The Angel

by Carla Neggers

  But Abigail didn’t want to think about kids right now. She wandered through the room. Sarakis’s devil collec­

  tion included paintings, drawings, illustrations, ceramics, books—and movies, she noted with surprise, from Vincent Price to The Omen and Beetlejuice.

  “This shit gives me the willies,” Bob blurted.

  THE ANGEL

  87 Abigail nodded to a locked door at the far end of the room. “What’s in there?”

  “That’s Victor’s climate-controlled room,” Jay said with a slight, irritated sigh. “It maintains precise temperature and humidity conditions that certain items require for pres­

  ervation. It’s quite small and cramped, Detective.”

  A noise out in the hall drew their attention back toward the pocket doors.

  A bushy-haired man—no more than twenty-five—stood in the doorway in a Harvard T-shirt and baggy shorts. “I thought that was a cop car out front.”

  Augustine seemed to welcome the intrusion. “Liam, it’s good to see you. Detectives, this is Liam Butler, Victor’s personal assistant.”

  “That sounds lofty,” Liam said, his cheerfulness incon­

  gruous given all the images of hell and damnation around him. “I did scut work for Victor in exchange for a small salary and a suite upstairs. I’m a graduate student at Harvard. Political science— I don’t know anything about art or col­

  lectibles. This was the perfect job. Flexible hours, decent pay, independence. It’s been great.” He gave a small moan, ran a hand through his hair. “I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “How did you come to know Mr. Sarakis?”Abigail asked.

  “He and my father worked together—a brokerage firm in Boston. My father’s at the Chicago office. He’s still slogging away. Victor retired about six months ago.” Liam seemed eager to talk. “He had me help sort through and catalog his collections. He’s got things stashed all over the house. I swear we’re going to find an Egyptian mummy stuffed under one of the beds.”

  “It’s all a legal matter now that Victor’s dead,” Jay said stiffly.

  Abigail looked for a reaction from Liam, but he didn’t 88

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  even seem to notice Jay had spoken. “How long did you work for Mr. Sarakis?” she asked.

  “Eighteen months. I’m going to miss this job.”

  “What will you do now?”

  He blew out a breath, shaking his head. “Stay here as long as I can, then find a new place. I can move in with some friends, maybe. Rents are expensive around here, but I saved some cash, thanks to Victor.”

  “Victor always spoke highly of Liam,” Jay said. Bob eased over to a black-wire sculpture of a particu­

  larly vile-looking devil. “Looks like a twisted great blue heron to me. So is Victor’s sister into the devil and evil?”

  Augustine tensed visibly. “I’m sure that Charlotte will be happy to answer any legitimate questions you have, Detec­

  tive O’Reilly.”

  Bob shrugged. “Good.”

  Abigail noticed Liam backing out into the hall at the testy exchange. “Did you see Mr. Sarakis the day he died?”

  she asked.

  “Just at breakfast. I spent most of the day helping a friend study for her orals—well, not study so much as deal with the pressure.”

  “What was Mr. Sarakis’s state of mind that morning?”

  “Preoccupied. That wasn’t unusual, though. He was always chewing on some idea, some interest. He was a bril­

  liant, inquisitive man, Detective.” Liam choked up a moment. “A gentle soul—a true Renaissance man.”

  “He was also a little strange,” Bob interjected.

  “Yeah. So what?” There was no defensiveness or irri­

  tation in Liam’s tone. He seemed to be asking a genuine question, trying to understand what Victor Sarakis’s ec­

  centricities could possibly have had to do with his death.

  THE ANGEL

  89 A fair point, Abigail thought. “What problem was he

  ‘chewing’ on?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It wasn’t a big deal. He’d often lose himself in his thoughts. Don’t get me wrong. He was a great guy. But you can look around here and see why he retired at fifty, can’t you?”

  She could, indeed. “Do you know why he went to Boston the night he died?”

  “Nope,” Liam said without hesitation. “Look, I wish I could help, but I don’t know what Victor was doing in Boston or why he drowned. I’m sorry it happened, that’s all. If you have more questions, ask away. It’d be good to get all this over with. Otherwise, I’d just as soon go up to my room.”

  “Go ahead,” Bob said. “We’ll be in touch if we have further questions.”

  With a look of relief, Liam departed, disappearing up the stairs as Abigail joined Bob in the hall. Jay stepped past them into the foyer and pulled open the creaky front door. “I appreciate your thoroughness, but if there’s no reason to believe Victor’s death wasn’t simply an unfortunate accident—well, I think you know what I’m saying.”

  No fishing expedition, Abigail thought. No assuming Sarakis’s unusual interests had a role in his death. A wealthy eccentric with a fascination with the devil drowning in two feet of water—reporters would love that one. The Augus­

  tines, who had a business to protect, would understandably want to avoid triggering a media sensation. She and Bob walked back across the weedy yard to her car. The shade had kept the interior reasonably cool, and she rolled down a window, letting in the warm air.

  “Okay,” Bob said, “so the devil stuff’s weird.”

  “Something’s not right about this man’s death, Bob.”

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  “Maybe so. Brief Cambridge PD. Keep digging.” He added sardonically, “Of course, that’s not an order, since you don’t report to me—”

  “I appreciate the green light.”

  “Yellow light. Not green.”

  Abigail stuck the key in the ignition. Some days, there was no pleasing Bob O’Reilly.

 
  Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland 8:00 p.m., IST

  June 21, The Summer Solstice

  Keira climbed over a barbed-wire fence—her third fence crossing of the evening—and dropped to the soft, thick grass on the other side, its ankle height suggesting that no cows or sheep fed out here. As far as she could tell, nearly every square inch of the virtually treeless hills around her was marked off for grazing. Sheep, being more nimble than cows, could navigate the rock outcroppings and steep terrain higher up in the mountains.

  She hoisted her backpack onto one shoulder. Once again, she’d come prepared, even if it meant a heavy pack. Last night’s hike had confirmed more details in Patsy’s story and narrowed down the possibilities of where the hermit monk’s hut might have been—or might yet still be. Tonight, Keira hoped either to find it or to settle on a spot that would work for the illustrations she had in mind. With plenty of light left in the long June dusk, she’d be 92

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  back in her cottage, tucked into her bed, before she needed to resort to her flashlight. The open landscape helped her feel less isolated, less as if she was a little out of her mind, heading off into the Irish hills in search of evidence that an old story told to her in a South Boston kitchen wasn’t pure fiction.

  She pictured Patsy McCarthy with her wisps of white hair, her bright eyes sparkling as she told the old story.

  “The monk, who was a kind and generous man, lived a simple life of prayer in a stone hut he’d built with his own hands by the spring in the rock-strewn hills above the harbor…”

  Keira smiled as she took a moment to regain her bearings. She was still in open pasture, above a stream that had carved a dip in the general upward slope of the hills. She’d left the dirt track a while back. A sharp barb had cut through her pants into her thigh on that first
fence-crossing, but she’d bit back a curse of pain, not wanting to alert the bull referred to in the Beware Of Bull sign tacked onto a post just before a small wooden bridge over the stream. The land was owned by Eddie O’Shea’s brother Aidan, who had given her permission to go exploring. She’d passed a modern barn and his scatter of well-used farm equipment along the track, but they were out of sight now. She made her way down the hill, the barren rocks and grass giving way to the trees and undergrowth that flour­

  ished along the banks of the stream, the ground wetter now, mushier, the air cooler. All she had to do was climb up the hill and she’d be back out in the open again. Had her mother come out here on the summer solstice thirty years ago?

  “Every year on the summer solstice, the mischief would begin anew.”

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  93 The stream was one of the distinctive landmarks in the story. The stone circle, the harbor, the position and the shape of the hills—they had all helped pinpoint the village and confirm that the story, however much of it was myth, referred to a real place.

  “The monk had no help from his brothers in building his little hut by the spring. He used his own hands, carrying stones up from the village. He didn’t mind. He’d always preferred his own company. His solitary life suited him.” Keira crept along the bank of the stream, dodging tree branches, pushing her way through tangles of vines and holly, the lush vegetation creating shifting shadows and a very different mood than out in the pasture. She picked up her pace, wondering how long to give her search tonight. But even as she formed the thought, she stopped abruptly, half in disbelief.

  She was standing at the base of the remains of what appeared to be an old hut built into the hillside, just as Patsy McCarthy had described, its gray stone visible here and there under a cloak of wild-growing ivy. Containing her excitement, Keira skirted a large oak tree for a closer look at the ruin.

  She could make out a front wall, the remnants of a chimney and a doorway—the door itself probably had been appropri­

  ated for another use decades ago. What must have been a thatched roof was gone, replaced now with a natural canopy of vines and debris. She couldn’t estimate the structure’s age with any accuracy, but she could always ask Eddie O’Shea to put her in touch with someone local who might know. Colm Dermott, a respected scholar, would certainly help. Abandoned buildings weren’t unusual in southwest Ireland, particularly hard hit by the famine years and sub­

  sequent mass emigration, but this one fired Keira’s imagi­

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  nation. The monk in Patsy’s story—or perhaps a monk upon whom he’d been based—could actually have lived here, in this tiny ruin on the hillside above the stream.

  “Never mind that the monk was content in his isolation, his brothers thought he needed company—needed them, in fact. They had other ideas about his life.” Keira could hear the gurgling of the stream directly behind her and, in the distance, sheep bleating at irregular intervals, comforting sounds for their familiarity, their normalcy. Whoever had lived out here clearly had main­

  tained a simple existence. It didn’t have to be Patsy’s monk. For all Keira knew, Patsy’s father, or his father, could have wandered out here and decided to add the ruin to their story of the three brothers and make a good story better.

  “It wasn’t just his brothers with other ideas, either. Oh, no.”

  Patsy had hesitated at that point in her telling, her re­

  luctance to admit she believed in fairies palpable.

  “It was the monk who first discovered the angel, in the ashes by the fire on the evening of the spring equinox. At first, he thought his brothers had put it there. More of their mischief.”

  Keira heard a rustling sound nearby and sucked in a breath as she looked around her.

  Just above her on the hillside, a large black dog paused in front of a hawthorn, drooling, snarling at her.

  “Easy, poochie,” she said in a low voice. She’d never been particularly good with dogs, and this was no friendly Irish sheepdog. “Easy, now.”

  The dog growled, his short black hair standing on end on his upper spine.

  Keira put some firmness into her tone. “You just stop. There’s no need to growl at me.”

  THE ANGEL

  95 Panting now, the dog edged down the hill toward her. She’d prepared for everything, she thought, except mean dogs.

  Mud, fallen leaves, ivy, stone and a half-dead tree par­

  tially obstructed the door’s opening, but she pushed aside a tangle of muck and greenery and slipped inside, hoping the dog wouldn’t try to follow her. She reached into her backpack for her emergency whistle. If nothing else, it might scare off the dog should he go on the offensive. She heard another growl, a sharp yip and more rustling of brush.

  Then, nothing.

  Assuming the dog ran off, Keira eased her backpack off her shoulder and set it on the mud floor as she surveyed her surroundings. The hut was very small, with a tiny window opening high up on the far end, above a mostly intact loft, and another window opening over the doorway—the only entrance, as far as she could see. The main wooden support beam above her looked to be holding firm, but rafters had caved in on each other, fallen leaves, branches and ivy forming their own organic roof. On the wall opposite the loft stood a largely intact chimney constructed of more gray stone.

  “The monk had never seen such a thing in all his life as the stone angel. She was so beautiful, he sat by the fire and stared at her for hours.”

  As Keira’s eyes adjusted to the semidarkness inside the hut, she got out her water bottle and plastic bag of snacks—

  a couple of energy bars, nuts, an apple. She tried to imagine the reclusive monk in Patsy’s story, going with the idea that he had existed and had lived here. What would he have look liked? What would his life on this hillside have entailed? It would have been rough, no doubt, dominated by the neces­

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  sities of getting food and water, staying warm, maintaining even a modest level of hygiene.

  In some ways, Keira thought, it would have been similar to her mother’s lifestyle in the woods.

  Patsy was a mesmerizing storyteller, taking Keira through every twist and turn as the brothers tried to figure out how the stone angel had come to them and what it meant. They all agreed the angel was a harbinger of good fortune. The monk brother believed Saint Ita herself had sent the angel to turn him and his brothers more deeply to lives of prayer, charity and simplicity as a means of bringing them good spiritual fortune. The farmer brother believed the angel would bring the good fortune of a bountiful harvest and productive cows and sheep.

  The ne’er-do-well brother, of course, had another idea altogether and believed the angel was meant to help him and his brothers—the entire village, in fact—turn a profit so they could open their own pub.

  All three brothers were convinced the angel had Saint Ita’s gift of prophecy.

  They were still arguing about their predictions three months later—on the night of the summer solstice—

  when fairies appeared and plucked the angel from the monk’s hearth.

  Keira smiled, remembering the glee with which Patsy had told that part of the story.

  The monk took the theft as a test of his faith and mettle and resolved to get the angel back. For the next three months, he chased the fairies through the hills, until, on the night of the autumnal equinox, the stone angel appeared again on his hearth.

  He kept its return a secret from his brothers. When the winter solstice came and went without a visit from the

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  97 fairies, the monk thought he’d won the contest of wills, that he was right in his interpretation of the meaning of the angel and all would be well.

  But his brothers eventually discovered his deception and accused him of lying and hypocrisy.

  They continued arguing, but without animosity—

  arguing
was a way of life for them. It was what they were used to, it was what they loved about each other. A good fight offered them a way to be together. On the next summer solstice, the fairies again came for the angel.

  Then on the autumn equinox, the angel reappeared on the hearth.

  On it went, the monk arguing with his two brothers and chasing the fairies, the angel disappearing and reappear­

  ing on the equinox or the solstice.

  In her elaborate telling of the story, Patsy had used just the right descriptive detail, the well-timed pause, the perfect tone to convey frustration, amusement, a sense of mischief. She’d teared up at the ending, when, one day, the angel simply disappeared from the hills for good. No one had it—not the fairies, not the brothers. Staying close to the hut’s doorway, Keira sipped her water and let the memory of Patsy’s voice quiet her mind. She could smell the mud and the pungency of the vines and decaying leaves around her in the hut, feel the dampness, making it easy to imagine the monk’s excitement at finding a beautiful stone angel on his hearth.

  It would be there…by the fire…

  “Keira.”

  She went still, her water bottle suspended in midair. Was it the wind, or had she just heard someone whisper her name?

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  Then came a creak, a groan of what sounded like a tree being uprooted—and then the sharp scrape of rock against rock. Dirt and ivy loosened overhead, and decaying leaves and twigs fell onto the mud floor. Keira lunged for the door, but didn’t get far as several rafters collapsed onto each other, sending dirt and debris down in front of her. She heard stones tumbling on the chimney side of the ruin.