by Ali McNamara
‘We’re not that good,’ Finn says. ‘Father Duffy is one of our better players.’
‘Your words are too kind, Finn,’ he smiles. ‘We’re two players short this week, because the Dooleys are away on holiday. You, my dear, could be our secret weapon.’
‘Oh, I’m not sure I’ll still be here on Tuesday,’ I say, but then I remember the house and how far we still have to go in tracing its owner. Kiki and I had discussed the possibility of staying on longer . . . ‘But I might be able to stay on – that’s if Finn can accommodate us for another few days. Our room might be booked?’
‘I’m sure I can sort something out,’ Finn says. ‘If you’re sure you want to stay, Ren? I can’t have the local priest pressuring one of my guests into taking part in a quiz if they don’t want to.’
‘It’s absolutely fine. I’d like to stay on in Ballykiltara for a while longer. There’s many questions I’d still like answers to, about the house and . . . other things,’ I imply, looking directly into his eyes like I had earlier.
Finn silently holds my gaze.
‘It seems that you, Finn, are the answer to all this lady’s problems,’ I hear Father Duffy quietly say. ‘How do you feel about that?’
‘Grand,’ Finn says, his eyes not moving a millimetre away from mine. ‘Absolutely grand.’
Sixteen
The next day Kiki and I decide to visit The Welcome House again to see if we can find any clues to its mysterious owner hidden inside. As I drive along in the direction of the house, I think about Finn and my visit to see Father Duffy yesterday.
After I’d agreed to stay long enough in Ballykiltara to take part in the quiz on Tuesday night, we’d gone back to discussing the history of the house. Father Duffy hadn’t disclosed any more information that would help us with our search, but he had told us more about the monks who came to Ireland to learn and to study, and he had also explained how Ballykiltara got its name.
‘The place of the church on the hill,’ I say out loud as we drive along.
‘What?’ Kiki asks, looking up from where she’s filing one of her nails.
‘That’s what Ballykiltara means. Father Duffy told us last night. Bally means place of, kil means church, and Tara is the ancient hill where the Irish high kings were crowned, so it has become a common name for a hill or elevated place.’
‘Oh,’ Kiki says, trying to sound interested. ‘That’s fascinating.’
‘Well, I think it is.’
Kiki puts her nail file down. ‘So it’s called that because of the church you went to yesterday being up that big hill? I had to climb that yesterday when I was talking to people for you. Nearly did me in, it did.’
‘Yeah, I suppose it is. It’s possible the town was named that before the church was ever built, though. Often churches are built on places that are of religious significance for many centuries before a building is ever erected to commemorate it.’
‘The encyclopaedia of Ren strikes again,’ Kiki says, grinning. ‘It’s no wonder they want you on their quiz team. I’m not complaining, though, if it means we get to spend more time here.’
‘You mean more time with Eddie,’ I say, as we pull off into the same lay-by where we’d parked a couple of days ago. ‘You were gone long enough last night.’
I’d spent most of yesterday evening alone, after Eddie had knocked at our door asking for Kiki. He’d then asked her in a very roundabout way if she’d like to go for a Chinese meal with him that night, which she’d accepted eagerly. After our visit to Father Duffy, Finn sadly had to go back to work, so I hadn’t seen much of him for the rest of the day.
‘About that,’ Kiki says as we exit the car and head up on to the footpath that runs alongside the road, ‘Did you tell Eddie I liked him?’
‘I might have mentioned something,’ I say, looking up at the house as we approach it. ‘Why? You do, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but don’t tell him that. You might scare him off!’
‘If Eddie isn’t scared off by now, he’s a pretty sound bet.’
‘I do like him,’ Kiki says dreamily, following me up the windy path that leads up to the house. ‘I’m glad you’re letting us stay on a few days longer. Now I can get to know him better.’
I’d arranged with Finn to extend our stay by another few nights. In fact, Finn said we could have the room for as long as we wanted it. He’d seemed quite pleased when he had extended our stay on the hotel’s computer, and I had to admit I felt the same. Ballykiltara was surprising me in ways I’d never expected it to, but I was enjoying those surprises as much as everyone else seemed to enjoy us being here.
Now all I need to do is get my house problems sorted so that I can relax and enjoy the rest of my time here in Ireland.
We’ve reached the top of the path and this time as we approach the house I find myself wondering if there’s anyone staying here at the moment, and not if the owner might be in.
I push the front door and again it opens for us just like it had two days ago.
This time we don’t hesitate on the doorstep; we walk confidently into the house. Now we know what this place is, the décor, which had seemed sparse before, seems appropriate for this peculiar, almost halfway house we find ourselves in.
‘What are we looking for?’ Kiki asks, following me as I walk through the hall towards the kitchen.
‘Clues to either the owner or the caretaker of this place.’
‘But it’s empty, we saw that the other day. There are no personal effects here, nothing to tie the house to anyone.’
‘There must be something!’ I call as I disappear into the kitchen. ‘I’ve been in enough houses in my time to know there’s always something.’
Kiki follows me into the kitchen and watches as I start opening drawers and cupboard doors in my hunt for a clue that might lead us to the owner.
‘I feel like a detective in a TV show,’ Kiki announces, as I rifle through a drawer filled with kitchen utensils. ‘Trying to solve the mystery of The Welcome House.’
‘You’re more like my wise-cracking sidekick,’ I tell her, closing the drawer and moving on to the next one. ‘Making smart remarks while your boss does all the work!’
‘OK, I’ll look too,’ Kiki concedes. She opens the fridge door and surveys the contents. ‘Which one?’ she asks, lifting a bottle of milk from the door.
‘Which one what?’
‘Which sidekick would I be?’
‘Depends on who I am, I guess.’ Nothing in this drawer, so I move on to the upper cupboards.
‘This milk isn’t too fresh,’ Kiki says, putting the milk back in the door. ‘It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here recently.’ She closes the fridge door. ‘I think you’d be . . . ’ She watches me as she thinks.
‘Sherlock Holmes?’ I suggest. ‘You could be Dr Watson.’
‘I’m not being the Hobbit!’ Kiki says in horror.
‘Sherlock was a book before it was a TV show,’ I remind her. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in this kitchen. Let’s try the sitting room. There might be something in that big dresser there.’
We head across the hall to the sitting room, and I begin searching through the huge wooden dresser while Kiki looks over the bookshelf.
‘Miss Marple?’ she asks, lifting a paperback book from one of the shelves.
‘What?’
‘Miss Marple,’ she says, tapping the cover of the book. ‘Agatha Christie? You could be her.’
‘Hmm, thanks for that – I think. But she doesn’t have a sidekick, does she?’
‘True . . . I’ll keep thinking.’
‘As long as you keep searching at the same time, that’s fine. These drawers are empty, there’s nothing in here. Anything on the bookshelves?’
Kiki shakes her head. ‘Only a lot of old second-hand books, mostly novels by the look of it.’
‘Upstairs then?’
We head up the stairs, Kiki suggesting possible detective duos as we go.
‘ . . .
Cagney and Lacey,’ she says as we reach the first bedroom.
‘At least they’re both women. I’m surprised you know them, bit old for you, aren’t they?’
‘There’s a Sky channel that does re-runs of vintage detective shows,’ she explains.
‘I wondered where you were getting all your knowledge from. There’s nothing in this room,’ I say after I’ve had a quick look in the first bedroom, so we head across the landing to the second.
‘You suggest one then,’ Kiki says, opening a drawer in a small wooden bedside table.
‘Why do we have to be like anyone else?’ I close the doors to the wardrobe – nothing, only some empty hangers. ‘Why can’t we just be us?’
‘Parker and Fisher.’ Kiki wrinkles up her nose. ‘We sound like a firm of estate agents, not a crime-fighting duo!’
‘Much as I hate to admit it, we’re closer to the first than the second. Especially since we’re still no further forward in solving this mystery!’
We give up on the upstairs of the house when we’ve checked all the rooms, but not before I take another look from one of the windows to check if the view is everything I remember it to be.
And annoyingly it is. This is definitely the house for Ryan Dempsey, and I have to keep trying to at least give him a chance of owning it.
‘Dempsey and Makepeace?’ I suggest to Kiki as I descend the stairs to meet her.
‘Hmm?’ a distracted voice replies.
‘Dempsey and Makepeace. I was thinking about Ryan Dempsey and it came to me. Perhaps you don’t remember them, they . . . What have you got there?’ I ask as I see Kiki standing in the hall looking at something.
‘I found it,’ she says, holding up a brown leather-bound notebook. ‘In here –’ She points to the hall table next to her. ‘It says it’s a visitors’ book. Can you believe we went all around the house and never looked here first? What are the chances?’
I hurry along the hall towards her and reach for the book, but Kiki protectively turns away. ‘Ah, ah, I found it. I get to look inside first.’
She opens the front cover of the book. ‘This looks like the letter that walker said he saw on that blog you found.’ She reads from the page: ‘Céad míle fáilte – that means a hundred thousand welcomes,’ she explains. ‘Eddie told me.’
‘Yes, I know. What else does it say?’ I ask excitedly, trying to peer over her shoulder.
‘Céad míle fáilte. Welcome to Ballykiltara’s very own Welcome House. Please feel free to stay here for as long as your need requires. A house has stood on this site for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, offering shelter and food to those that need it. Be assured, you didn’t find The Welcome House, The Welcome House found you . . . ’ She raises her eyebrows at me before continuing: ‘It knew you needed help and made itself available to you. The house would be grateful when your stay is over if you could leave it in the same way you found it, and if possible replace any food or supplies you have used with new ones. But if you can’t, please don’t worry, The Welcome House will continue to provide for those in need, just as it has done for you. Go raibh maith agat. Thank you and enjoy your stay.’ Kiki hands the book to me. ‘That’s so cute, isn’t it?’ she says as I cast my eyes over the page and see lines of ornate handwriting. ‘Don’t you think, Ren?’
‘It’s odd, that’s what I think. This talks about the house like it was real, like the house provides the food if the visitor doesn’t.’
‘Maybe it does?’
‘Kiki,’ I say firmly, ‘don’t you get drawn into all this nonsense too. There is a real-life person that looks after this house. There has to be. Don’t forget that.’
I turn the next page of the visitors’ book, and read the first entry. It’s from about three years ago, there’s a date, a man’s name, and then a short account of why he found himself here – like the blogger, another lost walker. Then there’s another entry underneath, a woman this time, who stayed at the house with her children, to escape her abusive husband. I show Kiki and again her eyebrows rise in surprise. We keep reading as the entries continue; there are notes from walkers and cyclists caught in dreadful weather conditions who stayed only one night at the house until they could be on their way again. Then there are entries from people who stayed here for longer, some like the woman and her children, caught in oppressive situations, and some from people simply down on their luck. But they all say the same thing: The Welcome House gave them shelter when no one else would.
I look at Kiki, we’ve both been reading the book open-mouthed for the last few minutes, astounded at the many diverse people who have found themselves here.
‘I bet this isn’t the only visitors’ book either,’ I say, tapping the cover, ‘I bet there’ve been many more before this one, if the house has been going for as long as everyone says it has.’
‘You’re right; I bet they tell some tales too. Do you think they’re here? Have we missed them? We’ve looked everywhere, though.’
‘I don’t think they can be. I expect whoever looks after this place has them hidden away somewhere.’
‘Yes, I bet they do,’ Kiki says, her eyes widening. ‘If only we were real cops, then we could get a search warrant to check everyone’s houses.’
‘Yeah, if only. That would make life a lot easier right now.’
‘You know, Ren, this book is pretty amazing,’ Kiki says softly, taking the visitors’ book from me. She runs her fingers gently over the leather cover before putting it back safely in the drawer. ‘This whole house is pretty special too. I’m beginning to wonder if we should be messing with it.’
I don’t want to admit it, but a similar thought has been niggling at me too – a tiny voice inside me that doesn’t want to rock this particular boat. But a much louder one keeps shouting it down because it knows I have to do just that.
‘We’re not messing with it,’ I try and justify, not only to Kiki but to myself. ‘We’re simply investigating the possibilities, that’s all.’
‘The possibility that it might be sold and used as a holiday home? I don’t think this house would want to be owned by one person – it’s too much of a free spirit for that.’
‘Perhaps that’s exactly what it would like after having strangers living in it for so long. Maybe the house would like the security and comfort of having one familiar owner.’
‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ Kiki says, nodding. ‘Yes, I suppose you might be right.’
I hadn’t thought of it either, until now.
But what if I’m correct? What if the house did want to be owned by a nice family, like a foster child that kept being passed from family to family; maybe it wanted to belong to one special person.
I shake my head. Even I’m being drawn into this madness now. This place we’re standing in is simply a building, a house made of bricks and mortar. It doesn’t care what happens to it, it doesn’t care who owns it. It doesn’t have feelings or a heart. It’s just a house, plain and simple.
But as we make our way back down the hall and let ourselves out of the front door – leaving it as we found it, on the latch, for the next visitor – I can’t shake the feeling that this house is anything but plain and simple. In fact, as we walk down the path towards our car, and I turn back for a moment to look at the house behind me, I can’t shake the feeling that someone or something is watching us go.
Seventeen
We leave the house and drive back towards the hotel.
‘You’re quiet,’ Kiki says as we pass the ‘Welcome to Ballykiltara’ sign that we’d passed the first time we’d driven into the town. ‘What’re ya thinking about?’
‘Not much. The house really.’
‘Gets you like that, doesn’t it?’ Kiki ponders. ‘It’s like a . . . feeling? Yes, that’s what it is: when you enter that house you can feel the presence of all the people that have stepped through that front door before you. It’s not a creepy feeling, either; it feels warm and . . . welcoming, like its name. In fact, i
s it just me, or did the house feel warmer today? The other day, it felt quite cold and chilly.’
She was right, I’d felt it too: both the warmth and the slightly odd feeling that the house seemed to generate. But I had to forget about all that and concentrate on what was important – my job.
‘We could try to find another house for Ryan?’ Kiki suggests after a few minutes of silence. ‘Something similar, but not that house.’
‘No,’ I say, pulling up at a zebra crossing. I watch two mothers push prams across it while they chat to each other.
‘Why? There must be loads of houses that would do.’
‘Kiki,’ I say, moving away again now the crossing is clear, ‘we don’t find houses for people that will do. We find the perfect house for them. So they can’t imagine ever living anywhere else.’
Kiki sighs. ‘I’m only suggesting that maybe, this once, another house could be found.’
‘No,’ I insist again. ‘We will discover who owns this house, and then we’ll do our best to encourage them to sell. Then, and only then, if they can’t be convinced, will we look elsewhere.’
Kiki sighs again; only this time it’s more of a huff. ‘When did you become so stubborn?’ she asks, folding her arms across her chest. ‘You’re like a dog we used to have when I was small. Bobby, he was called; lovely placid fella, but when he had a bone, he wouldn’t let go of it until he’d ripped all the meat off, then he’d spend hours crunching down all the bone, until that had all gone too. You’re like that, only with houses. You won’t rest until the job is fully crunched down.’
I keep my eyes firmly on the road. Kiki’s analogy isn’t one I particularly appreciate.
‘Although, sometimes that’s a good thing in life,’ Kiki continues in a gentler tone, ‘being as tenacious and driven as you are gets results, that’s for sure. But sometimes you need a little give and take. Oh, why are we pulling over?’ she asks as I swerve to the side of the road. ‘Have I said too much?’