She played the cadenza and imagined the hum of violins. Dunmullach held charms: calendar-worthy scenery, fine whiskey, and fine—what had O’Reilly called it?—craic. Handsome men. Not that she wanted any entanglements. She’d had two, with fellow musicians. Neither worked out. The first cheated with a flute player. The second gave her a ring—with the unspoken expectation her career took a backseat to his. When she’d been offered the assistant conductor’s position with the Cork City Philharmonic he’d given her an ultimatum: him or the job. She didn’t regret not choosing him, even if the job hadn’t worked out. She’d never be satisfied putting her own aspirations on the shelf to protect some insecure guy’s fragile ego. She learned her lesson. Romance would only distract her. Of course, merely admiring copper-red hair or storm-gray eyes wasn’t exactly getting entangled—
“I’d have played the trill a bit more vibrato.”
Gethsemane jerked and bumped the Steinway, sending sheet music to the floor. “Jesus, Irish.” She rubbed her elbow and glared at Eamon, suddenly seated beside her. “Stop doing that.”
“You should be used to it by now, darlin’.” Eamon motioned the scattered papers back to the piano’s music rack.
“I am getting used to you. A few days ago I’d have thrown something through you.”
Eamon nodded at the sheet music, fluttering pages. “So what d’ya think?”
Gethsemane played several measures from the opening of the third movement. “Not bad.” She bit back a smile.
“Not bad?” A blue halo flared around Eamon’s head. “Not bad? The Giant’s Causeway’s ‘not bad.’ The Book of Kells is ‘not bad.’ Beethoven’s bloody Fifth’s ‘not bad.’ That concerto—” he jabbed a finger through the paper “—is feckin’ brilliant.”
Gethsemane laughed. “Okay, the concerto’s—it’s called ‘St. Brennan’s Ascendant,’ by the way—” she mimicked Eamon’s Irish accent “—is feckin’ brilliant.”
“Unlike your brogue.” The aura dissipated. “And it’s ‘Opus Twenty-seven, Number One, Violin Concerto in G Major,’ not ‘St. Brennan’s Ascendant’.”
“It’s ‘St. Brennan’s Ascendant’ since Riordan and Dunleavy asked me this afternoon. Besides, ‘St. Brennan’s Ascendant’ fits on the program better than,” another brogue attempt, “‘Opus Twenty-seven, Number One, Violin Concerto in G Major’.”
Eamon grimaced. “Work on that.”
The phone rang. Gethsemane rose to answer it. “I’ll work on my accent if you work on the violin cadenza.”
“Work on the—There’s nothing wrong with the violin cadenza.”
“Not for an eternally thirty-seven-year-old compositional genius. A merely gifted sixteen-year-old student musician might find the fingering tricky,” she called from the kitchen.
“Find a soloist better than ‘merely gifted.’”
Gethsemane shushed him and lifted the receiver. “Hello?” The male caller slurred unintelligible words. “Who is this?”
“Yaknowdamnwellwhoshis! Shhurley! Declanhurley!”
“Mr. Hurley. How are you?”
“HowshahellyathinkIyam? DamnReillyrassinme…”
“Mr. Hurley, I’m having trouble understanding you. Maybe—”
“Unnershan this! I know ya sent O’Reilly after me—”
Eamon appeared next to Gethsemane. “What’s the story?”
She held out the phone.
“Gowl’s hammered,” Eamon said.
“No kidding. What should I do?”
Eamon shrugged. “Hang up on him.”
Gethsemane put the phone back to her ear. “He sounds pretty bad. Like borderline-alcohol-poisoning bad. Maybe I should call someone to go check on him.”
“He wouldn’t do the same for you.”
“Mr. Hurley,” Gethsemane said into the phone. “I’m going to hang up now. I’m going to dial 999—”
“Donshahanguponme! You—” Hurley broke off. When he spoke again his voice sounded distant. “Howdja get in? Whatchawant?”
A loud crack. Gethsemane remembered a baseball game, a home run with bases loaded in the last inning of the league championships. Nausea rose as realization dawned. Wood against flesh and bone sounded the same as wood against leather.
“Mr. Hurley?”
Glass rattled then crashed. A thud. Silence.
“Mr. Hurley?”
Breathing.
“Hello? Is someone there? Hello?”
A beep then a dial tone.
Homicide detectives questioned Gethsemane about the murder until three a.m. Why did Hurley call you? Did Hurley recognize his killer? Did the killer say anything? Afterward, an officer led her to a spartan wooden chair to wait for a ride back to Carraigfaire Cottage. He promised someone would be with her shortly.
Forty-five minutes later, Gethsemane went to find “someone.” The direction she thought led to the squad room led instead to an unfamiliar gray-green maze of Formica tile and peeling walls. Offices lined the hallway, dark behind frosted glass door panes except for one at the far end. The placard posted next to it read Iollan O’Reilly, Detective Inspector, Cold Case Unit. Gethsemane knocked.
“Come,” O’Reilly called.
“Good evening, Inspector,” Gethsemane said to the back of O’Reilly’s head. “I mean, good morning. Did you stay late or come in early?”
“Both.” O’Reilly faced her. “What are you—oh, the Hurley murder. Are you all right? Do you need to talk to someone? We’ve a victim’s assistance officer.”
Gethsemane shook her head. Rehashing the details of what she’d heard while some earnest social worker encouraged her to “process her feelings” was the last thing she wanted. “I just need sleep. I’m exhausted.”
“Tomorrow maybe, after the shock hits.”
“I’ll be okay. I won’t lie, I didn’t like Hurley. Not that I wanted him dead but—” Gethsemane shrugged. “I don’t shock easily since I spent a year helping my brother set up mission hospitals in Africa.”
O’Reilly grinned. “I suspect you wouldn’t let on if you did shock easily. If you change your mind, I’ve a number you can call.”
“Thanks. Can you tell me how to get back to homicide? I tried to find an officer to drive me home and I zigged at fingerprinting when I should have zagged.”
“Have a seat.” O’Reilly picked up his phone.
More sitting. Gethsemane massaged her back as she examined the inspector’s office. His suit jacket and fedora hung on a coat tree. Shelves packed with technical manuals and reference books lined the walls. A mug proclaimed “I’m the Big Brother” from atop English and Irish newspapers stacked on his desk.
“Dr. Brown has waited long enough,” O’Reilly said into the phone. “I’d drive her home myself, but I have a meeting with the Superintendent—Yes, yes, she’s in my office.”
Gethsemane stifled a yawn. O’Reilly’s voice devolved into a distant buzz as her eyes glazed. She dug her nails into her palms and blinked at a collection of photos clustered on one of the shelves. A smiling man with a fedora and gray eyes identical to O’Reilly’s leaned against a police car in the first photo. In the next, the same man posed with his arms around a beautiful woman who shared the inspector’s salt-and-pepper hair. Three young girls and a teen boy sat in front of the couple. The man was absent from the third photo. The boy, grown up into Inspector O’Reilly, stood with an arm around the shoulders of the still beautiful, now gray-haired, woman. The three girls, matured into adults, surrounded them. The youngest, wearing collegiate robes, stood closest to O’Reilly, her arm linked through his. The final photo featured a black cat tangled in silver tinsel.
“Taken care of,” O’Reilly said as he hung up the phone. “An officer will be here—”
“Shortly?” Gethsemane asked.
“—in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks.” Gethsemane pointed at the photos. “Your family?”
“Da, Ma, and sisters. The youngest, Brigid, is gettin’ married next June.” O’Reilly beamed.
“The cat?”
“Nero.”
“Like the emperor?”
“Like the detective. I adopted him after I closed my first case.” He lifted a manila folder from a stack on his desk and opened it. “You mind if I get on with this?”
Gethsemane waved O’Reilly back to his paperwork. Peering over his shoulder, she inhaled sandalwood and clove. “Any leads on the McCarthy case?”
“No,” O’Reilly said without looking up. “And before you ask, it’s still closed.”
She sat on his desk, on top of the file he’d been reading. “How is it still a closed case? You saw the videotape. You know Eamon McCarthy couldn’t possibly have murdered his wife. And now the evidence has been stolen and the investigating officer bludgeoned to death.”
“As far as my superiors are concerned, the evidence box is misplaced and Hurley’s murder is unrelated.” Gethsemane strained to hear his muttered, “And none of my business.”
He continued in his normal tone. “I need more than amateur videos and hunches to convince my superiors to let me open a case everyone considers solved. Not when there’s all this,” he gestured toward piles of papers, “to clear up.”
“Frierson and McKenzie didn’t have anything more than some newspaper clippings and the belief that justice had been denied when they asked a judge to reopen the George Stinney case seventy years later and look what happened.”
“We’re not talking about a kid being railroaded in mid-twentieth century South Carolina.”
“No, we’re talking about a man being wrongly blamed for two deaths in late twentieth century Dunmullach. At least Stinney got a trial. A joke of a trial, true, but more than Eamon McCarthy got.”
O’Reilly closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose.
“Why don’t your bosses think Hurley’s murder is connected to the McCarthys’? That his being killed a day after you start asking questions about Eamon McCarthy is a bit too coincidental to be coincidence?”
“Because Hurley’s murder was inevitable. More than inevitable, long overdue. Declan Hurley was a crooked garda and a marginal human being. He shook down prostitutes and drug dealers. He took bribes to make evidence appear in convenient places or to disappear altogether. At least a dozen people may have wanted him dead for at least a dozen reasons, none of ’em related to a twenty-five-year-old murder.”
“So that’s it?”
“Yes, Dr. Brown, that’s it. Hurley’s murder is an active case being investigated by the homicide unit. I, meanwhile, toil away trying to clean up the messes Hurley and those of his ilk left behind.”
“Those messes include the McCarthys,” Gethsemane said.
O’Reilly picked up his pen.
Gethsemane yanked the door open. “I’ll wait in the hall for my ride.”
A hush fell on the audience as she raised her baton. She waited. One second. Two. The down stroke. Cue violins. Wait. Something’s wrong. The musician in first chair—Orla. Second chair—Hurley. Bassoon—Jimmy Lynch—
A sudden chord, fortissimo, exploded on the piano. Gethsemane shot upright in bed, her bizarre dream already fading into memory. Haydn’s “Symphony No. 94” continued playing on the Steinway downstairs. The alarm clock revealed only three hours had passed since the gardaí dropped her off at Carraigfaire. She threw the clock across the room and buried her head beneath her pillows. The leather-soap aroma hit her just before the pillows sailed off the bed.
“Do you have any idea how much I hate you right now, Eamon Padraig McCarthy?” She replaced the pillows with the bed covers.
The covers joined the pillows near the door. Eamon materialized at the foot of the bed. “Sleep later. Talk now. What happened at the station?”
“Some wanker of a cop badgered me with a bunch of stupid questions and O’Reilly told me to mind my own business.” She held out her hand. “Blankets.”
“Are you always this chatty in the morning?”
“Only when I’m well-rested.”
“You’ve got thirty minutes.”
“An hour. And make coffee.”
The blankets landed in a heap on her head.
Semi-human after a hot shower and hot coffee, Gethsemane briefed Eamon on her night at the garda station.
“Evidence?” Eamon paced. “What evidence does O’Reilly want? A signed confession?” Blue sparks snapped.
“Something like that. Or at least a good reason why someone would want to kill Orla.”
“Don’t you mean a good reason why someone would want to kill Orla and me?”
“I can think of several of those.” Her coffee cup slid out of reach. “Sorry.” The cup slid back.
Eamon sat across from her. “O’Reilly’s got a point. Thing is, I can’t think of one damned reason why anyone would kill Orla. I can’t think of a reason why anyone would look at her cross-eyed.”
“Maybe Orla’s death wasn’t premeditated. Maybe an argument got out of hand. High winds, slippery rocks…You can’t think of a single person who might have been at least moderately annoyed with Orla? Someone from childhood? I still carry a grudge against Sukie Collins from the sixth grade.”
“Orla was a peacemaker. Her father remarried a girl not much older than her. Everyone knew disaster loomed. But a month into the marriage Orla and her stepmother were best friends. When Teague was born Orla became a second mother.”
“Surely she pissed off at least one person in all her years on the planet.”
“Pissed-off, no. That was my specialty. At worst, Orla may have inspired over-zealous admiration. Never anger.”
“You mean a stalker?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Jimmy Lynch’s sister, Deirdre, billed herself as Orla’s number one fan. Attended all of her poetry readings, wrote her hundreds of letters, even dressed like Orla for a while. Fancied they were ‘soul friends’.”
“Did she ever get violent?”
“Not towards Orla. Deirdre inherited the Lynch temper. She had a few knock-down reefins as a girl. One was with Siobhan. Don’t remember what about but Deirdre got the better of Siobhan despite Siobhan being twice her size. Deirdre always showed Orla the utmost respect, though.”
“Nothing weirder than the mini-me dress-alike routine?”
Eamon pointed a finger at the coffee pot which levitated and refilled Gethsemane’s cup. “Now you mention it, she did show up here at the cottage at odd hours once or twice. Twice. One time she wanted to discuss a chapbook Orla’d just published. Said she’d deciphered the poems and the message changed her life. The last time, she desperately wanted to see an award Orla won, the Hershberger Poetry Prize. Said it proved her prayers to St. Columba had been answered.”
“What happened?”
“The first visit, Orla talked to her for about ten minutes and she went away. The second visit, I called the guards and they talked to her and she went away. Never came back to the cottage. Stopped dressing like Orla, too. Wouldn’t speak to me when I ran into her in the village after that, except once to lash into me for coming between two anam cara. Shredded a bunch of my sheet music and left a bin bag full of the scraps in the back seat of my car.”
“Did you have her arrested?”
“For what? Littering? Poor taste in music? She didn’t do anything else aside from write some more letters to Orla.”
“What’d the letters say?”
“Don’t know. Orla and I had an agreement. I didn’t read her fan mail and she didn’t read mine.” Eamon’s aura glowed pink with embarrassment. “Some of mine contained, er, inappropriate requests from female fa
ns. Never acted upon but not something I wanted my wife to read.”
“Where are the letters now?”
“Teague claimed them. I think he donated them to the library.”
“And Orla’s award? The Hershberger Prize?”
“A little statuette about yay tall.” Eamon held his hands about six inches apart. “Teague must have that, too. It’s not at the cottage or lighthouse.”
“Looks like I’m going to visit Teague.” Gethsemane drained her coffee cup. “Even if he doesn’t remember what the letters said he might recall someone from back in the day, someone Orla slighted, even unintentionally. Or someone who imagined Orla slighted them. Little resentments, nursed conscientiously, grow up into big hatreds.”
Eight
According to the neighbor, the Connollys had gone to Kilarney for the weekend. A return trip to the library proved just as fruitless. Mrs. Toibin was out and the music department was closed for inventory. A surly librarian guarded the poetry department. Gethsemane could have conducted the whole of Brian’s “The Gothic” by the time the woman set a dusty file box in front of her. The papers within consisted of Orla’s correspondence with publishers and agents. No personal correspondence or diaries. Nothing hinting at a stalker. Gethsemane returned the box to the librarian who snatched it, sending box and contents tumbling. Papers spread like lava.
The librarian scowled. “Take care.”
Gethsemane apologized as the women stooped. Heads collided.
“Leave it.” The librarian elbowed Gethsemane out of the way and muttered as she gathered papers. “Bad enough people steal, now folks treat important documents like circulars in the Sunday paper.”
Gethsemane clasped a hand against her throbbing head. “Who’s stealing?”
“If we knew, they wouldn’t be stealing, would they? They’d be in jail.”
“What’s been stolen?”
The librarian snapped the box shut. “Orla’s letters, the ones admirers wrote to her. Her journal, some of her chapbooks.” She wrapped her arms around the box, shielding it from Gethsemane. “What’s your interest in Orla? Mrs. Toibin said you were a fan of her husband’s.”
Murder in G Major (A Gethsemane Brown Mystery Book 1) Page 16