by Lisa Alber
In his office, Alan fell into his chair with a groan. “I need a bloody business partner is what I need,” he said. “Here, I count the cash into bundles. You wrap them in rubber bands. Wait, but first.”
Alan gathered up the credit card slips into a haphazard stack and shuffled through them. “Tips,” he said. “Whatever else you say about Americans, they tip.”
He pulled cash out of the till and allocated the tips written onto the credit card receipts into various envelopes for his staff. He then divvied the tips he’d earned amongst the envelopes.
As they worked on either side of Alan’s desk, counting and bundling cash, Bijou decided to sniff every inch of Danny’s left leg. Satisfied with Danny’s odors, the beast leaned against Danny with her head heavy on his thigh. Saliva from her voluptuous jowls soaked through to his skin. Danny fondled the dog’s ears, and she blinked up at him drowsily.
“Ay,” Alan said, “so what’s biting into your sleep tonight?”
“A dead boy’s eyes.” Danny continued, “To be honest, I still miss Liam’s counsel. I’d have gone to him first, but—”
With Liam, Danny wouldn’t give much thought to how absurd he’d sound talking about lost boys and sparrows and soul-bearers and hoverings and Grey Man. But then, Liam had a bit of an old-world faerie dusting about him anyhow.
“Fer Christ’s sake, visit the man, would you?” Alan said. “Enough already.”
Danny nodded, thinking about last year’s murder case and Merrit’s invasive role in the outcome. In the end, Liam had avoided the consequences of his actions, and Danny couldn’t stand his own role in what happened. But fate had a way of exacting its own punishment, didn’t it? It had been an excruciating year for Liam, that much was true.
They continued counting and rubber banding in silence, then Alan said, “You should know that on the plaza Seamus overheard a man—his name is Dermot—accuse Liam of somehow causing his mother’s death.”
Danny sat back and finished off the pint that he’d brought with him, growing more weary by the second. “Was it a serious accusation?”
“Not sure. Seamus wasn’t bothered by it anyhow. Thought you should know is all.” After a pause, Alan said, “Merrit dropped by the pub.”
Danny snapped a rubber band and it broke. “You had to go there. If not Liam, then Merrit.”
Alan didn’t have to say what they were both thinking about the supposed connection between Merrit’s arrival and Danny’s separation from Ellen last year. Or, that to some in the village, it was too bloody convenient that Danny had moved into Fox Cottage, Liam’s old place located, oh, about 300 yards down the dirt track from Liam’s modern home, where Merrit now kipped.
“Merrit came in about that necklace she always wears,” Alan said, punching revenue into an adding machine. A tape spooled out the back end with a grind of gears. Alan described Gemma—sister to the Dermot fella—and the case of the stolen necklace. As Alan described Gemma, a guarded expression settled over his face. Danny pretended not to notice.
“Sounds like the situation took care of itself,” Danny said.
“Maybe.” With more whirring fingers, Alan came up with a final total and compared it against the total registered from the till’s tally “Ah, merde,” he groaned. “I’m twenty euro off. Putante merde. Get on with you then, I can’t calculate and talk at the same time.”
“Cheers then. I have to be in the morgue tomorrow bright and early anyhow.”
Thursday
Children, like dogs, have so sharp
and fine a scent that they detect
and hunt out everything—
the bad before all the rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
EIGHT
DANNY LEANED AGAINST THE wall in the morgue, doing his best to quell the return of the uneasiness that had bothered him the day before at the crime scene. Lost Boy wouldn’t have liked the looks of himself now that Benjy had opened up his skull and torso, weighed and measured his internal organs—including his brain—and then bundled everything back inside his abdominal cavity.
Bleary after a sleepless night, Danny had driven to the regional hospital in Galway City with more reluctance than usual. The morgue was an unprepossessing set of rooms located beneath the hospital, and he’d lurched down on the rickety elevator, trying not to think about why he’d insisted on going to this autopsy alone. Normally, he’d have O’Neil with him.
Lost Boy had gotten to him.
Still leaning against the morgue wall, Danny sniffed at the unsettling mix of bleach, stale air, and overripe flesh. The smell seemed worse than usual. He coughed against the cloying taste of death that sat on his tongue.
“What, you squeamish all of a sudden?” Benjy said.
“Bugger off.”
“I was after telling you that there’s something hovering over this one. You saw Grey Man’s sparrow for yourself.”
Danny opened his mouth to reply but cut himself off. Benjy was a superstitious and unorthodox old shite, but even he’d scoff at the notion that the boy—far from home, alone, cut down before his first shave—had somehow communicated to Danny. Daft, completely and utterly daft.
“Anything interesting?” Danny said.
Benjy bent over Lost Boy’s face. He pushed back his eyelids. “You don’t see this too often.”
One of the boy’s irises had a strip of brown running through the blue. “And?”
“And nothing. You asked for something interesting.”
Danny grunted. “You’re a right treat first thing in the morning.”
“I aim to please.”
After another prod from Danny, Benjy got down to business. He estimated that Lost Boy had been lying on chill ground for at least eight hours before his death.
“So he died of?” Danny said.
“Your classic subdural hematoma from a nasty blow to the head. Took him a while to die, poor lad. He had a slow but steady blood leak. It might have happened anywhere and the symptoms caught up to him as he crossed the pasture.”
“So we don’t know that we have a crime scene.”
“True enough.”
“Could he have fallen off one of the grass bundles?”
“No other bruises or bumps. He didn’t fall off anything.”
“Bloody hell, give me something we can use. Is there a crime here or not?”
“Hitting his head this way most likely occurred with the help of another human being. Satisfied?”
“As a drunk in the desert,” Danny said.
“Whatever happened, there was some force behind the blow. Did you find anything in the pasture?”
“Not so much as a tree branch.” Danny wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he asked anyhow: “Could he have survived if we’d found him earlier?”
“Yes. But the boy might not have understood how serious his head injury was until too late. He’d have had a nasty headache, but that’s not enough for some people to see doctors. Sometimes there’s a delayed reaction with traumatic brain injuries.”
“There was vomit near the bundles.”
“If it’s his, that’s a sure sign he should have gone to the hospital. Poor sod.”
Again, Danny coughed against a gluey sensation on his tongue. He tucked the cotton coverlet against the boy’s shoulder.
“And see there?” Benjy pointed to Lost Boy’s earlobes. “Newly pierced holes by the looks of it. The holes are fresh and they’re infected.”
“Someone took his earrings as a souvenir?” Danny said more to himself than to Benjy.
His mobile chirruped and he grabbed for it more hastily than usual. There was something about the morgue that made him feel like he was intruding. “Ahern here.”
“Might have a Lost Boy sighting in one of the shops,” O’Neil said. “A tourist saw the sketch in the paper and called around.”
NINE
DURING THEIR HOUR-LONG LUNCH break from festival activities, Merrit excused herself from Liam. She left him with his seaf
ood chowder and in his usual seat amongst the regulars at Alan’s pub. She rounded the corner away from the Plough and Trough’s handy location on the plaza and onto the noncoastal road that ran through the village. Most of the shops lined this road, and Merrit had it in mind to enter one of them, the most high-end of the shops: Pot o’ Gold Gifts.
Bumping along in the crush of tourists, she kept an eye out for the McNamara siblings, Gemma and Dermot. Dermot had offered to pay for a new chain for her necklace, but money was the least of her concerns. She hoped they were the kind to keep their private business to themselves, but she guessed that depended on how bitter they were about their mother’s death.
She’d like to protect Liam from a festival scandal if possible. He was still fragile after a year of cancer treatments. She’d had a hell of a time talking him into them in the first place, but in the end she’d dangled the perfect carrot: She couldn’t step into his matchmaking shoes without training.
Liam was nothing if not ego-driven to preserve his legacy. She’d bet his will more than the chemo had caused the cancer remission—for the time being, at least.
She reached Pot o’ Gold Gifts without seeing Gemma or Dermot, and was surprised by the police officer loitering at the door, smoking a cigarette. Or rather, the Garda officer. Since the Irish National Police were officially called An Garda Síochána, she was never sure whether using the term “officer” was correct. She decided to go local, especially because she recognized this man as working under Danny in the detective division.
“Hello, Detective Officer O’Neil.”
He smiled, one of the few locals who didn’t seem to harbor sideways opinions about her. In fact, O’Neil always appeared to be thinking secret and amusing thoughts, but not necessarily at anyone’s expense.
“Filthy habit, this,” he said. “One of these years I’ll quit.”
Merrit caught sight of Danny inside the shop, his lean frame lost in a baggy jacket. Merrit’s chest tightened when he caught sight of her. His impassive gaze was worse than a frown—like he couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge that he knew her at all.
She plastered a determined smile on her lips as she addressed O’Neil. “Any chance I can talk to the owner about fixing this necklace? I won’t be a bother.”
O’Neil fingered the broken chain on her palm. “That’s it?” he said.
“Since you’re here, I’d like to report vandalism. On my car. Like graffiti only worse. Can I give you the details?”
“I’ll need to see your car. Give me your phone number, and we’ll arrange a time.” He grinned. “I’ll let DS Ahern know too, shall I?”
On second thought, she took it back about his amusing thoughts at no one’s expense.
She jotted down her phone number for O’Neil, and a moment later a signal that Merrit didn’t catch transmitted itself from O’Neil to the guards in the gift shop, and from them to Malcolm, who approached from the back of the shop. O’Neil held up Merrit’s necklace so the moonstone caught Malcolm’s eye through the shop window.
“Merrit Chase,” Malcolm said when he opened the shop door, “so good of you to come. It must be all over the village by now that I’m helping the guards with their investigation of that unfortunate lad they found. I expect a journalist from the Clare Challenger to drop by, won’t he, Detective Officer O’Neil?”
“Only if you called him yourself,” O’Neil said. “And I hope you didn’t.”
Malcolm bowed Merrit into the shop. His excitement was contagious, and Merrit found herself smiling at this man with his strangely eye-catching appearance and buoyant manner. He managed to carry off the hairless thing well.
She held out the broken necklace. With the utmost care, he tipped her hand toward his. The necklace slid onto his palm. “This,” he breathed, “is a true vintage piece. Limited quantity, see here?”
Malcolm turned the pendant over. He pointed to letters etched into the silver mount that framed the stone. A curly F insignia that could be anything to Merrit’s untrained eye. “For Firebird,” Malcolm said. “And see the fraction 5/20?”
“I’ve always wondered.”
“It indicates that this was the fifth pendant of this design, meaning the scrollwork around the stone’s frame, out of twenty such pendants. Lovely, don’t you think?”
He nodded at her with eagerness and Merrit found herself nodding in return.
“And where did you get this, Merrit?”
He said her name with a proprietary intimacy, as if they’d been fast friends for years. Merrit had no doubts that from now on he would consider her a friend. She explained that Liam had bought it for her mother.
“I’m not surprised. Liam’s a man with taste. I’m sure it looked as lovely on her as it does on you.” Malcolm’s eyes shone. “Now. Where were we? Such good luck that you came into my shop, but then I do carry the highest quality jewelry for miles. Let me introduce you to more jewelry by the same designer.”
Merrit let Malcolm pull her into the shop with an elbow hooked around her upper arm. “I won’t touch anything,” she said to O’Neil.
“Bah, don’t worry,” Malcolm said. “They’re done with this area. And here I didn’t remember the dead boy was in the shop until Danny appeared. A tourist called in the sighting. Quite fun, I must say. The truth is that as busy as I am, I haven’t had a chance to read the newspaper yet. I’m sure I would have called the guards if I had recognized the lad’s face on the front page.”
The shop carried a fresh mossy scent from a candle lit next to the cash register. Swags of Irish linen brushed against Merrit’s arm, and then she was circling around a display of Waterford crystal. Malcolm positioned her in front of a glass cabinet that displayed an engraved wooden sign of a long-necked bird with outspread wings rising out of the words Firebird Designs. At Malcolm’s prompt, she peered into the cabinet at three tiers of necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings.
Malcolm pulled a ring from a plastic finger in the cabinet. “This brushed silver look would be brilliant on you.”
“Oh, but I’ve got to return to the festival. Right now I’m most interested in fixing the chain on my necklace.”
Malcolm pursed his lips, and Merrit felt compelled to compliment the jewelry again. She found herself promising to return when she had more time. Malcolm relaxed and said that he’d see her necklace fixed good as the day it was made.
With her stated business complete, Merrit had no excuse to stay. Still, she loitered, picking up the Firebird Designs artist’s statement and willing Danny to approach. She had a feeling Malcolm would be insulted if he knew that she was pretending to be interested in the jewelry as a way to talk to Danny about Liam. Malcolm seemed the sensitive type that way.
She read the statement, curious despite herself. Signed “J,” the statement professed a need to create jewelry that reflected inner beauty. Your inner beauty made manifest for all to see. The picture that accompanied the text showed a man of indeterminate age wearing a brimmed hat and sporting an unruly beard. He hunched over a work surface scattered with gems.
Finally, Danny arrived. “Time to escort Miss Chase outside.”
Malcolm called out a promise to have the necklace ready for her on Sunday. Almost to the door, Merrit told Danny under her breath that maybe he could have a word with a couple of tourists named Gemma and Dermot McNamara to tell them to lay off Liam. They claimed that Liam had matched their mother to her murderer.
“I heard,” Danny said. “But there’s nothing criminal in having a belief.”
“So you won’t talk to them?”
“No.”
Beneath Danny’s gruffness, Merrit caught a hint of something else; he wasn’t as disinterested as he let on. Liam had always been a surrogate father to him. More importantly, Liam missed Danny’s visits. It would be up to Merrit to bridge their gap since she was the one who had caused it in the first place.
“Liam could do without the extra stress,” she said. “He’s still fragile. Besides, don’t you h
ave strict slander laws over here?”
“I think the word you’re looking for is defamation.”
“Whatever. At least they don’t know where Liam lives, and no one’s going to tell them, right?”
“Let’s hope not.” Danny handed her off to O’Neil. “No more visitors until we’re done.”
She grabbed his arm. “You still care for Liam. Don’t pretend otherwise.”
He shifted backwards a step and spoke as he turned away. “Don’t go there. Playing the guilt card on me won’t work again.”
Bloody Merrit. Of course Danny cared about Liam’s welfare, but she’d have to excuse him if he didn’t feel like jumping when she called “boo.”
“Let’s wrap this up,” Danny called.
The few partials they’d retrieved might come back with a match. If not, they were back to nothing with Lost Boy.
Danny surveyed the shop, wondering why Lost Boy had entered. To buy an overpriced heraldic name plaque or Irish turf incense? Danny thought not. He approached Malcolm and asked him to go over his interaction with the deceased once again. “Is there anything else that comes to mind?” Danny said.
Malcolm’s fingers wandered amongst the pieces of jewelry in his case, twitching them by minute degrees until he was satisfied with their arrangement. “Perhaps if I give Merrit a discount, she’ll wear a necklace or bracelet while she works the festival—”
“Malcolm.”
Malcolm straightened. His lips puckered up to his nose as if he smelled something bad. “That lad, yes. I have an instinct about people, and this one, he didn’t come off right from the second he entered the store. I was onto him, you might say.”
“Oh? You didn’t mention that before.”
“I was trying to keep to the facts, but now that I’ve thought it through and seen how diligently your men powdered the areas he pawed, I realize that my observations are as important as the facts.”