Buried In a Bog
Page 1
PRAISE FOR THE ORCHARD MYSTERIES
“Sheila Connolly’s Orchard Mysteries are some of the most satisfying cozy mysteries I’ve read…Warm and entertaining from the first paragraph to the last. Fans will look forward to the next Orchard Mystery.”
—Lesa’s Book Critiques
“An enjoyable and well-written book with some excellent apple recipes at the end.”
—Cozy Library
“The mystery is intelligent and has an interesting twist…[A] fun, quick read with an enjoyable heroine.”
—The Mystery Reader (four stars)
“Delightful…[A] fascinating whodunit filled with surprises.”
—The Mystery Gazette
“[A] delightful new series.”
—Gumshoe Review
“The premise and plot are solid, and Meg seems a perfect fit for her role.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fresh and appealing sleuth with a bushel full of entertaining problems. One Bad Apple is one crisp, delicious read.”
—Claudia Bishop, author of the Hemlock Falls Mysteries
“A delightful look at small-town New England, with an intriguing puzzle thrown in.”
—JoAnna Carl, author of the Chocoholic Mysteries
“A promising new mystery series. Thoroughly enjoyable…I can’t wait for the next book and a chance to spend more time with Meg and the good people of Granford.”
—Sammi Carter, author of the Candy Shop Mysteries
PRAISE FOR THE MUSEUM MYSTERIES
“Skillfully executed…It’s a pleasure to accompany Nell on her quest. Fundraising the Dead is a promising debut with a winning protagonist.”
—Mystery Scene
“[The] archival milieu and the foibles of the characters are intriguing, and it’s refreshing to encounter an FBI man who is human, competent, and essential to the plot.”
—Publishers Weekly
“She’s smart, she’s savvy, and she’s sharp enough to spot what really goes on behind the scenes in museum politics. The practical and confident Nell Pratt is exactly the kind of sleuth you want in your corner when the going gets tough. Sheila Connolly serves up a snappy and sophisticated mystery that leaves you lusting for the next witty installment.”
—Mary Jane Maffini, author of the Charlotte Adams Mysteries
“National Treasure meets The Philadelphia Story in this clever, charming, and sophisticated caper. When murder and mayhem become the main attractions at a prestigious museum, its feisty fundraiser goes undercover to prove it’s not just the museum’s pricey collection that’s concealing a hidden history. Secrets, lies, and a delightful revenge conspiracy make this a real page-turner!”
—Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha Award–winning author of The Other Woman
“Sheila Connolly’s wonderful new series is a witty, engaging blend of history and mystery with a smart sleuth who already feels like a good friend…Her stories always keep me turning pages—often well past my bedtime.”
—Julie Hyzy, New York Times bestselling author of the White House Chef Mysteries
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sheila Connolly
Orchard Mysteries
ONE BAD APPLE
ROTTEN TO THE CORE
RED DELICIOUS DEATH
A KILLER CROP
BITTER HARVEST
SOUR APPLES
Museum Mysteries
FUNDRAISING THE DEAD
LET’S PLAY DEAD
FIRE ENGINE DEAD
County Cork Mysteries
BURIED IN A BOG
Specials
DEAD LETTERS
AN OPEN BOOK
Buried in a Bog
SHEILA CONNOLLY
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
BURIED IN A BOG
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / February 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Sheila Connolly.
Cover illustration by Daniel Craig.
Cover photos: Celtic Knots © shutterstock; Ivy © Prakapenka.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61912-4
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
Acknowledgments
My father’s father, John Connolly, was born in County Cork in 1883 and arrived in New York City in 1911. I never knew him. As an adult I thought that visiting Ireland, particularly the area where he was born, might help me understand who he was, and the result was a series of trips to Cork that I hope will go on.
My grandfather’s part of Cork is known as the Wild West, about as far as you can get from Dublin. It’s where Michael Collins was born, and where he was ambushed and died. It’s also an area that was particularly hard-hit by the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century. Somehow my Connolly ancestors managed to thrive, and there are still Connollys there.
This series was inspired by my discovery of a pub called Connolly’s, in the tiny village of Leap near my grandfather’s even tinier townland of Knockskagh. While the pub was small, it was well known for the musicians it attracted from all over Ireland. Sadly the last Connolly owner passed on a few years ago, but I had a chance to attend some memorable events there. I hope I’ve done right by it, in reviving it here at Sullivan’s, and there may yet be music there.
I’ve been a genealogist for years, but Irish genealogy poses some challenges, mainly because in the past many Cork families held to traditiona
l naming patterns—for example, a first-born son is named for his father’s father, a first-born daughter for her mother’s mother. You can imagine the confusion in a small community when multiple children are named for a shared grandfather! The solution has often been to add a nickname: Big Sean, Red-Haired Mick, Old Jerry, or even PatJoe (Patrick son of Joseph). I’ve used some of those in this book to help keep things straight. I hope I’ve got all the family connections right, but I won’t blame you for getting a bit lost. Not to worry—it’ll all come right in the end.
But this series might not have seen the light of day were it not for the several years I’ve spent taking classes in the Irish language. Some of the difficulties in learning Irish are due to the “improvements” in spelling imposed by the English in the middle of the last century. But when you hear it spoken, it’s far more musical, more expressive. I wish I could say I could speak it well after so many classes, but I’m still stuck on basics. I can at least follow a conversation, and the credit goes to Peigí Ni Chlochartaigh, mo mhúinteoir, a great lady with a wicked sense of humor (in any language), and to my more fluent colleagues in those classes.
Of course I have to thank my amazing agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, who helped shape my protagonist’s character, and to my long-suffering editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, with whom I had many debates about what was “really” Irish. I also appreciate the prompt assistance of the Public Relations Office of the Garda Siochána (the Irish police force) in Dublin, which answered my questions about Irish police jurisdictions and procedures.
Sometimes I wonder if County Cork is part of the modern world, despite the satellite dishes and mobile phones and supermarkets stocked with a wealth of European foods, because it feels timeless. It’s a special place, and I hope you’ll see that here.
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.
People live in one another’s shadows.
—IRISH PROVERB
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Maura Donovan checked her watch again. If she had it right, she had been traveling for over fourteen hours; she wasn’t going to reset it for the right time zone until she got where she was going, which she hoped would be any minute now. First the red-eye flight from Boston to Dublin; the cheapest she could find; then a bus from Dublin to Cork, then another, slower bus from Cork to Leap, a flyspeck on the map on the south coast of Ireland. But she was finding that in Ireland nobody ever hurried, especially on the local bus. The creaking vehicle would pull over at a location with no obvious markings, and people miraculously appeared. They greeted the driver by name; they greeted each other as well. Her they nodded at, wary of a stranger in their midst.
She tried to smile politely in return, but she was exhausted. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She was on this rattletrap bus only because Gran had asked her to make the trip—just before she died, worn down from half a century of scrabbling to make a living and keep a roof over her granddaughter’s head in South Boston. Now that she thought about it, Gran had probably been planning this trip for her for quite a while. She had insisted that Maura get a passport, and not just any passport, but an Irish one, which was possible only because Gran had filed for an Irish Certificate of Foreign Birth for her when she was a child. What else had Gran not told her?
And what else had she been too young and too selfish to ask about? Gran had never talked much about her life in Ireland, before she had been widowed and brought her young son to Boston, and Maura had been too busy trying to be American to care. She didn’t remember her father, no more than a large laughing figure. Or her mother, who after her father’s death had decided that raising a child alone, with an Irish-born mother-in-law, was not for her and split. It had always been just her and Gran, in a small apartment in a shabby triple-decker in a not-so-good neighborhood in South Boston.
Which was where Irish immigrants had been settling for generations, so Maura was no stranger to the Boston Irish community. Maybe her grandmother Nora Donovan had never shoved the Ould Country down her throat, but there had been many a time that Maura had come home from school or from work and found Gran deep in conversation with some new immigrant, an empty plate in front of him. Gran had taken it on herself to look out for the new ones, who’d left Ireland much as she had, hoping for a better life, or more money. The flow of immigrants had slowed for a while when the Celtic Tiger—the unexpected prosperity that had swept Ireland then disappeared again within less than a decade—was raging, but then it had picked up again in the past few years.
Maura suspected that Gran had been slipping these newcomers some extra cash, which would go a long way toward explaining why they’d never had the money to move out of the one-bedroom apartment they’d lived in as long as Maura could remember. Why Gran had worked more than one job, and why Maura had started working as early as the law would let her. Why Gran had died, riddled with cancer after waiting too long to see a doctor, and had left a bank account with barely enough to cover the last bills. Then the landlord had announced he was converting the building to condominiums, now that Southie was becoming gentrified, and Maura was left with no home and no one.
It was only when she was packing up Gran’s pitifully few things that she’d found the envelope with the money. In one of their last conversations in the hospital, Gran had made her promise to go to Ireland, Maura to say a Mass in the old church in Leap, where she’d been married. “Say my farewells for me, darlin’,” she’d said, and Maura had agreed to her face, although she had thought it was no more than the ramblings of a sick old woman. How was she supposed to fly to Ireland, when she wasn’t sure she could make the next rent payment?
The envelope, tucked in the back of Gran’s battered dresser alongside Maura’s passport, held the answer. It had contained just enough cash to buy a plane ticket from Boston to Dublin, and to pay for a short stay, if Maura was frugal. Since Gran had taught her well, she didn’t think she’d have any trouble doing that. How Gran had managed to set aside that much, Maura would never know.
She’d buried Gran, with only a few of her Irish immigrant friends in attendance, and a week later she’d found herself on a plane. And here she was. Maura was surprised to feel the sting of tears. She was cold, damp, jet-lagged, and—if she was honest with herself—depressed. It had been a long few weeks, but at least staying busy had allowed her to keep her sadness at bay. Gran had been her only relative, her only tie to any place, and with Gran gone Maura was no longer sure where she belonged. She was free, if broke. She could go anywhere she wanted, and with her work experience tending bar and waitressing, she could pick up a short-term job almost anywhere. The problem was, she didn’t know where she wanted to go. There was nothing to hold her in Boston, but there was no point in leaving either.
Maura looked out through the rain streaming down the windows. She’d always heard that Ireland was green, but at the moment all she could see was grey. What had Gran wanted her to find in Ireland?
Since Gran had never really mentioned any people “back home” to Maura, she’d been surprised to find a bundle of letters and photographs stashed next to the envelope with the m
oney, where Gran must have been sure that Maura would find them. Sorting through them after Gran’s death, she had found that the few photographs were ones she had seen no more than once or twice in her life, but luckily Gran had written names on the back; most of the letters had come from a Bridget Nolan, with only the skimpiest of return addresses—not even a street listing. Taking a chance—and wanting to believe that someone in Ireland would still care—Maura had written to the woman about her old friend Nora’s death and her wish that Maura make the trip to Ireland to pay her respects there. Mrs. Nolan had written back immediately and urged her to come over. Her spidery handwriting hinted at her advanced age and suggested that Maura shouldn’t delay, and it was barely two weeks later that Maura had found herself on the plane. And then on a bus, which passed through small towns, cheerfully painted in bright colors, as if to fight the gloom of the rain. Most often it took no more than a couple of minutes to go from one end of the town to the other, and between there was a lot of open land, dotted with cattle and sheep and the occasional ruined castle to remind Maura that she was definitely somewhere that wasn’t Boston. The towns listed on the road signs meant nothing to her. She was afraid of dozing off and missing her stop. Mrs. Nolan had given Maura sketchy instructions to get off the bus in front of Sullivan’s Pub in a village called Leap, and they would “see to her,” whatever that meant. The bus lurched and belched fumes as it rumbled along the main highway on the south coast, though “highway” was a rather grand description: it was two lanes wide. More than once the bus had found itself behind a truck lumbering along at a brisk twenty miles per hour, but nobody had seemed anxious about it; no one was hurrying.
Finally, through the murk of the late March afternoon in, Maura could make out a large painted sign by the road: Sullivan’s of Leap, with a dashing highwayman riding a horse straight out of the sign. It was no more than a minute later that the bus driver called out “Leap” (which he pronounced “Lep,” as in “leper”), and Maura gathered her belongings—which consisted of a battered duffel bag with her clothes plus an old school backpack with everything else—and waited while a few other women climbed down. The women appeared to be regular riders; they exchanged farewells and vanished quickly in different directions, leaving Maura standing alone in the rain looking at the dilapidated facade of Sullivan’s.