by Lila Dubois
“Then let her stay, put her out of the way.”
“I did, but she’s hungry.” Kris drew in a long breath through his nose. “She wants to see a menu from the pub.”
“Non. If she wants to eat pub food, then she will go there.” Tristan suddenly understood Kris’s ire. No one seemed to understand that the ambiance of dining was as important as the food, and that meant a beautiful room with well-appointed tables, candlelight and the aroma of fine wine, truffles and fresh herbs—not the stench of chips and meaty stew.
“Give that to me.” At his order, Kris handed over the pub menu, a laminated sheet of uninspired—though delicious, because if Tristan had to serve fish and chips, it was the best fish and chips ever cooked—pub fare.
Tristan stormed out of the kitchen into the restaurant. He took only a moment to appreciate the crystal chandeliers, cozy private areas created by half-walls and high-backed chairs, and headed for the darkest corner, a lost space where Kris seated those who wanted the utmost privacy or who weren’t dressed nicely.
Tristan’s brows rose in surprise when he saw who was seated there. A pretty blonde woman no older than thirty sat with her head bent over a castle map. She wore a tunic embroidered with geometric shapes in bold earth tones over a simple white turtleneck. A heavy brass medallion hung from a cord around her neck, and she toyed with it as she read. Her hair was straight, falling to just above her shoulder. She was lightly tanned, and when she looked up her eyes were a beautiful hazel rather than the blue he was so used to seeing.
She studied him, her gaze lingering on his face, but he could tell it wasn’t sexual—it was almost clinical.
“Hello,” she said, “I’m Dr. Melissa Heavey. You’re…” She did a second once-over. “…either the head chef or the poissonnier.” She was English and well-educated, from the sound of her accent.
Tristan stopped, taken by surprise. “I am the chef de cuisine.” He used the proper name for head chef.
“And you’re French. That explains the western European Caucasian bone structure but Mediterranean coloring.”
Tristan tilted his head to the side. “You’re a doctor?’
“A Doctor of Philosophy, yes. I’m a forensic anthropologist.”
“And you are here for the bones.”
“So you do know about them. I wasn’t sure if the staff had been told.”
“I am not staff. I am the chef.”
“Of course, my apologies. I did a research project on the social stratification within kitchens while I was at university. It’s very structured, almost caste-like, but with huge potential for upward mobility.”
“And that is how you know poissonnier.” Despite his irritation, Tristan smiled. The pretty English woman was intriguing.
“The fish chef, yes. You have the air of command necessary for a head chef, but you smell a little like raw fish and there is something shiny on your apron, which I assume is scales.”
Tristan’s gaze narrowed. “You are a detective.”
“No, of course not. I’m a scientist.”
Tristan shrugged. She sounded like a detective. “As you say.” Down to business. He held up the pub menu. “If you want to eat this food, you must go to the pub.”
“I need quiet. I won’t be here long.”
“Then you may stay, but you will not eat.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“Then go to the pub.” She was arguing with him. No one argued with him—no matter how beautiful they were. He wanted to shake her. Then kiss her.
“I want to eat here.”
“And I will not serve bangers and mash—” The inelegant words made his lips curl. “—in my beautiful restaurant.”
She tilted her head, hair swinging. “You’re quite serious.”
“Oui.”
She sighed, folded the brochure she’d spread out on the table. She then carefully replaced the silverware, napkin and glasses back in their proper spots and grabbed an ugly black case off the floor. She brushed past him.
Tristan nodded in satisfaction that he’d maintained the rules he’d set for his restaurant but was a little sad to see the interesting woman go. She wore loose pants that tied at the hips, and they were just tight enough across the derrière that he got the feeling that under the loose tunic top was a nice body. It had been a long time since he’d been drawn to a woman the way he was drawn to her. And it wasn’t just physical attraction—she was intelligent and strong.
He was so distracted by her derrière and his unexpected reaction to her that it took him a moment to realize that she wasn’t headed for the front door, but deeper into the restaurant.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, jogging a few steps to keep up with her. “Where are you going?”
“I’m hungry.” She stopped for a moment, looked around and then headed for the kitchen.
Tristan darted ahead of her, positioning himself in front of the swinging doors. He folded his arms. Pretty or not, intriguing or not, she wasn’t going to interfere with his dinner prep.
“This is my kitchen.”
“I can tell. I’m excited to see it.”
She tried to push past him, and he grabbed her upper arms. She made a little noise, and her eyes widened with pain. The case she carried fell from her hand.
Tristan released her. He’d barely touched her, yet it seemed he’d caused her pain.
“I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
“I…have a bruise there.”
Tristan raised a brow. “From another chef whose kitchen you tried to disrupt?”
“The result of killing the last man who tried to come between me and my dinner.”
Her expression was so deadly serious that Tristan had a moment of real worry. Then she smiled and laughed. It changed her whole face, making her seem less serious and disconnected—more warm and approachable.
“You looked quite alarmed,” she said as her laugh faded.
“I do not understand English humor.”
“Too bad, I’m quite funny.” With a smile, she grabbed her case and slid past him into the kitchen.
Cursing, Tristan followed her.
“Hello everyone.”
The busy sounds of the kitchen stopped as everyone looked up at the strange blonde woman standing in the doorway. “My name is Melissa Heavey and I’m hungry. Is there someone here who might be able to—”
Tristan grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back out through the doors.
“You are…crazy,” he said as he set her down. He was too surprised to be really angry.
“You’re not the first to mention that.”
Resigned, Tristan threw his hands in the air, then planted them on his hips. “Fine, I will bring you food. You will have stew, fresh bread, a salad.” That was as far as he was willing to relent.
“That sounds lovely.” She stooped and picked up her case. “Thank you very much…?”
“Tristan, Tristan Fontaine.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Tristan.” She held out her hand. “As I said, I’m Melissa.”
Rather than shaking, he took her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Enchanté, mademoiselle.”
He was both surprised and pleased when she blushed. He’d expected her to laugh.
“Enchanté, monsieur,” she replied.
He held her hand for a moment longer than was casual. When she pulled back, he let her go, watching her walk to her table with a smile. Tristan was looking forward to learning more about Dr. Melissa Heavey.
* * * *
A very somber-looking Sorcha let Melissa and Detective Sergeant Oren into the west wing. They’d locked down the whole building, ensuring that no one disturbed the remains any more than they’d already been disturbed. Melissa rolled her shoulders, trying to shake off the lethargy the truly delicious food had brought on.
“I’ll leave the door unlocked. Please let the front desk know when you’re done here, Dr. Heavey.” Sorcha finished unlocking the door at the entrance to the west
wing. They were standing in the glass hallway that connected it to the castle, and though it was only just past six, clouds had gathered, hiding the evening light.
“Thank you,” Melissa said absently to Sorcha as the door closed behind them. She took a moment to look around the nice if unremarkable hotel hallway. The only distinctive features on the first floor of the west wing were the exposed stone walls at either end. Other than that, it was a simple hallway of hotel doors.
“It’s up here,” Oren told her.
She followed him up. White dust had been tracked down the stairs, and in some places she could make out distinct boot prints.
As they mounted the last few steps, she saw more hotel doors, as nondescript as what was below them, but once at the top it was clear that something was very wrong here.
Midway down the hall, the debris started. There were chunks of plaster and splinters of wood leading up to a stone wall with an arched doorway in the middle. The door was half closed, and a pile of bricks was stacked to one side.
“Tell me what happened here,” Melissa said. She pulled out a small camera and took pictures. For an archaeologist, pictures and diagrams were key, because it was all about the context around a find or body. In her field, there was rarely any context to work with—a pit full of jumbled bones had no context other than horror and war.
But Melissa’s first love had been archaeology, and that was what her bachelor’s degree was in. In the ’70s and ’80s they’d discovered some truly amazing archaeological finds in Ireland. The bog bodies, as they were affectionately known, had taken the nation’s imagination by storm. By the time she was in university, the bodies had been studied and photographed, but she’d been lucky enough to be part of a team that took one of the bog people to be X-rayed and studied using new, more sensitive, equipment. After that, she’d been all about the bones and pursued her PhD in forensic anthropology rather than archaeology.
There were times she wished she’d stuck with archaeology—all these years later she’d seen more human bones than she cared to think about.
Though capturing the context of a body was not part of her field, based on what little she knew about what she was here to see, context was most likely important.
“It seems this room was closed up, sealed off if you will. Those bricks there were covering the door. No one got in, no one got out.” Oren rocked back on his heels, his voice grim.
“And no one has any idea how long ago that was done?” Melissa flexed her bad left arm out of habit, the familiar ache barely registering as she surveyed the destruction.
“Glenncailty was ready to fall down around us until Seamus O’Muircheartaigh—that’s the owner—decided to turn it into this fancy hotel a few years ago. There are stories about the castle, legends even, and I’d maybe heard that there was a doorway that had been bricked it.”
She’d read about the renovations on the website and had looked at the before pictures. “Why wasn’t this room opened when the castle was renovated?”
“For that you’d have to ask Seamus. I could only speculate.” Oren rocked back and forth on his heels, as if he was having trouble keeping from saying more.
“And what is your speculation?”
“That Seamus knew he was tempting fate herself by letting people in here and didn’t want to make it worse.”
Melissa frowned. “What do you mean?”
Oren looked at her. “Glenncailty is haunted.”
Melissa waited for the rest of the statement, or for him to laugh, but it appeared that he was quite serious.
“It’s haunted?”
“Yes.”
“Someone saw a ghost?”
“Not someone, many people, and not just one ghost.”
Melissa nodded, accepting that, though she didn’t believe in ghosts.
“You think that the owner—Seamus, was it?—knew that there was something bad in there, and that opening it might cause there to be more ghosts.”
“He knew that no one would have done such a thing without reason. Or at least that’s what I think, but I’m sure I couldn’t say.”
“So why was it opened now?”
“Well, that part of the story I’m still working on, but I’ll tell you that Séan Donnovan, a farmer in the area, came to the castle and he’s the one who took it down.” Oren gestured to the remnants of plaster and wood on the floor.
“So this—” she gestured, “—was a wall erected to hide the stone and the door?”
“It was.”
“And did he say why he took it down?”
“He said a few things, but none of them made much sense.”
There was definitely something that Oren wasn’t telling her, but Melissa let it go for now. She was anxious to get into the room.
She took a few steps forward, until she was beside the partially open door, and set down her case. She wouldn’t take it inside, so as to minimize her impact to the scene—plus, that freed up her good right hand. “As far as the police are concerned, what needs to happen?”
“We need to know what we’re looking at. If it’s something natural or something unnatural.”
“You mean how they died.”
“Yes, and we need to know how old the bodies…bones are.”
“Are you prepared for this to become a police matter if they’re more recent than you think?”
“There’s plenty of sadness in our history, and so if the bones are very old, they’ll be blessed and buried, no matter how they died. If they’re recent, we’ll open an investigation.”
From the tone of his voice, it was clear that he didn’t want to open an investigation. Squatting, she opened her case and took out a small, lightweight torch.
“I don’t want to disappoint you, but I may not be able to give you a clear answer as to date of death based only on the skeletons. A human decomposes down to the bone at any point between a few months to a year after death. We can use teeth for radio carbon dating, but that’s only accurate for remains older than 500 years and anyone alive after 1955, because the radiocarbon levels worldwide doubled around then due to nuclear testing.
“So if your remains are between, say, seventy and 500 years old, carbon-14 won’t work.”
“Ah, well then.” Oren rubbed the side of his nose.
“Don’t give up yet,” Melissa said as she pulled on gloves and took a mask out of its plastic package. “I’ll gather samples for other tests that might be able to tell us more about when they lived rather than died. We’ll test for polonium-201 and uranium-243. I’ll need you to take the samples to Dublin. The National Museum has agreed to test them, though it may take a while.”
“But they said they didn’t have time for this case.”
“Don’t worry, Sergeant, they know they’re coming.” She’d had to name-drop like mad and call in a few favors, but she’d gotten the museum to agree to run tests.
“So you think you’ll be able to tell me something?” He was taking notes as she spoke, and Melissa had worked with enough law enforcement or military personnel to know that while they might not always understand what she was saying, they liked to put it all into reports.
“With the trace element tests I should be able to at least date the remains to before or after 1900. Anything more precise than that and we’ll be using forensic archeology, not anthropology, because we’ll use the context and artifacts to date, rather than the bones alone.”
Oren grinned. “So you will give me a date.”
“Yes, I will, but it will be an educated guess, based on multiple factors,” she warned.
“How about I put down that you will give me a date?”
Melissa gave in, now anxious to get started. She put the mask on. “Sergeant, are you joining me?” she asked, voice muffled.
“No, I’ve seen enough for now.” He stopped outside the door, clearly reluctant to go in. “If you need anything or feel anything strange, I want you to call out.”
“Thank you, but I doubt that will
be necessary.”
Torch in her left hand, camera in her right, Melissa went in.
She’d set the camera to record. It had a function that would allow her to pull good quality stills from the video. If she were lucky, she’d be able to produce a 3D rendering of the room. She’d purchased several software programs that did renderings after seeing a presentation on the process at conference, but as of yet had only used it a few times.
She was thinking about that—the photos, the modeling, what she would do with the bones—as she stepped over the threshold.
Those thoughts died away as she looked around.
How terribly, terribly sad.
It was a large, bright room, with windows on three walls. The clouds had parted and the setting sun lit the room, but even the golden light couldn’t hide the destruction and sadness here. The walls weren’t exposed stone. They sported what had once been white wainscoting and pale blue patterned wallpaper. The furniture was Victorian in style and well made, though the room was a mess. Only a few pieces were upright, and many looked broken.
The air in the room was close and smelled of decay and dust. There were bits of rotted cloth and broken lumber carpeting the wood floors. Melissa was glad for the mask.
A modest four-poster bed sat near the door on the right-hand wall. On the other side of that, within arms-reach of the bed, was a lovely wood crib. Tattered lace was draped over the railings and dust coated it, but the delicate lines of the wood indicated that it was bought for a child who was loved.
Melissa had seen shocking things, horrifying things, and even disgusting things, but this abandoned nursery was the saddest. At first glance it was melancholy rather than gruesome. Or at least it would have been if she didn’t already know there were bodies in here.
There were other, smaller beds on the other side of the crib. The larger bed must have been for the nurse. Shredded white cloth hung from the ceiling over each bed—the remnants of pretty canopies. The scrolled sleigh-style bed frames were beautiful. The mattresses were pulled off, half fallen to the floor, and one was ripped open and leaking horse hair.