the kinds of boys I wanted to hang out with, but that’s probably because I’m old and sensible, right? Right. Right. That’s probably it,” to the dogs as they walked along.
There had probably been a path to the druid’s circle, once upon a time. Now there was a track of slightly-less-overgrown grass through fields and trees, and Megan’s calves were wet with rain clinging to the grass before the shape of another lake appeared, reflecting grey clouds and lined by winter-black trees. “What was that,” she murmured to the dogs. “Fifteen minutes? Yeah? Yeah, I thought so too. Not ten at all. It’s never ten.” Megan looked back, but the Lough Rynn house had disappeared, leaving her alone with the dogs in a very tame sort of wilderness. “Okay, five more minutes, and then we’re heading back, because otherwise we’ll be leaving the Williamses standing in the cold for an hour.”
In less than five minutes, though, a crowd of trees opened over what had to be the druid’s altar, with three or four lichen-stained stones piled on top of one another, and another leaning at a dramatic angle away from them. They were all at least six inches thick and curved like gravestones, obviously shaped rather than natural, but their positions made them look more like a lounge chair than an altar, to Megan. There were trails of mashed-down grass around it, as if other people had been that way fairly recently. She supposed if someone needed a bit of privacy and a little magic, the Lough Rynn grounds were a fine place to find it.
The puppies pulled at their leashes, wanting to climb and sniff the stones, but Megan shook her head. “It’s not nice to pee on druid altars.”
A dry-voiced old woman said, “Worse has been done to it,” and Megan stifled a shriek by turning it into a high-pitched laugh. The woman emerged from behind one of the massive old trees overhanging the altar, leaving Megan to imagine, for an instant, that she was a dryad or some other tree spirit herself. She’d never imagined dryads as wearing wool jumpers, thick plaid skirts, wellies, and a cloche hat jammed over their ears, though, much less carrying what appeared to be a metal detector. “I should know,” the old woman went on. “My parents would’ve been shocked to hear what I got up to on those rocks. You’re American?”
