Whispers in the Mist

by Lisa Alber

  After calling O’Neil outside Alan’s house, Danny had spent what remained of the night in the hospital, and by dawn the surgeon had told him he’d better get some rest. The emergency surgery on Ellen’s skull had gone well, but she would be unconscious for some time yet. The surgeon had bandied the terms “traumatic brain injury” and “skull fracture” around like confetti, and now Danny couldn’t get the phrases out of his head. His teeth felt fuzzy. He needed a shower like a fish needed its gills. Sweat coated the mobile that he clenched in case the hospital called. He’d already contacted his cousin in Galway, who’d agreed to fetch the children for the next week. They’d been so overjoyed to miss school, they hadn’t questioned him, and he hadn’t had the stones to tell them what had happened to their mother.

  Now here he sat, the ruse being that he’d arrived to give his statement. Garda or no Garda, as Ellen’s husband he was automatically a person of interest. Fine. He didn’t mind; it gave him an excuse to linger in the station. He wasn’t a serious contender as suspect anyhow, because of the signs that the intruder had been looking for something inside the house.

  He jotted a sentence or two of his statement while listening in on the conversations around him. Thus far, all he’d learned was that Clarkson had taken over the investigation, stating that Phoenix Park had no extra officers to spare. At the moment, he had O’Neil in his grips. The two of them spoke behind closed doors. Around Danny, a low murmur of expectation rose.

  The incident room door swung open and bounced against the wall. “You, with me,” Clarkson said to Danny. “O’Neil, sit and stay put until I get this sorted.”

  Danny followed Clarkson into the visitor’s office. Clarkson leaned back in a swivel chair. He stretched his arms over his head and cracked his knuckles before motioning Danny to sit down.

  “What are you after, Ahern? You think I don’t know that pulling in Malcolm Lynch was your doing?”

  “I’m here to give a statement about my wife, that’s all,” Danny said. “I’m glad to see O’Neil took the initiative on bringing in Malcolm. We need to find a man named John McIlvoy, and Malcolm is the man with the information. If Dermot McNamara is correct, then McIlvoy might have gone after Gemma and injured my wife in the process. Malcolm knows more about McIlvoy than he’s letting on. If McIlvoy has anything to do with my wife’s attack, I want him. So I’m hoping Malcolm will cooperate with you.”

  “And if he doesn’t, what then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  While sitting alone in the hospital, Danny had emailed John McIlvoy, but he doubted he’d receive a response. Later, he’d met O’Neil and two other DOs at the bakery, where he’d coached them about how to invite Malcolm in for a few more questions. Of Malcolm’s own volition, of course. As with most witnesses, all it had needed was a little ego flattery.

  “Are we done?” Danny stood. “I need to finish my statement.”

  Out amongst the warren of desks, empty coffee mugs, and ringing telephones, the men quieted when Danny reappeared with Clarkson.

  “O’Neil, with me,” Clarkson said. “Time to talk to Malcolm Lynch.”

  Danny finished up his statement and handed it off to a barrel-chested officer with a chronically grim expression. A loaner officer from Ennis.

  “Has anyone checked into John McIlvoy’s post office box?” Danny said.

  The officer glanced around before answering. He spoke in a low voice. “Ay, but he’d closed it down right enough. The permanent address he’d used to open the box led to a home in Shannon. Family there had never heard of him and knew nothing about a post office box.”

  So much for Malcolm not warning McIlvoy.

  A door opened and Clarkson’s voice rose over murmurs and paper shuffling. “Ahern, get over here!”

  “Watch your balls,” the officer said. “Last time he yelled like that a rookie had hurled on a body.”

  Clarkson, along with O’Neil, waited in one of the monitoring rooms. O’Neil avoided his eye.

  Clarkson’s face was red enough to glow in the dark. “Nothing new you want to tell me?”

  “About what?”

  Malcolm’s image appeared center stage on the television monitor. He sat erect and relaxed in the neighboring room. He sipped coffee and grimaced. “Inexecrable,” he said into the camera.

  “Here, Ahern. Listen.” Clarkson pointed to another television screen, pressed a button, and a second later Malcolm appeared. In the replay, Malcolm smiled his welcome at the men sitting off-screen. First to his right, then to his left. O’Neil had just introduced the session with the date and time when Malcolm interjected.

  “I know, even if you don’t, that much as I’d like to help you, I can’t—no one can accuse me of being uncooperative, not even Danny. Is he here, by the way?” On the monitor, his smile turned petulant. “I’d prefer to talk to him.”

  “I’m conducting this interview,” O’Neil said. “For the record, this is Detective Officer—”

  “Like I told Danny, you can’t compel me to reveal what I don’t know about John McIlvoy’s whereabouts. I have an alibi, quite the alibi, for the night of the boy’s death besides.”

  “You’re not here as a suspect,” O’Neil said.

  Malcolm waved a magisterial hand. “Please. Danny asked about John, which is close enough. I didn’t like his attitude while he was questioning me, by the way. I will be making a formal complaint—”

  “Posturing,” Danny said. “No clue why, but he’s definitely having us on.”

  “Never mind that,” Clarkson said. “Listen up.”

  “—and though it pains me to air Danny’s marital woes like this, I can’t see that I can help myself. I have a business to run, after all, and Danny never bothered to investigate the nasty graffiti. I can tell you that sales had been down since that day, and my shop is one of the most lucrative in Lisfenora—”

  “You were saying about your alibi? For which death, by the way?”

  “Oh, for that boy, Toby something.”

  “And?” O’Neil said.

  “As I was saying,” Malcolm said. “I have an alibi, so if you think I’m the dead ringer for Grey Man, as the newspapers are calling our phantom boy killer—brilliant moniker, Grey Man, don’t you think?—you might as well forget it now.”

  “That’s all fine, but we’re after information about John McIlvoy,” O’Neil said.

  “You might want to talk to Ellen Ahern. She’ll know all about my alibi that night. I trust I don’t need to spell out what I mean by that.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ALAN PUSHED BIJOU’S RESISTING snout into a plastic bag that contained a pair of Gemma’s dirty socks. Dermot cast a dubious glance at Bijou’s underbite and squashed-in snout. Alan had his doubts also—she was more of a drooler than a sniffer—but he’d had to do something to get Dermot out of his house. The man just about tore down the walls in agitation, and Alan couldn’t stand his stricken expression for a second longer. He’d been afraid it had mirrored his own.

  “Looks to me like she wants to fetch them not sniff them,” Dermot said.

  “She got us this far. Good girl.”

  But this far was where, exactly? Two hours of tramping around the countryside had led to nothing. Now they stood catching their breaths on a hill that from afar had shimmered purple with turning heather. Around them, ancient drystone walls divided the landscape into nothing but boggy fields. Fog gathered along the coastline, ready to roll over them. Wind bent grass tussocks and rustled the heather.

  “This is useless,” Dermot said. “Your dog couldn’t sniff her way out of a blanket. Gemma!” He bellowed into the wind, and the wind whipped the words back at them. “I’m heading back to Ellen’s house to have at the guards. They should be out here also. Coming?”

  “Soon. I’ll meet you back there.”

  Dermot saluted and marched down the hill, stumbling and slipping as he went. His voice carried back to Alan in a plaintive call to his sister. Alan hunkered down on his haunche
s, feeling plaintive himself. The wind echoed in his ears, a hollowed-out noise that reminded him of too many other solitary moments. Since he’d left France, he’d collected these moments around himself like a security blanket, burrowing himself inside the safety of the known. He was comfortable with his life, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  Yet, he couldn’t deny that, like Bijou, maybe he was hard-pressed to sniff his way out of a blanket.

  “Bijou, come.”

  Bijou sat at his side with nose lifted into the wind. It trembled and glistened. He could see that it worked; she was enjoying a world of scent he couldn’t imagine. Perhaps without Dermot’s distracting presence, she’d do better with the tracking. Alan lifted the plastic bag that contained wadded-up black knee socks. He sniffed but didn’t catch anything except a faint leathery smell. Still, they had to be pungent from a dog’s point of view. They’d been pressed up against Gemma’s feet by her clomper boots. She probably had dainty feet underneath it all. Did she paint her toenails? Did she wear sandals in summer?

  Scowling, Alan entrapped Bijou’s nose once again. Bijou reared her head back with a whine and trotted off in the direction Dermot had taken. Alan could still see him, a greyish shape summiting the next hill.

  According to Dermot, Gemma had left a bit of the human world behind when she lost her voice. He hoped that Gemma’s uncanny touch with animals, her semi-feral ways, had led her to safety. “Gemma’s a survivor. She’ll have followed an animal path to a sheltered area. You’ll see.”

  He hadn’t been able to hide the desperation from his voice, though.

  Alan turned around in a circle. Nothing impeded his view—not a rooftop, not a tree, not a standing stone or other megalithic monument. There didn’t look to be shelter for miles.

  Bijou looked back at him and whined.

  “Okay then,” he said, “painkillers for you and we’ll try again later.”

  Alan let Bijou lead the way back toward Danny’s house. When they crested the next hill, he caught sight of the abandoned famine cottage the next hill over. Twenty minutes later they arrived.

  From the cottage that Ellen called her folly, he spied on the activity below him. Garda and unmarked vehicles crowded the lane in front of Danny’s house. Several uniformed guards stood at the hedge line to warn spectators away. A flash went off: journalists. By now, the Irish Times had caught on to their local drama, as well as the newspapers from the neighboring counties. Alan didn’t recognize the man who led a gesticulating Dermot away from the journalists. He seemed to be in charge, though, as he handed Dermot off to one of the guards for safekeeping. The house blazed with lights, well-lit in the perpetual twilight of this particular day. Inside, figures passed back and forth, all bustle and buzzing he was sure. He hoped for Danny’s sake that the attacker had left a trace of himself.

  Alan called Bijou to him before she caught wind of the dozens of new friends to be made below them. Stooping, he led her into the folly. Bijou settled herself near the door. Alan squinted into the corners and along windowsills littered with powdery animal droppings. Perhaps Gemma had run in here.

  “Bijou, you ready?” he said and covered the dog’s snout with the plastic bag again. This time around, she allowed it with a patient blink and then followed him to the scuffed dust where the McNamaras had bedded down their first few nights in Lisfenora. He angled her head downwards. “Sniff?”

  Bijou complied with a few whiffs and wandered away. Once again, Alan covered her snout. Then he directed her head to the second disturbed area about the size of a sleeping bag. “Gemma here?” he coaxed.

  To his surprise, Bijou kept her nose to the ground, snuffling. Her tail rocked back and forth, and, by Christ, his clown-faced girl might have finally gotten the point. After giving her a treat, Alan pushed her sniffer back into Gemma’s dirty socks, then pointed her head to the ground. She circled a bit, then honed in on the second patch of disturbed ground again. This wasn’t science, but it seemed to Alan that Bijou had caught Gemma’s scent.

  He led her toward the door, covered her nose again, then pointed to the ground. Bijou sniffed at the threshold, then up the doorframe. With a huff, she sat and started sniffing the wind again. She was clearly done for the day, and Alan didn’t blame her.

  Alan took one last look around before heading back to his car. Westward, the direction he and Dermot had hiked, held nothing. North led to the barren, rocky Burren, also unlikely for a woman who sought covered refuge. East led to the neighbors, cows, sheep, and the village.

  The view south looked a lot like the view toward the Atlantic: rock walls undulating over the hills and heather purpling the hillsides. A hedgerow followed the lane past Danny’s house on its southern route toward the next village. A blurred patch of green disappearing around one of the hillsides looked like a mirage.

  Pressure gathered in Alan’s chest. That same quickening that had accosted him when Camille had entered his orbit. It was an instinct that he’d often tested by seeking her out. He’d always found her too.

  It seemed he couldn’t resist his compulsive stalker tendencies even after all these years. At least they had a legitimate use now. If anyone could track Gemma down, it would be him.

  THIRTY-NINE

  CLARKSON REPLAYED MALCOLM’S MOMENT in the spotlight as he revealed his alibi and made a cuckold of Danny at the same time.

  “Shame that I’m compelled to spill secrets,” Malcolm said. “I don’t kiss and tell. I’m a gentleman. I’d tried to break it off—in fact, I thought I had—but you know how women can be. At least that’s what I’ve found. Women grow so attached, don’t they?”

  Danny was too stunned to be angry. “He was playing with me.”

  Clarkson paused the video. “What’s that now?”

  “During our interview yesterday, he made a point of mentioning Ellen a couple of times. He asked about her. He couldn’t resist dangling her to see if I knew about their—thing.”

  “You’re telling me that pulling him in this morning wasn’t some kind of vendetta?”

  “No, Sir. It was about finding McIlvoy. And I didn’t pull him in. O’Neil did.”

  “Give me some bloody credit, yeah?” Clarkson said. “You’re supposed to be on leave, yet in you come to write a bloody statement without a prompting. And now this revelation. You were hoping for something.”

  “Like I said, about McIlvoy. But I’ll tell you what, Malcolm is on my shit list now. He doesn’t provide the information about McIlvoy, I’ll see to the obstruction charges myself.”

  “Don’t you go there,” Clarkson said. “Now get out of my sight. You look like shite, you’re not thinking straight, and you’re so tainted we need a warning label on you.” Clarkson ordered O’Neil next. “Get Lynch the hell out of here too. With our apologies.”

  At the door, Danny paused. “How’s the hunt for Gemma McNamara going?”

  “We’re on it.”

  “I hope so because she’s the key.”

  “To what?”

  “To nailing McIlvoy.”

  Danny dragged a plastic chair until it bumped up against the hospital bed and sat down. Ellen laid quietly, eyelids smooth and twitch-free. An enormous bandage encased her head, which he’d expected, but not the wire that extended from somewhere within the bandages—no, from within her skull—into a monitoring device. More bloody phrases: “intracranial pressure” and “drainage.”

  He’d understood quickly enough and urged the nurse to be on her way. He was fine, he’d said, even though he wasn’t. Weariness collapsed him onto folded arms with Ellen’s hip warm against the top of his head. He closed his eyes against the shadows within his arms and felt for Ellen’s hand. Her skin felt the same at least, pearly almost, that soft and lustrous fairness he’d always admired. Still admired, he reminded himself.

  The scent of soap and citrus clung to her skin. The smell of steam rolling out of the bathroom. Ellen loved her long showers at the end of the day. He pictured her scrubbed and fragrant and bu
ndled in her thick robe, enjoying a cuppa in her favorite chair, letting her hair air dry in long waves under the lamp. With a rare night off from the children, she’d been relaxing when—

  No, stop thinking about it.

  Exhaustion overwhelmed him. In addition to the nurse, the surgeon had also come and gone. In a tone somehow both businesslike and commiserating, he’d explained Ellen’s condition with yet more words: “induced coma.” In other words, someone—perhaps McIlvoy—had hit her so hard with the alabaster statue from Italy that he’d cracked her skull wide open. “Her brain needs time to heal. We need to run more tests and wait.”

  Beneath the exhaustion, a current of anger burbled on low ebb. Rising bubbles of pain and regret and rage grew and burst with sticky pops that hurt Danny deep in his soul. For now, it was manageable. For now, the current anchored him.

  Danny sat up and pulled Ellen’s diary out of his jacket pocket, wondering what it had been doing in the bedroom closet. Ellen could have dropped it, or set it down in a distracted moment with the kittens, or hidden it away from his prying eyes. Not that it mattered. Ellen had always been prone to mislaying her keys, her reading glasses, anything, really.

  He opened the journal to a random page and caught Merrit’s name. I wouldn’t have thought she was Danny’s type, but can I blame him if he shagged her? Not hardly. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the twit.

  “Jesus, Ellen, would you listen to yourself in here?” he said.

  A few pages on, Ellen wrote: It’s nice to be wined and dined, and to be noticed as a woman. I know what M is doing—a seduction—but he’s very good at it. I find that I’m rather drawn to him.

  Danny’s stomach churned. That was disgusting. He let the book fall open to a page bookmarked by a pen. Ellen’s last entry, last night, after the shower but before her attacker had arrived.