CHAPTER TEN
Cíara’s apartment, like her own, sat above businesses, and it took a private key to enter the stairway. Megan made a show of searching her pockets every time someone came near, until the door suddenly opened from inside and she gasped a thanks at her oblivious benefactor. The stairs went up five flights in all, and Cíara’s apartment—of course—was on the fourth floor. Or the fifth, if Megan was to count it the way the Irish did, with the ground floor being zero rather than synonymous with first. The floor above it, what Americans would call the second floor, was the first, in Ireland. Almost three years living there and she still went to the wrong floor all the time if directed by a local.
No one answered when Megan knocked, which she did loudly enough to wake the dead or—more likely—hung over; in fact, she did wake the next-door neighbour, who opened the door with a glower that said Megan had awakened him, at least.
Megan, summarily ignoring the scowl, said, “Hi!” brightly. “Do you know if Cíara’s home?”
“She’s not answering the feckin door, so what do you think? I haven’t seen her since Thursday.”
“Do you usually?”
The youth—Megan couldn’t tell from the shaggy hair, skinny frame, and loose clothes whether they subscribed to a gender binary or not—shrugged sourly. “Yeh, we get home about the same time most nights. She was a feckin wreck Thursday, all after crying over somebody dying, and that’s the last I saw her.”
“Did she have a boyfriend or somebody she’d go stay with? Family?”
“Nah, only yer wan she’d been hanging out with. Who the feck are you, anyway?” Suspicion finally worked its way through the haze and irritation of an abrupt awakening, their scowl sharpening into something more personal.
“A friend of her employer’s,” Megan said truthfully. “We were worried about her. What one she’d been hanging out with?” A “wan” in Irish parlance generally meant a woman; “yer man” and “yer wan” had, Megan suspected, some kind of basis in the same kind of institutional sexism in the Irish language that begot the question “Was it a boy or a child?” when babies were born. She hadn’t quite worked up the resolution to try getting to the bottom of the linguistic matter, although it nagged at her whenever she heard it.
“I dunno, a tall wan with gobs of dark hair and a proper tan. Fit, if you like that type, and American. But not like you.”
Megan said, “Okay, thanks. Look, if you see Cíara, can you tell her Fionn’s worried about her?”
The neighbour shrugged and retreated into their apartment. Megan stared at the closed door a moment, then shrugged, too, and trotted back downstairs. Sleuthing had to be easier when you could wave a police badge at someone and demand answers, instead of slinking around, waking up the neighbours without ever finding out if your suspect was even home. Though it sounded like Liz had been to Cíara’s apartment, which could support the affair theory. Or at least a friendship, which seemed more likely, if Simon and Ellen’s beliefs about Liz’s preferences were right.
She pulled out her phone on the walk home, searching for personal information about Liz Darr as she took the long way to her apartment so she wouldn’t pass in front of the garage and catch Orla’s attention. Odds were that her boss wouldn’t try to get her to drive—Orla hated paying overtime more than most people hated liver and onions—but even entering the woman’s line of sight would remind her that Megan had a prohibited dog in her apartment, and an extra ten minutes of walking seemed worth avoiding that potential confrontation.
There were loads of articles about Liz, everything from her own blogs to interviews with the Times, book reviews and fan encounters, pictures dating back to high school, but nothing to indicate whether she’d ever dated women or had wanted to. Which meant absolutely nothing, of course, but from Meg’s perspective, Liz’s mother might not have known everything, and it would have been helpful to find Liz had had a tragic love affair with a college girlfriend to establish the possibility that she and Cíara O’Donnell had been dating. Evidence was leaning heavily toward not, though, and she had to remind herself that she’d gotten the idea that there was an affair going on from Niamh, who thrived on the most dramatic possible interpretation of any circumstance.
She tucked the phone back into her pocket as she went up to the apartment and said, “What good is the power of the internet if it can’t deliver relevant gossip to my fingertips when I want it?” to Mama Dog as she came in.
Mama had no answer and couldn’t be bothered to rise up and go for a walk when Megan shook the leash at her, but the puppies wriggled and squirmed blindly as she petted them with a fingertip and tickled their tummies. Then, exhausted from their efforts, they fell asleep again. Megan took Mama on a walk whether she liked it or not and returned home to watch Mama poke her puppies until they woke up and started to nurse. Then she gave a great, heaving sigh like she now carried the unwanted weight of the universe on her little bony shoulders and looked tragically at Megan, who laughed and fell backward onto the couch to study the ceiling as if it might contain some answers.
“Okay. How hard can it be to find Cíara, right? Just to talk to her, you know? That’s what the internet is for.” After another few seconds, she said, “I’m talking to dogs. Wow. Okay, then. Up and at ‘em, Meg. There must be more to your life than this.” She squirmed her phone out of her pocket and did a search on the girl’s name, which led her to plenty of women, none of whom—according to their photographs—were the one she wanted. A few attempts at narrowing the search—even using Cíara’s apartment address—achieved nearly identical hits and engendered a faint sense of exasperation. On one hand, it was probably good she couldn’t find someone armed with only their name and a vague guess at their age. On the other, it was a real bother when she wanted to be able to do that.
And on the third hand, Megan was old enough to remember the world before the internet, and how what she’d just tried would have been absolutely impossible then anyway. “How quickly we adapt,” she told the puppies, who had eaten greedily and fallen asleep without warning. They weren’t really so much trouble, Megan thought. Mama Dog lifted one ear, then let it flop back down without further commentary, while Megan tried to remember if she’d eaten yet today. Her phone, still in her hand, binged to announce a text message from a neighbourhood friend. It said, in its entirety, hungry?
Megan laughed, texting back you must have read my mind. Starving! and twenty minutes later, an American bearing a bag of food and a tray of coffees appeared at her door. Megan stood on her toes to kiss his scruffy cheek. “You’re a man among men.”
“It’s true, I am,” he said cheerfully. About her age, bespectacled and afflicted with the notion to wear tweed, Brian Showers had been in Ireland for pushing twenty years and ran a small-press publishing house out of his spare room, because that was a thing people did. Megan was convinced that he had been invented for the purposes of making Ireland just that little bit more surreal and delightful than it could naturally lay claim to. His extravagant, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” rolled out with the soft, Transatlantic accent that called his country of origin into question.
“I will never look on food delivery with despair.” Megan took the stack of bags and coffees from him and put them on the table on her way to get a couple of plates. Brian went directly for the puppies, whose milk-sotted sleep went undisturbed even while he gave them gentle ear rubs. Mama opened one eye and moved her head just far enough to suggest he pay attention to someone who would appreciate it, and he transferred the ear scruffles to her. “I see,” said Meg. “You’re really just here to visit the dogs.”
“Fionnuala told me about them, and yes, you’ve scored a very palpable hit, but that’s why I brought lunch, to make up for the fact that I’d be neglecting conversing with you in favor of cooing over these wee darlings.”
“Mmm. I’ve been up since six and can’t remember eating, so all is forgiven.” Megan plunked down at her kitchen table and dug through the bag to find not only sandwiches but still-warm pains au chocolat, which were almost universally called chocolate croissants in Ireland. “Breakfast first,” she said to the flaky pastries, and sank her teeth into one while turning a remarkably good cup of coffee from one of the local roasters around until she could drink from the little sip hole. “I thought Two Fifty Square didn’t open until noon on weekends. Or is it noon already?” She looked for a clock and found it to be a quarter till.
“No, they open early, at nine. And even if they didn’t, neither can they resist my ineffable American charm or my sorrowful hungry gaze when I arrive early at their back door,” which, Megan knew, lay less than a dozen steps from Brian’s own front door. “Also, I told them I’d be back with all the Liz Darr gossip after they closed tonight.”
“Oh, you really are using me.” Megan caught him up on what she knew anyway and he abandoned the puppies to eat—sandwiches; he, apparently, had already had breakfast—and listen with interest. She pulled up Liz’s website to show him the second video that had been posted, and he took her phone with long fingers to hold the speaker next to his ear.
“What’s the music?”
“I think it’s ‘Molly Malone.’ It was on the last video, too, but not quite as loud. But she was talking a lot more in the other one. Simon says—” She made a face. “I don’t know how anybody could name their kid Simon, knowing they’d face a lifetime of that. Anyway, he said it was her favourite song. Her mother hates it, though. Or hates that these are posting.” Megan sighed. “She says it’s like being haunted, which I guess it is.”
“You know that traditionally, the dead only haunt the living if they need vengeance.”
Megan stared at Brian, who blinked mildly back at her. He looked ordinary enough, all high forehead and diffident smiles shining through a beard that came and went with the seasons. “You know, normal people don’t have case files on when and why ghosts haunt people.”
“Normal people don’t run small presses dedicated to the gothic and supernatural either. Ergo, I’m not normal. Did Ms. Darr leave behind reasons to haunt someone?”
“Brian, you—” Megan broke off, uncertain if what she’d been about to say was true, then charged onward anyway. “You can’t really believe she’s haunting her . . . her own blog site? Her husband? Ghosts aren’t real.”
“Aren’t they?” Pleasure, but not necessarily teasing, sparkled behind Brian’s round glasses. “I don’t know, Meg. I’ve spent a lot of time with stories of ghosts and the fantastic. Now, most of them are fiction, I grant you, but even fiction is inspired by something, isn’t it? Did Ms. Darr have a reason to haunt us?”
“Well, she may have been murdered, so I guess so, but—but you can’t be serious, Brian.” A chill, ridiculously, ran across Megan’s nape and lifted all the hair on her arms, proving that she thought the idea had some slight degree of merit, no matter how preposterous it was. “What kind of ghosts would haunt blogs anyway?”
“Twenty-first-century ghosts obviously.” Brian laughed as Megan rolled her eyes and finished, “All right, fine, there’s probably a more mundane explanation, but it can’t be coincidence that she’s playing a song about a ghost after her own death. I think probably—”
Megan’s phone rang, Fionnuala’s number coming up. Megan held up a finger, pausing Brian’s speculation. “Lemme get this.”
“Megan?” Fionn’s voice, high and thready with panic, made Megan pull the phone a few inches away from her ear. “Megan, you’ve got to get to the restaurant right away. Martin is dead.”