The Kenmare Cineplex was housed in a strip mall, sharing space with a Vietnamese noodle joint, a dry cleaners, a nail and tanning salon, and a convenience store–petrol station that supplied cigarettes, beer, and deep-fried food kept warm under an orange light.
Daniel saw it now as Annie or any other outsider might and sighed at the depressing signs of development. If Eire-Evergreen were successful, it would surely add more commercial eyesores to the neighborhood. Was it arrogance, or regret born of an unrealistic romantic vision of rural Ireland that made these surroundings such a disappointment? Who were any of them to determine what the region needed and who could best meet those needs? The jobs these inelegant businesses offered—the store cashiers, the beauty technicians, the dishwashers, and the food servers—might pay a pittance, but that pittance could keep a family off public assistance or pay a son’s tuition at a technical college or home care for an elderly parent.
Behind the tidy gardens set against houses painted in rainbow-bright colors, beyond the postcard fields of wildflowers and woolly sheep and the barren mountains, were families trying to hold together lives in a country that had gone from economic boom to bust in a decade. In those very fields lay the ruins of famine houses—homes abandoned during the Great Famine of the mid-1800s—left to crumble as a testament to the sorrows of the past.
In the years before he entered prison, the changes to his country had floored him. The wealth on display in the magnificent new housing estates, in the gleam and sparkle of Dublin’s tony shops and restaurants, in the purr of sleek, late-model German sedans, and in the artfully landscaped gardens of hushed art galleries—it all belonged to a different world, not to the Ireland of his youth.
Now many of those housing estates were empty, their entry gates chained and patrolled by security companies to prevent looting and squatting; half-constructed home sites had been abandoned; For Let signs were posted in vacant shops; the headlines predicted continued gloom as the world recession ground on. The mine had the potential to change this grim scene, to be part of an investment in Ireland’s recovery. But a copper mine on the Beara coast would be the equivalent to this strip mall on the outskirts of a beautiful village: a blight, a visual tragedy with longer-lasting consequences. The mine would do irrevocable harm.
His dreary reverie was stopped short by the appearance of Cat and Polly exiting the cinema lobby in a flurry of fabrics and colors—patterned tights under denim shorts, black leather high-top boots with loose laces, and bulky, vintage cardigan sweaters covering tight shirts cut far too low for the eyes not to be drawn to the girls’ soft, pale curves. Daniel sighed. To be that young and vulnerable, yet so aware of your own power and possibility. The girls piled into the back, Cat’s head bent over her phone, her fingers punching out a text with rapid dexterity.
“So, you wanted to meet Annie Crowe,” Daniel said, watching his niece through the rearview mirror. Her head snapped up. “She’s parked just there, following us back to the village.” Both girls whipped around.
“Why don’t we ride with her?” said Catriona. “I mean, so I can give her directions if the cars get separated?”
“Not likely to happen. And she’s got GPS. Stay put, Cat.”