“WELL,” SHE said as we walked back to our bungalow, “neither one of them fellas is a master criminal are they now? Sure, wouldn’t they have a hard time organizing a crooked football pool?”The sun was still shining brightly, but the wind was picking up and the breakers were growing louder. There might be a “blow” coming in from Long Island or some such place. Then the rain would be “hard” instead of “soft.” We would consider an Irish “soft” rain, by the way, a torrential downpour in Yank Land.
“You have the right of it,” I agreed.
“Och, they’re a dead end, I’m afraid. The Gardaí will be sniffing around the financial world. They’ll be finding out that, while there’s a lot of talk about developing the harbors and inlets and lakes out here, there’s no real money for it yet, and not likely to be … . The weather is daunting, if you take me meaning, and picturesque will take you just so far.”
“Actually, I thought you missed an obvious benefit of your Aran scheme … . You would have to build a marina on each island … .”
“And a friggin’ tunnel into Galway … and, faith, why not a factory to mass-produce Aran Island sweaters.”
“You ought to write it up and send it to the Irish Times.”
“You’re the author in the family, Dermot Michael Coyne … . And wouldn’t there be amadons who would take it seriously like that poor round gobshite of a man!
Then she turned thoughtful. I thought it best not to disturb her. She was on an emotional roller coaster, steeper and wilder than her usual mercurial romp through life.
On the way back to Renvyle House, I asked, “How come we switched from tennis to golf?”
“I’m sick of being the domineering bitch who always gets her way. You really shouldn’t put up with me, Dermot Michael Coyne. I’m a friggin’ spoiled brat.”
OK, WISE GUY, YOU DON’T RESPOND TO WHAT SHE SAYS BUT TO WHAT SHE MEANS. LET’S SEE YOU FIELD THAT HOT GROUND BALL.
I tried, “Annie McGrail didn’t raise any spoiled brats.”
“Hmm,” she snorted. “Doesn’t yourself say all the time that I’m bossy?”
“Wasn’t Ma bossy and didn’t I love her?”
My grandmother, also from Carraoe, was both bossy and conniving and I adored her. Nuala, who had translated her diary for me, identified with her. She even sometimes seems to be claiming that she heard from her, even though Ma, as we called her, had been dead for seven years. I chose to believe that she was merely asserting, sometimes with remarkable accuracy, what Ma would have said under the circumstances.
“You never win any of the arguments. You wanted to play golf, I wanted to play tennis, so you were willing to play tennis just to keep me happy.”
“No,” I said. “I knew if I agreed too easily, you’d switch to golf!”
“Go ’long with you, Dermot Michael Coyne. I’m serious. You never win any of the arguments.”
“Only the serious ones.”
“For instance?”
“Coming over for these two months, buying a bungalow, taking your medicine.”
She pondered that.
“’Tis true,” she said reluctantly. “I guess I’m confused. Maybe I should take two of them pills every day!”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Och, I’m just funning you, Dermot! … Would you look at that … the Gardaf are checking golfers! … Me name is Nuala Coyne and I’m not a guest at the hotel and this is me husband, Dermot Coyne, and we have playing privileges here.”
“May we see your identification?” The young man, red hair with freckles, was immune to the smile of a beautiful woman.
“Dermot, do you have our passports?”
“Woman, I do not.”
“No identification at all?”
“Not at all, at all … Except me husband usually carries a wallet with a crock full of credit cards.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do. You certainly cannot play golf here. Moreover, failure to produce a valid identification document is in itself a violation of Irish law.”
The other guard, a tall black Irishman, seemed a little more lenient.
“Sure, Brendan, we could ring up the hotel, couldn’t we now?”
“Or Chief Superintendent McGinn.”
The man waiting on the tee, perhaps for golfing partners, turned around and grinned. “Oh, Shenandoah,” he crooned, “I love you so … . Officer, you might also check with those two plainclothes Gardaí who are Ms. McGrail’s
bodyguards and are standing over there by the pool and wondering whether you’re out of your mind.”
Brendan looked skeptically at the priest, “You ought not interfere in matters of Garda business, Father Lane.”
“Would you ever look at our lads over there, Brendan? Aren’t they waving them through?”
“Well, I guess it will be all right … .”
Jack Lane considered the cop carefully.
“Clergymen, officer, are citizens of Ireland just like anyone else. They have the right to make representations to Gardai who are acting inappropriately.”
“Och, sure An t‘Athair, Sean O’Laighne,” me wife said with the infinite respect she reserved for the clergy, “wasn’t the poor lad just trying to do his duty? And don’t I look like the kind of woman who would have a carving knife with me golf sticks?”
“Jack, Nuala Anne,” he said as we approached the tee. “I hope you wouldn’t mind my playing with you?”
“With a holy priest, sure I’ll have to watch me language now, won’t I? And anyway, Father, won’t I be beating the both of you?”
“We’ll see about that!”
The course had nine holes all right, five par four and four par three, not the kind of course I liked to play. The first one was a hundred and fifty yard par three. We let herself shoot first, not that the matter came up for discussion. In long red-checked shorts and a red sweater she was a fearsome sight as she swung her eight iron and hit the ball into a sand trap short of the green.
“Shite,” she protested.
“’Tis only a vulgarity,” Jack commented as he teed up. His nine-iron shot sailed over the green and into the rough beyond.
As is well known, the greens in Ireland are like our fairways, and the fairways are like our rough.
I put my drive some three feet from the pin.
“Looks like this is going to be easy,” I announced.
“A friggin’ birdie,” me wife protested. “’Tis not fair, at all, at all, and the wind helping you too!”
“She really has no respect for the clergy, Jack. She beats my brother, George, all the time.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother who’s a priest, Dermot.”
“Yeah, and he’s a smart-ass,” I said. “Thinks he knows everything.”
“Isn’t his reverence a good and holy priest and himself now the parish priest of his own parish after working for all them years for the little bishop at the Cathedral?”
“The little bishop?”
“The very same … By the way, Father, have you found the second part of your man’s manuscript yet?”
“I’ve been searching for it, but no luck yet.”
“Sure, you’ve been looking in the wrong place, haven’t you now?”
We had reached Nuala’s sand trap.
“Where should I be looking, Nuala?”
“Well,” she said, approaching the ball with a sand wedge, “shouldn’t you be looking in that old closet down in the little basement behind the water pipe?”
She chipped the ball over to the far side of the green.
“Shite!” she protested again.
“There’s no little closet there,” Jack Lane, his golf bag hanging limply in his hand, said as he stared at me wife. My wife.
“Ah, there is now. You’ll just have to remove the old furniture that’s in front of the door, won’t you now?”
She put the sand wedge in her bag and began to amble to the other side of the green. As if in the presence of the uncanny, Jack Lane followed her gingerly.
“There’s a third segment of the manuscript somewhere in your house, or maybe in the church, but I haven’t figured out where yet.”
“You are indeed one of the dark ones, Nuala Anne?”
“Och, sure, only charcoal gray! … You’re away, Father.”
Jack got the ball on the green, on the opposite side of the lie of his first shot.
“Would you guys please concentrate,” I demanded. “I want to putt for my bird.”
“Gobshite,” me wife muttered darkly.
On their fourth shots they managed to get their balls closer to the cup than mine. Naturally, I drilled in the putt. A bird for me, a double bogey for each of them. Jack Lane was obviously a very good golfer, a valid competitor for meself. Myself. Nuala Anne, however, had disconcerted him altogether.
“My wife claims, Jack Lane,” I said as we went to the next tee, a two hundred and forty yard par four, “that she knows who the killer up on Maamtrasna was and why the killing occurred and herself not even finishing the first manuscript yet.”
“Sure ’tis clear as the nose on your face,” Nuala said, tilting her pert nose skyward as though everyone knew who the killer was. “And wasn’t the motive for the violence sex, like it usually is? And haven’t I given my husband the answer in a sealed envelope?”
“I see.”
He was down in five on the hole and Nuala actually produced a par. With an easy swing I put my ball once again within a few yards of the pin. Dermot Michael Coyne was on a roll. A bird and an eagle.
“We should be playing for money,” I commented to my disgruntled companions.
“Did you know, Father Jack Lane,” Nuala Anne, all innocence, asked, “that Matt Howard built his manor house on the Maamtrasna cemetery?”
Jack considered his five iron as though he were wondering whether it would serve as an exorcist’s cross.
“No, Nuala Anne, I didn’t know that,” he said cautiously.
“The Irish name means ‘Church on the Hill,’ doesn’t it now? And didn’t your man walk up there in the funeral procession and didn’t Lord Ballynahinch build his manor house on top of it?”
“Did he?” The priest was thunderstruck.
“And isn’t it a lucky thing that we’re not superstitious about such things or we’d be thinking that he’d have terrible bad luck for such a thing?”
“Dermot,” the priest said, “why don’t we hit our drives and then discuss this new message from the charcoal gray world?”
“A brilliant idea!”
I used a four wood, which dropped my ball maybe twenty yards short of the green. Nuala dubbed her four wood and was at least a hundred yards short. Jack Lane’s five iron didn’t serve him much better. I figured that with a good chip I would earn myself a bird.
“You were saying, Nuala Anne?”
“I was asking what you think of this Matt Howard person and his wife.”
That was not what she had said, but it was indeed what she was asking.
“Lady Daphne.”
“And his wife Lady Daphne.”
“Would you be thinking that Matt Howard might ask someone to creep into this historic house and slit the throats of three Russian army officers?”
“Would he?”
“Not very likely. He has oceans of money, all of it earned more or less honestly. No reason to engage in risky violence to make a few dollars more.”
Nuala merely sighed.
“As to what I think of him, he’s a nice enough fellow, generous to the Church, supports the peace process up
beyond above, and is a friend of Tony Blair. He rubs me the wrong way, I guess, because there’s enough Republican blood in me not to like English landlords, even of the modern New Labor variety.”
Nuala’s nine iron dumped her ball on the green, two putts away from the cup. Jack Lane’s shot fell in the rough beyond the green.
“Do you deal in controlling golf balls?” he asked her suspiciously.
“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
I had never thought of that possibility. I started to think about it when she sunk her thirty-foot putt and I missed my six footer. A bird for me wife and a par for me.
“Shite!” I exclaimed.
“And Lady Daphne?” I asked as we hiked to the next tee.
“She’s a little odd, Dermot. No, I take that back. She’s more than a little odd, she’s …”
“Round the bend altogether?” Nuala asked helpfully.
“You have the right of it. Vague and unfocused.”
“She’d worry about living over a cemetery?”
“More likely she’d love it … . There’s lots of strange people that hang around the Howard family.”
“That’s what we’re interested in, Jack Lane,” I said. “The more strange people the better.”
So the match continued. Dark clouds rushed in from the Atlantic, the wind picked up even more. I pulled a Chicago Bulls windbreaker out of my golf bag and wrapped it around my wife’s shivering shoulders. I won the match, naturally, with a miserable three under par, herself came in one over par, and the poor little priest finished at five over par.
“Worst game I’ve ever had at this course.” He sighed. “I’m no matched for preternatural powers.”
“Sure, wasn’t it just the wind? … Would the Howards ever mind, do you think, if I called them and said I wanted
to talk to them about the Church on the Hill, which isn’t on the hill anymore?”
“If you identified yourself as Nuala Anne McGrail, they’d be willing to talk to you about almost anything.”
“Wouldn’t that be grand!”
A trip to a manor house over an ancient graveyard with my wife in her current woman-leprechaun mood would be like an episode from the Addams Family.
“Could I save my reputation as a good loser, if not as a good golfer, by offering to take you to supper down at the Station House in Clifden?”
“Would your reputation last till Monday night, Father Lane? Aren’t me poor ma and da coming up from down below in Carraroe for the weekend?”
“Monday night it is … . Now, I think I’ll go home and drench myself in holy water.”
“Go ‘long with you, An t’Athair!”
Just after we had parted, Nuala shouted after him, “Och, Father Lane?”
He turned, a man badly beaten. “Yes, Nuala Anne?”
“Don’t forget to look in the closet behind the old furniture back at the parish house.”
His agreement was lost in the wind.
Nuala huddled in the lee of my arm as we fought our way back to the bungalow.
“Was I awful, Dermot Michael?”
“Terrible, woman, and that poor priest so badly confused that he couldn’t concentrate on his game.”
“Sure, I didn’t want him to beat you, did I?”
“You spooked him and charmed him at the same time, and, what’s more, young woman, you did it for the pure hell of it.”
“Purgatory of it … Besides, we need that manuscript, don’t we now, if we’re going to find out who the killers really were?”
“We do indeed … . And you knew where it was only when he joined us on the links, of course.”
“No, while we were walking down the road and meself knowing he would be on the links … Hold me tight, Dermot Michael, I’m perishing with the cold, and me poor ma and da coming up from Carraroe tomorrow.”
“Where it will be warm and sunny, it being so far away.”
In the bungalow, the whole ménage was in the toylittered family room, where my son, face smeared with baby food, diaper hanging loose, silly grin on his face, was experimenting, to general amusement, with his first steps.
“Ma, he’s wonderful!” Nelliecoyne enthused. “Look at the way he laughs when he falls on his ass!”
Whereupon Michael Dermod did just that. He pulled himself up on a chair leg and then tottered two steps towards his mother, down whose cheeks tears of joy streamed as she grabbed him in her arms.
Like I say, the woman wears many different faces.
As we sat down to supper, the phone rang.
“Dermot Coyne,” I informed the caller.
“Jack Lane … Do you keep holy water in the house?”
“With what else would we sprinkle everyone when the thunder and lightning dash in from Boston?”
“I thought so!”
“You found the manuscript.”
“I did. It’s not in good shape, but you should be able to read it. There’s no ending yet. Whenever herself figures out where it is, I’ll hunt it down.”
“Good!”
“I also found a picture of the cemetery up there. It was actually in front of the old manor house. It’s pretty clearly a cemetery.”
“Thank you,” I said briskly.
At the table, Nelliecoyne was throwing baby food back at her brother.
“Jack Lane,” I said. “He found what he was looking for.”
“Brilliant!” my charcoal gray wife chortled. “Didn’t I tell him he would!