CHAPTER 21
“I didn’t kill him!” Jenny screeched her way out of the office under Doyle’s bemused arrest, writhing with anger and shouting at the top of her lungs. “I didn’t kill Seamus Nolan! I never would! He was the love of my life! Aisling! Tell them!”
Aisling had straightened away from the desk when her mother ran, but sank back down against it, looking decades older than her nineteen years. “To be fair, I think she wouldn’t,” she said to the room at large. “Not out of the love of her heart for him, but for the cash. He couldn’t even tell me they’d divorced.” She closed her eyes, then in slow, piecemeal motions, put her face in her hands. “That’s how wrapped up in her he still was. If he told me, he couldn’t keep sneaking about helping her. And then you.”
Her voice went bitter and cold as she lifted her gaze to her uncle. “You wouldn’t have killed him either, would you? For the same reasons. How long did he pay your debts for, Adam? If the estate’s in trouble, how much of that is on you? I need an accountant,” she said to Megan. “Someone to help me figure it all out. Will you help me find one?”
“Of course.” Megan nodded at Aisling, but watched Adam, who had lost color and what remained of any youthful vigor. He’d become an old man in the last minutes, instead of simply an older one. “I wonder if your father really did just slip.”
Even as she wondered, she shook her head. Aisling focused on her, a question in the quirk of her eyebrows, and Megan shrugged. “The bike wouldn’t have been in the hedge, if he’d slipped. I mean, Doyle could be right, it could just be that some punk wandered by and grabbed the bike because they were in the right place at the right time, but the sun doesn’t rise until almost nine in the morning right now. It’s dark and cold and damp, and the lights aren’t good along the road there. And the bike rack is at the side of the visitors’ centre. You have to actually come into the parking lot to see it. People don’t usually wander country roads at half seven in the morning in the dark, looking for bikes to steal. It’s more a crime of opportunity.”
“Well, it wasn’t me,” Aisling said with a tired smile, “so if it wasn’t Mam or Uncle Adam, who was it? You three were the next people to see him.”
“Margaret at the visitors’ centre said she’d seen the bike on her way in,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “What time do they open there?”
“They were open when we arrived a little before ten,” Megan said. “Which would be early for an Irish tourist attraction in the winter, but Imbolc is coming up.”
Rafael blinked. “Imwhat?”
“St. Brigid’s Day,” Aisling answered. “February first, Imbolc. It’s the first day of spring in the Irish calendar.”
Sarah cast a dubious look outside at the gray mist. “I’m not sure you understand what ‘spring’ is, but okay. So Margaret could have gotten there early?”
A smattering of laughter touched Megan and the two Irish-born people, even Adam. Aisling said, “We’re not known for early, we Irish,” and Megan grinned.
“Not at all. But she wouldn’t have had to be early. I don’t think people are wandering into that parking lot looking for bikes to steal, as a rule. What matters is she saw the bike, and then it was gone. And the only person we know was there in the meantime was Father Colman.”
“But the bike was gone before we got there,” Raf objected. “And we saw Colman leaving.”
“Yeah.” Megan sagged. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someone did just take the bike. Maybe it was just an accident. I’m sorry, Ais. I’ve brought all this chaos into your life for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” the young woman said fiercely. “Look what you did turn up. My mam’s dumped toxic waste on my estate, and my uncle’s trying to steal it from me to pay off his gambling debts. I’d have known none of it without you—or that my inheritance was in danger at all. You,” she said to Adam. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
“You can’t do anything,” he muttered. “The estate’s mine anyway. I’ll sell it all and walk away from this wretched wet country.”
“You know they’re challenging that under Brehon law,” Megan said to the old man. “Seamus’s lawyer has an argument drawn up for old Irish law to supersede colonizer law. Even if it doesn’t work, it’ll buy time, and you don’t have any. Doyle’s not here,” she added almost cheerfully. “This might be your only chance to disappear for good, because I’m sure he’s going to come back.”
An actual gleam came into Aisling’s eye. “I might drop a credit card on the floor that would cover the cost of a plane ticket, if I were to find that my great-uncle Adam had left a notarized letter renouncing all his rights to the Rathballard estate and title. I even might be clumsy enough to drop that card if I thought someone would drive him to the airport and stop at my solicitor’s office in Dublin on the way to notarize that letter. Or sign over power of attorney, or whatever it was that needed to happen.”
“Strangely enough,” Megan said in a bright, stilted tone, “I happen to be a professional chauffeur with a Lincoln Town Car in the parking lot. Perhaps I could be of assistance, Miss Nolan.”
“Oh, gosh!” Aisling clapped her hands together theatrically. “Gosh, do you think you could, Ms. Malone? That would be sooooo helpful!”
Adam’s color had come back, hot enough that Megan thought he might be risking a stroke. “You’re mad. You’re all mental. Are you mad?”
“Could you,” Rafael asked with a sparkle in his own voice, “perhaps drop my wife and me back at St. Brigid’s Well, on your way? I have some triskelions to paint on her skin, you see.”
“I think that can be arranged,” Megan told him cheerfully, then raised her eyebrows at Adam. “And I think you’ve got two bad choices here, buddy, but a quiet retirement in the Canaries sounds like a lot more fun than finding out what Doyle and his bookie employers have in store for you.”
“They’ll come after me,” he said desperately.
Megan shrugged. “Then I’d learn to run.”
* * *
It was late by the time Megan returned to Kildare; paperwork renouncing an inheritance wasn’t, as it turned out, as easy as one might think. Not, she admitted to herself—because she’d left the dogs with Rafael and Sarah at the holy well—that she’d thought it would be all that easy. She wasn’t even sure if it would stand up in court if Adam ever wanted to challenge it, but she’d dropped him at the departures curb at Dublin Airport, and she didn’t really think she, or Aisling, would ever see him again. She had no idea where he was going, either. Hadn’t asked, didn’t want to know.
There was a text from Aisling when she got back to the hotel, asking if all three of them could come to the celebration of life for her father the next day. It’s not a wake, exactly, Aisling had written. And it’s definitely not a funeral, not a Catholic one, anyway. But if you could come . . .
Megan responded, promising she would, then dropped into bed without checking in with Sarah and Rafael. Either they were sleeping, she figured, or they weren’t, and either way, they didn’t need a third party involved. Although they still had the dogs, who between them qualified as considerably more than a third party. At least they rarely needed to go out in the middle of the night.
She woke earlier than she wanted to, and after trying to go back to sleep, reluctantly dragged herself down to the hotel’s fitness centre, all mirrors and weight machines and an incongruous-to-her-mind cross on the wall, wrapped with a rosary. She’d lived in Ireland long enough that she thought random signs of Catholicism shouldn’t still surprise her, but they did. It was less distracting than a television, at least, and she counted its beads while exercising, which was both distracting and soothing.
Which was, she supposed, the whole point of prayer beads. It made the half hour she worked out go by faster, at least, and she left all sweaty and contemplating whether she should get her own rosary just to keep her mind on something other than aching muscles while she exercised.
Rafael was taking the dogs out through the lobby when she came up from the fitness centre. Megan jogged to catch up, catching the Jack Russells’ attention before Raf noticed her, and crouching to scuffle the little animals before smiling tiredly up at her friend. “Want me to walk them? You’ve gone beyond the call of duty already.”
“We can share the burden.” He offered her a leash. “You’re up early. Everything okay?”
“I usually get up at half five or six to go to the gym, and habit defeated me this morning. Couldn’t go back to sleep, even though I got back late. Dropped Adam to the airport, and I’ve got all the paperwork he signed to bring to Aisling. This has not been the holiday I wanted you guys to have.”
“This has been a much better adventure than we ever could have possibly asked for.” Rafael flashed a bright grin, and Megan had to admit he looked more refreshed and happier than he had when they’d arrived a few days ago. “Everything else aside, I got to shock tourists at the holy well yesterday by painting tyrannosaurs on Sarah, which was amazing.”
“Triskelions! Triskelions!”
“Those too,” Rafael said happily. “I don’t believe in magic, Megs, but this whole thing has been good for us.” They ducked under a black branch dripping with water as they reached the riverside, then walked down the paved path beside it in step while the dogs darted back and forth, sniffing at everything. “Did I tell you I’m studying to switch to general practice instead of working in the ER?”
“Sarah mentioned it. She was wondering if you’d actually be able to give up the high-octane ER life.”
“Honestly?” Raf fell silent as they padded down the path, then shook his head. “I didn’t think I could. Like, up until this week, I didn’t think I could. But even though it’s been a genuinely whacked week, it’s also been really great. I’ve spent so much time with Sarah. And I met your friends, even if it was just on the phone, and they’re going to be in San Francisco, and I thought, man, if I’m working all the time, it’s just gonna be Sarah and them hanging out, and I’ll be the guy hearing all their great stories and wishing I’d been there. I don’t know if Sarah and I will ever be lucky enough to have kids, but even if we don’t, this week has kind of reminded me what it’s like to have a life again. I guess it’s been eye-opening? And if it’s that obvious after a few days, then, yeah, the ER is going to have to figure out how to do without me, I think. I want a schedule that lets me spend time with my family.” He knocked his shoulder against Megan’s. “That means you, too. You’re gonna visit, right?”
“Apparently all the people I love best are going to be in San Francisco, so yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to! No, seriously, I will. And if you’re working less, it’ll be easier, too, because I won’t have to cram seeing you into the edges of your twenty-hour shifts. As if my weird life hasn’t kept us from hanging out as much as I wanted so far this week.” Megan made a face. “I really didn’t want for this to happen.”
“We’re here for another, what, eight days? And we’ll just have to come back to see more of the country, since this visit has been a little well-centered.”
Megan laughed. “Well-centered. No, no, I think the whole point is that my life isn’t well-centered, it’s all, what did you say? Whacked. I don’t think we say ‘whacked’ anymore, either, Raf. But yeah, no, I know what you mean. At least you got to see behind the scenes at the Rathballard House?”
Rafael’s eyes widened. “Not just behind the scenes, but all the drama behind them, too. Is that what it’s always like when you get involved in these things?”
A groan escaped Megan, loud enough that Thong stopped sniffing things and came back to make sure her human was all right. “It’s not always that reveal-y. I had no idea Adam had gambling debts. But it’s a little like that, yeah,” she admitted. “People don’t like being caught out. I just wish it—”
She broke off, and Rafael coughed in an attempt to hide a snerk of laughter. “You just wish there’d been an actual murder to solve?”
“That sounds so much worse than I mean it!” Megan wailed. “Not that I can think of a way for it to sound better! Also, I swear, Raf,” she added, sobering a little, “listen to me. I still get overblown about things the way I did when I was seventeen, don’t I? Aren’t I supposed to sound more . . . grown-up by now?”
“You are grown-up, but people are people. We still get excited and dismayed by the same things we always did. Believe me,” he said wryly. “If you spend most of your waking hours in an emergency room, it becomes really, really clear that people stay who they are through their whole lives. I think the biggest difference is that some people learn to pick their fights as they get older, and probably most of us lose some energy along the way. But that just means we save what we have for the stuff that’s really important.” He nudged her shoulder with his. “Like figuring out whodunit, if there’s been a suspicious death. It matters to you.”
Megan stopped to hug him. “When’d you get so smart, mi amigo?”
“I’ve always been smart,” he replied, muffled into her hair. “This is my wisdom you’re admiring now.”
“Well, I tell you what wasn’t wise. Falling off that tree branch backward, that wasn’t wise.”
Rafael let her go, offended. “You said you’d catch me!”
Megan burst out laughing, and they went back to the hotel bickering cheerfully, with the dogs winding around their ankles.