by J. D. Robb
“My memory doesn’t stretch quite that far.” There was nothing of the simple pleasure of the rooftop garden in his tone now, but the edge of the Dublin alley. “What do you want?”
“Not your money, or some favor, or whatever it is people must try to wheedle out of you. Not every blessed soul’s on the take, you know,” she said with some impatience. “But I’d like a few minutes of your time.” She mopped at her face. “Out of this bloody heat. In my office? We could be private there, and I think you’ll have an interest in what I have to tell you.”
“If it’s about her, I’ve no interest whatsoever.” He called for the elevator, fully intending to go all the way down, and straight outside. “I don’t give a damn where she is, how she is, who she is.”
“That’s a hard line, and from an Irishman, too. The Irish men, they love their mam.”
He flashed her a look that had her taking a full step back before she realized it. “I’ve managed fine without one since she walked out the door. I’ve neither the time nor inclination to discuss her, or any personal business with you. Louise may believe you’re a valuable asset to this facility, but push the wrong button, and you’ll be out on your ear.”
She lifted her chin. She squared her shoulders. “Ten minutes in my office, and if you’re so inclined, I’ll resign. I feel I have a debt to pay, and I begin to think I’ve left the paying too long. I don’t want anything from you, lad, but a bit of your time.”
“Ten minutes.” He snapped it out.
She led the way to an office, past a series of session rooms and a small library. It was cool inside, and orderly, with a trim little desk, a small sofa, two comfortable chairs.
Without asking, she went to a small friggie and took out two bottles of lemonade.
“I worked on a crisis line in Dublin,” she began. “I was fresh out of university, working on my advanced degree, and thought I knew everything I needed to know. I intended to go into private practice as a counselor, and make myself a tidy pile of money. The hours on the crisis line were part of my training.”
She handed him one of the bottles. “It happened I was working the lines when your mother called. I could tell she was young. I could hear that. Even younger than me, and hurt, and scared to death.”
“From what I know of her, that’s unlikely.”
“What do you know of her?” Moira shot back. “You were a baby.”
“A bit older when she walked.”
“Walked, my arse. Siobhan wouldn’t have left you if there’d been a knife at her throat.”
“Her name was Meg, and she dusted her hands of me before my sixth birthday.” Finished with this nonsense, he set the bottle down. “What’s your game?”
“Her name was Siobhan Brody, whatever the bastard told you. She was eighteen when she came to Dublin from Clare, looking for the adventure and excitement of the city. Well, the poor thing got more than her share. Bloody hell, sit down for five minutes.”
She ran the cold bottle over her brow. “I didn’t know this would be so hard,” she murmured. “I always thought you knew, and after this place, was sure of it. Though the fact you built it changed my opinion of you entirely. I figured you for another Patrick Roarke.”
A good act, he thought. The sudden distress and weariness of tone. “What you think, what you figure, means nothing to me. Nor does he. Or she.”
She set the bottle down, as he had. “Does it matter to you that I know, as sure as I’m standing here, that Patrick Roarke murdered your mother?”
His skin flashed hot, then cold again. But he never flinched. “She left.”
“Dead was the only way she’d have left you. She loved you with every beat of her heart. Her aingeal, she called you. Her angel, and when she did, she all but sang it.”
“Your time’s moving quickly, Ms. O’Bannion, and you’re not selling anything I’m buying.”
“So, you can be hard, too.” She nodded, picked up the bottle and sipped as if she needed something to do with her hands. “Well, I expect you can be, and have been. I’m not selling anything here. I’m telling you. Patrick Roarke killed Siobhan Brody. It couldn’t be proved. Why should the cops have listened to me if I’d had the courage to go to them? He had cops in his pocket back then, and enough of the scum he ran with would’ve sworn to it when he said she’d run off. But it’s a lie.”
“That he killed is no news to me. And that he had pocket cops to cover his murdering ass isn’t a bulletin either.” He lifted a shoulder. “If you’re toying with blackmailing me for his sins—”
“Oh, bloody hell. Money doesn’t drive every train.”
“Most of them.”
“She was your mother.”
He angled his head as if mildly interested, but something hot was roiling in his belly. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because it’s true. And I’ve nothing to gain by telling you. Not even, I’m afraid, a lightening of my conscience. I did everything wrong, you see. With all good intentions, but I handled it wrong because I thought I was so wise. And because I cared about her. I got wrapped up in it all.”
She drew a deep breath, and set her lemonade aside again. “The night she called the crisis line, I told her where she could go. I soothed and I listened, and I told her what she could do, just as I was trained, just as I’d done too many times before. But she was hysterical, and terrified, and I could hear the baby crying. So I broke the rules, and went to get her myself.”
“I might believe you went to get someone, but you’re mistaken if you think she was connected to me.”
She looked up at him again, and this time her eyes weren’t so canny, but swamped with emotion. “You were the most beautiful child I’d seen in my life. Breathtaking little boy, dressed in blue pajamas. She’d run out, you see, snatching you right out of your crib, and not bringing anything along. Nothing but you.”
Her voice broke on the end, as if she saw it all again. Then she drew in, went on. “She held you so close, so tight, though three of the fingers of her right hand were broken, and her left eye was swollen shut. He’d given her a few good kicks, too, before he’d stumbled off, already half-pissed, to get more whiskey. That’s when she’d grabbed you up and run out. She wouldn’t go to the hospital or a clinic, because she was afraid he’d find her there. Afraid he’d hurt her so bad she wouldn’t be able to take care of you. I took her to a shelter, and they got her a doctor. She wouldn’t take the drugs. She wouldn’t have been able to tend to you. So she talked to me, talked through the pain of it, and through the long night.”
Though Roarke continued to stand, Moira sat now, gave a long sigh. “She got work in a pub when first she came to Dublin. She was a pretty thing and fresh with it. That’s where he found her, her only eighteen and innocent, naive, wanting romance and adventure. He was a handsome man, and it’s said charming when he wanted to be. She fell in love, girls do with men they should run from. He seduced her, promised to marry her, pledged his true love, and whatever it took.”
She gestured, then walked to stare out of the window while Roarke waited. While he said nothing. “When she came up pregnant, he took her in. He said he’d marry her by and by. She said she’d told her family she was married as she was ashamed to tell them the truth of it. That she was married and happy and all was well, and she’d come home for a visit when she could. Foolish girl,” she said quietly. “Well, she had the baby, and he was pleased it was a boy, and still said by and by for marriage. She pushed for it, as she wanted her child to have a true father. And that’s when he began to beat her, or knock her about.”
She turned back, facing him now. “It wasn’t so bad at first—that’s what she said to me. A lot of them say that. Or it was her fault, you see, for nagging or annoying him. That’s part of the cycle this sort of thing takes.”
“I know the cycle, the statistics. The pathology.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t have done what you’ve done here without taking the time to know. But it�
��s different, entirely, when it’s personal.”
“I don’t know the girl you’re speaking of.” A stranger, he told himself. A fantasy, more like. A tale this woman wove with some cagey endgame in mind. It had to be.
“I knew her,” Moira said simply.
And her quiet voice shook something inside him. “So you say.”
“I do say. The night she called the crisis line, he’d brought another woman into the house, right under her nose, and when she’d objected, he broke her fingers and blackened her eye.”
His throat was dry now, burning dry. But his voice stayed cool. “And you have proof of all this?”
“I have proof of nothing. I’m telling you what I know. And what you do with it is your business. Maybe you’re as hard as him after all. But I’ll finish it out. She stayed a week at the shelter. I saw her every day. I’d decided she was my mission. God help us both. I lectured her, and used my fine education on her. She had family back in Clare—parents, two brothers, a sister—a twin she told me. I convinced her to write to them, for she refused to call. Said she couldn’t bear the shame of speaking it all out loud. So I pressured her to write, to tell her family she was coming home and bringing her son. I posted the letter for her myself.”
Her desk ’link rang, and she started like a woman coming out of a dream. After a quick, trembling breath, she ignored it, and went on.
“I pushed her into this, Roarke. Pushed her too hard and too fast because I was so flaming smart. I was so right. And the next day she was gone from the shelter, leaving a note for me that she couldn’t run off and take a man’s son away from him without giving him the chance to do what was right. Her son should have a father.”
She shook her head. “I was so angry. All my time, my precious time and my efforts wasted because this girl was clinging to her romantic foolishness. I stewed about it for days, and the more I stewed the madder I got. I decided I’d break more rules, and go to the flat where she’d been living with him and talk to her again. I’d save her, you see, and that beautiful little boy, in spite of herself. So I took my self-righteousness and my high-flown principles to the slum where he’d kept her and knocked on the door.”
He had a flash, the sights and smells of his childhood. The beer vomit and piss in the alleyways, the crack of a hand across a cheek. The air of mean despair. “If you knocked on his door in your social worker’s suit, you were either brave or stupid.”
“I was both. Back then, I was both. I could’ve been sacked for what I was doing, should’ve been. But I didn’t care, for my pride was on the line here. My pride.”
“Is that what you were after saving, Mrs. O’Bannion?”
His cool, and lightly amused voice made her wince. “I wanted to save her, and you, but aye, I wanted my pride with it. I wanted the package.”
“Few were saved in that time and place. And pride was a bit dear for most of us to afford on a daily basis.”
“I learned the truth of that, and Siobhan was my first lesson. A hard lesson. I had with me the letter that had come from her parents, and I fully intended to scoop the two of you up and send you off to Clare.”
There was a bright burst of laughter, a child’s laughter, outside the office, then the sound of feet running down the hall. A rush of female voices followed, and then there was silence.
She sat again, folded her hands on her lap like a school girl. “He answered the door himself. I could see right away why she’d fallen for him. Handsome as two devils. He looked me up and down, bold as brass, and I jutted my chin right up and said I’d come to speak to Siobhan.”
She closed her eyes a moment, brought it back. “He leaned on the doorjamb there, and smirked at me. She’d run off, he said, and good riddance to her. Stolen fifty pounds of his hard-earned money and taken herself off. If I saw her, I was to tell her to keep right on going.
“He lied so smooth, I believed him. I thought she’d come to her senses after all, and gone home to Clare. Then I heard the baby crying. I heard you crying. I pushed my way inside. I must’ve taken him by surprise or I’d never have gotten past him. ‘She’d never leave her baby,’ I said, ‘so where is she? What have you done with Siobhan?’ ”
Her hands unlinked, and one of them curled into a fist to pound on her knee. “A woman came out of the bedroom carrying you with as much care as you carry a cabbage. Your nappie was dripping, your face was dirty. Siobhan, she tended to you like you were a little prince. She’d never have let you get into such a state. But the woman was a bit worse for drink, a florid-looking thing wearing nothing but a wrapper gaping open in the front. ‘That’s my wife,’ he said to me. ‘That’s Meg Roarke, and that’s our brat there.’ And he slipped a knife from his belt, watching me as he flicked a thumb over the point. ‘Any who says different,’ he said, ‘will find it hard to say anything after.’ ”
More than three decades later, in the cool haven of her office, Moira shuddered. “He called me by name. Siobhan must’ve told him my name. Never in my life have I been so afraid as when Patrick Roarke said my name. I left. If anyone left you there, with him, it was me.”
“For all you know she’d gone home, or gotten away. Harder to travel with a baby on your shoulder.”
Moira leaned forward. It wasn’t anger he saw on her face, or impatience. It was passion. The heat of it blasted out of him, and turned cold under his skin.
“You were her heart and her soul. Her aingeal. And do you think I didn’t check? I had, at least, the belly for that. I opened the letter. They were so relieved, so happy to hear from her. Told her to come home, to come and bring you home. Asked if she needed money to get there, or wanted her brothers, or her father to come fetch the both of you. They gave her family news. How her brother Ned had married and had a son as well, and her sister Sinead was engaged.”
Overcome, she reached for the lemonade again, but this time simply rubbed the bottle between her palms. “I contacted them myself, asked them to tell me when she got there. Two weeks later, I heard from them, and they’re asking me, is she coming then? When is she coming? I knew she was dead.”
She sat back. “I knew in my heart when I’d been in the hovel and seen you, she was dead. Murdered by his hand. I saw her death in his eyes, when he looked at me and said my name, I saw it. Her parents, and her brother Ned, they came to Dublin when I told them what I knew. They went to the police, and were shrugged off. Ned, he was set on and beaten. Badly beaten, and rocks were thrown through the windows of my flat. I was terrified. And twice I saw him walking by there, he made sure I saw him.”
She pressed her lips together. “I stepped away from it. Shameful as it is, that’s what I did. Records showed Patrick and Meg Roarke were man and wife, and had been for five years. No record of your birth could be produced, but the woman said the babe was hers, and there was no one to say different. No one who dared, in any case. Girls like Siobhan came and went in Dublin town all the time. She’d turn up when she was ready, and I nodded and said that was so because I was too afraid to do otherwise.”
There was a hideous weight on his chest, but he only nodded. “And you tell me this long, unsubstantiated story now, because . . .”
“I’ve heard of you. Made it my business to keep track of you, best I could even after I married and moved to America. I knew how you ran, much as he did. And figured those few months she was able to give you had been burned out of you, and he’d stamped himself on more than your handsome face. A bad seed, I could tell myself. You were just another bad seed, and I could comfort myself that way, and not be wakened in the middle of the night with that pretty baby crying in my dreams.”
Absently, she picked up a small paperweight of clear glass shaped like a heart, and turned it over and over in her hands. “But in the last couple of years, I’ve heard things that made me wonder if that was so. And when Louise came to me, told me of this place, and what you meant to do with it, I took it as a sign, a sign it was time to speak of it.”
She studied his face.
“Maybe it’s too late to make any difference to you, or to me. But I needed to say it to your face. I’ll take a truth test if you want it. Or I’ll resign as I said I would, and you can write me off.”
He told himself he didn’t believe her, not a single word. But there was pain under his heart, like a knife between the ribs. He was afraid it was truth stabbing at him. “You should understand that at least some of what you’re claiming I’ll be able to verify or debunk.”
“I hope you’ll do just that. There’s one other thing. She wore a claddaugh, a silver claddaugh on her left hand—like a wedding ring, she told me, that he’d bought her when you were born. His promise that you’d be a family, in the eyes of God and man. When she came out of the bedroom, Meg Roarke was wearing Siobhan’s ring. The ring that girl wouldn’t take off her finger, even after he’d beaten her. The bitch was wearing it on her pinky, as her hands were too fat for it. And when she saw my eyes land on it, when she saw that I knew . . . she smiled.”
Tears began to run down her cheeks now. “He killed her—because she left, because she came back. Because he could. And kept you, I suppose, because you were the image of him. If I hadn’t pushed her so hard, had given her more time to heal. To think . . .”
She wiped her face, and rose to go to her desk. From a drawer she took a small photograph. “This is all I have. I took this myself of the two of you the day before she left the shelter. You should have it,” she said, and handed it to him.
He looked down, saw a young girl with red hair and green eyes still bruised from a beating. She wore a simple blue shirt with that red hair falling over its shoulders. She was smiling, though her eyes were sad and tired, she was smiling, with her cheek pressed against that of her baby. A face that was still rounded and soft with innocence, but unmistakably his own.
So he was smiling as well. A bright, happy smile. And the hand that cuddled him close had a silver claddaugh on its long, delicate finger.