CHAPTER 21
A priest and a hipster got out of their vehicles in the driveway as the Williams women left the house. Megan, in their wake, felt like she’d walked in on the beginning of a joke she couldn’t find a punch line to. Jessie threw herself across the yellowed lawn into Reed’s arms, babbling her astonishment at his coming for her, while he kissed her hair and looked puzzled. As the rest of the women drew closer, Megan could hear him saying, “I told you I’m here for you, babe, but you gotta keep me posted, Jess! How else can I be where you need me if you’re back and forth all the time?”
The puppies sat down on Megan’s feet, pinning her in place, and grumbled at the gathering, as if they regarded it as impeding their opportunity for a nap. Megan bent to rub their heads as Sondra approached the priest, glancing once at her younger sister and Reed before sighing the sigh of a woman who had given up on that fight for the time being. “Father Anthony? I’m Sondra Williams. These are my sisters, Raquel and . . .” Another sigh. “Jessie.”
Jessie waved from within the circle of Reed’s arms, and Raquel, like Sondra, shook the priest’s hand. “You’ve spoken with Miss Edgeworth?” Sondra asked, and the priest—in his sixties if he was a day, but compact and well put-together, like he exercised vigorously—nodded with a cheerfully bemused air.
“She’s made it clear I’m to help you in every way I can. It’s your mother, is it? I’m sorry to hear of your loss. And you’ll be wanting to bury her here?”
“If we can arrange it very quickly,” Sondra said wearily. “I have to be back in the States by Tuesday morning.”
For a moment Megan thought the man might actually allow himself a faith and begorrah, not that anyone in Ireland ever said that unless—and not usually even then—they were making fun of American ideas of Irishisms. She had herself only once heard someone say an apparently totally sincere top of the day to ye, which was close enough to top of the morning that she’d spent the rest of the week laughing every time she thought about it. When she’d related that story to Irish friends they’d been incredulous, even with the allowance that it had been said on the first sunny day after a hurricane. However, Father Anthony recovered himself with a shake of his head and a brisk rub of his hands. “All right so. Will you be wanting the whole ceremony, or will it be a smaller affair?”
The older sisters exchanged glances. “We’re not Catholic, and nobody but us is even here,” Raquel ventured. “Probably smaller is better. Very small.” Her eyes filled with tears and Sondra, for all her faults, put her arm around Raquel’s shoulders.
“You’ll be wanting to leave before Monday evening if you can,” Father Anthony ventured. “I’ve Mass to deliver on the Sunday morning, but given that it’s an emergency, we might make Sunday afternoon around half four?”
“Will they have released Mama’s body?” Jessie whispered from within Reed’s arms. All the sisters exchanged anguished glances and Megan lifted a finger, indicating she’d deal with it. She walked a few steps away, the puppies following to sit on her feet and grumble again, and called Detective Bourke.
“You’ve never found something out already,” he said, and she shook her head like he could see her.
“No, they’re trying to arrange funeral, uh, arrangements—” She winced at her own ineptitude with the language and heard Bourke’s soft chuckle. “Yeah, I word real good. Anyway, they’re wondering if Mrs. Williams’s body can be released for a funeral at Lough Rynn on Sunday afternoon.”
“There’s nothing more to be done with the autopsy,” Bourke said. “I don’t see how that could be a problem. I’m glad they’ve got that sorted. How are they holding up?”
“As well as they can be. Thanks, Paul.” Megan hung up and nodded at the others. “Sunday should be fine.”
“We’ll get it sorted so.” The priest paused. “There’s talk enough around Mohill about those who might be descendants of the old earls. If you wouldn’t mind your own selves, there might be more people at your mother’s funeral than you’d imagine.”
The sisters exchanged startled glances, and Raquel gave the priest a wet smile. “I think that might be kind of wonderful.”
“Why don’t we go over and invite Miss Edgeworth ourselves?” Jessie said suddenly. Reed, his arms still encircling her, peered at the top of her head.
“Who?”
“Our great-aunt, or something. The lady who owns all this land. She’s the last of her family, except us.”
Sondra, visibly trying to figure out the family relationship, said, “She’s more of a distant cousin, I think,” and Jessie rolled her eyes.
“Whatever. We should go invite her. And we can ask her about—”
“You have family,” Reed said, dazed. “That’s amazing. Could I meet her too?”
Jessie said, “Of course!” as Sondra said, “Absolutely not,” as strongly. They stared at one another and Sondra said, “She’s very old and didn’t think much of having visitors, Jess. We don’t need to invite somebody else along right now.”
“No, no, yeah, I get that. It’s cool, it’s cool.”
“Oh my god, though, Reed, you could stay here and protect the house. Somebody is living there and trashed the storage room! They had Gigi Elsie’s diary!”
Reed paled behind his beard. “What?”
“No, it’s okay, we found it and we’re safe and you wouldn’t believe what we found in it, old letters and what we think are maps and—” Jessie’s excited burbling turned into tears without warning and it took her several seconds to recover enough to speak. “But whoever’s living there, if they had the diary, they must be the one who killed Mama, so if you could just—the police are coming. If you could just stay and keep an eye on it until they get here? That would be the most wonderful thing anyone could ever do.”
“Of course, babe.” Reed looked shaken, but kissed Jessie’s hair before giving her a tremulous smile and a nervous look at the house. “But I might stay out here, y’know? If that’s cool.”
“I think that’s smart.” Jessie sniffled, then smiled wetly at first Reed, then her sisters. “Okay. Okay, I think we should go talk to Anne, and then maybe I’ll drive back to Dublin with you, okay, Reed? Okay, Sonny? Raq?”
Both of her older sisters nodded like they’d given in to the inevitable. Jessie’s smile bloomed and they finally, under Megan’s guidance, all got into the car to drive away.
* * *
Anne Edgeworth met them at her front door, framed in it like a gnome in a giant’s house. “I suppose you’re after coming back to tell me Maire Cahill’s in hospital for treasure hunting on my own lands. Don’t bother. I’ve heard it all.” She stomped unceremoniously into the parlour and sat with a curmudgeonly thump as the younger women trailed in after her. Sondra and Raquel looked expectantly at Jessie, whom they evidently thought had the best chance of charming the old lady. She stared back at them a moment, then shrugged and turned her sweetest smile on Anne.
“No, we thought you’d have heard that already. We live in a big city,” she said ruefully, “but even there it seems like everybody learns everyone else’s business right away. It must be hard here sometimes, if you want a little privacy.”
Anne sniffed. “Nobody bothers me if I don’t want to be bothered. What are you after, then, with your own beguiling eyes and the smile like my sister’s?”
Jessie, caught, blushed and looked down. “We found some old letters from our Geepaw Patrick, and some—well, we wonder if they really are treasure maps. I know it’d be crazy, but . . .” She gestured to Raquel, who took the letters and the maps out of her purse and put them into Anne’s gnarled hands. Silence fell while the old lady looked through them, lingering especially over one of the letters.
“I remember Nancy Dunne,” she said eventually. “She seemed like an old woman when I first knew her, although I know now she wasn’t yet fifty. She was a fair beauty still. They said she loved Patrick with all her heart, and that she never would marry after he disappeared. I thought it was romantic, when I was a wee lass my own self. The village thought it was sad, a girl like that wasting her life on the love of a dead man, but as I got older I thought she had more sense than any woman I’d ever known. Maybe she did love him that much, but what it meant for her was she was never shackled to any man, dying young of making the babies that the Church demanded of her. Between her and Patty I saw clear enough what would become of me if I married, and how I could live if I didn’t. She died alone, but you’d never know it from the funeral mass. They came from all over the county to see the burial of sweet Nancy Dunne. Maybe they’ll come to mine so. Let’s see the maps, girl.” She beckoned for them, then remembered they’d already been given to her, and shuffled the old papers around.
Unlike the other women, Anne Edgeworth had no problem with handling the delicate pages like they were newly made. She rearranged them, tapped them together, held them up to the light, turned them around, squinted at them and then at her distant family, then back to the maps. “It all looks like rubbish to me.”
“There are coins drawn around the edges,” Megan ventured. “I noticed you had some old coins in your collection. We wondered if there might be a correlation.”
“There’s one that me da said came from Patrick himself,” Anne said without interest. “It’s no good, though, all twisted and black. His carriage ran over it and bent it in half.”
“I saw that one,” Megan said hopefully. “May I get it?”
“Please yourself.” Anne held the drawings up again, although the afternoon light was fading. “What were these pressed against?”
Megan, rising, glanced at the sisters and shook her head. “Nothing, why?”
“There’s a bit of embossing so.” Anne turned the paper so Megan could see what she meant, and light caught the edges of the faintest imaginable impression at its centre.
“Dang. Your eyesight is amazing, Miss Edgeworth.”
Profound satisfaction settled in the lines around Anne Edgeworth’s mouth. “So it is, for all that I’m eighty-nine years of age.”
“There wasn’t anything in the diary for them to be pressed against,” Raquel said with conviction. “I would have noticed that when I was a kid, even if I didn’t notice there was something weird about the bulky covers.”
Sondra shook her head. “They weren’t weird. Plenty of old clothbound books like that have really thick covers. I don’t think it was something you had any reason to notice.”
Surprised gratitude at absolution coloured Raquel’s cheeks. Jessie got up to look at the embossing on the page while Megan went to the kitchen to get the coin. By the time she came back, less than a minute later, all four Williams women were examining different sheets with their eyes and fingertips. “They’ve all got embossings,” Raquel reported to Megan. “Really, really faint ones, right in the middles. I don’t think they’re accidental.”
“Does the coin look like any of the ones on the edges?” Sondra handed Megan one of the maps and she turned the coin, trying to see its interior under the bent black grime.
Anne muttered, “For heaven’s sakes,” and got up with exaggerated stiffness to stump down the hall. She returned a moment later with silver polish and a rag, both of which she handed imperiously to Megan, who took them without complaint and set to polishing the coin.
A few swipes cleaned the grime away considerably. Megan scrubbed it with more enthusiasm, trying to get a good look at the image on its surface, and fumbled it with surprise. “I’m pretty sure this is a Viking coin.”
“Really?” Jessie jolted to her side, trying to see, while the other women came over more slowly and made room for Anne.
“It’s really old,” Megan said with a fair degree of confidence. “It’s not a perfect circle and the surface isn’t polished the way modern coins are, and look at the back.” She turned it so the outside of the bend faced the others. Letters, or shapes, she didn’t recognize at all encircled the outer border, and the coin’s centre had what looked like a hand-chiseled quarter-cross in it. Jessie curled her fingers around its outer edge, trying to get a sense of its circumference even though it was badly bent.
“Is this . . . it’s about the same size as the embossings,” she said cautiously. “Isn’t it?”
“Go get a hammer from the shed,” Anne commanded the young woman, who jumped to do as she was told even as Sondra and Raquel exchanged horrified glances. “What?” Anne demanded. “It’s my own coin, isn’t it, and I’ll do with it as I like, including smashing it flat again. Take it to the front stoop,” she ordered Megan when Jessie came back with a hammer, and Megan, tempted to throw a salute, marched to do as she’d been told too. Everyone followed her, crowding into the doorway as she hammered the old coin flat again.
It unbent surprisingly easily, with only a few hard bangs taking the worst of the bend away. Even the etching on the reverse side didn’t seem too badly damaged by Megan’s efforts, and a man’s profile could be easily seen on the face when they turned it over. Jessie ran to the parlour, got the maps again, and held one of them up in front of the coin, trying to align it to the profile.
A shadow caught the light just right and the little gathering gasped collectively as coin and map etching lined up. Jessie whispered, “Holy shit!” and tried for another map. They had to turn the coin a little to make it line up.
Raquel vibrated with excitement. “He must have made those etchings before he ever even left Ireland. I can’t believe we can still see them. They’re so faint.”
“We’d never see them without the coin. Or at least we’d never know what they were. Maybe with digital enhancement.” Sondra passed a hand in front of herself as if brushing the idea away, like she knew they’d have never gone that far. “Do they all match?”
“You have to keep turning the coin,” Jessie said, doing that. “It must have shifted when he was making the etchings.”
A cold thrill dropped through Megan. “No. No, give them to me, it’s—they—” Excitement jumbled her words and she took the papers when they were handed to her, then shooed everyone back inside. “I need to—we have to—go, go!” Even Anne allowed herself to be herded, and the women all gathered around Megan again at a table in front of the parlour window. Megan shuffled the map pages into order, following the Roman numerals on the individual pages, then, starting with the bottom one, lifted it to the light so she could align the coin with it. She got it lined up, and, hands shaking, put it down carefully before doing the same thing with the next coin. She put it down too, still aligned to the coin’s face rather than a tidy stack, and went through the whole pile that way, using the coin to orient them like a decoder ring. Before she’d gotten halfway through, the Williamses were whispering with understanding, and when she’d finally finished, they all took half a step back like they were afraid of disturbing what she’d discovered.
Jessie hissed, “Take a picture, quick, take a picture,” and in a flurry everyone but Anne did, ending with a collective sigh of relief that the work was recorded and any mistakes they made that undid the carefully stacked papers would no longer be catastrophic. Only then did Jessie shiver and whisper, “It really is a map.”
The dozen sheets, aligned to the coin and stacked in the right order, made a new picture of their own. The manor house lay in its centre, with the carefully sketched X’s describing an elegant arch to the house’s left, in the gardens, and the druid’s altar off to the manor’s right. Lines from other parts of the original drawings came together to suggest a pathway between the two points, but something about the shadows at the druid’s altar made Megan say, “A tunnel,” suddenly. “There’s no aboveground pathway there, is there? But there could be a tunnel.”
Anne snorted. “We’d have long since found tunnels. Children and young people have been crawling around those stones for longer than I can remember.”
“But they weren’t always collapsed,” Raquel said. “Patrick had a drawing from when he was a child, where they were all standing in a circle. Something could be hidden beneath them.”
“Treasure hunters and archaeologists have poked at it for at least fifty years,” Anne replied dismissively. “They’d have found an entrance if there was one. Go on yourself and try crawling under those stones, girl. See what you see.”
“But Patrick used to bury things for his brothers, didn’t you say?” Megan whispered. “What if he found his way into something and decided to hide it?”
“Why would he hide a treasure?” Anne demanded.
“Because of the evil earl,” Raquel said. “He was afraid his whole family would be the same way. They were already rich. If they found some kind of real trove, he might have been afraid they’d hoard it all and never do anything decent again. Or maybe he thought he’d come back for it someday. Or maybe he took it all to America.”
“We’re not rich enough for that,” Sondra muttered, and despite their nervous excitement, her sisters laughed. “But Anne says there’ve been treasure hunters all over those grounds for decades. They’d have found something.”
“Would they?” Megan wondered. “Does anybody know how deep metal detectors detect metal?”
“No, but a woodchuck would chuck all the wood it could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”
Raquel elbowed Jessie while Megan looked it up online and said, “Only a few feet deep at most, and wet ground apparently makes them work less well. Are there any—” She straightened hopefully, looking at Anne. “Are there any caves around here? Isn’t there a lot of limestone?”
“It’s Ireland,” Anne said. “There’s limestone everywhere, gell.”
“If there’s a cave—even just a natural hollow several feet down—digging a deep hole is hard,” Megan said with the voice of experience. “But if there’s a wee cave of some sort then filling an entrance to one might not be so hard. And then if you piled a bunch of rocks over it . . .”
“So you think the druid’s altar is the entrance to a treasure cave?” Anne’s thin white eyebrows rose, and when Megan nodded cautiously, she threw her hands up. “Well, what are you standing here for so? Go on! Go see!”