Death of an Irish Mummy

by Catie Murphy

  “Okay, I’m not sure I’m up for crawling half a kilometre through the dark to an uncertain destination . . .”

  “It’s not uncertain. We know it leads somewhere under the garden.”

  “Maybe we should have started in the garden,” Raquel said. “We didn’t even go look to see if we could find the arch.”

  “If it’s still there that means it’s made of stone or concrete,” Jessie said airily. “We’d never be able to break through it. Okay, I’ll go look at the tunnel and if it’s impassable you can pull me back up and we’ll do this another way.”

  “Tomorrow,” Sondra said. “In the daylight.”

  Jessie, already sitting on her butt at the edge of the hole, said, “Right. Tomorrow in the daylight. Whee!” She slid down and landed on soft earth with what sounded like a bone-rattling thump. Her muffled voice came up in bits and pieces. “The tunnel opening down here is just dirt. It’s—” Megan peered down to watch her knock pieces of it away. “It’s pretty tall. Creeping height, not crawling height. The air smells okay.” She looked back up at Megan, her face already smeared with muck. “Are you up for it?”

  Megan looked between the young woman smiling hopefully up at her and Jessie’s older sisters. Sondra rolled her eyes expressively and spread her hands. “Might as well.”

  “It shouldn’t take too long,” Jessie said happily. “We can mostly walk, and all we’re really going to do is see if there’s anything at the other end. We’ll take pictures if there are. How long does it take to walk a kilometre?”

  “About ten minutes. Under the circumstances let’s assume it’ll take that long to do half of one. If we’re not back in half an hour, Sondra . . .” Megan had no good ideas as to what should be done if they weren’t back, but Sondra nodded.

  “Be careful.”

  “Absolutely.” Regretting the future condition of her chauffeur’s uniform, Megan sat on the edge of the hole and slid down after Jessie. For the space of a breath she fell, and in that time, considered this to be one of the stupidest things she’d ever done. Then she hit the soft earth with a thump and, safe and literally grounded, she thought maybe it wasn’t so bad. Jessie and her torch were already several feet ahead of her, hunched in a tunnel about four feet tall but easily passable.

  A few minutes later Megan decided that creeping through a limestone hollow had never been on her bucket list, and now that she was doing it, she was confident it wasn’t something she’d ever needed to do in order to feel she’d lived a full and satisfying life. It was relatively easy going, though. The tunnel, while very dirty, was smoother than she expected. She supposed the little lake now behind them had, at some point in its history, been fed by the larger Lough Rynn somewhere ahead of them. “Can you imagine being a kid a hundred years ago crawling through this without a flashlight?”

  Jessie said, “Oh my god,” in genuine horror. “No, I didn’t even think about that. Do you think he had an actual torch or something?”

  “Probably. And also a more intrepid sense of adventure than I’ve got.”

  “He was only twenty-two when he left Ireland,” Jessie said. “He was probably too young to think he could ever be in danger, when he was exploring this thing.”

  “The innocence of youth,” Megan agreed, and they went quiet again, as if the weight of earth above them pressed them into silence. The tunnel widened and narrowed again a couple of times, then suddenly opened into a chamber that only earned that distinction by being twice as wide and slightly taller than anywhere they’d passed through before.

  Moldering sacks and decaying wood spread across the floor, still half-visible beneath pellets of blackened silver and the gleam of pure, untarnished gold.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jessie Williams heaved like she might actually vomit with excitement. Megan, although sympathetic to the sentiment, said, “I swear to god if you throw up in here I’ll rub your nose in it like a puppy,” and Jessie gulped, then giggled through watering eyes.

  “Legit. That would be the grossest thing ever. Oh my god, Megan. Oh my god. Is it real?”

  “I think so.” Megan couldn’t quite get herself to move any closer to the piles of loot, which was unquestionably what lay in front of them. Most of it was lumped against the back wall—corner, if a roundish chamber could be said to have corners—with individual bits having rolled free as their containers rotted, or as intrepid small animals explored the little cave. Coins lay among the silver nuggets, and what gold she could see had been shaped into bracelets and torcs. She burped bile herself and put a rattling hand over her stomach, trying to calm it. Hot and cold kept running through her, breaking a sweat all over her body, then turning it icy. “Holy, um. Wow. I . . . Wow.”

  Jessie giggled again. “Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god.” She finally nerved herself up and crept closer, kneeling near the outer edge of the hoard. “Oh my god. How could a kid find this and not tell anybody?” She started taking pictures before she even touched anything, which Megan thought was amazingly restrained.

  “I don’t know. Well. I guess it would sure be a great source of personal pocket money.” She gave the same kind of high-pitched giggle Jessie was indulging in, and suddenly they were both wheezing with laughter at the idea of a short-pantsed Victorian tween passing off the occasional Viking coin as his allowance. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” Megan finally wiped her eyes and came forward to crouch beside Jessie, passing her hands over the lumps of silver and gold without touching it. “There must be twenty pounds of this stuff here. What’s it doing here? This is—” Megan sat hard, breath suddenly coming in short gasps. “Jessie, this is . . . I drive people around Ireland all the time and I’ve learned a lot of the stories about treasure finds here. This has got to be one of the biggest finds ever. This is—we better not touch it. We’re supposed to call the authorities. I’ll call Paul as soon as we’re back aboveground.”

  “But it’s our land!”

  “It’s Anne Edgeworth’s land,” Megan said dryly. “Which means she’ll probably get half of whatever valuation the government puts on it to pay out to the treasure finders, which is you and your family.”

  “And you!”

  “I—if that’s what you decide, that would be . . .” Megan shook her head. “The point is this is a national treasure. It doesn’t matter if it’s your land or not. Take—we’ll just take . . . pictures.” She couldn’t blame Jessie in the least when the younger woman picked up one of the gold bracelets and slid it on her wrist, then hefted its weight in astonishment.

  “It weighs a ton,” Jessie whispered reverently. “Wow. Try it on.” She took a selfie with the bracelet on display before offering it to Megan, who wasn’t quite good enough a person to say no. For the next several minutes they traded items, trying them on, taking pictures, and giggling like idiots, until Megan suddenly cried, “Oh no, we said we’d be back in half an hour! We’d better run!”

  “Can’t I take just one?” Jessie pouted when Megan pointed imperiously to the hoard, but she put everything back. Megan took a few more pictures of the whole thing, then followed Jessie back out the tunnel, both of them chattering with excitement and not really listening to the other as they hurried back. Part of Megan wanted to turn back and go sit with the ridiculous trove they’d found, as if it would somehow disappear if not watched. Up ahead of her Jessie yelled, “I’m back, help me up!” to her sisters. Megan caught up to squat, put Jessie on her shoulders, and stand with a dramatic grunt, lifting Jessie as someone’s hand came down to pull her from the surface. Jessie shrieked, “Reed!” gleefully as she rose. “Reed, Raq, Sonny, you won’t believe what we found!”

  “Treasure?” Reed asked with a chuckle.

  Jessie squealed, “Yes! Help Megan up, we’ll show you the pictures! Where are Raq and Sonny?”

  “They went to use the woods as a toilet.”

  “Sonny did that?” Jessie laughed and obviously started showing Reed pictures anyway, because no one offered a hand as Megan looked up. She rolled her eyes,
put her back against one side of the entrance hole, and tested the distance to the other side with her feet. She’d never get her jacket clean, but she could climb the walls herself if she had to. Reed was up there gasping over the photos while Jessie giggled happily, and Megan, faintly exasperated, dug a handhole into the dirt, seeing if it would hold her. It collapsed as soon as she put weight on it, which was what she expected from earth she could dig a hole into with her hands anyway.

  “Hey, hello?” Megan shone her torch upward, trying to get their attention.

  “Sorry, Megan!” Jessie appeared at the top, smile sparkling. “Can you use a braid of my scarves to help climb up with or should I find rocks or something to drop down for you to boost yourself up on?”

  “The scarves should work.” Megan smiled and Jessie disappeared, the ends of her scarves flying above the hole as she took them off and started braiding them. The shadows from Megan’s upward-facing phone torch made a fascinating pattern against the dark sky before a weirdly familiar hollow thunk sounded, the dull noise of flesh hitting flesh. The scarves fell as Jessie gave a short cry of pain, and a moment later Reed appeared above the hole, his teeth bared in a furious smile. He held a bowie knife in one hand, its short blade bouncing torchlight around. Megan went cold to her core, her body feeling thick and stupid even as she abruptly understood, on some level, exactly what had been going on for the past few days.

  “So now you’re going to go back in there and bring out as much of that treasure as you can carry,” he said, almost conversationally. “When you’ve brought it all, we’ll see whether I help you out or not. If you don’t, I’m going to start by killing this stupid, needy, won’t-shut-up bitch, and then her sisters, and then your goddamn dogs.”

  Megan croaked, “What?” and bent to get her phone, shining its torchlight more toward Reed, like she could understand him better if she could see him more clearly. She said, “What?” again, trying to sound genuinely stupid and using it to cover the action of activating her phone’s voice recorder.

  “I said go get the fucking treasure, Megan, or I’m going to kill everybody and your dogs. Jesus, why are women so stupid? Fucking Jessie, mouthing off about her family’s estate since forever, like there was something important on it, and her stupid Irish boyfriend telling me all about his crazy aunt who goes treasure hunting. Jesus Christ. Go get the gold.”

  “Okay.” Megan spread her free hand, her voice hoarse. “Irish boyfr—Flynn? What does Flynn have to do with anything?”

  Reed stared at her like she was a fool, which Megan, her frozen shock starting to thaw, thought might have some merit. “I hacked Jess’s genealogy account to see who she was cheating on me with. I found Flynn,” he sneered the name, “and read all his messages about his aunt treasure hunting on Jessie’s estate. So I flew the fuck over here to check it out, and then it turns out her stupid mother was coming here too, and I couldn’t let her get in my way.”

  Megan, softly, said, “Oh my god,” and took a step back like she was afraid, before whispering, “Do you . . . I could carry more with a bag. It’d be faster. Do you have a backpack?”

  Reed curled his lip. “In the car, but like I’m going to leave you alone to make a phone call while I’m getting it. Why would you want me to hurry anyway?”

  “Because I’m in a pit ten feet deep and I won’t get out until I’ve done what you wanted? It’s gonna take more than one trip anyway, and I don’t want to be down here any longer than I have to be.” Megan’s heartbeat nearly drowned out her words in her own hearing, adrenaline and fear crashing through her. “What if I throw my phone up there so I can’t call while you’re gone? You can give it back to me for the light when you get back.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Reed sounded dubious but satisfied at the idea. “Throw it up here.”

  Megan turned the voice recorder and the torch both off, made sure the phone was locked to her fingerprint, and tossed it up to him. It soared up in an easy arc and he snatched it from the air on the first try, then threw it aside. His voice was mocking as he said, “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Not likely.” Megan waited a full minute for his footsteps to fade, then scrambled to brace her back against one side of the tunnel and her feet against the other. It would be easier with another ten inches of width to scrunch into; as it was, she had to put a lot of weight on her toes to squeeze upward, but she reached the top in less than five minutes and flopped herself onto the stones, gasping for breath.

  Her eyes had adjusted to a darkness barely brightened by a crescent moon while she’d climbed, and she could see well enough to find Jessie’s unconscious form slumped a few feet away from the deconstructed druid’s altar. Megan checked the young woman over very quickly—she had a massive bruise coming up on her jaw, but didn’t seem otherwise hurt—and bet on youth and vitality overcoming any potential unseen injuries. She found her own phone, sent a text that said only 911 to Paul Bourke, and dragged Jessie off the ground and into a fireman’s carry. Hauling a dead weight from the ground to over her shoulders wasn’t Megan’s favourite thing to do, but she really wanted to get Jessie well away from Reed’s return. She followed the already-trampled path back toward the house, then cut away into the woods far enough away from the altar that she hoped Reed wouldn’t notice. Her whole body buzzed with endorphins as she found a tree to deposit Jessie under and whisper, “Hey. Hey, Jess, can you wake up? Jessie?”

  Jessie came awake with a gasp and Megan whispered, “Shh, shh, it’s Megan, you’re safe. He’s back at the car. I’m going to go find your sisters. Don’t go anywhere and don’t use your phone, he’ll see the screen glow. I already texted for help, okay? You hear me? You understand?”

  “Yeah.” Jessie shivered, tears in her eyes, but she nodded. “Come back for me.”

  “Don’t worry. I will. You just stay here, stay quiet, stay brave. Okay? Can you do that?” At the younger woman’s nod, Megan smiled, kissed her forehead, and sprang up to run, quietly, back to the druid’s altar. The grass immediately around it was flattened from them working and walking around earlier, but there were no signs of bloodshed, no stains of purple-black under the thin moonlight. Megan’s chest hammered with relief. She didn’t think Reed had killed the older sisters—his knife had been clean, and if he’d had a syringe of air to pump them full of, he probably wouldn’t have bothered showing off with the blade. Or, at least, Megan wouldn’t have, in his position. She would have waited until she, Megan, was out of the hole, killed her with the syringe, and gone in for the treasure herself. Either Reed wasn’t that clever, or she had a wider criminal streak than she’d previously imagined.

  There were trails in the grass where bodies had clearly been dragged to the side. Megan followed them and found Raquel and Sondra, both conscious but gagged and bound with, Megan saw in dismay, the dogs’ leashes. She pulled their gags out and Sondra said, “The puppies ran away as soon as they were off their leashes.”

  A shock of relief much stronger than she’d expected knocked Megan back a moment. She let out a shaky breath, nodded, and whispered, “Jessie’s safe. He clobbered her, but I got him to go look for a bag to put the treasure in and got her to safety,” as she untied them. “He killed your mother. I’m sorry.”

  “How?” Raquel kept her voice quiet, but the single word resounded as a plaintive cry anyway. “He didn’t get to Dublin until after Jessie and Sonny did!”

  “He’d been here for days. Maybe weeks. Jessie said she hadn’t heard from him since Christmas, right? He must—ah, dang it! He must have been the person staying in the house. And we left him to guard it!”

  “No wonder the police didn’t show up.” Sondra rubbed her wrists as Megan released them. “Or rather, they probably did, but he would have cleared everything out and they wouldn’t have found anything, so they probably left again. Dammit!”

  “And he knew what Mama looked like, so sneaking up on her—she wouldn’t even have been suspicious if she saw him. She’d just have been delighted to see
someone she knew,” Raquel whispered. “And the diary, he knew about the diary, Jessie would have told him all about it all. Oh no. Oh no.”

  “You two stay put,” Megan half-asked, half-ordered. “Do you have your phones? I texted Detective Bourke for help but if someone doesn’t show up soon, you should try again. Wait as long as you can stand, though. I don’t want Reed to see the phones glowing. You’d be surprised how easy they are to see in a dark night, and if I’m gonna go deal with him I’d rather he didn’t have any idea I was coming.”

  “You’re going to deal with him? By yourself?”

  Megan gave Sondra a tight smile. “I mostly drove and was a medic in the military, but they taught us how to do a few other things too.” Even in the dim moonlight, Sondra visibly paled and nodded. Megan nodded back. “Keep an eye out for the dogs, would you? But don’t call them. It’s too quiet out here and he’ll hear you.”

  “You’ll come back for us?” Raquel whispered, just like Jessie had done. Megan pulled a reassuring smile for her, even knowing it would barely be seen in the darkness.

  “Absolutely. Give me twenty minutes.” She rose, then paused. “We found a treasure, by the way. A huge one. That’s what Reed was after.”

  “He wanted an heiress all along,” Sondra said bitterly, but for once, Raquel was the more cynical.

  “He never wanted Jessie at all, just her kingdom.”

  “Well, he’s not going to get any of it.” Megan stalked back toward the druid’s altar, taking a long way around the clearing and moving carefully between trees to keep cover even in the darkness. One enormous tree stretched directly over the altar, its big branches reaching down to nearly touch its one standing stone. Megan, keeping an eye on the path Reed would return on, shimmied up the tree and tucked herself behind its main trunk, just beside the broad V that split the reaching branch over the altar.