Murder in G Major (A Gethsemane Brown Mystery Book 1)

by Alexia Gordon

  Fourteen

  The next morning, Gethsemane headed straight to her bicycle, pausing only long enough to consult a map she’d found at the cottage. She felt a twinge of guilt as she passed congregants in their Sunday best gathered in front of Our Lady but she kept on south to Carnock. She stopped at the base of a rocky outcrop and stared up at the towering derelict hulk of a building perched atop it. As she pedaled up the tortuous strip of cracked asphalt leading to the summit, images of Poe’s House of Usher stuck in her head. The desolate patch of land deserved the nickname “Golgotha.”

  She leaned her bicycle against a gnarled tree bordering the overgrown semi-circular drive in front of the former psychiatric hospital and examined the massive brick building, half its windows boarded up, the other half with broken panes of glass looking like so many black eyes. A wind sprang up, carrying with it a hint of leather-and-soap. A faint voice suggested—or did she imagine it?—she forget about spooky basements and moth-eaten records and do something sensible like ride back to the Mad Rabbit for a drink. She ignored it and approached the abandoned asylum.

  Chains and a padlock barred the front doors. Gethsemane picked her way through waist-high weeds and peered into one of the un-boarded-up windows. Mold grew on a mug in the windowsill, cobwebs hung from light fixtures, dust covered the nurses’ station. She walked around the building, trying to find a way inside. On her second circuit, she discovered a maintenance door falling off its hinges. Several minutes of vigorous pushing, kicking, and swearing yielded an opening large enough for her to slip through. Her eyes adjusted to the building’s dim interior as she fumbled along a grim corridor to an even grimmer stairwell. She felt her way down to, she hoped, the basement. Cobweb-laced windows set high in the walls let in just enough light to see she stood in another hallway, this one with doors at the far end. She crept to the first and turned the knob. Locked. She tried another. A storage room. A third. The morgue. She shuddered and slammed the door. As she turned to go back to the stairwell she noticed a second hallway branching off to the left.

  Faded signs pointed the way to the records department. Gethsemane followed a maze of corridors to a door with Records stenciled on it in worn, flaking gilt. Hinges creaked as she stepped into a room half a large as a football field. Gray metal shelves crammed full with dust-covered brown folders of varying thicknesses filled most of the space. Signs suspended overhead labeled with letters of the alphabet indicated which charts occupied a particular row. Gethsemane started toward the M’s, then hesitated. Annoyance and suspiciousness about Eamon’s withholding his psychiatric history battled guilt over prying. She changed direction toward the S’s. The Sullivans had enough baggage to fill a travel supply catalog. She’d start by uncovering their secrets.

  Gethsemane walked down the row, pulling charts from the shelves at random until she found a Sullivan. The typewritten label affixed to the cardstock cover read Nuala Sullivan—Pegeen’s sister. Gethsemane blew dust from the chart, sneezing as the thick cloud tickled her nose. She opened the chart to the first page.

  She closed it after reading a decades’ long history of mental illness. Nuala had been labeled a pyromaniac at age eight. Age twenty-one brought a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Nuala had shuttled between the asylum and jail more than two dozen times before her thirty-fifth birthday. Gethsemane remembered their previous meetings. Was Nuala haunted by ghosts or by hallucinations? And did pyromaniacs blow things up?

  Gethsemane traded Nuala’s chart for one a quarter of the size—Pegeen Sullivan. Unlike her sister, Pegeen only had one admission to St. Dymphna’s. She’d attempted suicide on March twenty-fifth, thirty-seven years ago, Eamon’s wedding day.

  “No wonder she missed the wedding,” Gethsemane said aloud.

  She read on. Pegeen stayed at St. Dymphna’s for three weeks, after which her psychiatrist deemed her no longer a threat to herself or others and released her. Pegeen cooperated with all aspects of her treatment program during her stay except one—she refused to divulge why she drank a tisane brewed from foxglove.

  Gethsemane re-shelved Pegeen’s chart. She took a deep breath. Time to find out what put Eamon in St. Dymphna’s.

  McCarthys filled most of the M section’s shelves. She hoped that only meant McCarthy was a common name in Dunmullach. Eventually, she pulled down Eamon’s record, a folder about the same size as Pegeen’s. Another deep breath, then she flipped open the cover.

  She relaxed by the third page. Murphy spoke true. Eamon checked himself into St. Dymphna’s for a “rest”—from a grueling tour schedule, a copyright battle with Ulbrecht, wedding preparations—and checked himself out two weeks later. He spent the interim entertaining elderly ladies on the dementia ward with show tunes.

  Gethsemane put the folder back and dusted her hands. Guilt edged out irritation. Eamon probably hadn’t thought his “stay-cation” worth mentioning. She wouldn’t mention it either. She turned to go, then jumped at a thud behind her. A chart, three times as thick as Eamon’s, lay on the floor beneath a newly empty space on a shelf just above her head in the L section. On the label—Maureen Lynch. She stood on tiptoe and slid the chart back into its slot. It fell again as soon as she put her feet down, landing open, almost on her toes.

  “Eamon? Is that you?” She sniffed. Nothing on the air except the odors of dust and mildew. But maybe? The faintest hint of white roses and vetiver?

  She stared down at the chart. Maureen Lynch’s first admission to St. Dymphna’s occurred on her eleventh birthday. Gethsemane picked it up. Continued reading brought back memories of paging through her mother’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a teenager. Maureen Lynch qualified as a “textbook case” of chronic mental illness. Her abbreviated life consisted of a series of increasingly long psychiatric admissions punctuated by increasingly short stays outside. Her diagnoses progressed over the years from quaint melancholia and hysteria to coldly modern major depression with psychosis and schizophrenia.

  Gethsemane gasped. About two-thirds of the way through, Maureen Lynch became Maureen Sullivan. She kept the surname through a half-dozen more admissions, each coinciding with a desertion by her husband, Joe Sullivan. By the seventh, final, admission she was Maureen Lynch again. She’d been committed after the church granted her now-former husband an annulment. Maureen stabbed Joe’s new girlfriend, a barmaid from the Mad Rabbit, then ran naked through town brandishing the bloody knife while screaming about what part of Joe’s anatomy she intended to cut off. According to a police report neatly stapled into the chart, she’d been subdued by Oisin Ardmore and her youngest daughter—Pegeen—and taken into custody. Six weeks later she’d committed suicide by hanging herself in St. Dymphna’s laundry room.

  Gethsemane closed the file and reached up to replace it on the shelf. She held her breath. It stayed put. She crossed her arms against a sudden chill. Pegeen’s sister started fires and her mother went after people with knives. Pegeen’s suicide attempt seemed mundane in comparison.

  Gethsemane looked at the shelves again. Her hunch paid off. She pulled down a chart labeled Deirdre Lynch. The record’s family history section exposed Deirdre as Maureen’s niece. Her problem list included homosexuality—considered a mental illness at the time of Deirdre’s admission—and DeClerambault’s Syndrome—erotomania. Hadn’t Eamon said Deirdre Lynch had an unhealthy attachment to Orla? Hadn’t she witnessed the depth of Deirdre’s devot—

  Too late, Tchaikovsky warned her. Gethsemane’s collar jerked up and back then something—someone—shoved her forward. Hard. A sharp pain lanced her eyebrow. Deirdre’s chart slipped from her hand…

  She awoke lying on the floor. Her forehead throbbed. Dark liquid mingled with dust in a pool around her face. She touched her cheek. Sticky. She held her hand in front of her eyes. Her fingers looked blurry…and red. She tried to count them. One, two, four…Her fingers moved away from her. The room dimmed…

  Gethsema
ne coughed herself awake. She sniffed. Smoke! She sat up, sending pain shooting through her head and graying her peripheral vision. She lay down again and let her eyes scan the room. The shelf above her held nothing other than a red stain on its edge. The nearby shelves stood empty as well. She pushed herself up onto an elbow. Flames flickered from a small mountain of charts piled in front of the door. She rolled over and tried to crawl but the room’s spinning thwarted her. She lay down once more and tried to force herself to think. She felt drowsy. Noises. Pounding. Wood cracking. Footsteps. Oh, please, let them be coming closer.

  She yelled. “I’m in here!” Or did she imagine that too? She tried again. “I’m here!”

  Everything went black.

  Gethsemane blinked. And blinked. And blinked. The room faded into focus. Not the records room. Not a room at St. Dymphna’s. A room with bright overhead fluorescent lights, one of which flickered and buzzed. A hospital room. Gethsemane closed her eyes.

  “Dr. Brown? Dr. Brown, can you hear me?”

  Gethsemane opened her eyes again. Three faces blocked her view of the lights—O’Reilly, Francis, and a man who looked familiar. And angry. She couldn’t tell which one had spoken.

  “Yes,” she said to all three. “I hear you.”

  “How do you feel?” O’Reilly asked.

  Gethsemane answered after a quick self-assessment. “Nothing from the chin up.”

  “Don’t worry, miss.” A fourth face, framed by a stethoscope, displaced the other three. “The feeling will return once the anesthetic wears off.”

  “Anesthetic?” Gethsemane asked.

  The stethoscope nodded. “I gave it to you before I stitched up your forehead.”

  Gethsemane raised her hand to her head. A bandage covered her eyebrow. She remembered the sticky substance on her face and the red stain on the shelf. She shut her eyes. She wanted to ask questions but had difficulty putting words together in the correct order.

  Inspector O’Reilly saved her the trouble. “You’re lucky Kieran Ross saw you riding out to Carnock and followed you. What the hell were you doing up there?”

  “I think Americans call it snooping,” Francis said.

  “Investigating.” Gethsemane opened one eye.

  “In Ireland we call it trespassing,” the angry stranger said. Gethsemane recalled where she’d seen him—the homicide unit at the garda station. She didn’t know his name. He continued. “And breaking and entering. Have you gone mad?”

  A commotion spared her an answer. O’Reilly pulled back the curtain enclosing her stretcher. Two uniformed police officers dragged Nuala Sullivan, handcuffed and struggling, down the hall. Pegeen followed. The sight reminded Gethsemane of—something.

  “Let me sister go, ya scabby gobshites!” Pegeen pulled at one of the officer’s jackets. “She’s done nothin’!”

  “Nothing?” The officer dodged a foot. “You call smashing the grocery store windows and setting the fruit bins on fire nothing?”

  “She’s crazy,” the other officer said, ducking an elbow. “All kinds of crazy, just like your ma. Belongs back in the looney bin, she does.”

  Crazy. Mother. Crazy mother. Gethsemane pressed her temples. Whose mother was crazy? She could taste the memory hovering at the edge of consciousness. She willed her synapses to start firing.

  “You shut it.” Pegeen grabbed the officer’s arm. “My mother wasn’t crazy. Neither is my sister.”

  “Both bat shite crazy. Whole damn Lynch clan’s crazy and has been since your family tree was still an acorn.”

  Pegeen punched the constable. He staggered backwards and lost his grip on Nuala. Nuala bit the other officer and she and Pegeen bolted down the hall and out the door. The officer ran after them. The angry detective ran after the officer and O’Reilly ran to assist the fallen constable, then he and O’Reilly ran after the others.

  “Once or twice a century Dunmullach wakes up,” Francis said. “Glad I was here to see it.”

  Gethsemane propped herself up on her elbows. “Maureen Lynch.”

  Francis repeated the name. “So?”

  “Pegeen and Nuala’s mother.”

  “What about her?”

  “She stabbed someone. And threatened to emasculate her ex-husband.”

  “Not surprising,” Francis said. “The family does have a history of violence on the Lynch side. And a history of improvidence on the Sullivan side.”

  “What kind of violence?”

  “Besides resident sociopath, Jimmy, and his father and his father before him? Deirdre’s thrown a few punches in her day. She’d fixate on some bird, fancy they were best mates, then ramp up to ninety if her feelings weren’t reciprocated. Her ma was the same. She once put a woman’s eye out. You can trace most of the town’s property damage to Nuala. And Peg flies off the handle if anyone reminds her the Lynches aren’t the full shilling.”

  Another commotion arose. The four police officers dragged the two Sullivan sisters kicking and screaming back into the hospital. Several hospital staff descended on the group. They managed to carry Pegeen and Nuala down the hall and out of view through a set of swinging double doors.

  “Wow,” Gethsemane said.

  “You Americans put things so succinctly,” Francis said.

  “It’s a gift.” Gethsemane sat up and swung her legs over the side of the stretcher. She clamped a hand over her now-throbbing forehead and looked around. “Where’re my clothes?”

  Stethoscope tried to push her back down onto the stretcher. “Hold on.”

  Gethsemane shook him off. “I’m fine, Doctor.” A stabbing pain behind her eye contradicted her. “At least I will be after a good night’s sleep.”

  “You’ve suffered a head injury and smoke inhalation. You need to stay in hospital, at least overnight,” the doctor said.

  “No thanks.”

  “If it’s the food you’re worried about,” Francis said, “it’s better than the stuff they serve at St. Brennan’s.”

  “I’m not worried about food. I’m worried about cops and their questions.” She hopped down from the stretcher. “I’m not in the mood to be interrogated or charged with a felony.”

  An argument ensued with the doctor while Gethsemane gathered her blood-and-soot-stained clothes. She won after she promised to stay home from work the next day and to have someone check on her frequently throughout the night. She wondered if he would have acquiesced if he knew the someone was a ghost.

  “You’re wearing that out?” Francis asked.

  Gethsemane looked down at her voluminous hospital gown and at the ruined outfit bundled in her arms. Then she looked at Francis’s jacket.

  He sighed and handed it to her. “I’d best take care. I’m liable to turn into a gentleman, hanging around you.”

  Gethsemane thanked him. “Ride home?”

  “Don’t want much, do you?”

  “C’mon, Grennan,” Gethsemane said as she pulled on the jacket. Voices spoke in the hall. “Before Inspectors O’Reilly and O’Grumpy get back.”

  Francis ushered her to the clerk’s desk. Gethsemane ignored the displeased look from the homicide detective and the amused look from O’Reilly as she signed out of the emergency room.

  Fifteen

  A good night’s sleep, a hot shower, and the breakfast Eamon had insisted she eat somewhat restored Gethsemane the day after her attack. Her head still ached but she rode to the garda station anyway and gave her statement to the same angry police officer who’d harangued her in the emergency room.

  Afterwards, she wound through the station’s gray-green halls to O’Reilly’s office. She found him seated across from a blond man of similar age but brawnier build, dressed in a plain suit and tie with worn-at-the-heels brogans. O’Reilly wore leather oxblood slip-ons. The men stood when she entered.
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  “Should you be up?” O’Reilly offered her a chair. “Are you feeling all right? You snuck out of the hospital.”

  “I’m fine. I hate hospitals.”

  “A head injury’s serious. So’s smoke inhalation—”

  “Mother her to death, why don’t you, Iollan?” the blond interjected.

  O’Reilly blushed. “Dr. Brown, meet DI Kildare, from Cork. Donny, Dr. Brown, St. Brennan’s music director.”

  “A pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “I’m not nearly as bad as he says.” Gethsemane nodded toward O’Reilly.

  Kildare touched his forehead. “What happened?”

  Gethsemane fingered the bandage over her brow. “A little run-in with a homicidal maniac.”

  “Dr. Brown’s added amateur detective to her long list of accomplishments,” O’Reilly said. “Her investigation prompted me to take another look at the McCarthy case.”

  “Did you just—”

  “Don’t gloat.”

  “Iollan tells me you know something about a case I’m working. Oisin Ardmore.”

  Kildare. O’Reilly mentioned him at the pub the day she showed him the clipping from the Cork Guardian. She glanced at O’Reilly’s desk. The familiar news story lay on top of a pile of papers. Gethsemane reached for it. “Someone mailed a copy of this to me around the time Siobhan Moloney was murdered.”

  “Dr. Brown tipped me off about Aoife Fitzgerald’s pharmacy logs.” O’Reilly’s face fell. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to her in time.”

  A moment of silence passed in Aoife and Teague’s remembrance. Gethsemane recalled why she’d come to see O’Reilly. She pulled Francis’s toxicology report from her pocket. “Speaking of tips, Inspector, I meant to give this to you.”

  “What is it?” O’Reilly unfolded the sheet.