When the workman left she handed out keys to each of her staff. “Now we know that no one other than any of us can get inside. There can’t be a former employee, a ghost, or a faerie with access to this shop.”
Keeva looked as if she wanted to say something about faeries not needing keys, but she closed her mouth again. Ambrose’s expression had warmed a tad. Sam wondered how long it would stay that way.
“Okay, then,” she said with as much brightness as she could work into her voice. “Let’s continue what we were doing yesterday, rearranging shelves and displays so the inventory looks fresh and new.”
The women went right back to their tasks but Ambrose’s face was again a mask. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt his moods go icy. She was weary of walking on eggshells around him.
“Could you help me in the back room?” she asked him, walking that direction without waiting for a reply.
When they were alone she turned to him. “Ambrose, what is it? Aside from the fact that I showed up here, unwanted, and that I’m trying to see the shop get back on its feet again—what is bothering you?”
He stood with arms folded across his chest, staring at the toes of his shoes.
“Terry’s dying has obviously caused you a lot of pain,” she continued gently. “You cared a great deal for him, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. The man was a mentor to me, almost a father. I’ve missed havin’ him here each day.”
“But he hadn’t been coming into the shop for months before he died. You’ve had time to adjust to that. So there’s more.” She waited for a dam of some sort to burst, an outpouring about how unfair it was that Sam got the shop.
“There’s something fishy about all of it,” he finally said. “Ask that lawyer. Where did Terry’s house go? His personal things? No one ever said.”
Sam took a breath. “Mr. Ryan mentioned some sort of charitable trust. I’m afraid I don’t know any details.”
“Exactly. And where is that trust? And who does know the details? If you’re the heir, you should have been told all that.”
“So it isn’t me that you’re angry with?” Sam ventured.
“Get over yourself, as they’d say in America,” he said, his eyebrows fiercely pulled together again. “This is about Terry and the rest of his estate. What’s happened to it?”
Sam took a mental step back. What was he talking about?
“Are you saying that the lawyers have pulled something? Done something illegal?”
“I’m saying I don’t know. The funeral they held for Terry was nothin’. It was like someone said ‘ah, just stick ’im in the ground’. And the wake—a paltry thing. And Terry, him bein’ a solid gold member of this community. I’m sayin’ it was all wrong.” His arms gestured wildly and she noticed his brogue got heavier the more excited he became.
“You mentioned his house. I’ve never seen it,” she said. “No one has said a thing to me.”
“He’d a lovely home, in a nice part of the city. No castle, mind you, but a large place. I’d been there a few times. We all had. Terry hosted us and our families for Christmas dinner. Keeva’s sister even worked as his caregiver in his final months. Was she just given the boot, I ask? I cannot imagine it.” His face had become flushed as he spoke, but now he simply leaned back against the small worktop where the teakettle sat, as if the energy had left his body.
“Ambrose, I promise you, I will look into this. I agree. You are entitled to better answers than you’ve gotten so far.” She patted his arm and started toward the door. “I’d like to have those answers too. I have a feeling my uncle would have wanted you to know.”
She walked out, leaving Ambrose to collect himself.
In the shop Keeva was ringing up a sale at the register while Bridget arranged books in the front window, making today’s display even more enticing than what she’d done yesterday. Sam glanced around but couldn’t see anything that required her immediate attention. She decided to pay a surprise visit to the offices of Ryan and O’Connor.
A mist had moved in during the morning and Sam found it a bit challenging to locate the law offices that she’d only visited once before. But eventually she came to a familiar intersection, with the jewelry store that she remembered. She opened the shiny black door at the street level and climbed to the second floor.
Daniel Ryan was busy with a telephone call, according to the secretary who occupied the desk in the small reception area. When he finished, she would be happy to announce Sam.
Magazines about finance, business and the computer industry lay in a neat row on an end table and gave Sam a pretty good idea of the types of clients represented by Ryan and O’Connor. She picked up one on business and idly flipped it open, wondering if there were articles about how to revive a very dilapidated, very old retail store.
Before she found the answer to that question, Daniel Ryan opened the door to his private office and invited her inside.
“Come to get the paperwork out of the way, then?” he asked, reaching into a drawer and pulling out a folder.
“No, actually. Not quite yet. I still have questions about the financial state of the store—”
“Which, as I mentioned last time, has nothing to do with the fact that it is yours.”
“Yes, you did say that.” Sam put on as gracious a smile as she could muster. “There are other things. You mentioned that certain items in the estate went to some kind of charitable trust—including my uncle’s home?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“What’s the nature of this trust?”
“Well, I’m not really at liberty to say.” His gaze traveled across the desk.
“I suppose what I’m asking is whether this trust, or whatever organization it is, actually occupies the house. Or, are my uncle’s possessions still in it?”
Ryan fiddled with the pages inside the folder some more. “I’m not sure I can say.”
“It’s just that some of Terry’s friends here in Galway . . . well some have expressed—how do I say this?—reservations, about the way his funeral and wake were conducted. It’s led me to be concerned about who, really, has taken over his house and his other things.”
“Oh, that. Well, I can assure you that everything was done in accordance with your uncle’s wishes. A nice service, a quiet burial, a small wake. He was a man of simple tastes. He didn’t want there to be a big fuss over him. At the end.”
Sam watched his face, the slight twitch that grabbed at the corner of his eye.
“I would like to visit my uncle’s grave,” Sam said. “My mother asked me to do that.” It seemed like a reasonable request, even if it weren’t true.
“I’ll take you there,” Ryan said. “Soon. Um, I’m afraid I have appointments the rest of the day now. Maybe in a day or two? I could call you.”
The lawyer’s words made sense, but why was there such discrepancy between what were supposedly Terrance O’Shaughnessy’s wishes and what his close friend Ambrose Piggott believed them to be? Sam thanked him for his time and said she would wait for his call.
Out on the street the mist had broken up, leaving everything glistening with damp; the clouds were high and white and unthreatening. She felt the last of the style go out of her hair. A walk in the cool air might help clear her head, she decided, so she set off toward the hotel.
Who was right about Terrance’s final wishes—Ambrose or the lawyer? She asked herself why it mattered to her—this was something that had happened months ago and couldn’t be changed—but for some reason it bothered her. Maybe it was simply that if she had to take ownership of the bookshop, as Daniel Ryan stated, she wanted to have a decent working relationship with Ambrose. Plus, there had been the man’s emotional connection to her uncle. She tended to believe him.
Down by the dock sat the Glory Be, alone and still in the same berth where the police had left her. Sam wondered if Beau had been in to see Detective Lambert again today. She ducked out of the pedestrian traffic and sent a q
uick text to him. Are you in the hotel?
Almost immediately she got his response: At police station. Can head back now.
She replied: See you in 20 min.
She stared at the boats for a couple more minutes, debated going inside and having a glass of wine in the pub while she waited for him.
Across the street from the hotel she noticed the high stone wall and remembered that they could see over it from the third floor. There was a graveyard behind that wall.
Maybe she could save Daniel Ryan the trouble of taking her to visit the grave if she could find it herself. She crossed Dock Street and followed the rock wall around the corner where a doorway-sized entrance led to the grassy area beyond. She climbed the steps past a wooden sign that said Forthill Graveyard and a plaque written in Latin with a rather graphic skull and crossbones on it.
The place was as quiet as, well, a graveyard. Vivid green grass covered the ground between a variety of headstones—white stone crosses, round-shouldered gray mossy ones, a few that leaned at angles. She looked around the enclosure that was probably an acre or two at most, not spotting any graves that looked obviously newer than the others. She began to walk among the stones, which weren’t exactly in precise rows anymore, picking out names.
At one side she noticed that an equipment shed stood with the door open. Fifteen minutes until Beau would be back, and reading every gravestone in the place would take hours. She called out, “Hello!”
A man in dungarees stepped out. He had a wicked looking blade in his hand and Sam found herself taking a step back, although she was still a good twenty feet out of his reach.
“Hi, I wonder if you could tell me where a particular grave is?”
“Might. I been working around this same bunch for a long time now.” He chuckled at his own joke.
“Terrance O’Shaughnessy.”
“There ain’t no such.”
She gave him a puzzled look.
“Most of ’em’s the graves of those men from the Spanish Armada. Executed after they tried to invade England in 1588, they were. Buried right here.”
“So there aren’t any recent graves here?”
“No ma’am, you’ve got the wrong place.”
Sam was nearly certain Daniel Ryan had said her uncle’s grave was there but maybe she was mistaken. One of them certainly was.
Chapter 11
Sam left the cemetery and crossed the street to the hotel. Beau’s familiar shape had just passed through the heavy glass doors that led to the elevators so she picked up her pace and caught up with him just as one of the elevator doors slid open.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. How did it go at the bookstore?”
It took her a minute to shift mentally, past the graveyard and the visit to the attorney’s office. She described the nuisance of the destroyed window display and the fact that she’d had the shop’s locks changed.
“If another incident in the night happens now, it’s got to be one of the employees,” she said.
He smiled down at her as the door opened to the third floor hallway. “It pretty much has to be anyway, don’t you think?”
“Unless you believe in faeries, sprites or leprechauns. At least they’ll all know that I’m keeping closer tabs on them.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to think about this whole thing, Beau.”
She told him about the lawyer’s cagey manner whenever she tried to ask him questions, and the visit to the cemetery, which had left her completely puzzled.
“I think Daniel Ryan is hiding something from me. He sure is eager for me to sign those papers, but when I ask questions he manages to divert the conversation another direction.”
“So, talk to his partner?”
Sam had nearly forgotten about the other one, since she’d never met him. She pondered Beau’s suggestion. “That makes sense,” she finally said. “He’s the older partner, was probably the one who worked with my uncle for a long time. Maybe I’m being unfairly suspicious of Ryan. Maybe he just doesn’t know that much about the estate.”
She rummaged in her bag and came up with the business card she had stashed there. “I’ll set up an appointment and then we can take the rest of the day off and go do something fun.”
As it turned out, the only time both attorneys would be in their office was that afternoon, as O’Connor was leaving for London in the morning.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said when she’d hung up the phone. “If I want to talk to Mick O’Connor it has to be today.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“Thank you. Maybe they won’t give me such a runaround with your big strong presence in the room.”
He laughed. “More likely, they’ll just feel that it’s twice the reason to get the deal finalized and get rid of us.”
At the law office, the secretary led the way to the senior partner’s private office, where they were greeted by a florid-faced man in his sixties. His hair was white around the edges, nonexistent on top, and blue eyes twinkled under thick white brows. Add a red hat and you might be shaking hands with Santa.
Sam returned his smile but didn’t let herself become distracted from her mission.
“I don’t mean to cause problems,” she said, “but I feel like there is so much I don’t know about this bookshop I’ve inherited. I don’t want to sign anything until—”
“Completely understandable,” O’Connor said.
Daniel Ryan had joined them in his partner’s office, his eyes darting back and forth between the others.
“Your uncle spoke very fondly of his American family,” O’Connor said. “Terrance and Maggie never had children. He thought of your mother and you as the family he never had here.”
“Mother remembers him fondly, too. It’s just that the news of this inheritance came completely as a surprise. None of us expected anything like—”
“Oh, I know. That was a big part of your uncle’s nature. Generosity, surprises, watching people’s reactions—he loved doing nice things for those he cared about.”
Sam suppressed the impulse to argue. Surely there were people right here in town that he cared about more than a faraway relative he’d never seen.
“I’ve looked over the financial records for the shop, and there’s hardly any information. Wasn’t there more, somewhere? If I’m to operate this business from another continent I need to have some idea what to look for in sales.”
A glance passed between the two lawyers.
O’Connor didn’t answer immediately. “It’s possible that some of the records would be in Terrance’s home. He did keep a room there as his study.”
“May I go there and have a look?”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it. Sam felt as if she were pulling teeth to get to the heart of the situation.
Finally, he spoke: “We could probably arrange that.”
Some kind of signal went between the partners and Ryan left the room.
“We shall make sure the place is tidy and that no one from the trust is using it at the moment.”
“What about this charitable trust? Isn’t there some way I can leave the bookshop to it as well?”
“Well, I’m sorry to say, no. It’s a matter of how the estate was all arranged.”
She bit back a surge of frustration as Daniel Ryan opened the door and gave his partner a nod.
“Well, then, that’s set,” Mick O’Connor said. “Shall we go now? My car is just downstairs and, well, because of my meetings in London this week, today’s the best time.”
He stood up, not really making it an option unless Sam chose to miss out on the opportunity altogether. She noticed that the younger lawyer had vanished behind the closed door of his own office.
The car was a silver Mercedes, spotlessly clean, and Sam almost got into the driver’s seat before realizing she was on the wrong side of it. Beau took the back seat directly behind Sam. O’Connor drove carefully through the narrow lanes until they’d l
eft the congestion of central Galway and began to see individual house lots and places with small gardens out front. The route was completely unfamiliar to Sam and she guessed they were going north, although there was nothing to really tell her so. She suspected that Beau, with his internal navigation sense that she’d often teased him about, would know exactly how to repeat the trip.
Gradually, the size of the homes and the land they occupied grew larger, and when the lawyer turned onto a lane and slowed, Sam saw that her uncle’s neighborhood was a nice one. O’Connor brought the car to a stop in front of a Tudor-styled house surrounded by mature trees and a neatly manicured lawn. Unless Terrance O’Shaughnessy had been an avid gardener until his dying day, he’d hired help with this place.
Dark half-timbers delineated sections of the second floor, with four evenly spaced windows across the front and it appeared at least an equal number along the sides of the structure. The ground floor façade was bisected by a small portico in front of a leaded glass door, where identical topiary plants stood sentinel on either side. Wide mullioned windows balanced the appearance.
“Uncle Terry’s home is certainly in much better condition than his business was,” Sam commented as they got out of the car in the circular driveway in front. A side drive led to a large old carriage house.
“Oh, yes. There was a full time gardener and a housekeeper. The house itself was something Terry acquired after making some very successful investments on the continent. Years ago. He and Maggie chose this home and made it their own.”
“When did the bookshop come into the picture?”
“Ah, well, that was Terry’s passion—books. He bought the shop from an old woman who couldn’t run it anymore and then created the legend that he had won it in a poker game. He had a fondness for Western novels, you see. He loved being in the store, watching the new titles come in, recommending books, matching his customers’ tastes to the books he thought they would like. Ambrose is much the same, you know.”
Sam nodded but didn’t say anything. So far, the only soft side she’d seen to the grumpy manager was when he talked about Terry. But she had to admit that she’d not spent enough time around Ambrose to know him yet.
7 Sweets, Begorra Page 9