‘So then why do people talk to journalists?’ he wondered.
I shrugged. ‘Many reasons. If a death is suspicious, maybe they hope that reading about it in the newspaper will jog someone’s memory.’
He looked away. ‘Yes, but Bathsheba’s death wasn’t suspicious.’
‘Of course not,’ I replied quickly. ‘But there are other reasons, too. It can help to talk about the person you’ve lost. Grace said that Bathsheba had lived a long and interesting life. Perhaps you could tell me some stories about her. We could do a piece on a life well lived, sort of thing.’
He looked at Greg, who was hovering a few feet behind me, fiddling with his filters again. ‘A life well-lived? Perhaps. I mean … I feel quite comfortable speaking to you, Miss Smith. I believe you’d do an admirable job telling Bathsheba’s story. But stories of a life like Bathsheba’s, well, they’re more evening material, don’t you think?’
Greg cleared his throat. ‘Probably. Listen, Ash, I’m not sure Grace had the right idea in sending us here. But maybe … maybe we should just leave Donald alone for now, yeah? If he wants to do some sort of memorial piece when he feels more up to it, he knows how to get in touch with us.’
I stood up without argument, hiding my confusion. I was positive that Donald would have given me an in-depth interview, had Greg agreed. So why hadn’t Greg agreed? Why was I sent here by Grace, only to be dragged off as soon as I was getting anywhere? Was this all part of the mysterious trial? Because if it was, I had no idea whether I was passing or failing.
Just as we were about to leave the deck, I turned back to Donald. ‘Y’know, there’s another reason why people talk to reporters. Same reason they can talk to therapists, or a stranger in the pub. Sometimes it’s easier, when you’re grieving, to talk to someone you don’t know.’ I squeezed his shoulder. ‘You know where I am, if you want an off-the-record chat.’
As I went to walk away, he called after me. ‘Wait – Miss Smith. There is something I’d like you to write, about my Bathsheba.’
I turned back. ‘Yes?’
‘You can write … you can write that she always had my utmost, undying love.’
8. Norman Normal
I wandered around the shop, while Greg bought himself some lunch at the deli counter. For a convenience store in such a small town, it certainly had a lot of lunch-time customers. A lot of vegan food on the menu, too.
With my enormous breakfast still filling me up, I doubted I’d be hungry again until dinner time. As more people filed in, the shop began to get a little crowded, and I decided I’d be better off going outside to wait for Greg.
As I stepped outside I looked across the road, only to see yet another kaleidoscope-haze.
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ I turned to a grey-haired man sitting on a bench behind me. He was reading the Daily Riddler.
‘What’s weird, love?’
‘The way the mist is settling in very specific areas only.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘What mist?’
‘Across there.’ I pointed.
‘Don’t see any mist there, love. I see a stretch of lovely green, with sheep grazing on it stretching all the way down to the beach. Maybe you need glasses?’
I felt my shoulders heave up and down. Yeah. Maybe the ten eye tests I’d had in the last five years had all been wrong. I had a good idea of how he was going to reply when I asked the question. But his answer had confirmed something. He didn’t seem like he was lying. He seemed absolutely convinced that there was a green across the road, filled with happily-grazing sheep. I’d asked Greg about the haze as we walked into the shop, and his answer had been a jumpy, ‘Huh? Yeah, yeah it’s always a bit misty around here.’
So what did that mean? Some people in this town were clearly hiding things, but this man outside the shop, and the woman who’d been knitting on the train … those two didn’t seem like they were hiding anything. They seemed completely oblivious.
‘Are you local?’ I asked.
‘Lived here all my life, my darling,’ he said. ‘This is my shop.’ He pointed to the sign above the door: Norman’s Shop. ‘I’m Norman. But you’re definitely not local, are you love? That’s a Dublin accent I detect.’
I sat down beside him. ‘Yeah, I’m from the big smoke all right,’ I said. ‘Hey, Norman, are there some big businesses nearby or something? Or maybe some big housing development a little way out the road?’
He laughed as though I’d just told a joke. ‘In Riddler’s Edge? Would ya go on, would ya? Sure, what you see is what you get.’
I sincerely doubted that. I cast an eye back into the shop. ‘So … where do all the customers come from, then? The queue is out the door.’
He followed my eyes, shrugging. ‘I imagine they’re just travelling through. We get a lot of people just passing through.’
‘Huh.’ I looked up and down the street. If all of these people were passing through, then why were the parking spaces in front of the shop empty? ‘Is there a large carpark somewhere, then?’
Again, he laughed like I was a prize joker. ‘For what? Sure there’s hardly anyone in the town. I hope you like the quiet life, my love. Because if you don’t, then Riddler’s Edge just isn’t the place for you.’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ I said. ‘Seems pretty exciting to me. I mean, I wasn’t even off the train before there was a death.’
‘My mother told me about that. The lady with the nut allergy. Such a lot of nut allergies, these days.’
‘Are there?’ I certainly hadn’t been made aware of a lot of cases of death by peanut.
‘Oh, yes.’ He nodded knowingly. ‘My mother, Norma, takes that train up and back from Dublin once a week like clockwork. There’s been three unfortunate incidents on the train recently. Four now, if you include the last one. People really need to read menus more carefully if they’ve got an allergy.’
9. To the Lighthouse
After an afternoon of being shown the workings of the Daily Riddler, I was thoroughly bored. Everyone there was nice enough, but they were all being just as cagey as Greg and Grace. When I asked about the other recent nut allergy deaths Norman had told me about, they’d been even cagier. I was beginning to think this wasn’t a trial period at all. Perhaps at the end of the week some cheesy TV presenter would appear and tell me I’d been on a hidden camera show the whole time.
When I returned to the Vander Inn, Donald had left the establishment and returned to his own home. A home that was in some unspecified nearby location, just like Malachy’s restaurant. Pru was out for the night, apparently, so I ate dinner alone in the dining room, while Nollaig laid a large table for what she told me was a regular poker game.
‘You’re welcome to join us,’ she said. ‘We usually start around midnight and keep on until dawn.’
‘Thanks, but I’m not much of a gambler.’ I pushed my empty plate away. The meal had been lasagne and salad. Simple but delicious. Nollaig had made chocolate mousse for dessert, but I was too full to have it just yet. ‘I might just head on up to my room. I had an early start this morning, so I’ll probably be asleep before my head hits the pillow.’
Nollaig smiled. ‘Whatever you like. We’ll keep the noise to a minimum.’
≈
I’d fallen in love at first sight with my room. Turned out I was now falling in love at second sight, too. I raced to my bed, kicked off my boots, and pulled my phone from my bag.
I’d love to be able to tell you that I had a large array of friends to call and keep up to date. But when you move around as much as I did as a kid, you learn not to get close. And just like my reluctance to accumulate too many belongings, I’d continued to keep people at a distance long after I left foster care.
There was another reason I was eagerly looking at my mobile phone, and the reason was that I was a big fat liar.
Yeah, I liked to write things shorthand in my little reporter’s notebook. I didn’t write down what people said in there, though. I only jotted down general i
mpressions. But I did record what people said, just not in my notebook – I used my mobile phone instead.
So yes, I’d lied to Greg about the notebook. I didn’t like being sneaky and underhanded (okay, maybe just a little bit), but I needed to throw him off guard. If he didn’t think I was recording anything, then he wouldn’t have any reason to try and sabotage my mobile phone.
And no, I didn’t consider him above sabotage. I knew I’d done the right thing in secretly recording things throughout my day. And now that I was finally alone, it was time to find out – was I paranoid, or was this whole town out to get me?
I played back my conversation with Miriam, stopping and rewinding, over and over, at the point where she said, ‘I mean, Gunnar looks shady I know, what with the Vlad’s Boys tattoo and everything. But I hope he’s not really like that. He couldn’t be, could he? Not deep down. He’s probably just easily led. He would never have killed–’
No, I wasn’t paranoid. Miriam had said exactly what I remembered her saying, word for word. I listened to some more snippets from my first day in Riddler’s Edge, confirming that pretty much everything had been as weird as I’d thought at the time.
But where was that going to get me? What was I supposed to do with any of this? Did they want me to figure out the town’s secrets by myself, and pass the trial that way? Or did they want me to prove I could shut up and take directions? I sighed. I’d never been one to shut up and take directions. And what sort of editor would want a reporter who didn’t butt in where they weren’t wanted? I mean, sure, that was exactly what John had wanted at the Daily Dubliner, but not every editor could be that short-sighted. Could they?
I took a stroll towards the French doors, and trained the telescope on the lighthouse. Detective Quinn’s car was there, and there were lights on inside. My eyes widened. No. No way in the world could he live at the lighthouse. He had to be there for some other reason. Like … he was just visiting the sexy barefoot man who did carpentry in his spare time.
I gritted my teeth. He did live there. I knew it the same way I knew Monday was the longest day of the week. I knew it the same way I knew I’d never look good in hot-pants. And that whole thing I said about lighthouses being sexy? Well, maybe I was changing my mind. I mean, they were just tall, skinny, badly proportioned buildings. Nothing alluring about them at all.
Anyway, it didn’t matter why the detective’s car was parked at the lighthouse. The point was, if his car was there, he was there. I’d been keeping my mouth zipped for hours now, and I was sick of it. It was time to start behaving like myself, and get the answers I wanted. And who better to give them to me than the man who had the same mysterious condition as Bathsheba?
I glanced at my watch. It was just after seven, and the light was fading fast. I should have hired a car for the journey to Riddler’s Edge, but I’d always hated driving. I was never quite sure how I passed my driving test. Any time I had to drive for work in Dublin I’d done so in an automatic, and even that was dicey.
Still, I thought as I pulled my boots on again, a walk in the dark couldn’t be all that bad. Not when I had a lighthouse to guide my way.
≈
Halfway along the road, I realised that a no-longer-operational lighthouse isn’t much good at guiding the way, so I pulled my little torch from my bag and switched it on. The closer I drew to the lighthouse, though, the less my torch seemed to see. I banged it about a few times, pulled the battery out and put it back in again. I tried the torch app on my mobile phone, too, but I still couldn’t see more than a foot in front of me.
Somewhere in the near-distance, I could hear noise picking up. There was a line of trees on the horizon, a line I hadn’t noticed earlier on – maybe those trees were what was covered by the haze? The noise seemed to be coming from there. Voices were chatting and laughing. Something was howling. Seriously? Howling?
‘I feel the need to swear,’ I muttered. ‘The very strong need to swear. And then to flee. To flee while swearing profusely.’
I banged a few more times at my torch, and even switched the battery out for the spare one I kept in my purse, but the new one seemed to be totally fried.
‘I’m not giving up,’ I said, muttering again. Hey, I was hearing things, seeing things, and still convinced that almost everyone in town was holding out on me, so I might as well talk to myself, too. ‘I’m going to that lighthouse.’
As soon as I said it, the beam on my torch began to work. ‘Well, would you look at that?’ I gave myself a self-congratulatory pat on the shoulder, and picked up my pace. As I neared the lighthouse, though, I paused again. I had to, because … wow.
Okay, so I know that you totally bought that whole thing about me no longer finding lighthouses sexy. I also know that you’ll be completely surprised to read that I was having a sudden and profound turnaround on that thought.
I was in love with this place. Truly, madly, deeply. There was no point in denying it anymore. This really was the house of my fantasies. It was just a pity about the guy inside.
I only had one foot on the shingle driveway when Detective Quinn yanked open the front door and shouted out, ‘Who the hell is there? Show yourself or I’ll shoot.’
Yip, there he was – the man I loathed.
‘It’s me, Detective Quinn,’ I said. ‘Ash. Aisling Smith.’
He was illuminated in his doorway, standing a little back from the threshold. In his hands he carried a pair of sunglasses. I had an amazing view of him. So amazing that I could see the way his lip curled as soon as he heard my voice.
‘For the love of the goddess,’ he said. ‘And there was me thinking you couldn’t possibly get any more annoying. Listen, I’m off duty. Whatever you have to say, you can say it at the garda station tomorrow.’
I made my way up the shingle driveway and stood in his view. ‘I would do, if I thought it’d make a difference. No, I think I’ll say it to you now. Where’s Gunnar Lucien, Detective Quinn?’
His sawed his jaw. ‘He’s in the land of none of your business. It’s just adjacent to the land of get the hell off my property.’ He moved further back inside, and slammed the door.
Here’s the thing. You might not have noticed it yet, but I really am a stubborn person. Some say I’m stubborn to a fault, but I say I’m stubborn to a purpose. So I did what any stubborn to a purpose woman would do. I banged on his door and shouted through his letterbox. ‘What’s Vlad’s Boys, Detective Quinn?’
No answer.
‘What’s this condition you’ve got, Detective Quinn? Something similar to Bathsheba Brookes? Last I heard, you couldn’t contract a nut allergy. What’s with the sunglasses after dark? What’s with the lies? What’s with this whole godforsaken town?’
He ripped open the door. Oh my. I hadn’t noticed the first time he opened the door, but he was barefoot. A barefoot, dark-haired man in a lighthouse.
I really wished his toes could have been weird. Not because I have a fetish for weird toes (but each to their own). More because I wished that this man had at least one flaw in his appearance. He had plenty in his personality, though, so I guess that would have to do.
‘Come in before you wake the whole town up, you crazy witch!’
≈
Well, it didn’t exactly help to discover that inside the lighthouse was even better than outside. The kitchen had the perfect blend of old and new – natural wood countertops mixed with modern appliances. The living room was circular for criminy’s sake. Not shag-pad circular like Grace’s apartment. More statement interior design circular.
There was a spiral staircase at the side of the room, and I could see a lit-up deck outside, leading all the way down to the beach.
Gulp.
There were a few photos on the walls and on a shelf by the TV. All of them featured a woman with chestnut hair, sallow skin and dark brown eyes. In some she was kissing Detective Quinn. In others she was smiling coyly at the camera. In all of them she looked amazing. And in the ones where she was wearing
hot-pants? Well, I guess some women really do have it all. Maybe if I did more lunges and squats I’d have thighs like that. Did I say more lunges and squats? I should have said any.
‘She your wife?’ I asked.
‘She’s none of your business is who she is.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You definitely belie the myth that people in small Irish towns are friendly. You also belie the myth that we don’t pay our public servants enough. This place must have cost a fortune.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘I inherited the lighthouse. Not that it’s any of your business. Not that any of this is any of your business. For some reason I can’t quite work out, Arnold decided to give you a trial. But trust me, a trial is all it’s ever going to be. You’re not cut out for this place.’
‘Really?’ I sat down into a squishy couch, trying to appear casual. ‘I’m not cut out for a tiny town that’s going through a mysterious spate of nut-allergy related deaths? Well, it’s a good thing I wasted all those years training as an investigative journalist, then.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘What did you just say?’
‘Which part? The part where I said I was an investigative journalist or the part where I said a spate. Well, yeah. I’d call four deaths in as many weeks a spate. Wouldn’t you?’
He moved into the kitchen, and I shuffled around in the seat so I could watch him. He was at the coffee machine, pouring himself a small shot of espresso.
‘Yes, please,’ I said.
‘I didn’t offer you one.’
‘Oh, I know – but I thought I might just help your manners along. Detective Quinn, I’ve been a journalist for over eight years. I’ve travelled to plenty of small towns to ask questions when there’s been a murder. Never one as small as this, mind you. But the funny thing is, very few of those places had a permanent detective in their station. Few of them even had a station anymore, thanks to cutbacks. So how come Riddler’s Edge has its very own detective?’ I glanced at the holster on his back. The holster that was accentuating his toned physique a little more than I would like. ‘Do you find you need to use your gun a lot around here?’
A Little Bit Witchy (A Riddler's Edge Cozy Mystery #1) Page 6