Calendar Girls

by April Hill

  I looked closer, mostly for effect. I couldn’t afford to lose this story—if it was a story— not even to a pal like Angie. “That is not Devlin O’Connell,” I announced firmly. “What that is is some Irish lobster dude who could bear a very slight resemblance to Devlin O’Connell; maybe a little around the eyes, and if he took a bath and shaved once in a while. But your eye is still as good as ever. Under all that fish slime and sweat, this guy is definitely, mildly hunky.”

  I must have hit exactly the right tone, because Angie, who has the instincts of a flesh-eating fungus when it comes to a good story, picked up the clipping and looked at it again.

  “Are you sure it’s not him?” she asked plaintively.

  “No, Angie. I’m not sure. I’m just making this all up, and the next time you go to the ladies room, I’m planning to bail out of here and hop the first plane to Ireland.” I glanced at the paper again. “To Ishkabibble Island or whatever this sinkhole is called. Now, go back and smear your congressman, and next time you go downstairs, remember you owe me a large latte.”

  Devlin O’Connell—for those of you who can’t read, or are too young to remember—wrote an astonishing first novel about the middle-ages in Ireland that became an international publishing sensation. That was twelve years ago, and the book incited a craze for things Celtic that swept the nation and emptied bookstore shelves of every available copy of The Round Tower. Handsome and brilliant was apparently an irresistible combination, because for months following the book’s appearance, O’Connell’s every movement was front-page news. Tabloid reporters, in particular, clambered all over one another, slavering for the privilege of paying top dollar for a grainy photo of one of his reputed bar brawls, or for any tingling detail of his legendary erotic conquests. It was even possible to find someone, here and there, who had actually read all one thousand two hundred and forty-two pages of The Round Tower—like me.

  But the gazillions of folks clamoring for O’Connell to pen a sequel to The Round Tower were about to be crushed by disappointment. After six gaudy months in the limelight, Devlin O’Connell simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. He didn’t show up to collect his Pulitzer Prize for Literature, but reportedly donated the money to an Irish charity for inner-city kids. There was no lack of rumors about his whereabouts, of course, a lot of them made up by Seek. He was living with a tribe of Christian headhunters in a Brazilian jungle, and working on a sequel. He had undergone plastic surgery and hair transplants in a private clinic in the Swiss Alps, and now bore a striking resemblance to Howard Stern. He had become a deranged hermit, like Howard Hughes, suffering from paranoia and an irrational fear of toilet paper and canned tuna. Unsubstantiated sightings of the reclusive genius continued to make the nightly news. Finally, though, after several years with no verified sightings or new scandalous tidbits, the public lost interest, as it always does.

  And here he was, posing with a twenty-two pound lobster, in a local newspaper published thousands of miles away, in some forlorn little place in Ireland called—I checked the name again to be certain of the spelling—Inishbofin Island.

  * * *

  I went home that night with my brain on fire. I had been fascinated by Devlin O’Connell for years, and I’d been searching files for him ever since I went to work for Seek, where hounding people who are looking for privacy is what we do best. Of course, Seek usually preferred its prey to be guilty of things like beheading a close relative, or embezzling the life savings of a lot of frail little old ladies. You know—the human touch.

  “Who the hell cares about some has-been writer?” asked Todd that night, when I told him about my big scoop. “He probably went off somewhere and drank himself to death.”

  “Maybe, but if this does turn out to be O’Connell, it’ll make a terrific story,” I persisted. “I’m thinking of maybe going to Ireland to check it out.”

  “And what does Leland have to say about that?”

  Todd was right, of course. Leland Wiley always had the final say about the stories we pursued, and his word was law. If Seek had been a third-world country, Leland would have disappeared the opposition and elected himself Dictator-in-Chief.

  “So, if Leland doesn’t like it, I’ll just do it on my own,” I replied smugly. “When he reads it, maybe he’ll…”

  Todd reacted to my bravery with a snort. “Yet another of the half-baked ideas you’re always coming up with. If you take off like that, without his okay, you’ll not only jeopardize your position at the magazine, but your reputation as a journalist.”

  “My position!” I whooped. “Face it, Todd. My position, as you call it, is crap. The whole magazine is crap. And my reputation is a couple of steps lower than crap. Sub-sub crap!”

  “It’s also the best job you’ve ever had, and probably the best one you’ll ever get,” he said coldly. “And if you think I’m going to pick up the tab for you to ruin your career by running all over the world chasing some phony literary has-been, you can think again.”

  “Did I ask you for anything?” I grumbled.

  Todd gave a cynical laugh, the one he always used when dismissing me. “The evening is young, dear.”

  And at that precise moment, I knew. I was going to leave Todd, and my job.

  To hell with both of them! I was going to Ireland.

  I had around seven hundred dollars in my personal checking account—earmarked for the month’s phone and cable bills, and I could pocket another three hundred by helping myself to the week’s grocery money. Which meant that I had just enough to cover a cheap hotel and a round trip airline ticket to the Emerald Isle—if I didn’t mind being duct-taped to the wing.

  The timing was perfect. With a bit of luck, and a decent Internet connection, I could send in my story in time for the St. Patrick’s Day issue, and be back in Dublin’s fair city for the parade.

  * * *

  It was raining when I arrived in Dublin, and never stopped raining during the long bus trip to the small fishing village on the Galway coast where I would board the ferry to Inishbofin Island—The Island of the White Cow—populated by an estimated one hundred and sixty human residents, considerably more sheep and cows, and lots and lots and lots of birds.

  Which suggested to me that locating one elusive Pulitzer Prize recipient shouldn’t be all that difficult. All I had to do was avoid stepping in too much cow and/or sheep shit, and ask a few probing questions of some of the naïve villagers.

  From the sea, Inishbofin looked like a typical Irish coastal fishing village in early spring. Pretty, intensely green, and shrouded in fog. I checked into the cheapest bed and breakfast I could find, and then went out for a walk, trying to ignore the incessant rain. The village sat on a low embankment, separated from the beach by a one-lane road and one of the long, ubiquitous stonewalls that twine and twist across the Irish countryside like one of the snakes that Ireland is famous for not having, thanks to St. Patrick, himself. The rocky beach was strewn with seaweed and kelp, and dotted with crystal-clear tide pools that would vanish when the tide came in. I noticed that there weren’t many boats in the harbor, though, and figured it would be a simple matter to learn which of them belonged to my prey.

  I was wrong. Everyone I talked with was wonderfully friendly and cheerful, but not a single one professed to know or have heard of anyone called Devlin O’Connell. When I tried showing a blurry copy of the lobster clipping, the same people merely shrugged their shoulders and wished me well in my search. That particular newspaper was from the mainland, they explained, and the consensus seemed to be that nobody who fished these waters had netted a lobster of such a prodigious size for more than fifty years. I spent the better part of my remaining Euros to rent a rusted bike, and toured the other villages on the island in the continual rain, asking the same questions, and getting the same answers.

  After three days, I was feeling mildewed, and morose. I was out of time, and out of money, except for the sixty bucks I’d tucked away for an emergency. (You might be surprised
to learn that visiting a quaint Irish fishing village doesn’t come as cheap as it did, once upon a time. The bottom line was that I was no closer to locating Devlin O’Connell than the day I came ashore. It was also becoming clear to me that everyone I had asked about Devlin had been trying to protect the guy—from people like me, presumably. I had run into a big, green wall.

  On my fourth day, defeated in body and spirit, I packed my bag and walked into town to catch the ferry back to the mainland. For the first time since I arrived, it wasn’t raining. With an hour to wait, I decided to squander what was left of the budget to spring for a sandwich at the only pub in town. I had just taken my first bite when, without asking permission, a tall, attractive man in jeans, a short, neatly trimmed beard, and a tweed jacket sat down at my table.

  “I understand you’re looking for me,” he said.

  For a second, I think I may have actually stopped breathing. Devlin O’Connell was sitting across the table from me. Alive, in the flesh, and looking something exactly the way he should—like Errol Flynn. He helped himself to one of my chips.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, in a transparent effort at sounding confused. “Were you speaking to me?”

  He smiled, and took a second chip from my plate. “Save it, lady. I’ve known you were on my tail before you left New York, which only goes to prove that I have friends in some very low places. We may be isolated out here, but we do have Google. Your name is Catherine Allman, and you call yourself a journalist. You work for Leland Wiley, which doesn’t say much for your talent, or your character.” When he motioned to the young woman at the bar, she drew a pint from the first wooden keg on the counter and brought it to the table. O’Connell was apparently a regular customer. “Now,” he continued. “What is it you want from me?”

  Suddenly, I began to feel really rotten about what I was doing, or what I’d tried to do, anyway. Talk about failure. Not only had I failed to get the story I’d come for, I’d just been caught red-handed, stalking a man who simply wanted to be left alone. “I don’t even know you,” I stammered. “Why should I want anything from you?”

  “You look frightened,” he observed. “Is that because you’re feeling guilty, or because you know the scumbag you work for will fire your ass when you come back empty-handed?”

  I was so nervous now that I was trembling, but it was too late to change my stupid story, so I just kept lying—which is a pretty good description of what I’d been doing for a living since the first day I went to work for Leland Wiley. “I still don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I lied, as calmly as I could manage without throwing up on the damned table. “I don’t work for anybody. My name is…Kirby. Janet…uh, Jeanette Kirby, and I’m a trained ortho…orothinologist.” After garbling the word, and my supposed name, I attempted a small, brittle laugh that sounded phony, even to me. “You know, someone who studies birds? And if it were any of your business—which it isn’t— I’d explain that I came here to photograph some of island’s birds. For this book I’m writing. About birds. I’ll be going back to the mainland on the afternoon ferry. And for your information, Mr.—Mr. whoever you are, I am not nervous.”

  He shook his head. “You should be. Around here, someone who tells whoppers as big as that last one is asking to have her mouth washed out with soap. And if she keeps it up, she could even get her backside paddled. The word you’re looking for is ornithologist. Would you like me to spell it?”

  “I know how to spell it, thank you. Another lie. I had no idea how to spell it. That’s why I had Spellcheck. “I just…it’s just that you made me nervous, by attacking me the way…”

  He smiled. “Attacking you?”

  “Yes—attacking me. What would you call it if someone you’d never met just walked up and began insulting you?”

  He smiled again, and without another word, finished his beer and stood up to leave. But then, he seemed to change his mind, and paused in the doorway for a moment.

  “Go home, Ms. Allman. There’s no story for you here. When—or if—I ever feel compelled to talk to a genuine reporter, I’ll call one. One who’s capable of telling the truth.”

  And with that final slap in the face, he walked out. I watched through the pub’s smoky windows as he got into a battered green truck and drove away. It was only then that I stopped biting my lip, and started to cry—just a little.

  Next, I tried to work myself up to a first-class snit, which wasn’t as easy as I had expected. The hard fact was that Devlin O’Connell had treated me exactly the way I deserved to be treated. Maybe better than I deserved. From what I’d read about the man’s temper, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d hauled off and punched me in the nose,

  The longer I mulled over his parting words, though, the angrier I got, and the easier it got to work up that snit I mentioned. Okay, so I hadn’t been exactly honest. That’s the way the fame game worked, right? I dug through my wallet until I found my emergency stash. Spent carefully, sixty bucks would get me another forty-eight hours at my B&B, and another rented bike. I got up from the table and wandered over to the bar, where the young woman who’d delivered O’Connell’s beer was drying glasses. What the hell, I reasoned. She was young, pretty, and visibly smitten with the village hero. And from my experience, young women with a crush on someone simply love to talk about the object of their affections.

  The next morning, I rented the same rusted bike, and went looking for a small-whitewashed farmhouse with blue shutters and a battered green truck parked in the yard. The one with a sign on the mailbox that read, O’Flannery, Corncrake Cottage.

  His name wasn’t Devlin O’Connell. It was Connor O’Flannery.

  “He had to change it, y’ see,” the blushing young lady at the pub had explained, pleased to be discussing him with one of his closest friends from the old days in the States—which was how I’d introduced myself to her. “And it was all because of that Flannery O’Connor, y’ know? The famous book writer? A woman, she was, and both of them writers from Ireland. A bit confusing it would ha’ been. He took Devlin from the old graveyard, at the church, and his own dear mother was an O’Flannery before she married, y’know.”

  I didn’t know, and I had no idea at all what the hell a corncrake was, but in spite of the mist and heavy fog that had begun to creep back in, I found the house about two miles outside the village, at the end of a short, muddy lane. It was a cottage, actually—an unusually pretty and picturesque cottage, small and whitewashed, with the traditional thatched roof, and flowers just beginning to appear in the window boxes on either side of the entranceway which had been painted an almost electric shade of blue, to match the shutters and what I took to be the Irish version of a Dutch door, or maybe vice-versa. Behind the house, I noticed a low stone wall separating the small yard from the bright green fields beyond, and assumed that it was there to keep O’Flannery’s two light brown cows and six black-faced sheep from wandering into his spotless yard and doing what probably came naturally to even the most picturesque of their species.

  The green truck was nowhere in sight, and after watching the house for close to an hour, I finally decided the coast was probably as clear as it was going to get. I had already learned (from the fact that none of the doors at the place I was staying had locks) that most of the charming, relentlessly friendly people of Inishbofin Island were trusting souls, and could only hope that O’Flannery had the same attitudes. Still, the cottage’s front door faced the road, so I decided to use a rear window to make my entrance.

  Inside, the little house was immaculate, filled with books, and pleasantly warm, despite the fog. Corncrake Cottage was obviously very old, but well cared for. There were only three rooms—a tiny kitchen, a fair-sized living room, and off to one side, a small bedroom. I peeked into the bathroom and discovered it was just that. A room with a bathtub and a sink. A quick glance through the rear window I’d just come through revealed what was called, in my home state of Nebraska, an outhouse.

  In the far
corner of the living room, I struck pay dirt. A large wooden desk, equipped with a laptop, and a printer. And stacks of printed pages. The new and long awaited masterpiece, maybe? I rummaged through my purse for the digital camera I was never without.

  * * *

  I had photographed each of the rooms and the outhouse, and was leafing through the first pile of papers for a title page, when I heard a soft chuckle behind me. When I whirled around, Connor O’Flannery was sitting on the edge of his plank dining table, holding in his right hand the biggest wooden spoon I’d ever seen.

  “I don’t enjoy violence, as a rule,” he said pleasantly. “But I suppose it does have its uses. When you catch an intruder in your home, for instance.” Before I could decide which way to run, he had a firm grip on my arm and a second later, I found myself facedown over the table, with his hand pressed firmly on the small of my back.

  “Let me go, you fucking bastard!” I shrieked.

  “Had you rather I take you into the village?” he inquired pleasantly. “To the police? Breaking and entering while a guest in a foreign country? I’m fairly certain a charge like that will get you deported, if nothing else. Your choice, Miss Allman. A very sore bottom, or a revoked passport and an international incident?”

  Later, I would devoutly wish that I had chosen the international incident option, but how was I to know that being spanked with a simple wooden cooking utensil could leave a person’s ass with a cluster of egg-shaped welts and a thirty-six hour pain in the same ass?

  He was very thorough, and in no hurry, at all, and since my feet barely touched the floor, my defenses were limited to squirming, pounding my fists uselessly on the table, and doing my level best to kick him in the balls. The kicking attempt was not only a failure, but my single near-miss brought on a retaliatory barrage of scalding blows to the backs of my thighs that smarted like blazes, even through the heavy fabric of the designer jeans I was wearing. Connor O’Flannery may have been a faded literary legend, but for a has-been intellectual, he’d managed to stay in damned good physical shape. I had also learned something important about lobster fishing. All that heavy lifting gives his biceps a terrific workout.