fourteen

Too tired to stand, Nathan sat on the toilet to pee, blinking at a green towel still damp from Zoe’s mid-afternoon shower. He stood, shook himself, and tucked his bits away. Strange to share a bathroom with a woman after so many years. He’d forgotten how good their conditioners and creams and bath oils smelled. How clean they were. Most days, Zoe showered twice.

And Annie yesterday. He hadn’t let himself approach close enough to sniff her, but he imagined her skin smelled fresh like the outdoors.

A gloomy nostalgia overwhelmed him. His wife, Susannah, had always smelled good too. Scent memories wafted straight into the silent core of himself that he’d long ago locked away, the part of him that didn’t want to remember sitting on the ground next to a giant clawfoot bathtub, trailing his fingertips back and forth in the bubbles while Susannah soaked. Sometimes he climbed in with her, sometimes he loitered like a voyeur. He’d talk about a new glaze recipe that had flunked the firing test. She’d ruminate about a painting that was up for auction that one of her clients might bid on. Those were the most perfect moments in their marriage, and the memories came along with the scent that teased him now.

He splashed cold water on his face in an effort to shock himself back to his senses. This wasn’t Susannah he smelled; this was Zoe. Citrus and vanilla rather than sandalwood and jasmine.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Nathan listened with towel pressed against his face. Zoe called, “Coming.” She knocked as she passed the bathroom. “Hello in there.”

A moment later, her voice carried back to him, a cheerful hello aimed at whoever had rung the doorbell.

“Dad, it’s a Detective Sergeant Ahern,” Zoe called.

Nathan hung the towel over the bath rod, taking his time, and left the aromatic shelter of the bathroom. Zoe had changed out of her street clothes and into fleecy pajama bottoms, ivory and slung low on her hips, and a cobalt turtleneck jumper. She was as effortless as Susannah had been, as if she’d skipped off the pages of a fashion magazine with her hair bundled in crazy curls on top of her head and butterfly earrings sparkling from her ears.

“Nathan, hello?” Danny said.

He’d missed something and now he stood at the bottom of the stairs with no memory of descending them.

“Don’t mind Da,” Zoe said. “He hardly sleeps.”

Danny smiled at Zoe, keeping it professional, but Nathan noticed the pause as he took her in, his curiosity apparent, before stepping inside. Nathan led the way to the sofa in the living room.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Detective Sergeant,” Zoe said. “It must be pretty obvious that I’m Nathan’s daughter.”

“Yes,” Danny said. “I’m aware of that.”

Zoe laughed. “Fair play. I’ll make coffee. Dad guzzles it by the gallon. Back in a wink.”

Nathan dropped into the closest chair, forcing himself not to rub his side, and indicated the chair opposite him for Danny. Nathan followed Danny’s gaze to his hands clutching the armrests. With a jerk, he dropped them to his lap. Somehow he’d opened the scabs on his knuckles again.

“You should get those seen to,” Danny said.

“It’s nothing. The work dries out my hands.”

“I’m here about Elder Joe’s death,” Danny said.

Nathan rocked forward on his seat and settled his head in his hands. The familiar buzzing revved up at the base of his skull, a presage of one of his episodes. Perhaps the imagined scents in the bathroom had short-circuited his brain.

It was happening more often, these reactions. His body taking over. Older men sometimes asked Nathan where he’d fought, and he’d lie. Sometimes Afghanistan, sometimes the Balkans. They knew what to do: talk, distract, and listen. They knew how the outer battlefield could mutate into an even worse inner terrain. 

He needed to survive this conversation with Danny and then escape the house for a while. Land himself in the Burren, walk off his agitation on that strange limestone pavement that didn’t remind him of himself or his family or his former life in England.

“Right.” Nathan straightened up. “What about Elder Joe?”

“This morning Detective O’Neil and I spoke to his daughter, Róisín. Up in Galway.” He paused, waiting, but Nathan didn’t know what to say. “Have you met her before,” Danny continued, “perhaps while she visited Elder Joe?”

“Oh, no. She doesn’t come around. Not that I know of, anyhow.”

Zoe entered and circled around the back of the sofa to sit down beside Danny. She’d done the best she could with Nathan’s collection of chipped coffee mugs. A small pudding bowl held sugar.

“What am I after missing?” she said. “You two look too tragic for words.”

“I need to talk to your father in private,” Danny said. “Would you excuse us?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Dad?” She stood. “Never mind. That’s grand.” Halfway across the room she turned around. “You’ll come find me when the detective leaves, right, Dad? No secrets, remember.”

She left the room before Nathan could muster an answer, not that he had one.

Danny picked up a coffee mug and stirred in a teaspoon of sugar. He sipped and settled back, apparently waiting out Nathan again. Nathan liked Danny, thought of him as a Garda officer with an open mind, not likely to jump to conclusions. The problem was that Nathan himself was confused. Was he supposed to have done something?

He swiped at his clay-encrusted jeans, trying to rub away the trembles. The buzzing ratcheted up a notch. “Elder Joe was a friend,” he said.

“That’s why I’m here. Mackey at the Plough said you lodged at his house when you first moved to Lisfenora.”

“Yes.” On a deep fortifying breath Nathan managed to pour milk into his coffee without spilling.

“Were there any other lodgers at the time? This would be starting at the end of last summer, true?”

“Sometimes he had other guests. Older people. Sometimes I’d come in to watch the telly with them. I stayed in one of the outbuildings.”

“Nothing struck you as odd with the other guests?”

Nathan thought back, trying to remember anything about his two-week stay. The buzzing onslaught continued unabated. “No. I was intent on finding my own place fast. I had my own problems.”

Danny nodded, understanding. “How did you find out Elder Joe took in lodgers?”

“I don’t understand what all of this has to do with Elder Joe’s death. Unless—do you think one of the lodgers did it?”

“We have to check it out,” Danny said. “We found one of his current lodgers in a bad way.”

Nathan set aside his coffee. “That’s bloody awful.”

“You know nothing about this business of his with the lodgers?”

“No, and to answer your question, he told me himself that he took in lodgers. The Plough was the first pub I hit when I arrived in the village. I asked Alan if he knew of a place to let, and he pointed me to Elder Joe.”

“Fair enough.” Zoe’s voice rose and fell from her bedroom, singing in a tuneless way. Danny smiled. “Nice to have our children nearby, isn’t it?”

Danny studied Nathan with too much interest now, no doubt pondering his mental fitness. It was Zoe. In her reflection, Nathan appeared deficient.

“Was there anything else?” Nathan said. “About Elder Joe, I mean.”

“When did you see him last?”

Nathan’s mind went blank. “What day are we today?”

“Today is Wednesday.”

“I haven’t gone to the pub as much as usual because of Zoe, even though she threatens to go with me every night.” His joke that wasn’t a joke fell flat. Danny gestured for him to continue. “Last week sometime. Thursday or Friday.”

“You were seen with EJ at the Plough on Friday night, the night he died.”

“Oh right, we went fishing that day. Ended up at the pub afterwards.”

“You knew EJ well, then.”

“Uh—”

“A few minutes ago you said he was a friend.”

Sweat coated Nathan’s skin. The clammy moistness of it made him twitchy. What did that mean, friend? Nathan hadn’t had a friend since Susannah died in 2003. “I knew him to fish with, but he didn’t confide in me.”

Which made him a safe friend. Confidences required reciprocity, and if Nathan didn’t receive them, he wouldn’t be held to the social contract of revealing his own either.

Danny sipped his coffee, never taking his eyes off Nathan. “He didn’t mention any troubles or concerns in his life?”

“No. We went up to Galway to trout fish. I drove. Elder Joe could be garrulous or quiet depending on his mood. He was quiet that day. More so than usual.” Nathan wasn’t sure this was true, but he needed something to tell Danny that didn’t contradict Nathan’s memory of that day, which was faulty at best. “We stopped by the Plough when we returned. I left around ten.”

“EJ found his own way home, then.”

“He always manages a lift somehow.”

“Where did you go after that?”

“Home. Zoe can corroborate.”

Danny held his mug with both hands. He surveyed Nathan’s meager belongings interspersed with a few fine antiques. The dusty ficus, a stained glass window pane mounted on the wall, the teetering pile of books next to his chair, the six-foot Rococo grandfather clock. “What secrets was Zoe referring to before she left the room?” he said.

“No bloody idea. She wishes I talked more, though.”

Danny took his leave, and Nathan followed him out. He continued walking after Danny drove away, far out into the countryside where the wind swept back his hair and whistled in his ears. An hour later, Nathan’s head finally cleared, but he kept going. He couldn’t bear his house at the moment.

He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, hesitating, thinking about who his friends were and weren’t. Without Susannah to ground him, his relationships were illusory at best. Go on then, he ordered himself, and pressed Annie’s number.