Eight

“What happened to you?” Eamon, surrounded by a worried saffron aura, materialized in Carraigfaire’s entryway as Gethsemane let herself into the cottage.

“Vivian Cunningham happened. She showed up unannounced on Carrick Point Road for a rousing game of dodge the pedestrian.”

“You’re all right?”

“The bike and I are both fine. My dress is the only casualty.” She filled him in on what had happened between Sweeney’s and home as she led the way into the study.

Eamon’s elbow disappeared into the wood of the rolltop desk as he leaned against it. “Lismore’s such a gobshite, I’ll forgive Vivian for adulterating whiskey.”

Gethsemane winced as she lowered herself onto the sofa.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Fine,” she said in defiance of her shoulder’s and hip’s protest. “Nothing a few dozen naproxen won’t fix. What were you up to while I was convincing a priest to snoop and crashing my bike?”

“I went up to Carrick Point to watch Sunny and Lismore put on their holy show. You should be proud of me. I resisted the urge to blast them off the cliff, despite their turning my lighthouse into a backdrop for their theater of the grotesque.”

“Then you saw Vivian?”

Eamon shook his head. “She must’ve gone before I arrived. Sunny, Lismore, and Amott were the only three I saw. Sunny’d decked herself out in some diaphanous, grass-green fairy get-up, complete with wings. She looked like Titania if Titania had been styled by the costume designer from the Dunmullach Amateur Dramatical Society. No doubt the Bard’s rolling in his grave. Honestly, Sunny was so over-the-top, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the Duchess of Cambridge riding through on a horse. I assume Vivian left before I got there.”

“Did you see anything to clue you in to impending danger?”

“You mean like Lismore pacing off in the distance to the cliff’s edge or Sunny testing the weight of largish rocks? No, nothing like that.”

“Maybe it’s Rosalie.” Sore muscles transformed a deep sigh into a short, sharp intake of breath.

The saffron in Eamon’s aura intensified.

“I promise I’m okay. I just need to give up sleuthing for the night and go to bed.”

“Then I’ll bid you good night. May Queen Mab guard you against troublous dreams that make you sad.”

“You’re butchering your Shakespeare.”

Eamon bowed like an actor taking a curtain call. He began to dematerialize, feet first. “If this shadow has offended…”

Gethsemane chuckled.

Translucency ascended his legs. “…think but this and all is mended…”

“G’night, Irish.”

Stars, framed by the window behind him, came into view through his nearly transparent torso. “…that you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear…” He vanished.

Gethsemane finished the quotation. “And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding than a dream. Lord, Irish, I hope so.”

  

Shakespearean good wishes failed to bring peaceful sleep. Tossing and turning in bed mirrored thoughts of Ty, Sunny, and Rosalie tossing and turning in her mind. Rosalie and her mysterious note rose to the top of the list of worries. No obvious human force threatened her. But a supernatural one? What if whatever she kept out of her hotel room went after the rest of the village? What charm would protect everyone else?

She conceded defeat to insomnia and sat up. Frustrated, she threw a pillow, which sailed through the chest of a saffron-hued Eamon. He hovered near the foot of her bed.

“Look out the window,” he said.

She went to the window and looked out. The full moon cast enough light for her to recognize Verna walking alone along the road from the lighthouse.

“What’s she doing?”

Gethsemane shrugged. “Walking.”

“At this hour?”

“It’s the twenty-first century. Women are allowed out after dark. Even without a chaperone.”

“You don’t go out walking this late.”

“That’s me. It’s a hang-up.” She tucked hair back into her head scarf. “My mother’s convinced there’s no legit reason to be outside after midnight. Whenever I think about going out that late, I get a mental image of my mother staring at me in disapproving silence. Other women go out this late.”

“You’re a grown woman and your ma’s three thousand miles away.”

“Doesn’t matter. She will always be my mother and she will always be in my head. One day, possibly one day soon, I will turn into her.”

Eamon jerked his thumb toward the window. “Your ma would want to know what Verna’s doing out this late.”

“She would. But she wouldn’t go out and ask. She’d wait until after sun-up and ask her then.” Gethsemane opened the window and leaned out. Verna’s back remained visible in the distance as she passed the cottage around the bend in the path that led down to the main road.

“What are you doing?” Eamon asked.

“I am not yet my mother so I’m watching to see if Verna is being followed.” She leaned farther out. “She isn’t. She isn’t running, she isn’t crying, and she isn’t casting worried glances over her shoulder.” Vivian’s dash into the path of her bike and Rosalie’s paranoid behavior bubbled up in her memory. “Nor did she run in front of a moving vehicle or toss salt over her left shoulder. No boo hags are lurking—are they?”

Eamon’s saffron hue intensified. “No, no cailleach feasa are out tonight. Would you come back in before you fall?”

Gethsemane’s pajama top tented toward the room’s interior in response to Eamon’s pointed finger. “And Tchaikovsky, mercifully, keeps silent.” She pulled her head back in. “Verna, like me, is a grown woman. Unlike me, she chose to go for a late-night walk, probably because she needed some solitude to process the turmoil happening in her life. I am not going to disturb her. I’ll take a page from Mother’s playbook and say something to her later, at a decent hour.” She yawned. “Now, I’m going back to bed.”

  

She fell asleep just before dawn. Pounding on the cottage door awoke her almost as soon as she’d drifted off. Cursing, she dragged herself out of bed, retrieved her head scarf from under the pillow where her tossing and turning had dislodged it, fumbled on a robe, and went downstairs.

Inspector Sutton, head of the Dunmullach Garda homicide squad, greeted her with a scowl.

She re-tied the scarf. “It can’t possibly be a good morning if you’re standing on my porch at a quarter after oh-dark-thirty, Inspector.”

“D’ya mind telling me why a dead man is hanging from your lighthouse?”