by Anne Emery
“Right. So, nothing else you can think of then?”
“No. Except maybe, but no . . . That’s all over now.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, a boyfriend of Lauren’s was a bit of a . . . a drinker. What do they say now? A party animal! But I don’t think he ever hurt her, or anything like that.”
They thanked Mrs. Beasley, reassured her that her conversation would not be relayed back to Commodore Rendell, and headed back to the police station.
“Nothing much there,” Piet said.
“No,” Ailsa agreed. “I think Meika Keller was loved by her husband and stepchildren, and we haven’t learned anything that would account for a suicide, let alone a homicide. If Rendell took her out on their boat for a late night sail and threw her overboard, we haven’t come up with anything remotely like a motive. And the two kids. I don’t see anything there. Boyfriends? Gold-digging future in-laws? It would be stretching things to find a motive there.”
“Except that if you’re a guy who marries into the Rendell family, you will eventually share in a nice inheritance. The house on the Arm, the boat, the money. And if the mother is standing in your way, trying to force you off the board, why not eliminate her now?”
“So, the guy gets Meika out of the way now, then he’ll hold the commodore’s head under water at a later date? We won’t be making any arrests based on that scenario, Piet.”
“No, we’ve got nothing to go on there.”
“And if it wasn’t suicide, how did the killer get her out there? She would hardly have gone for a swim with him at midnight in the first week of February. The water would be barely above zero. So how did he do it?”
“That’s what we have to find out. We’ll check to see if any boats were out late at night.”
Chapter III
Brennan
Brennan and his brother had a couple of shots of whiskey on Friday evening before they set out on foot for the Collins-MacNeil family’s wood-shingled house on Dresden Row. A light snow was falling, and the golden light shining in the windows offered a warm welcome to guests. Brennan ushered Terry in ahead of him to be greeted by Maura MacNeil. They had met on a couple of occasions before, and the MacNeil said she was delighted that Terry was in town. Then it was Brennan standing before her, looking down at her lovely soft face — deceptively soft; a tongue-lashing by the MacNeil would leave you in shreds — the face that had sustained him during those months when he was in prison and she was still in Ireland. Visiting hours were what he had lived for; he well remembered how bereft he had been following her last visit, before she got on a plane to fly home to Halifax. Bereft. Inconsolable.
Her big grey eyes looked up at him, with none of their customary mischief. She made no effort to mask her concern. Did he still look like the bruised and battered convict he had been in Her Majesty’s prisons in the North of Ireland?
“Brennan, you look as if you’re thirty days into a hunger strike,” she said, drawing him into her embrace. He wrapped his arms around her and held her, then broke free and attempted a smile.
He looked over and saw Terry’s eyes on him. He finally came up with something to say. “I’ve at least had a shave since you saw me last.”
“Oh, Brennan,” she said, “of all the things you endured in there, I figured the ‘hygiene procedures,’ or lack of them, would be the thing that would do you in.”
“How well you know me, acushla.” Brennan knew he had a reputation for being fastidious. He still had nightmares, and probably always would, about his first day in the Crumlin jail when he found out he’d be lucky to get two showers a week. A week! And then he’d caught sight of the unspeakable thing on the floor of the cell: a chamber pot. The fact that he had to share a cell with another man was bad enough, but to have to be in someone’s presence when . . . He drove the thought from his mind and said, “Have you something a class up from prison-made potcheen, my dear?” Poitín was home-distilled liquor, often made from potatoes. The stuff they managed to make in prison had nearly done his head in.
“We have it all, and you know where to find it.”
Brennan led Terry in the direction of the drinks cabinet in the dining room, stopping to greet the two oldest children on the way. Brennan introduced Terry to Tommy Douglas, Monty and Maura’s oldest son. It had been more than a year since Brennan had seen Tommy; he would be twenty-one or twenty-two by now. He looked like his father, with blondy hair and sky-blue eyes. He was a student in university and was in a band called Dads in Suits. Terry got into conversation with him, and Brennan turned his attention to the daughter of the house.
Normie was twelve years old, red-haired, bespectacled, and angelic. He had noticed that she’d been rather quiet at school since he came back, not that she had ever been loud or disruptive. She was friendly and courteous as always, and her work was top of the class, but he’d had the impression that something was bothering her. And what he seemed to be seeing now was the putting-on of a brave face. “Hi, Father!” Her voice was bright, her eyes wide, and her lips turned up in a smile. “How are you?”
“Grand, grand, Normie, just fine. And yourself?”
“Great!”
He leaned down closer and said, “Is everything all right with you, Normie?”
“Yes, everything’s really good.” The same bright-eyed insistence.
Brennan was not at all convinced, but he was not about to spoil the party for her by getting into it now. Nor did he want to dwell on what had happened to the choir school during his involuntary absence from the place. He had been invited to spend a year directing a choir in Rome, which had not triggered any upheaval here at his school. But then events spiralled out of control in Ireland, and if a certain judge in the Crumlin Road Courthouse had had his way, Brennan would have been held behind bars in Belfast for years. Well, nature may abhor a vacuum, but power thrives on it. A cabal of meddlers at the choir school — some of the more high-strung parents, devotees of a local business mogul styling himself as W. Langston Soames — had set themselves up in positions of authority at the school. A coup d’état. Well, Brennan would devise a way to overthrow the lot of them. But for now, he would put all that aggravation aside. He headed to the sideboard and poured himself a good measure of Jameson, threw it back, and then poured another.
And now here was Monty.
“Brennan,” he said and clapped a hand on Brennan’s shoulder. “I don’t even know where to begin, after what you’ve been through.”
Brennan shook his head and raised a hand to ward off any discussion of the events in Belfast.
But Monty continued. “And of course I was no help to you, being more than twenty-five hundred miles away when your ordeal began. Bad timing, to put it mildly.”
Putting it mildly was putting it all too mildly, in Brennan’s view. He couldn’t help feeling the way he did, angry and betrayed. Monty had brushed off the late-night warning that his Belfast lawsuit could have serious implications for Brennan and other members of his family over there. Worse still, as Brennan had heard from one of the Burke family’s IRA associates, when the man had given Monty the warning, Monty had even laughed and made a joke about it.
And here they were now, face to face. Well, Brennan wasn’t about to let on how badly the whole thing had affected him, was not about to whinge at him, “You laughed at me.” He was not about to show weakness in front of Monty. He knew the MacNeil would have only one word to say about his determination to brazen it out: Men! Nor was Brennan going to allude to any of this in front of Monty’s children or his guests.
But Monty spoke up again. “I know we always think we ‘can imagine’ what somebody went through in prison, lawyers perhaps most of all, given what we’ve seen of our clients. But of course we can’t even come close. I am so sorry about what happened to you, Brennan.”
Brennan merely nodded in response. Monty’s words struck Brennan as a
lawyerly expression of regret: he was sorry for what had “happened to” Brennan, not for any part Monty himself had played in the debacle. But Brennan admonished himself: who was being lawyerly now? They stood in silence for a few seconds, and then Tommy Douglas walked by and waved. “I’ve got a gig at Gus’s.”
Dads in Suits were playing at the old north-end Halifax pub. Everyone wished him luck, and this opened the way for Monty and Brennan to make small talk about music. Sports came up then, and they speculated about the fortunes of the Quebec Nordiques hockey team, which was now the Colorado Avalanche, of all things.
Oh, good timing at last. One of Monty’s fellow lawyers hailed him from across the room, and he excused himself. Then Brennan spotted little Dominic, the youngest child at four years of age. Black of hair and dark of eye, he had been conceived when Monty and Maura were living separate and apart. On more than one occasion, people had made a jest about the child looking a lot like the family’s parish priest, Father Burke. All in fun, of course, but Brennan knew Monty had not found it the least bit amusing in the early days of the child’s life. That was all behind them now, though. Monty loved the little fellow like his own son and had recently made the adoption formal.
Dominic had known Father Burke all his life, and he gave him an uproarious greeting. “Father! Father!” Brennan put his whiskey glass on the coffee table and held out his arms. The little boy flew across the room and crashed into Brennan, who lifted him high in the air and wiggled him around. The child laughed with delight. Then Brennan put him down and said, “Dominic, do you remember one time I told you I have a brother who flies airplanes?”
“Yeah!” There was nothing in the world Dominic loved more than planes. He had an entire fleet of toy aircraft, and his parents had to keep a close eye on him to keep him grounded.
“Well, here he is. My brother, Terry.”
Dominic stared at Terry with eyes wide and mouth agape. Then, “Do you really fly planes?!”
“I do.”
“Wow! Can we go in one now?”
“Not right now, Dominic, but some day we will. Have you ever been up in a plane?” Terry knew the answer to that.
“Yeah! I flew all across the ocean. And back again.” He spread his arms out like wings. “And they let me look in the front!”
Brennan had heard that the crew on the Air Canada jet returning from London to Halifax, after the Belfast trip, had invited the little lad into the cockpit before take-off.
“I have planes in my room! You have to see them!” He took Terry by the hand and pulled him up the stairs to inspect the fleet.
Brennan went for another glass of whiskey and engaged in some idle chat with a couple of the lawyers, and then helped himself to another drink. He was feeling pleasantly lit by this time, though he was still a long way from langered. Somebody cranked the music up, and a few couples started to dance. He sat watching, nursing his whiskey. Terry came down from the skies with an ecstatic little novice pilot by his side. “He flies this one! Terry does! Seven-four-seven!” Dominic waved the little plane around for all to see. Then he broke away and yanked his sister by the arm and boasted to her about his contacts in the aviation industry.
Maura MacNeil was standing with her best friend, Fanny, unconsciously swaying to the music as the pair of them talked. Brennan had the urge to get to his feet and take a turn around the floor with the MacNeil, but, before he could decide yes or no, Monty came by, took her hand, and danced her around the room. They did such a fine job of it that others merely looked on from the sidelines. Brennan, too, watched the show until he glanced over and saw that Terry’s eyes were on him, again.
What Brennan needed was another drink but he did not want to dip any further into his hosts’ supply. He made a mental note to bring a quart of Jameson over on his next visit to replenish the stock. But now he got up and walked over to Terry, cut off whatever his brother started to say, and announced, “Time to hit the road. Go to O’Carroll’s for a jar or two?”
“Whatever you say.”
“Good. We’re off.”
They said a few quick goodbyes and hit the pavement, walking from Dresden Row to Morris Street, then down to Lower Water and turning left. The falling snow shrouded a giant container ship making its silent way out of the harbour to distant seas.
When they got to O’Carroll’s on Upper Water Street, they saw the same musicians they had sung with on the fateful Tuesday past. Terry and Brennan greeted them, ordered pints and glasses of whiskey, and settled in for the ceol agus craic. After his second pint and a whiskey, Terry felt called upon to give the room a song. Brennan felt called upon to affect complete ignorance of whatever his brother might be trying to imply. The song was the Tom Jones version of “I Who Have Nothing.” All about the fellow on the outside looking in, while his love goes dancing by with a man much better placed to give her anything she wants in this world.
Monty
The party last night was a good time enjoyed by all, none more so than little Dominic, who had done a bit of networking and made a connection with a man who could further his planned career in civil aviation. Terry Burke was everything an aspiring pilot could hope to be: a man who flew jumbo jets around the world and who could keep people’s attention with announcements from the cockpit or tall tales around the bar between flights.
His brother Brennan was a little subdued, though. It was the first time Monty had seen Brennan since the action-packed semester in Belfast, and Monty had been more than a little apprehensive about seeing his friend after all Brennan had been through. Brennan was a bit cool to him, Monty thought. There was no doubt that Brennan had had a very rough time in Belfast. But no one had spelled out to Monty at the time how the case he had taken on in Belfast could possibly have had consequences for Brennan and the other members of the Burke clan in the North of Ireland. As far as Monty had known then, the only controversial episode Brennan had engaged in over there had been done in collaboration with Maura; they had disguised themselves as American tourists and entered a bar in Loyalist East Belfast to try to spot a man connected to a series of bomb attacks committed decades earlier. The subject of their investigation was as serious as anything could be — the bombs had killed more than thirty people — but from what he heard from Brennan and Maura after their bit of theatre, their performance had been nothing short of hilarious. No wonder Monty had laughed and made a wisecrack when an IRA man confronted him late at night on a Belfast street and told him, without offering any details, that Monty’s legal work could pose serious problems for his friend. All Monty could picture was the Reverend Father Brennan Xavier Burke, BA (Fordham), STL (Pontifical Gregorian), STD (Angelicum), dressed down as a redneck American tourist. And, sure, he had laughed.
Brennan
Brennan said goodbye to his brother Saturday morning and then said his early morning Mass. The sacrament gave him some consolation, but that feeling of peace was short-lived. When he was in the kitchen afterwards, having breakfast and reading the paper, Mrs. Kelly came flapping over to the table. “Father Burke! Father Burke!”
He looked up. Her face was flushed and her eyes gleamed with excitement. Malice, more like. She attempted to arrange her features in a funereal expression as she said, “There’s someone here to see you. That poor, poor soul! The commodore! In the parlour.”
Brennan rose without replying and walked into the sitting room. He put out his hand to Hubert Rendell, but Rendell didn’t take it. The two men faced each other silently for a long uncomfortable moment. Then Rendell’s eyes went to the far corner of the room, and Brennan turned around, just in time to see the arse end of Mrs. Kelly scurrying out of view.
“Commodore Rendell, I don’t know where to begin to —”
“Let’s begin with the night of Tuesday, the sixth of February, when she asked for your help and you didn’t bother, or didn’t remember, to show up for the meeting.”
The man’s cold
anger, his icy calm, struck Brennan more forcefully than any amount of red-faced agitation or shouting could have done. Brennan was guilty, no point in trying to plead otherwise, so he merely said, “All right.”
“Now Meika didn’t even tell me this herself. Which suggests to me that whatever was troubling her was something grave. Well, it obviously was, wasn’t it? Given that she walked into the sea and kept walking, after being stood up by her priest and confidant.”
Brennan hadn’t thought it possible to feel any worse than he already did about Meika Keller, but this pasting from her husband made him realize there was an infinite vein of guilt to be mined. All he could do was stand there and take it.
“The only reason I heard about this planned meeting at all was that our friend Vicky Latimer, another professor at Saint Mary’s, called me to say she had overheard Meika speaking to you at the university and asking if you could see her later that evening. Vicky kind of teased her about going to see a priest. ‘Going into a dark room with a handsome bachelor and telling secrets,’ she said to Meika, or something like that. Meaning the confession box, I take it. But Meika told her it was ‘spiritual guidance, the usual Catholic stuff.’ She sort of indicated the building around them, the McNally building, when she said ‘Catholic.’ You know, building named after a bishop. ‘Nothing scandalous,’ she said to Vicky. That’s the way our friend remembered it. She thought no more about it. Until, of course, she heard the news the next day. So. Father Burke. What was it my wife wanted to talk to you about?”
“She didn’t say what it was. Just could she come speak to me after a charity event she was attending that evening. She thought she’d be free by ten o’clock, so we agreed on that time. She would come here to the parish house.”
“Which she did, apparently. And was told by the housekeeper that you were nowhere to be seen.”
