Chapter Eleven

Where is everyone?” I leaned the bike and came in through the parlor door, blinking in the sudden dark.

“Here’s Claire!” they called from inside. They’d been waiting for me.

“What’s he done now?” I called, frightened.

“Who?” Aunt Bridey said.

I remembered Molly’s warning. “Johnny,” I said, to throw them off.

“Och, he’s helping Jenny Rose.”

So he’d come back here. “Where is she?” I asked.

“She’s milking the goats,” Ned said. “Seamus forgot and took off. She’ll be right in.”

Jenny Rose did all the grunt work, I remarked to myself. But you couldn’t say anything. I cringed to think what they would say about Johnny.

“The solicitor’s on his way,” Bernadette informed me grandly.

“Johnny’s helping milk the goats?”

“Oh, yes.” Dierdre curled her hair around one finger. “He won’t just watch,” she said knowingly.

I stiffened. Mr. Come-in-the-door-and-drop-down-on-the-couch-’til-he-left-the-next-day was now off to milk the goats, was he?

“He’s made Seamus a deputy,” Dierdre said.

“Who did?”

“Why, your Johnny. He gave Seamus that detective’s card and all,” Uncle Ned said as he squared off all the bills and envelopes before him on the table. “The kind NYPD detectives’ family members keep in their wallets. So when they take their driver’s licenses out when they get pulled over for speeding, the cop will say, Oh, all right, off with ye.”

Bridey said, “Last night he gave that to him.”

So that was the tip, I thought, relieved.

“Come on, Ned.” Bridey nudged him. “Get those bills away so I can polish. Mr. Truelove will be here any minute.”

“Seamus isn’t here now, though, is he?” I said just to make sure. The image of the broken cat wasn’t something I could easily let go of. I tell you the truth, now that I was safe in Bally Cashin, the whole thing made me feel heavy and sad. I’d just begun to get used to Seamus. To think of him as a lovable old Saint Bernard who’s always in the way.

“Sure, he has a lot to do as a deputy,” Dierdre said. She loved Seamus, you could tell.

“His first job was take Johnny’s luggage from Dayday’s to Auntie Molly’s Bed and Breakfast,” she added.

“That figures.” I laughed, sitting down in the comfortable chair.

“We didn’t want Seamus about when Mr. Truelove tells us what’s in Peggy’s will.” Dierdre smiled, relaxed. She’d shampooed her hair and set it and there were rims of pressure where the rods had held the soft hair down. She was waiting to comb it out later, it seemed. Peggy now, is it? I thought. Things must be looking up.

“Well, you know Seamus,” Liam confided, looking furtively about. “He repeats everything.”

Not everything, I thought sadly, pulling myself back from Liam’s breath. As usual, he’d started early. I took my boots off under the table and sat on my feet. I hoped they weren’t going to start criticizing Johnny right away. I knew what was coming. They weren’t the type to keep quiet about show-offs and blowhards. I reminded myself to keep in mind he was, after all, the father of my children. I mustn’t end up agreeing with them. And I certainly wasn’t up to defending him. I braced myself for the attack to come. Unconsciously, I touched my wedding ring.

Uncle Ned turned his gaze to my hand. “Johnny sure comes galloping onto the scene,” he said.

“Now that,” Dierdre floored me by saying, “is a man!”

“I’m sorry?”

“One magnificent specimen,” Bridey added, approvingly, drizzling the oil on the cloth. Then she squeezed half a lemon into it.

“Aye,” Uncle Ned agreed. “He fits right in, your Johnny does.”

Aunt Bridey rubbed the top of the table roughly with the linseed oil and lemon juice. “What you’d call a real man,” she said. “Knows what he wants. Did you see him enjoy my cake? With relish, he ate my cake.” She shook her head. She pulled up her sleeves. “I swear Seamus is getting more and more good for nothing. I don’t want you giving him another pound until he gets to his chores.” She looked up at me. “Did you not see him?”

“I must have just missed him,” I said, not lying, really.

Liam yanked the polishing rag from her hand and did it on his own. “He also got a detective’s benevolent association card and kept it in his cap, in the outside band, and he looked like a reporter for the Sun,” he said. “All he needed was a clipboard, he could get in anywhere.”

It was such a shame. You could tell they all loved Seamus. I almost loved him myself.

Someone clopped on the door.

“I didn’t hear a car,” I said.

“It must be Mr. Truelove.” Bernadette jumped. “He parks up on the road.”

“Once he had to stay the night,” Liam whispered. “The bridge washes out all the time.”

I said nothing.

“That was a bad night for us all.” Bernadette looked at Liam.

“He wouldn’t want to go through that night again.” Liam looked at her.

“He can’t digest his mushrooms, poor man,” Bridey said to me.

“Poor us.” Bernadette lifted her shoulders.

“Aye. That night was a penance for us all.” Bridey scurried across to ditch her rag and the oil in the cupboard bottom.

Liam got up and strode across the floor. He rubbed both hands together and gave me a meaningful eye. He was expecting something good. He opened the door. Indeed, it was the talkative little Mr. Truelove.

His hat was in his hand. “God bless the house,” he mumbled, coming in, a briefcase crammed with papers at his side. He brushed disgustedly at his shoulder. “The bloody larks!” he complained.

“And for the rich they sing,” Liam remarked.

“Give him something,” Bridey instructed Bernadette. She tiptoed across the kitchen and came back with a Turkish towel. Bridey brushed his shoulder with it. “Brings luck,” she said, but she didn’t say it too loud. “Everyone knows Mr. Truelove only wears the one jacket,” she said to the side. It wasn’t that he couldn’t spare the money, it’s just people are the way they are.

We all stood about until he settled himself at the table.

Jenny Rose stepped in lightly and Johnny stepped in behind her. For all his girth, he’s light on his feet. I can’t deny his face lit up when he saw me. Of course he didn’t really know anyone else. Everyone sat down where they could and Liam and Johnny lifted in the bench from outside. Liam pulled a bottle of duty-free bourbon from his pocket and took another swish. Oh, here we go, thought everyone.

Mr. Truelove’s sensitive eyes began to water from the linseed oil fumes. He ruffled through his papers, stopped, took out his handkerchief and held it to his nose. “Madame,” he appealed to Aunt Bridey. “Would it be too much the bother if I were to sit elsewhere?”

Mortified, Aunt Bridey instructed Ned to go and bring in the embroidery stool. “It’s heavy,” she warned, “and mind you don’t scratch my floor.” The Cashin women all seemed to share that trait, owning the floors. Johnny went with Uncle Ned and the two of them, squatting with their heels together, carried it back in. “Zen,” Johnny said, nodding his head sagely when they put it down a little bit off-center. Everything good and off-center for Johnny is Zen. It makes the back of my neck prickle. Mr. Truelove settled his bottom upon it.

One paper on top, he cleared his throat, then mired through the legal terms.

Dierdre shook her head around and around, then came to rest it looking out the window, right at the spot where their poor house had been. She moaned at regular, appropriate intervals.

It irked me, the way Johnny sat there as if this were his family, too. But, you see, to him it was. He’d planted himself. Then Mr. Truelove said, in a ceremonial voice, “I would like to read a letter from Peg and would everyone mind coming together, this way we could put her spirit to rest.”

“What’s this? What’s he trying to do?” Liam objected. “Make it into a religious ceremony?”

“I come to know Margaret, er, Peg, rather well over the years.” Mr. Truelove smiled to reveal unfortunate teeth. “She and I had more than one thing in common.”

Here Dierdre moved around uncomfortably.

“She wasn’t overly fond of the bank’s investment policies and neither was I.” He blew his nose. The dandruff fell like snow from his lightbulb-shaped dome to his shoulders.

Every one of us leaned from the edge of his or her seat.

Then Dierdre started to cry softly. Mr. Truelove, moved, spoke directly to her.

“As for the matter of a wake, she didn’t want any sort of ceremony whatsoever.” He looked over the tops of his glasses and whispered, “She didn’t want to give the locals a chance to scoff after her, she always said. You understand. Just a quick incineration.”

“What?” Bridey cried, her coronet askew. “Cremated? Peg?”

“Yes.”

“Can she do that?” Uncle Ned asked.

“She can do anything she wants now she’s dead.” Liam hiccupped.

“No, I mean is it Christian?”

“It’s allowed, certainly,” Mr. Truelove stated.

“Allowed with the Protestants, you mean,” Bridey said.

I turned around to see how Jenny Rose was taking this, but her head was bent. She was sketching Mr. Truelove in pencil on a new shirt cardboard.

“The saints were burned,” Bernadette pointed out. “Burned at the stake.”

Dierdre put her little sherry glass down with a refreshing bang. “How could she do this?”

Liam leaned across the bench we sat on and took my hand in his. “Isn’t it awful? No pretty grave to tend. No soft blowing petals in the breeze.”

“Shut up!” Bernadette said. “You’re drunk.”

Dierdre cinched her hefty waistline with her hands. It was a strain for her to wear black, you could feel it. She had at least a lavender buckle on the belt and she touched it again and again, as if remembering who she was. “When will I get the money, though?” she asked politely. “Will I have to pay for that beforehand? Now I’ve lost the house…”

“Well, it must cost that much less,” Uncle Ned reckoned, “what with the police handling the, uh, ‘incidentals.’” He said this as delicately as he could. “There can hardly be a mortician if she’s not to go belowground, there’s that much less to do.”

No one had a word to say. He continued, itemizing upon his fingertips. “There won’t be the gravediggers, that will save you a bundle right there. You’ll have no need for flowers, incense. I wonder if we really even need the priest…”

Johnny sat on the bench with his hands folded in front of him as if he were back in Brooklyn in grammar school. I really hated him. Zen was my word. My thing. Or nonthing. Fickle Brownie lay contentedly at his little feet, I noticed with a stab of annoyance.

The telephone rang out.

“Leave it ring.” Liam dismissed it with a magnanimous sweep.

Ned got up and went inside to quiet it. We sat silently, craning our ears, until he came back in. He looked pleased.

“Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy,” he said importantly and sat down.

“Well, what does she want?” Bridey said.

“Plans for the fishing.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, yes,” he remembered. “And someone should go over to take back Jenny Rose’s canvases. They shan’t be able to tend to them now, she says. Willy will be back to London tomorrow.”

“Will he now?” Aunt Bridey said.

“She says the conditions in the rooms there in the big house are too damp,” he added apologetically to Jenny Rose. “No good for the well-being of any canvas.”

“Why wait ’til tomorrow, then?” Jenny Rose stood. “Let him leave now, before I get my murdering hands upon him.” She paced the room furiously. She picked up the sketch she’d been working on and ripped it in two. “Tell him to throw them away. Throw them out the window! I won’t have them anymore!”

Mr. Truelove beheld his image torn in half. “When Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy will have her way,” he said philosophically and to no one in particular, “Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy will have her way.”

“She thinks she can cook this up on top a all this, does she?” Aunt Bridey was beginning to look like my mother just before she’d stood up in church that time Father Sweezy’d announced from the pulpit we should all go down and sign a petition for some politician. “Uh-oh,” my dad had said out loud, but it was too late. My mother had already stood up in the church, packed as Palm Sunday, and she waved her big fist in the air and shouted at him up in the pulpit, “How dare you! How dare you?” Right in front of everyone. I’ll never forget it. None of us will.

It had been a terrible moment for our family. We girls were still very young and you know how young girls are, they don’t like their mothers calling attention to themselves, let alone causing an uproar and uproar she did cause. They wouldn’t let her back in the Rosary Sodality for years. I think they still don’t want her in the Propagation of the Faith to this day. Now that I am older and aloof, I agree that the state and the church should be separate and I think it was rather splendid what my mother did. So I sat there in Aunt Bridey’s kitchen and vowed to mention that to her when I got back home. Because I don’t think I ever had.

Anyway, Aunt Bridey was getting that Cashin girl glow around the bicep. “You’ll keep your personal asides to yourself, Mr. Truelove,” she rose up to her full height and announced. She trembled as she spoke. “You’ll be here for one reason and for one reason only!”

Ned, his elbows out, sucked his empty pipe at Bernadette, his eyes twinkling. That’s your mother, he seemed to be thinking, that’s the stuff that drew me to her!

“Mother Bridey might be queen of Bally Cashin,” Liam cut in, “but all the tributes still go to Audrey Whitetree-Murphy herself.”

Right away, Aunt Bridey seemed to quell. The wind just went from her sails and her head went down. I knew what she must be thinking. For her own son to say that!

Up until that moment, you wouldn’t get away with a word against Liam, no matter how much trouble he’d made. Not with me around. But I don’t go for grinding your heel into someone’s ear when her head’s already on the ground. And it’s not drink that does that, that makes a person mean. I’ve known plenty of drunks. It just seems that some of them have to drink because that bitter place at the bottom of their heart is so painful that it’s pushed so far away, it takes a raging numbness to allow it out. That’s what happened to Liam. There was a hate at the bottom of his well and he couldn’t get to it without numbing the well walls first. It was just a horrible thing to be near.

“It’s a shame, too,” Dierdre said, unsure, but you could tell Dierdre didn’t have the gumption anymore either to stand up to the name Audrey Whitetree-Murphy. Not even for her sister.

Uncle Ned, no stranger to trouble, said, “Why not let’s get this will business over with.”

“But Mr. Truelove goes on and on,” Liam protested thickly.

“Like the long-winded Brannagan,” Uncle Ned remembered. “Do you remember Brannagan? The fastidious railroad time-checker from Clonmel? ’Twas just after his promotion. He was determined to make a fine job of it. After weeks of pages detailing the comings and goings of each train, well, the depot foreman threw up his hands and he said, ‘Enough of this, Brannagan. It’s too much!’ So right away Brannagan changed his reports. Now they read: ‘On again. Off again. Gone again. Brannagan.’”

Nobody laughed so he laughed himself.

Ignoring him, Liam scoffed, “Aunt Dierdre quakes at the presence of gentry. Like they all do.”

I thought of my father and how we act around him and I thought, it’s true. It was true what Liam said.

Liam leaned over toward Johnny. “Pompous pissheads!” He rattled a three-minute egg timer back and forth in his hand.

“That’s not true,” Dierdre said hotly. “I’ll say what I please. I’m not one to sugarcoat what I’ve got to say.”

“Oh, no, sure, you’re not.” Liam yawned. “Bull.”

Dierdre fluttered the purple beads around her neck. They snapped and careened across the floor.

“You watch your tongue, Liam,” Bridey warned, bending over to pick them up. Someone would break their neck.

“Come away with you, son.” Uncle Ned patted the bench gently. He’d been through so much with him. “Come take your seat and we’ll hear the rest from Mr. Truelove.”

But Liam went and stood before his mother on the floor, leaning over her and spraying. “If it wasn’t for Willy, I’d have blown up that Bishop’s seat long ago.”

Bridey pushed him away nervously. “Go on, now, you’ll have the American faction thinkin’ it was you blew up the slate house.”

I think I must have raised my eyebrows.

He saw the disapproval on my expression. “And you!” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I didn’t think you’d be fickin’ around with the locals. I never took ya fer that!”

You could have heard a pin drop.

Johnny wiped the corners of his mouth with his forefinger and his thumb. He’d never hit a drunk, at least not when he was sober, but I think at that moment he was about to.

Jenny Rose sprang to her feet. “And maybe she didn’t expect to find a blathering, piss-sodden failure for a cousin, either! There’s a disappointment!”

Liam put the egg timer on the table with deliberate care, then turned around, swaying dangerously. “You’ll not talk to me like that. Not you!”

She put her small triangular face squarely into his. “What do you mean, ‘not you’? Me? What do you mean? Go ahead, say it! Say what you’ve never said and you’ve felt all along! Tell us how you’ve resented me my lifelong. Tell us all! Tell what a great writer you were and how nobody valued you. Nobody gave you your chance! Make sure everyone hears what you’ve always just insinuated, that the slate house would have been yours until I came along. How all of it would have been yours and Bernadette’s. How Dierdre and Peg used to say you were their clever boy until I came along. Tell all of us your childhood dream, now, Liam. We’re all listening. You’re drunk enough to say it. You can always brush it away in the morning, by saying you were pissed. The way you bully your mother. So tell how you used to plan when they all would die, you’d turn Bally Cashin into a hotel. ‘The Poets’ you wanted to change the name to, isn’t that right? How you’d hire Willy Murphy as a great chef because he’d be too shy to go out into the world and make his own living.” She turned and swept one arm out in a lofty gesture. “Tell the world how Jenny Rose, daughter of nobody knows, kept you from your secret dream just by being here. Just by existing. Don’t turn away! You’ll look at me now and you’ll hear what I say before everyone. You bullied me and everyone else with the threat of your belligerence. Tip-toeing around so we wouldn’t set you off. You made me feel worthless and cheap my whole lifelong. Even when you praised me you did it in that demeaning way you have of doing things, educated and smug so I’d feel at all times the fool. Well, I won’t anymore. You’ll not make me feel worthless one day more.” She followed his wobbling head with her brow. It was just between them. “Because I’m worth twenty a you. And we both know it, don’t we?”

He lurched toward her.

She turned and faced him, her savage little face glaring at him. She wouldn’t give way. “Ah, go on back and piss yer bed.”

Liam knocked over the egg timer then crushed it as he fell to his knees. He stayed that way for a moment, his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed in a heap. A stream of bright blood ran from his knee along the clean floor.

Jenny Rose, seeing what she’d done, looked around her. Everyone stood. Her passion spent, she covered her mouth with her hand and ran from the room. There was something in the eyes, the way she’d held firm and then in the way the juice left her eyes, like a bird, half-formed, wriggling to be free, and she’d run. Something so dreaded and familiar to me. My thoughts flew back to Johnny. What had he been trying to tell me out there on the cliff? What had he said? He hadn’t come because of me? Why, then? I pondered. And then it came to me.

Suddenly, I knew. It all happened so fast. I watched her go. I tipped my head sideways and saw myself in the mirror, the trailing rest of innocence suffused with the moment of new knowledge. It was sort of funny. One minute you don’t know and the next you do.

There sat Johnny, in the muggy light from the window, saying nothing. His hazel eyes wore an expression of, what, not bewilderment, no, it was more like he was listening, replaying a scene in his mind. He was remembering something. It was this knowing on his face that I knew nothing about, that was the brunt of the shock. And yet my heart never skipped a beat. It was like one minute it wasn’t there and the next it was.

I pulled my shawl around myself and climbed from the chair, the room. I held the wall. “Jenny Rose!” I cried. “Jenny Rose!”

She was at the top of the stairs, sitting on the top step, threading her laces into brown boots.

“Who’s your father, Jenny Rose? Do you know?”

“You think I did it, don’t you?” she hollered, unhearing.

“No.” I covered my ears. “It’s not about that.”

“Yes, you do. Look at you. You doubt me. You think I could have killed her, admit it!”

“That’s not what I’m talking about!” I stomped my boot in a pitiful gesture. I stood there. Suddenly, I thought it shouldn’t be like this, with shouting and more misunderstanding. “Come here and let me explain,” I said, hoping if I acted calmly I would be calm.

“Well, say it, then.” She came at me down the stairs. “You never trusted me.” She pushed past me, knocking me down. “Believed in me! ‘Have faith,’ you said. Indeed! That was all malarkey. You think I killed her as well!”

Before I could answer, she’d run past me out the door. Jesus, I thought, taking hold of my shoulder where I’d hit the wall, maybe she did kill her! I dropped, stung, onto the stairs.

I stayed there a while, sitting on the steps, thinking about so many things. Years ago, when Johnny’d first come into my life. Part of his permanent charm for me had been the way he’d dismissed Carmela. What was it he’d said? “Too many years workin’ vice,” he’d shrugged to explain away his lack of interest. How those words had delighted me. Sure. He’d already had her. How could I not have guessed?

“Is she in here with you?” Bernadette poked an intent face in.

“No.” I shook my head.

“She always does this,” she said bitterly. “Runs off when we need her.” She watched me, intrigued by my apparent nonchalance. “Coming back in?”

“Not now. I have to think.”

“Come on. Have a drink.”

“No.”

“You’ll have to move,” she said, annoyed. “They want to carry Liam up.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to keep him down there?” I snapped.

“Well,” she said. “Yes.”

Bridey stood behind her. “She’s not there?”

“No. It’s just Claire.”

Johnny pushed his way through them. They went away. He sat below me on the steps.

“She’s yours,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.

I couldn’t believe it. I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it.

He took a deep breath. “When I told you I hadn’t come because of you, what I meant was, I came here, to Ireland, because of Jenny Rose. At least I was trying to tell you…” His voice trailed off.

I must have glowed with heat. “Does Anthony know? And Dharma?”

“No, not yet. But I’ll tell them. We’ll tell them.”

“We?” I sputtered. “There is no ‘we.’”

Bernadette came in to go up the stairs. We didn’t budge. She was about to say something but even she could feel the tension so she just climbed over us. Neither of us said anything. Finally, he said between his teeth, “First, I didn’t mean what you think I meant. It’s just you were so in a hurry to get away. I thought maybe you just wanted an excuse to get back to your Irish boyfriend.”

“Yeah, right,” I hissed.

He pitched his head back. “He’s got your picture in his hotel room.”

“You went to his hotel room!”

“I was looking for you.”

“And you thought you’d find me there? What would you have done if you had, shot the both of us! Is this what you want to talk about? My love life?” I made a snort of disgust and started to get up.

He grabbed me by my ankle.

“Did you sleep with him?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“You know, you’re right.” He let go of my ankle. “There is no us.”

Uncle Ned put his head in. “They canna find Jenny Rose!”

We stomped back into the kitchen. There was a piece of custard pie with cherries on it, black ones, sitting on the table on a flowery Oriental plate. Despite everything, my mouth began to water and I wondered who it was meant for.

They’d put Liam away inside, in the parlor, on the velvet couch. Not a brilliant move, I remember thinking. They should have left him on the floor. But it shows you what they were like. They provided him with his dignity even when he’d spent it.

“Well,” Mr. Truelove said peevishly to Bernadette when she came back in, “you must find her or we can’t go on.” He straightened the edges on his papers.

“Just go ahead without her then,” Bridey said. “As long as Dierdre’s here.”

“Go on, for God’s sake, Mr. Truelove,” Bernadette poked him and whispered, “get on with it!”

“I can’t do that,” he whispered back. “Sure, she’s left it all to Jenny Rose.”

There was a moment of shocked silence. Then, Dierdre stood meekly. “It’s just as well,” she said. “You know, I was always telling Peg I’d murder her.” She said it simply. “You should have heard me! I didn’t mean it, though. But it serves me right. I was afraid. I thought someone would say I’d killed her and I’d go to prison. I didn’t want to go to prison!”

“But why would anyone think you’d killed her?” Ned said. “You loved her.”

“Haloo!” Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy put her head in the door, knocking as if it were an afterthought.

“Speak of the devil,” Bernadette snorted. One thing about Bernadette: you could never say she was a phony.

Woodenly, Aunt Bridey rose and gestured her in.

Audrey Whitetree-Murphy gushed uncharacteristically. “Oh dear,” she said. “I seem to have a talent for choosing the wrong time.”

“Indeed,” Uncle Ned said contritely, “you’ll have to take us as you find us.”

“Just as I telephoned, who should pull up but my William. He’s off to London in the morning,” she fluttered. “He gave me a lift and I—”

“He’ll find Jenny Rose,” Dierdre said knowingly. “Willy’ll bring her back. He’ll know where she’s gone.”

I sat on the bench and Johnny sat beside me. All the men but Johnny stood. It was him Audrey Whitetree-Murphy chose to sit beside, in the space between the two of us.

Aunt Bridey jabbed Uncle Ned. He cleared his throat. “What I mean is, er, I’m sorry to say we can’t be offering you our hospitality just now.”

“Don’t give me a thought, then, Nathaniel. I’ll catch my breath and be on my way directly.”

Liam poked his burly head through the curtains. He grinned, all ginger and mischief. Aunt Bridey and Uncle Ned hurried him back into the parlor. You could hear them reasoning with him and he would hiccup in reply. Then came the sound of the shower rushing.

It was a little shocking to hear Uncle Ned addressed as Nathaniel. I hadn’t guessed that was his name. How lonely this silly woman must be, I remember thinking, what with all her Edwardian house and silent servant. She’s forever underfoot. But then a thought occurred to me. “And another thing.” I leaned toward Johnny. “Our marriage is invalid because you married me under false pretenses. I can get an annulment, you know.”

“Oh, that’s just like you. Give up. Run away. That’s what you’ve been silently threatening me with since the day I met you.”

“That’s a lie!” I said, but it wasn’t. I would always look away, out the window when things were tough. I’d dreamt of flight. “It appears I should have left.” I straightened my back, my teeth rigid.

“It was long before I ever met you.”

“If I’d left, you could have had what you really wanted.”

“I might have slept with your sister,” he answered me right back, “but I never knew there was a baby.”

“Oh, sure.”

The surprised face of Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy was not enough to deter us, we were both so hot we were beyond caring.

Johnny yanked on my skirt until the hem touched Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy’s leg. “When I met you, I was so crazy in love with you, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing you. I wouldn’t dare tell you I’d slept with her. You would have left me! You were always so ready to run. When your sister said to me, ‘Don’t ever tell,’ I thought fine, that’s fine with me. I told her, ‘Just don’t you ever tell.’”

The thought of the two of them keeping a secret from me all these years was enough to give me a stroke. I raised my voice, “You knew about her all these years and you never—”

“The first I ever heard of Jenny Rose was five hours before I got on the plane! Why do you think I came here?”

“Me, too,” I said, calming down. “My mother told me right before I left for the airport.”

“You ask your mother.” He trembled. “She’s the one who masterminded this whole can of worms.”

I sucked in my breath. “Very nice. Sleep with an underage girl, get her pregnant and then smugly blame her mother. Adorable.” But in my heart I thought, How could she! How could my mother?

“I beg your pardon.” Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy smoothed her skirt. “I seem to have interrupted a family project.”

Johnny gave her just a moment’s thought. “You should have thought about that before you came barging in here,” he said to her and turned right back to me. “I met your sister up at Regents Row. She didn’t look underage, let me tell you. I might have been drunk but I wasn’t that drunk. She told me she was a flight attendant, for Christ’s sake. How the hell did I know? It was a one-shot deal. She got up and left me sleeping in my car.”

“In your car!”

“Yeah. In the parking lot at the bandshell. I didn’t even know where she lived, awright? And neither of us ever wanted to see each other again. When I met you all those years later, I took one look at her and I knew I knew her from somewhere but I wasn’t even sure where! I only remembered because she was such a bitch. I remembered that. You know what she told me? The night it happened? She told me I’d ‘do.’ Do! ‘You’ll do,’ she says to me. She was using me, Claire, nothin’ else. I’m telling you the truth. If I’d known she was pregnant, I would have at least paid for the kid. You know that. You know I’d never desert my own blood.”

It was such a raw moment that I didn’t realize everyone was watching, but I must have, peripherally, because to this day I’m aware of how they were on the sides, their eyes round. I tried not to look at Johnny but you couldn’t help it. He was so rattled, the spit was coming from his mouth like a restrained rhinoceros. It was true what he said. You can’t always tell when someone’s lying but it’s a funny thing about the truth, it very often rings true.

His own blood. Jenny Rose. Our Anthony had a sister. Dharma too, for that matter.

Dierdre stood off to the side with her hands over her mouth.

“Well, we’ve got to find the girl.” Aunt Bridey came to herself first. “Who knows what she’ll do.”

“Could she hurt herself?” Johnny stood.

“Sure,” Dierdre said, still pale from the shock. “She’s that high-strung. Once she threw her paintings off the cliff.”

“When?” I asked. “When did she do that?”

“’Twas before you came.”

“What’s the difference?” Bernadette cried.

“Before Peg died?” I pursued.

“I don’t know.” Dierdre wrung her hands. “I get so confused.”

“’Twas just before, I’d say.” Bridey put a finger to her lips. “I remember thinking, every time Jenny Rose gets het up, there’s the devil to pay…”

Audrey Whitetree-Murphy cleared her throat. “You needn’t worry if that’s all it is. Though I don’t wonder you’re fearful someone would see them. Vulgar, disgraceful, ghastly business! I found them and destroyed them. Well, we did, Molly and I. They washed ashore, down by Mrs. Wooly’s cottage.”

“What’s she mean?” Dierdre asked Bridey.

Bridey went beside her sister and put a gentle arm around her. “She found the dirty drawings Jenny Rose threw off the cliff, dear, that’s all.” Tenderly, she stroked her cheek with the back of her hand. “You’re not to worry, now. No one will see them.”

My heart tugged to hear Jenny Rose’s haunting work described as dirty.

“I’m more worried about the money,” Dierdre admitted, sighing. “I don’t mind so much not inheriting the lot, but, now my loom’s gone, too, what shall I do? How will we survive?”

“You’ll come move in with me,” Bridey said impulsively.

Ned and Bernadette exchanged panic-stricken looks.

I couldn’t understand how everyone could continue talking and just ignore that compelling pie.

Dierdre got up slowly and came over to Johnny. She put her saggy arms around him and hugged.

Johnny’s big arms dropped down to his sides. He didn’t know where to look.

“Come back here, Dierdre!” Bridey said, alarmed.

Dierdre wiped away a tear, squeezed Johnny’s hand and went back to stand with her sister.

Johnny might not have known how to act, but he understood that somehow, through his admitting the truth, a relationship had been formed. Italians understand all that, covenants through blood, it’s in their nature. Brusquely, he bowed to Uncle Ned’s outstretched expression of warmth. Though nothing was resolved, ranks were being drawn.

I started to reach for a cherry but was put off by the pure dislike leaking out of Bernadette’s eyes. I knew how she felt about Temple Fortune. She reached her foot out in front of her. Her dull sheen leather boots gave her the look of being armed and ready. A rake had scraped, like fingernails, across one toe. She pointed it this way and that and then she looked right at me, challenging. I wondered what she’d been up to just before all this.

“What if there really was a killer?” Mr. Truelove said suddenly, thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t it be something if it wasn’t an accident.”

“Yes,” Bridey took it right up. “I’ve been thinking so much about it.” She went around the table. “I mean, maybe the killer made a mistake. I mean, if there was a killer. Maybe he meant to kill Dierdre.”

Dierdre’s face fell into her hands. “Don’t even say it!” she cried.

“Well, you said yourself you took off unexpectedly. If even I hadn’t known!” She clutched her chest. “Anyone would have thought it would be you there in your own house. It was just because of the trip that things were different. And the trip was a surprise.”

“No,” Dierdre said, “if it hadn’t been for the trip, Peg and I would have been off bowling. Everyone knew we bowled on Mondays. No.” She rattled her head. “This was all my fault! I must have left the drum in the wrong spot. I’m always doing foolish things like that. I’ve only half a head!”

“Dierdre, no,” Uncle Ned soothed her. “It must have been God’s will. That’s what it must have been. The police said there was no evidence of foul play.”

“Oh and when the police say so, then we know it’s so,” Bernadette said.

“You know,” Johnny suggested, unoffended, “maybe no one wanted to kill either of them. Peg or Dierdre. Maybe someone wanted to kill someone else. To kill Jenny Rose.”

“Who would want to kill Jenny Rose?” Dierdre said.

Nobody answered this.

“Would Jenny Rose have been in the house on a Monday?” Johnny asked.

“Well, she lived there,” Bridey said.

“But would she have normally been there?”

“No.” Dierdre sounded sure. “She was always in her studio.”

“But she was on her way back,” Bridey ascertained. “’Twas pouring rain and she was close to the house as it was when it happened.”

Dierdre shivered.

“Unless…” Johnny thought out loud and then stopped.

Oh, God, I thought. Johnny thinks Jenny Rose did it. I knew he did, I could see him thinking she was family, had motive, mood and opportunity, little golden rules he liked to go by.

“What sort of pictures were they?” he asked. “The ones you found. I mean, what did they depict?”

“Ooh you’d best ask Jenny Rose herself those questions.”

“Why?” He turned to Dierdre. “Was there something … unacceptable about them?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” She sniffed, suddenly cool.

At that moment, in came Liam, cowed and showered. He moved heavily but he wasn’t sodden anymore. He wasn’t even sick. You had to marvel at his resilience.

“What have you done, now?” Bernadette demanded angrily.

“I’ve brought the mail,” he said meekly.

“Let me see.” Bernadette snatched the lot.

“Here,” she said to me, tearing an envelope as I went out the door, “I’ll let you have an Irish stamp for the children.”

Johnny tried to follow me out.

“Don’t come with me.” I shook him off.

“Let her have some time to herself,” Dierdre suggested.

“You’ll stay with us, Johnny,” Aunt Bridey said firmly.

“He’s been through so much,” Dierdre said.

“Aye,” Uncle Ned said. “Bless him.”

Bless him? I thought, outraged, and I went out and away on Molly’s old-fashioned bicycle. I drove all the bumpy way, the whole three miles to Baltimore and down the terrifying little hill to the spangling harbor. I was on my way to Temple’s hotel but then I saw the film boat docking and rode over to it instead. He was there. He stood with one foot on the boat and the other on the dock. I stayed on my bicycle.

“You spent the night with him?” was the first thing he said to me.

“I did not. Good day to you, too.”

“You know he searched my room?”

“He’s good for that.”

He looked sullenly about. “Well, wait there.” He stepped back onto the boat. “I’ll get my gear and we’ll have a pint.”

“I have to go back.”

He squatted down so his face was close to mine. “And why do you come when you always have to go back?”

I ignored this. “You know what I just found out? Jenny Rose is his child.”

He pulled his breath in.

“Johnny’s child.”

Instead of the shock I’d expected, he looked pleased.

“What?” I said. “Are you happy about it? Because you look happy.”

“If this is what it takes to get you out of bloody Queens and on with your life, then, yes, maybe I am pleased.”

“It’s not Queens that’s so bad. The best people in the world live in Queens.” I heard myself defending the place I’d so long despised and in the words of my ever enemy, my husband. “… hard-working people,” I added.

“People who don’t know any better.”

“People with dreams for their children.”

“Ah,” he said. “But none for themselves…”

My chin rose. “Your children are your dreams…” You wouldn’t know about that, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

He looked over his shoulder. “Look, something’s happened. I don’t want to talk about it here, but”—he lowered his voice—“I’ve got an offer to go back out to LA.”

I licked my lips. “LA? I thought you hated LA.”

“Everybody hates LA when they can’t get a job there.”

“So what kind of a job?”

“Oh, you know. Big studio. Lots of money…”

“… do whatever they tell you…”

“Maybe not.”

“Oh, please.”

He touched my cheek. “You’ll love LA.”

“I hate LA.”

“Why?”

“The ocean’s on the wrong side, for one thing.”

“It’s a lot of fun.”

“I don’t like fun.”

“Sure you do.”

“No, no. I really prefer stress and bad weather.”

“They have bad weather there, too. What else?”

“There’s the slight matter of my children.”

“There are great schools in California. They can take bicycles insead of subways.”

“Oh, then they’d fail for sure. You can’t study on a bicycle. Anyway, I’m sure it’s all cars.”

“We can make films, Claire.” He brushed my hair off my face.

“I like public television. And I like to go to the movies, I don’t want to make them. They never let you make your own stuff, just stuff they think can make money. Car wrecks and chase scenes. I don’t like people telling me how to spend my time.”

“You’re just saying that.”

I admitted something I otherwise wouldn’t have. “I’d imagined us together here in Ireland, a bog fire in the hearth, a black kettle boiling…”

“You’d get tired of that fast enough.”

I rang the bell on my handlebar. “Why don’t you want your little playmates to find out about your good fortune?”

He tipped one ear up. “I sort of promised to hang around and do another film with them. You know, for the ecology.”

“And now you don’t want to?”

One of his workers came over and made an exasperated hurry-up sign to him.

“Look,” he said. “I can’t do this now, Claire.”

“All right.” I wheeled the bike around. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Fair enough.”

I whipped out my camera.

He stood still for me.

I took a quick shot of him there in the waning light, opening my aperture all the way, counting upon him as a professional to know enough to stay very still, handsome and rugged-looking in his sweater on the boat. He held the camera with his magnetism. He knew how to stand still. He knew how to wait.

“You’ll come to Mrs. Wooly’s fish meet, then?” I packed the camera back into my shawl.

His eyes glittered in the seeping dark. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Good. ’Til then.”

“Bye.” He waved.

He’s very cool, I thought.

I took off, still seeing the romantic framework I’d shot around him: the thick, coiled ropes, the dozing cat, the nets, and then a wrinkled-up Marks and Spencer shopping bag in the trash bin, just catching my eye from the deck as I pedaled away.