CHAPTER 11
Sarah and Rafael had an air of palpable excitement about them in the morning, which, Megan had to admit, was a nice change from the usual attitude of people around her when she got tangled up in an inexplicable death. Even Paul, who was fond of her, spent a lot of time exasperated that she was involved at all, and Jelena obviously hadn’t liked any of it.
To be fair, Niamh basically always thought it was a riot, but her presence was more hit-and-miss because she was so often off being famous.
Rafael, though, looked like he desperately wanted a trench coat and one of those Sherlock Holmes hats. When Megan said as much, he positively lit up. “A deerstalker? Can we find one?”
Megan said, “Probably,” at the same time Sarah said, “No,” and Raf’s expression went to war with itself, trying to be thrilled at Megan and pout at his wife. Both women laughed, and Megan added, “But also, probably not now. I have no idea if there are any hat shops in Naas.”
Raf, brightly, said, “I have the internet in my pocket. I bet it can tell me,” and made a show of sulking off toward the car when Sarah, not very sternly, shook her head. He muttered, “Fine. I guess we want to get to the scene of the crime nice and early anyway . . .”
“We’re not going to the scene of the crime,” Megan pointed out, but facts had no hold on him as he skulked around, pretending to hold up a magnifying class and saying, “Egad!” to the dogs.
“I’d ask if he’s always like this, but—” Megan said to Sarah, and they both laughed again.
“He’s much sillier with you, though,” Sarah murmured. “Part of it is that he really needed the holiday, but it’s you too.”
“I know his true ridiculous self, and have since we were six,” Megan agreed. “Did he ever tell you about the time he broke his leg falling out of the tree?”
Sarah squinted as they trailed after her husband and the dogs. “He mentioned breaking his leg and said it was your fault.”
Megan’s jaw dropped with indignation, even though that was, in fact, Rafael’s version of the story, and always had been. “He fell the wrong direction!”
Rafael yelled, “I did not!”
“Me!” Megan said, still indignantly, but to Sarah, gesturing wildly to animate the story as she told it. “Me on the ground here on this side of the tree branch! Him up on the branch, terrified because he couldn’t get down! He’s facing me! I said, ‘Let go and I’ll catch you!’ He lets go and falls backward! Away from me! Onto another log! Of course he broke something! He’s lucky it wasn’t his wretched head!”
“You said you’d catch me!” Rafael called with the remembered injured pride of an eight-year-old.
“I would have if you’d fallen toward me! He spent the whole summer in traction,” Megan told Sarah gloomily. “It was the most boring summer of my life.”
“Like that was my fault!” Rafael, at the car, scooped the dogs up and waited for the women to catch up with him, then, more sentimentally, added, “She was great. She did spend practically the whole summer hanging out with me. Mom bought me a brand-new Game Boy, and we played Super Mario Land and Tetris until we were having nightmares about being crushed by blocks.”
“Sometimes I can still see the tetrinos falling when I close my eyes,” Megan reported dolefully, and beneath that, Rafael mumbled, “Tetrominoes.”
“Oh my God. Whatever. Get in the car, you pedantic dork.”
Sarah, getting in the front seat herself, breathed, “I had no idea they even had a name. Those are the blocks, right? They’re actually called something?”
“Welcome to the terrible knowledge earned by bored children over a video game summer,” Megan replied solemnly. “Also, now that I’m thinking about it, I bet I should have hired a dog sitter for the day. Today, not that summer. Just to clarify.”
“There’s that one woman, Gwinny somebody, the actress?” Raf said. “She’s a dog sitter. I was reading an article about her the other day. She’s gotten pulled into a couple of things like you keep doing, Megan. Minding her own business, walking the dogs, finding dead bodies. Maybe you could hire her.”
“Gwinny Tuffel, right, I know her from EastEnders or something. No, that was somebody else.” Megan paused, trying to remember where she knew the actress from, then shook her head. “Anyway, yes, I know who you mean, but she’s British and probably not available in County Kildare, Ireland, on five minutes’ notice, so, no, I’m more thinking about asking the hotel.”
“Why do either of you know about a British dog-sitting, murder-solving actress?” Sarah asked, mystified, then considered her own question. “I feel like that answers itself. Never mind. Let’s take the dogs, Megan. At least over to the church. I assume we’re going to a church?”
Megan waved her phone. “Yeah, I got directions to where Father Colman works. Is stationed? Is registered? What do Catholics call it?”
“Assigned, they’re assigned to a parish,” Rafael said, “and I can’t believe you don’t know that after growing up with me.”
“If you’ll recall, I was stunned and horrified to discover that church was something you had to go to during the summer, too,” Megan pointed out, and said to Sarah, “In so far as I’d ever thought about it, I assumed it was something you had to do in winter, like school.”
She laughed. “Are you suggesting Raf broke his leg to get out of going to church all summer?”
“It was a bad trade,” Rafael assured them both. “How’d you find out where Father Colman works?”
“Secret murder-driver-investigation stuff,” Megan said in as dramatic and arrogant a tone as she could manage. Her friends looked sort of offended, and she laughed. “I asked at the front desk. Nobody knew, but one girl was sure her ma would, and when her ma didn’t, she rang her da’s grandma, who did.”
“Her ma rang her da’s grandma, or the girl who works at the desk did?” Sarah asked curiously as they got in the car.
“Believe it or not, her ma did, and then rang her back at work. All aboard the Irish gossip train, I guess.”
“I love it. Aunties the world over never miss a beat when it comes to gossip. How far are we going?” Sarah held up a finger. “What I’m asking is if there’s time for a nap between here and there. All this murder-mystery stuff is hard on my sleep.”
Rafael coughed, and Sarah gave him a warning look that made Megan laugh. “It’s only a few minutes, sorry. We could probably walk, but the weather . . .” The skies above were leaden, not quite raining, but certainly threatening it, and a few thick, spattering raindrops did fall as she pulled out of the hotel parking lot. They seemed to just be a warning, though, and the car was still dry when they arrived at the parish house on the church grounds.
Despite the relatively early hour, Father Colman was out on the grounds, clearing brush, and it looked like he’d been at work for some time already. His pale face was flushed pink from effort, and he was dressed much more traditionally than he had been the other morning, in an actual cassock with a white shirt beneath it, and the dangling accoutrements of the clergy: a cross, a long belt, a rosary. It struck Megan that save for the colors, it really looked very similar to the outfit Seamus Nolan had been wearing when he died.
Colman paused when the car pulled up, took a bottle of alcohol spritz out of his pocket, and cleaned his hands as he came down a small hill to greet them. Sturdy, practical black work boots were visible beneath the cassock’s hem, and Megan wondered if that was de rigueur for priests in old-fashioned clothing, or if he wore nicer shoes inside the church.
He paused as they got out of the car, examining them as the spritz bottle went back in his pocket. “Megan Malone. The murder driver. Patrick Doyle told me to watch out for you. I’m Father Colman.”
“Father,” Megan said as politely as she could with dismay sluicing through her. “I’m not used to this whole ‘my reputation precedes me’ thing. Did he tell you not to talk to me?”
“Yes, but I’m rarely a man to do what I’m told, and besides that, I’m desperate curious to hear what it is you want of me.” He smiled rather beatifically, first at Megan, then at her companions. “And you are?”
“Rafael and Sarah Williams,” Raf offered. “Murder-driver hangers-on.”
“Oh my God.” Megan put a hand over her face, and Colman laughed.
“Will you have a cup of tea? Come in, at least. The weather’s threatening.” He turned in a swish of robes, inviting them along as he angled for steps placed into the low hill rather than walking them up over the grassy knoll itself. “I expect you’d like to ask me about Seamus Nolan’s death, and whether I saw anything.”
“Well, yes. And also why you’re wearing a cassock,” Megan admitted. “I thought those went out of fashion decades ago, and you weren’t wearing one on Monday.”
“They’re warm and easy to move in,” Colman admitted. “Western men have been sold a bill of goods on the emasculating effects of dresses. They’re grand.”
“Right?” Sarah asked, audibly delighted. “Agbada are still the traditional dress for Nigerian men, and it’s one of the things I miss from being a child there. American men dress so stodgily.”
“It’s Beau Brummell’s fault,” Colman informed her as he ushered them into the rectory. It was a small, beautiful old building, the exterior of cobbled stone and the general structure being what the Irish called “two up, two down”: a public room and a private room downstairs, and two bedrooms upstairs, although Megan bet the second room upstairs had almost always functioned as an office for the priests assigned there. The downstairs was mostly open now, the wall between the two main rooms knocked out for internal French doors. Colman took them through a living room filled with oversized leather seating. The usual kind of crosses adorned with rosary beads hung on the walls, interspersed with smaller variants of known as Brigid’s crosses. It was homey and comforting, but Megan ended up bringing her attention back to Colman as he led them into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, what? Beau Brummell? Wasn’t he, like, the fashion maven of the Regency era? How can boring men’s clothes be his fault?”
“My understanding is that he wasn’t wealthy, so he couldn’t afford the brilliant colors and fabrics that the rich men around him wore, so through sheer force of personality and an eye for well-fitted clothing, he convinced the rich that their colors and flashiness was crass, and that dark, subdued, tailored trousers and coats were more suitable for men of class. Two hundred years later, and the Anglophile world is still wearing what one poor but persuasive British dandy convinced the elite was appropriate menswear.” By the time Colman had finished his explanation, he’d poured tea for all of them and gotten them settled around his small dining room table, which sat in a square of light from the window.
All three of the Americans were gazing at him in astonishment as he wrapped up. Megan eventually said, “I had no idea,” and Colman beamed with pleasure.
“Most people don’t. There, that’s your history lesson for the day. Now I suppose you’ll want to interrogate me.” He sat with his own cup of tea and made an inviting gesture with it. “Have at.”
“Em.” Megan was surprised into using the Irish version of “um,” although she didn’t usually hear herself doing that. “Well. You were at the holy well very early. Why? And did you see anything?”
“I’m very fond of Saint Brigid, and I like to think she’s fond of me,” Colman said earnestly. “I go there often for a morning devotional, and I’ve encountered Seamus any number of times. I didn’t see him Monday morning, though.”
“Tell me about your devotional,” Megan said, partly out of real curiosity and partly, she admitted privately, to see if she could get the priest to slip up.
He smiled briefly over his cup of tea. “I like to pray at the stone arch over the closer well. I suppose in the vanity of my heart I hope that someday I’ll look down to see my knees have worn grooves in the stone and cement, to say that I was there, and that I worshiped. I fear the granite is harder than my knees, though, and I haven’t enough years left to make my mark. I feel that I can speak directly to Brigid there at her well, and through her, to God.”
“What do you talk about?”
Colman chuckled and ducked his head. “Some days it’s a desperate prayer to set the world to rights, isn’t it? Begging for people to find enlightenment, in whatever form that may take, so they might follow God to a brighter future. Other days it’s smaller. A sick child, or an ailing mother, or a father out of work and a family growing desperate. And some days I’ve nothing to ask at all, save to be quiet in God’s embrace, and find some peace within myself.” He sucked his teeth, then sighed. “Monday was one of the latter. I don’t often go to the upper well at all anyway, but I felt too old and tired to even think about it then. So I didn’t see anything, or hear anything. I suppose he must have already been in the water when I arrived, God rest his soul.”
“Did you get along with him?” Megan wondered. She could almost feel Sarah and Rafael exchanging glances as they sipped their tea, being quiet so they didn’t interrupt.
“Someone will tell you this if I don’t myself, so I’ll say to you that I’m mostly sorry to see him dead because I think dying now curses his immortal soul to hell,” Colman replied steadily. “There’s no good in worshiping pagan gods in these times, Ms. Malone. Brigid found her way to Christ, and it’s as a saint she should be revered, not as a heathen goddess adulated by an unenlightened people.”
Megan kept her eyebrows down with an effort. “Weren’t the goddess and the saint different people? I mean, I know there’s a lot of crossover, but wasn’t there supposed to have been a Christian Brigid too? A nun? I know she was supposed to represent an awful lot of what the goddess did, but I’d have thought you’d see them as separate?”
“Who knows,” Colman said as if it pained him. “But if we’re to accept that God could take a mortal form in Jesus, we could also presume that the ancient heathen goddess might have taken form as Brigid of Kildare, and in doing so, cast off her pagan origins and dedicated herself to Christ.”
“I never even considered that as a possibility.” Megan took a swift sip of hot tea, using it to avoid saying the wrong thing, then shrugged a little. “But then, I’d never heard that Beau Brummell was responsible for boring clothes, either, so maybe there’s a lot for me to learn today. So you thought Nolan might convert back to Christianity, or Catholicism, given time? That he might have given up on Brigid-the-goddess in favor of Brigid-the-saint?”
“No,” Colman admitted, “not really. But where there’s life, there’s hope. I wish he hadn’t brought so much attention to the well as a site of the goddess, though. Do you know there are people who actually believe the goddess will bless them with children if they come to there to pray and ask it of her?”
Sarah spoke in a neutral voice, through thinned lips. “But if the saint and the goddess represent the same things, how do you know which one they’re asking for help from?”
The faintest curl of disdain pulled at Colman’s mouth. “I know. You can tell. Especially the ones he encouraged to come there, with their fiery columns and their three circles and their sun signs. They’re searching for the old, dark paths, not the way into the light.”
“The triskelion?” Megan asked, surprised. At Rafael’s breath of a question, she took her phone out and used a fingertip to draw three spirals on a sketchbook page, each leg of the spiral feeding back toward the others so they made a single unit. “I didn’t know that was a symbol of Brigid. I just thought it was an old Irish thing.”
“True believers would carry her cross, woven of straw or—” Colman lost a bit of his high-handedness. “Or of toothpicks and yarn, to be honest, these days. But it’s that cross that belongs to the saint, not the old circles. They were the goddess’s. So you know,” he said, more darkly, “you know which of them they’re coming to ask favors from.”
“And Nolan brought more of those pagan worshipers around than you felt comfortable with?” Megan asked. “I wasn’t clear on how serious his whole druid thing was. He really believed, huh?”
“He played it up for the news and made light of it, but he did. He wouldn’t have come to the well all the time, in times when no one would notice him, if it didn’t mean something to him. I only wish it had meant the right things.”
“I don’t suppose you killed him,” Megan said lightly.
Colman blanched, hands suddenly shaking so hard with emotion he had to put his teacup on the table. “And risk my own immortal soul? I did not.”
“No, I didn’t suppose you had.” Megan put her own cup down and conjured up a smile for the priest. “Thank you for your time, your patience, and your interesting history lesson about Beau Brummell. I appreciate it. And . . .”
She hesitated, and he chuckled. “And you’d also appreciate it if I didn’t mention you came sniffing around to Detective Sergeant Doyle?”
“I wouldn’t ask you to lie about it, but if you didn’t feel like bringing it up, I wouldn’t hate that.”
“I’m sure I’d have no reason to be talking to the man again,” Colman assured her as he led them back out. The Brigid’s crosses in the living room caught Megan’s eye again as she followed him. Straw and rushes, she thought, none of them the cheap yarn ones he’d disdained. There was even a three-legged one she’d never seen before, closer to the triskelion she’d drawn than to the shape she thought of as Brigid’s cross. Maybe the old priest wasn’t quite as anti-pagan as he made himself out to be, although she couldn’t see any profit in saying so aloud.
Instead, at the door, she smiled and offered a hand to shake. “Thanks for your time, Father. We’ll get out of your hair now.”
“The tea was excellent,” Rafael said to the older man as they left, and when Megan glanced back, the priest was in the doorway looking satisfied.
None of them spoke until they were in the car, and even then there was a brief, loud silence before Sarah blurted, “Well, I feel a real urge to go back and sit on one of those stones and draw, what did you call them? Triskelions? All over my body now. What a bigot.”
“I offer myself as tribute,” Rafael said immediately. “I’ll be glad to help with that. Megan, you in?”
Megan laughed. “No, no, sorry, but I think that would be weird.”
“Yeah, okay, fair. Still, I’m all in, baby.” That was directed at Sarah, who beamed at him.
Megan laughed again. “So does that mean you want me to drop you two off at the holy well while I go on to Rathballard House?”
They chorused, “No!” as one, and Sarah shook her head for emphasis. “No, we’re in it this far, I want to see how it all works out. And besides, I’ve always wanted to look around one of those old grand house’s gardens. Let’s go ahead and do that, and maybe you can drop Raf, me, and some body paint at the holy well later.”
“Mmm-hmm. And then you two can call a taxi and make out like teenagers in the back seat while they drive you back to the hotel.”
“Somehow that sounds both disgusting and perfect,” Rafael said. “C’mon, let’s go to the big house so Sarah and I can get on with being gross later.”
“He does not pitch things well, does he?” Megan said to Sarah. “I’m suddenly afraid to ask exactly how he proposed.”
“Oh, believe me, you don’t want to know.” Sarah waited a dramatic beat. “I’ll tell you on the drive over.”
Megan hastily turned the engine on, then perked her ears for the gossip as she drove.