Death of an Irish Mummy

by Catie Murphy

  “No, we can’t,” Megan said to that one, loudly. “We can’t disturb it any more than I already did. I shouldn’t have even taken the diary, but I did. It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she added defensively, although it wasn’t the Williamses to whom she had to defend herself. Detective Bourke, on the other hand, would want to know what she’d been thinking. Her only justification went back to grade school, when she’d one day taken a pair of scissors and cut a large hole in her favourite shirt. Her outraged mother had demanded, repeatedly, to know why Megan had done that, and all she could say was it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Sometimes there just wasn’t a better reason. In fact, Megan suspected that it seemed like a good idea at the time was the underlying reason for a lot of what people did, and that they generally learned to layer in more elaborate, if not more honest, explanations later.

  “Should we put it back?” Raquel asked uncertainly. “We have all these papers out of it now but we could say we found them in the mess?”

  “Oh, good,” Sondra muttered. “Let’s plan our story for lying to the police.”

  “I’ll put it back,” Megan said. “I took pictures of where I found it, so if I put it back, it’s—”

  “It’s like we disturbed a crime scene, or whatever it is, and then put things back where we found them,” Jessie said dryly. “But even if our fingerprints would show up on the diary, they’d all be there anyway—well, except Megan’s—so if we just say we found the papers, maybe nobody will ask where and the diary can be where you found it as evidence or whatever.”

  “Here.” Raquel offered Megan the damaged diary. “Go put it away and then we’ll . . .”

  “Call the police,” Sondra finished.

  “I already texted—” Megan’s phone buzzed as she spoke and she took it out to check the incoming message from Paul, which said DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!!!

  Two second later the phone rang with his number coming up, and he opened with, “Did you touch anything? Don’t touch anything. Are you still there? Get out,” as Megan pressed the speaker button so everyone could hear. She widened her eyes at her clients, grimaced guiltily at the phone, and said, “We, um, okay, we’ll—okay.”

  Bourke, suspiciously, said, “Okay what,” while Megan took the phone off speaker, traded Raquel the dogs’ leashes for the diary, and sort of half-ran, half-snuck back to the upstairs servants’ bedrooms so she could put the book back where she’d found it. Why she snuck, she didn’t know; it wasn’t like either Bourke or the guy staying in the bedroom could see her, but sneaking felt important.

  “Okay, we won’t touch anything and we’ll get out of the house. We found—we did find—some papers that—we don’t know yet, but they might have some answers.”

  “Found them where? In that bedroom?”

  Megan, face screwed up like a child trying very hard not to get caught in a lie, said, honestly if not exactly truthfully, “No, in the storage room.” She slipped into the bedroom and put the closed diary back where she’d found it, tucking it down just enough that its square was visible, like it had been when she’d come in. Then she scurried back downstairs, suddenly very aware she was leaving a lot of footprints in the dust.

  Bourke sounded ever so slightly mollified. “All right so. Don’t touch anything else and don’t go hunting down whatever you think those papers mean. I’ve called the local guards already and they’ll be there soon. Go outside to meet them and don’t go finding any more trouble.”

  “I do not find trouble,” Megan said with as much dignity as she could muster as she got back to the sisters. She spun her finger at them and pointed down the hall, indicating they should leave. A little to her surprise, they did as she told them, and she fell in at their heels. “It keeps finding me.”

  “For the love of God, Megan . . .”

  “Look, we’re going outside and I’ll call you again as soon as we know anything.” Megan hung up, extremely aware she hadn’t promised any of the things he’d asked for, and hurried down the stairs and outside after her clients.

  CHAPTER 21

  A priest and a hipster got out of their vehicles in the driveway as the Williams women left the house. Megan, in their wake, felt like she’d walked in on the beginning of a joke she couldn’t find a punch line to. Jessie threw herself across the yellowed lawn into Reed’s arms, babbling her astonishment at his coming for her, while he kissed her hair and looked puzzled. As the rest of the women drew closer, Megan could hear him saying, “I told you I’m here for you, babe, but you gotta keep me posted, Jess! How else can I be where you need me if you’re back and forth all the time?”

  The puppies sat down on Megan’s feet, pinning her in place, and grumbled at the gathering, as if they regarded it as impeding their opportunity for a nap. Megan bent to rub their heads as Sondra approached the priest, glancing once at her younger sister and Reed before sighing the sigh of a woman who had given up on that fight for the time being. “Father Anthony? I’m Sondra Williams. These are my sisters, Raquel and . . .” Another sigh. “Jessie.”

  Jessie waved from within the circle of Reed’s arms, and Raquel, like Sondra, shook the priest’s hand. “You’ve spoken with Miss Edgeworth?” Sondra asked, and the priest—in his sixties if he was a day, but compact and well put-together, like he exercised vigorously—nodded with a cheerfully bemused air.

  “She’s made it clear I’m to help you in every way I can. It’s your mother, is it? I’m sorry to hear of your loss. And you’ll be wanting to bury her here?”

  “If we can arrange it very quickly,” Sondra said wearily. “I have to be back in the States by Tuesday morning.”

  For a moment Megan thought the man might actually allow himself a faith and begorrah, not that anyone in Ireland ever said that unless—and not usually even then—they were making fun of American ideas of Irishisms. She had herself only once heard someone say an apparently totally sincere top of the day to ye, which was close enough to top of the morning that she’d spent the rest of the week laughing every time she thought about it. When she’d related that story to Irish friends they’d been incredulous, even with the allowance that it had been said on the first sunny day after a hurricane. However, Father Anthony recovered himself with a shake of his head and a brisk rub of his hands. “All right so. Will you be wanting the whole ceremony, or will it be a smaller affair?”

  The older sisters exchanged glances. “We’re not Catholic, and nobody but us is even here,” Raquel ventured. “Probably smaller is better. Very small.” Her eyes filled with tears and Sondra, for all her faults, put her arm around Raquel’s shoulders.

  “You’ll be wanting to leave before Monday evening if you can,” Father Anthony ventured. “I’ve Mass to deliver on the Sunday morning, but given that it’s an emergency, we might make Sunday afternoon around half four?”

  “Will they have released Mama’s body?” Jessie whispered from within Reed’s arms. All the sisters exchanged anguished glances and Megan lifted a finger, indicating she’d deal with it. She walked a few steps away, the puppies following to sit on her feet and grumble again, and called Detective Bourke.

  “You’ve never found something out already,” he said, and she shook her head like he could see her.

  “No, they’re trying to arrange funeral, uh, arrangements—” She winced at her own ineptitude with the language and heard Bourke’s soft chuckle. “Yeah, I word real good. Anyway, they’re wondering if Mrs. Williams’s body can be released for a funeral at Lough Rynn on Sunday afternoon.”

  “There’s nothing more to be done with the autopsy,” Bourke said. “I don’t see how that could be a problem. I’m glad they’ve got that sorted. How are they holding up?”

  “As well as they can be. Thanks, Paul.” Megan hung up and nodded at the others. “Sunday should be fine.”

  “We’ll get it sorted so.” The priest paused. “There’s talk enough around Mohill about those who might be descendants of the old earls. If you wouldn’t mind your own sel
ves, there might be more people at your mother’s funeral than you’d imagine.”

  The sisters exchanged startled glances, and Raquel gave the priest a wet smile. “I think that might be kind of wonderful.”

  “Why don’t we go over and invite Miss Edgeworth ourselves?” Jessie said suddenly. Reed, his arms still encircling her, peered at the top of her head.

  “Who?”

  “Our great-aunt, or something. The lady who owns all this land. She’s the last of her family, except us.”

  Sondra, visibly trying to figure out the family relationship, said, “She’s more of a distant cousin, I think,” and Jessie rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever. We should go invite her. And we can ask her about—”

  “You have family,” Reed said, dazed. “That’s amazing. Could I meet her too?”

  Jessie said, “Of course!” as Sondra said, “Absolutely not,” as strongly. They stared at one another and Sondra said, “She’s very old and didn’t think much of having visitors, Jess. We don’t need to invite somebody else along right now.”

  “No, no, yeah, I get that. It’s cool, it’s cool.”

  “Oh my god, though, Reed, you could stay here and protect the house. Somebody is living there and trashed the storage room! They had Gigi Elsie’s diary!”

  Reed paled behind his beard. “What?”

  “No, it’s okay, we found it and we’re safe and you wouldn’t believe what we found in it, old letters and what we think are maps and—” Jessie’s excited burbling turned into tears without warning and it took her several seconds to recover enough to speak. “But whoever’s living there, if they had the diary, they must be the one who killed Mama, so if you could just—the police are coming. If you could just stay and keep an eye on it until they get here? That would be the most wonderful thing anyone could ever do.”

  “Of course, babe.” Reed looked shaken, but kissed Jessie’s hair before giving her a tremulous smile and a nervous look at the house. “But I might stay out here, y’know? If that’s cool.”

  “I think that’s smart.” Jessie sniffled, then smiled wetly at first Reed, then her sisters. “Okay. Okay, I think we should go talk to Anne, and then maybe I’ll drive back to Dublin with you, okay, Reed? Okay, Sonny? Raq?”

  Both of her older sisters nodded like they’d given in to the inevitable. Jessie’s smile bloomed and they finally, under Megan’s guidance, all got into the car to drive away.

  * * *

  Anne Edgeworth met them at her front door, framed in it like a gnome in a giant’s house. “I suppose you’re after coming back to tell me Maire Cahill’s in hospital for treasure hunting on my own lands. Don’t bother. I’ve heard it all.” She stomped unceremoniously into the parlour and sat with a curmudgeonly thump as the younger women trailed in after her. Sondra and Raquel looked expectantly at Jessie, whom they evidently thought had the best chance of charming the old lady. She stared back at them a moment, then shrugged and turned her sweetest smile on Anne.

  “No, we thought you’d have heard that already. We live in a big city,” she said ruefully, “but even there it seems like everybody learns everyone else’s business right away. It must be hard here sometimes, if you want a little privacy.”

  Anne sniffed. “Nobody bothers me if I don’t want to be bothered. What are you after, then, with your own beguiling eyes and the smile like my sister’s?”

  Jessie, caught, blushed and looked down. “We found some old letters from our Geepaw Patrick, and some—well, we wonder if they really are treasure maps. I know it’d be crazy, but . . .” She gestured to Raquel, who took the letters and the maps out of her purse and put them into Anne’s gnarled hands. Silence fell while the old lady looked through them, lingering especially over one of the letters.

  “I remember Nancy Dunne,” she said eventually. “She seemed like an old woman when I first knew her, although I know now she wasn’t yet fifty. She was a fair beauty still. They said she loved Patrick with all her heart, and that she never would marry after he disappeared. I thought it was romantic, when I was a wee lass my own self. The village thought it was sad, a girl like that wasting her life on the love of a dead man, but as I got older I thought she had more sense than any woman I’d ever known. Maybe she did love him that much, but what it meant for her was she was never shackled to any man, dying young of making the babies that the Church demanded of her. Between her and Patty I saw clear enough what would become of me if I married, and how I could live if I didn’t. She died alone, but you’d never know it from the funeral mass. They came from all over the county to see the burial of sweet Nancy Dunne. Maybe they’ll come to mine so. Let’s see the maps, girl.” She beckoned for them, then remembered they’d already been given to her, and shuffled the old papers around.

  Unlike the other women, Anne Edgeworth had no problem with handling the delicate pages like they were newly made. She rearranged them, tapped them together, held them up to the light, turned them around, squinted at them and then at her distant family, then back to the maps. “It all looks like rubbish to me.”

  “There are coins drawn around the edges,” Megan ventured. “I noticed you had some old coins in your collection. We wondered if there might be a correlation.”

  “There’s one that me da said came from Patrick himself,” Anne said without interest. “It’s no good, though, all twisted and black. His carriage ran over it and bent it in half.”

  “I saw that one,” Megan said hopefully. “May I get it?”

  “Please yourself.” Anne held the drawings up again, although the afternoon light was fading. “What were these pressed against?”

  Megan, rising, glanced at the sisters and shook her head. “Nothing, why?”

  “There’s a bit of embossing so.” Anne turned the paper so Megan could see what she meant, and light caught the edges of the faintest imaginable impression at its centre.

  “Dang. Your eyesight is amazing, Miss Edgeworth.”

  Profound satisfaction settled in the lines around Anne Edgeworth’s mouth. “So it is, for all that I’m eighty-nine years of age.”

  “There wasn’t anything in the diary for them to be pressed against,” Raquel said with conviction. “I would have noticed that when I was a kid, even if I didn’t notice there was something weird about the bulky covers.”

  Sondra shook her head. “They weren’t weird. Plenty of old clothbound books like that have really thick covers. I don’t think it was something you had any reason to notice.”

  Surprised gratitude at absolution coloured Raquel’s cheeks. Jessie got up to look at the embossing on the page while Megan went to the kitchen to get the coin. By the time she came back, less than a minute later, all four Williams women were examining different sheets with their eyes and fingertips. “They’ve all got embossings,” Raquel reported to Megan. “Really, really faint ones, right in the middles. I don’t think they’re accidental.”

  “Does the coin look like any of the ones on the edges?” Sondra handed Megan one of the maps and she turned the coin, trying to see its interior under the bent black grime.

  Anne muttered, “For heaven’s sakes,” and got up with exaggerated stiffness to stump down the hall. She returned a moment later with silver polish and a rag, both of which she handed imperiously to Megan, who took them without complaint and set to polishing the coin.

  A few swipes cleaned the grime away considerably. Megan scrubbed it with more enthusiasm, trying to get a good look at the image on its surface, and fumbled it with surprise. “I’m pretty sure this is a Viking coin.”

  “Really?” Jessie jolted to her side, trying to see, while the other women came over more slowly and made room for Anne.

  “It’s really old,” Megan said with a fair degree of confidence. “It’s not a perfect circle and the surface isn’t polished the way modern coins are, and look at the back.” She turned it so the outside of the bend faced the others. Letters, or shapes, she didn’t recognize at all encircled the outer border, and
the coin’s centre had what looked like a hand-chiseled quarter-cross in it. Jessie curled her fingers around its outer edge, trying to get a sense of its circumference even though it was badly bent.

  “Is this . . . it’s about the same size as the embossings,” she said cautiously. “Isn’t it?”

  “Go get a hammer from the shed,” Anne commanded the young woman, who jumped to do as she was told even as Sondra and Raquel exchanged horrified glances. “What?” Anne demanded. “It’s my own coin, isn’t it, and I’ll do with it as I like, including smashing it flat again. Take it to the front stoop,” she ordered Megan when Jessie came back with a hammer, and Megan, tempted to throw a salute, marched to do as she’d been told too. Everyone followed her, crowding into the doorway as she hammered the old coin flat again.

  It unbent surprisingly easily, with only a few hard bangs taking the worst of the bend away. Even the etching on the reverse side didn’t seem too badly damaged by Megan’s efforts, and a man’s profile could be easily seen on the face when they turned it over. Jessie ran to the parlour, got the maps again, and held one of them up in front of the coin, trying to align it to the profile.

  A shadow caught the light just right and the little gathering gasped collectively as coin and map etching lined up. Jessie whispered, “Holy shit!” and tried for another map. They had to turn the coin a little to make it line up.

  Raquel vibrated with excitement. “He must have made those etchings before he ever even left Ireland. I can’t believe we can still see them. They’re so faint.”

  “We’d never see them without the coin. Or at least we’d never know what they were. Maybe with digital enhancement.” Sondra passed a hand in front of herself as if brushing the idea away, like she knew they’d have never gone that far. “Do they all match?”

  “You have to keep turning the coin,” Jessie said, doing that. “It must have shifted when he was making the etchings.”

  A cold thrill dropped through Megan. “No. No, give them to me, it’s—they—” Excitement jumbled her words and she took the papers when they were handed to her, then shooed everyone back inside. “I need to—we have to—go, go!” Even Anne allowed herself to be herded, and the women all gathered around Megan again at a table in front of the parlour window. Megan shuffled the map pages into order, following the Roman numerals on the individual pages, then, starting with the bottom one, lifted it to the light so she could align the coin with it. She got it lined up, and, hands shaking, put it down carefully before doing the same thing with the next coin. She put it down too, still aligned to the coin’s face rather than a tidy stack, and went through the whole pile that way, using the coin to orient them like a decoder ring. Before she’d gotten halfway through, the Williamses were whispering with understanding, and when she’d finally finished, they all took half a step back like they were afraid of disturbing what she’d discovered.