MY WIFE handed me the sealed envelope.“Go on open it, will you, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“I will, woman, if you give me a chance, though I have no doubts that you’ve been absolutely right all along.”
YOU’D BETTER NOT.
“Shut up.”
The note, on a sheet of white computer paper and in Nuala’s neat and precise hand—the handwriting of an accountant—was brief and to the point.
Any idiot would know that Big John Casey was behind the murders. Who else would have had the power in the village to force other men to commit such crimes? Who else would resent a man with a few sheep who dared to steal from his many? Who else would resent the fact that Breige O’Brien had not married him? Maybe the secret society was involved, but politics was only an excuse. Big John Casey had the power to do away with John Joyce and his family and he did just that. He might not have gotten awav with it if it hadn’t been for the
Anthony Joyces and their lies. No one in the family would have dared to inform on him. He didn’t want to see Myles Joyce die, though there was no love lost between them. He didn’t want to see innocent men go to prison. He was afraid that Pat Casey and Pat Joyce would inform on him to save their lives, but he was pretty confident that the Brits wouldn’t believe them. Still, he must have had some uneasy days until the hangings were over.
Now call your friend An t‘Athair Sean O’Laighne and tell him that I was right all along.
Nuala Anne McGrail Coyne.
“So you had the right of it all along,” I said, sitting down on our couch. Two white furry critters tried to nibble on my shoes.
“Cut it out, Deirdre.”
“That’s Dana, Dermot Michael.”
Fiona stood at the door of the parlor admiring her progeny.
“I did have the right of it,” she said, “but it was evident all along, wasn’t it now?”
“Elementary.”
She sighed loudly.
“Not that it does us or them any good.”
“Except that the truth can be told at last.”
“Sure, didn’t your man tell it in his articles long ago?”
“It’s all forgotten. The record should be made clear and explicit.”
“Won’t our Ethne do it in her Ph.D.?”
Ah, that was the way the wind was blowing, was it now? Incidentally, like everyone on the island she called the precious doctorate the P Haitch D, the Irish language lacking a soft h sound.
“There’s something I’m missing, Dermot Michael,” she confessed, “as plain as the nose on me face.”
“Pretty nose.”
She snorted.
“I can’t figure out whether it has to do with the past mystery or the present.”
“Maybe both?”
She glanced up at me, as if I had said something very intelligent.
“Maybe you have the right of it, Dermot Michael.”
“I’ll call the priest.”
“Tell him that the final installment is under a stack of old church records in a closet in his office and that I’m dying to know how it ends.”
“You don’t know, Nuala?”
“I don’t have a friggin’ clue.”
The next morning about eleven o’clock Eugene Keenan appeared at our door. There were four Garda cars in front of our house, our own constant protection and three accompanying the Deputy Commissioner.
“Look at all the Garda cars,” my wife protested. “What will the neighbors think?”
“That they’ll be happy when these crazy Yanks go home!” I said, not doubting the truth of that.
“Jesus and Mary be with this house,” Gene said as I opened the door.
Nuala replied in Irish that Jesus and Mary and Patrick should be with all who came to the house.
“Woman,” the Deputy Commissioner said wearily, “where’s me tea?”
Gene Keenan, a tall, handsome man with twinkling blue eyes, gray-tinged brown hair, and an easy smile, brought out the worst in my wife, just as Jake Lane did. He was a perfect target for her love of banter, something which I was usually spared because I was her “dear sweet husband.”
“Well, if them as says they’re coming for midmorning
tea and expecting warm scones were on time, wouldn’t the tea and the scones be ready!”
He glanced at his watch, “eleven o’clock?”
“’Tis late morning as anyone knows. Midmorning ends at ten-thirty.”
“But I smell the fresh scones in the air?”
“Well, if you’d sit down for a moment and stop your complaining, won’t we get them for you?”
Nuala departed for the kitchen, and Fiona joined us in the parlor en famile. She must have smelled cop because she gave Gene the greeting she reserved for former colleagues.
“Well, isn’t it herself and with small ones? Fiona, girl, it’s been a long time.”
She curled up at his feet, and the pups instantly began feeding.
“She wasn’t out in Maamtrasna yesterday, was she?”
“We had Nuala. That was enough.”
“And Detective Sergeant Sayers.”
“You promoted the woman, did you? Well, ’tis high time, I’d say, and herself a brilliant Garda.”
Nuala sailed into the room with Ethne in tow and platters of tea, jam, butter, clotted cream, and scones, dense with raisins. It looked like a good morning for Dermot Michael.
“I’ve been out there for two and a half hours,” Gene Keenan began after Nuala had introduced Ethne, poured the tea, and distributed the scones, an extra one to me. “You can’t imagine the dustup this has created. The media are all over the place. Tony Blair and our Taoiseach are screaming. Everyone who might have done it is denying responsibility, and the explosions have destroyed all the obvious evidence. We’ll dig out something eventually, but it will take time. Fortunately no one has told them how the warning about the bomb was delivered. The next thing would be the fairie and the leprechauns.”
“The telly is saying that the Gardai think the lads are involved, maybe one of the dissident groups,” Nuala observed. Discretely she put another scone on me plate. My plate.
“It seems to have been the kind of car bombs they might use. These days, however, everyone seems to know how to make a car bomb. I don’t think it’s the lads, but none of us can figure out why someone would blow up MacManus’s house, take some shots at you, and then try to kill the whole Howard family.”
“Did they want to kill them?” Nuala asked innocently.
“You were out there, Nuala, how could you have any doubts?”
“Whoever planted the bomb didn’t know that we’d park behind the Rolls, that the plumber’s van would park behind us, and that the Garda would appear with a fourth car. He wasn’t counting on four explosions. Nor did he expect that your man would chase poor little Ona out to move the car. He might just as well have figured on exploding the bomb by remote control at some time when no one would get hurt. The car was far enough away from the house that if it were the cause of the only explosion, no one would have been hurt.”
The Deputy Commissioner rubbed his unshaven chin. “That’s an interesting possibility, Nuala. We’ve never thought of it. Yet it might have gone off if young Ona opened the door or turned the key.”
“Suppose you knew the exact plans of the family for the day and thought that the car would not be touched. You could blow it up at night and scare everyone all the way back to Westminster and not hurt anyone.”
“That would point towards that sleepy young Englishman who’s Matt Howard’s secretary.”
“It might.”
“He took charge afterwards, I’m told, perhaps to make sure that no one died.”
“Or it could have been O’Regan the builder or anyone in the family or one of the servants,” I suggested. “Or someone on the outside who had an informant inside.”
“We noted,” the Commissioner continued, “that the bomb was probably triggered by remote control just before our cars arrived. Someone heard them coming and pushed the button so they wouldn’t be able to defuse and examine the bomb.”
“Or someone saw them on the road,” Nuala observed. “It might have been one of us or it might have been someone up at the top of the mountain where the John Joyce family lived.”
“You don’t think there’s a connection between the killings in 1882 and the present mess, do you?”
“The explosion took place right on top of the old cemetery where the Joyces were buried and many other people from the valley too.”
Gene Keenan’s frown darkened. Nuala gave him another scone, richly buttered and jellied.
“Are you telling me that the dead might have triggered the explosion?”
“Or someone who thinks that the Brits have been around the valley too long. Or someone who resents that your man’s wife has Joyce and Casey in her background and that her branches of the family were on the wrong side.”
“My headache is getting worse.” The Commissioner sighed. However, he did finish his scone. Our supply was running out.
“What’s under the ground on that hill, Commissioner Keenan?”
“Nothing, Nuala Anne, except the bones of the long dead.”
“No, I mean what kind of precious metal.”
“We’ve covered that base. There’s nothing there.”
“Could someone in the government know what’s there without your knowing?”
He pondered thoughtfully.
“Maybe, maybe. The bureaucrats are great for keeping secrets from one another.”
“Could you find out?”
He nodded slowly. “I think so.”
Nuala made a couple of more suggestions about questions for which they might seek answers. Gene Keenan removed a used index card from his inside jacket pocket and jotted notes on it.
“I’m not sure where this is going,” he said with yet another huge sigh, “but it will give our people something to do.”
“Mind you,” Nuala admonished him, “they should be very careful about how they ask the questions. We wouldn’t want anyone to know what we’re up to, would we now?”
“No, Nuala Anne, we certainly would not.”
Nuala presented our offspring, who had been shyly peeking around the door. Nelliecoyne informed the Deputy Commissioner that she had seen him on the telly. He left, shaking his head, as if he had returned to the twentieth century from, let’s say, the fifteenth.
The phone rang.
“Jack Lane here, Dermot … . You guys OK?”
“Never better.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Me wife will figure that out.”
“Just like she figured out where the last segment of the memoir is. I’ll drop it off this afternoon. I haven’t read it. I figured she should read it first.”
In the afternoon, Gene Keenan called.
“Dermot, you can tell that lovely witch she’s right. There is a strain of gold in that hill. Not a lot. Not enough for a gold rush, not enough to affect inflation in this country,
but enough to bring someone several million pounds. It’s been kept a secret because the office in charge doesn’t want another Cro Patrick scare.”
“I’ll tell her.”
Which I did.
She nodded in satisfaction.
“Think of it, Dermot, the Joyces and all those other poor souls up there have been sleeping on a bed of gold.”
Almost immediately after the phone call, Jack Lane arrived with a thin stack of foolscap.
“I want it tomorrow morning,” he said.
“You must come in for tea, An t‘Athair O’Laighne.”
“And keep you from reading how the story ends? I may not have much sense, but I have more sense than that.”
After we had read the story, it was time and long past time to go to bed. Nuala has a ritual every night in which she briskly brushes her long, shiny black hair. Perhaps I should say furiously. Her attire for the ritual varies from hardly anything to a tightly knotted terry cloth robe. I have assumed that this is a signal as to how she views the possibility of lovemaking. That night the robe had three knots instead of two.
However, after our brush with death, I wanted her desperately. Almost uncontrollably. I loved her so much. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I took the brush out of her hands, lifted her off the vanity stool, and imperiously pried open the belt of her robe.
“Dermot!” she cried and stiffened in protest.
I discarded the robe and captured both her breasts.
She collapsed against my chest and giggled.
As I wrestled her onto the bed, she sighed. “Wasn’t I after wondering when you’d be getting around to it?”
So much for my ability to read the signs.