by Dorien Kelly
Kylie nodded. After Mairead left, she dug through her desk for a tissue, and wished herself anyplace but Ballymuir.
Michael bolted upright at the sound of someone clearing his throat. Daylight shone through the window at the top of the steps. He scrubbed a hand over his face, then looked at Pat, who stood at the end of the bed.
“What time is it?”
“Just past ten.”
“Jesus.” He couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept that late. Not that last night counted as sleep.
“We’ve made you breakfast. And Vi, she’s brooding about like a mother hen. She’s been up here twice to check and see whether you were still breathing.”
“Barely,” he muttered, nerves jittering just beneath his skin. He’d made some decisions—or more accurately, faced the inevitable—sometime before the sun rose.
“Well, c’mon down and eat when you’re ready.”
When he made it downstairs, the twins were huddled in front of the stove. Vi sat at the kitchen table, a concerned expression tugging at her mouth.
“They’re feeding me?” he asked in an undertone.
She nodded.
“And did you witness them preparing the meal?”
“No.”
On a morning when he least needed it, he’d been presented with a test of nerves. After the lesson he’d given Pat and Danny last night, eating whatever they’d cooked up would be a nasty gamble. But he also knew he had to show them trust. He just hoped they’d earned it.
“What’s going on?” Vi asked. “Why were the boys sleeping on the stoop when I got home?”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Assuming he survived breakfast.
Resigned to his fate, Michael sat. “Bring it on, boys.”
Danny settled a plate in front of him, and Pat provided the cutlery. Though his stomach objected to the thought of food, he tucked into his eggs and rashers. The boys were doing anything they could to avoid looking at him.
Between bites he said, “I’ll be leaving town today for a day or two.”
“Short notice, isn’t this?” asked his too-perceptive little sister.
“The opportunity came up to do some business in Galway. Guess I forgot to mention it yesterday.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You did. And what sort of business might this be?”
“Furniture and room repairs for a hotel,” he lied. “It’s one of those old townhouses all fitted out for paying customers. They’re friends of Jenna Fahey, and got my name from her. Anyway, I had hoped to be here to help Kylie finish setting up for the art exhibition, but I can’t. Boys, I need you to fill in for me.”
“Sure,” Pat said. Danny nodded his agreement as he set toast and juice in front of Michael.
“And Vi, keep an eye on Kylie, if you could. Her father’s not going to make life any too easy on her.”
“Only a few days gone, you say?”
He did his best to feign nonchalance. “I think I’m allowed to worry over the details. After all, I haven’t traveled much.”
“Fine, then. We’ll carry on for you.”
“Grand,” he said, ignoring her skeptical tone. He raised his juice glass, thinking to take a sip, then paused and set it back on the table. Last night’s call had made time precious, and certain words needed to be spoken. Before it was too late.
“Pat... Danny, I know you think I’ve been hard on you, and maybe I have. But I want you to know I’m proud of you, and glad you’re my brothers.” He hesitated before going the full distance. “I—I guess all this is my roundabout way of telling you I love you.”
The boys coughed and stammered, but words didn’t matter because Michael already knew they felt the same way, too. Embarrassed after pitching all that messy emotion into the open, he concentrated on his juice. The glass was nearly to his mouth when Danny sent it flying.
At Vi’s outraged howl, the twins bolted.
Michael cocked one brow at the mess before him. “My payback for last night. Something more than oranges in that juice, I’d be guessing. We’ll leave the boys to do the cleaning.”
Navigating around the spill, he led his sister from the kitchen. “Before you start interrogating me, I promise everything’s fine. I’ve written out the name and number of the hotel.”
“Now, that’s big of you. This is nothing but business?”
‘Nothing but. And I love you, too, sweet Violet.”
Neither of which was a lie.
Michael reached Galway by mid-afternoon. He parked his car in a garage a block from the City Centre hotel he’d lied to Vi about, booked a room to calm any suspicions, should she call, and then set out on foot. He bargained with himself: “Thirty minutes, just thirty last minutes of freedom, then down to business.”
Though it was early in the season for any tourists but the most avid, the sidewalks were full to spilling. It was a day he considered obscenely beautiful— skies blue, breeze fresh—too pure for the ugliness he faced. Bargained minutes ticking down, he walked past the shops and bars along the pedestrian area of Quai Street, through the “suits, ties, and cell phones required” business district, then to Eyre Square.
Hands jammed into his pockets, Michael focused on the details of his surroundings long enough to recognize that he stood in front of a jeweler’s window. The irony was acid-sharp. If this moment had spun out just twenty-four hours earlier, he might be seeking an engagement ring.
His unwilling gaze swept past the Claddaugh rings, a Galway tradition of two hands clasping a crowned heart. Just before he turned away forever, he saw a ring with a center stone the silvery blue of Kylie’s eyes. It was an elegant thing, no flash about it, just deep and quiet substance.
He couldn’t have her, couldn’t love her, but he could leave something for her to remember him by. Fighting back the emotion closing its fingers about his throat, he walked into the store.
“Can I help you?” asked a young woman from behind the counter. The small gold stud from her eyebrow piercing glittered in the overhead light. The sight of it gave Michael strange comfort. She looked every bit as out of place in the posh surroundings as he.
“There’s a ring in the window . . . some kind of bluish stone.”
She smiled. “Ah, the aquamarine.” Slipping a set of keys from a chain about her wrist, she unlocked the display and brought the ring to him. “This is an heirloom piece. We get them now and again. Pretty thing, isn’t it? The stones on either side are diamonds—an old cut. Not modern enough to suit most women.”
He knew one whom it would suit to perfection, and it pained him that he wouldn’t be sliding it on her finger himself.
“In fact, the store owner’s been pressing me to put the ring back into the vault. But I’ve had this feeling . . .” The clerk paused, then tilted her head and gave him a look that could have been Vi’s, had it not been coming from a girl a full head shorter and with eyes of brown instead of green. “I’ve known that the right person would be coming for it. Soon, too.”
A day too late, to his way of thinking, but he kept his sorrows to himself.
Ring all prettily packaged together with a note of love and apology he’d written, Michael left the jeweler’s and wove into the crowds. Briefly settling his hand over the box in his jacket pocket, he walked on.
It was time. Past time, actually. He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket.
“O’Gara’s Pub,” he murmured, thinking of the meeting place his prison padmates had spoken of. The terrorist’s flavor of the month in munitions, money, whatever one fancied, they’d said old O’Gara knew where it could be had.
It took only a few questions of a man behind the counter at the corner bookshop, and Michael was on his way. Instead of taking the bus line that had been suggested, he walked, of course.
The streetscape gradually changed from urban to seedy. Shop stoops went unswept, paint peeled from doors and shutters. Slashes of gang graffiti scarred bleak brick walls. This might be another city and another time, but truth remaine
d constant: He had walked straight to his own past.
Two men walked by, caps pulled low. Though they didn’t slow, he knew he was being watched. These were the sort of streets on which one didn’t stop, not without raising suspicion and risking a beating—or worse. Pulling on a cold, closed expression, Michael walked with absolute intent.
Not much farther down, next to a vacant shop front, stood O’Gara’s. Its windows were painted over, cutting it off from the rest of the world. Trash littered the walk. It was exactly as he’d known it would be. He pulled open the door, walked in, and settled at the bar as if he’d been there a thousand times before. In a way he had, for in his days with Dervla, he’d seen plenty of places like it.
Four men sat to his left, each hunched over a glass, and each with a cigarette anchored in the comer of his mouth. None looked familiar, though with the dim light and heavy pall of smoke, his own brothers could be here, and he’d not know it.
The bartender, with his stained tee shirt and shaved head, was too young to be old O’Gara.
“A Paddy’s,” Michael said.
The drink arrived in a glass that looked as though it had never seen soap or water. He downed it, then cadged a cigarette from the man closest to him. As he sat there, it occurred to Michael that while Rourke wasn’t a stupid man, he quite possibly was. Without old O’Gara to drop names with, no one was going to speak to him. He waved the bartender over, ordered another whiskey, and gave one last try.
“I’m looking for O’Gara,” he said when the sullen man slapped down a refill in front of him.
“Dead.”
No point in offering condolences, and no point in making chat. “Then what about Brian Rourke?”
The bartender’s expression slipped from sullen to overtly hostile. “Don’t know him.”
It was a lie, but arguing would change nothing. Only finding Rourke would. Michael put a few bills on the counter.
“If you do happen to meet Rourke, tell him Kilbride came to spit on his grave.”
He drank down the rest of the whiskey, then readied to leave. He knew he had the advantages of time and no other ambition. He’d walk the streets, find himself a hidden corner, then wait as long as it took to make Kylie safe. He trusted the job to no one else.
Just before Michael turned away, a door next to the bar swung open. The heavy figure in the entry was silhouetted by yellowish light. “You can’t spit on a live man’s grave, Mickey.”
Michael froze. He’d thought he could handle this with the same icy coldness that had gripped his heart since last night. But he’d made one crucial error. It was fire that had seized him, not ice.
“The name’s Michael,” he fought past teeth clenched nearly as tight as his fists.
“Ah, but you were Mickey when I last saw you. ‘Quick Mickey’ is what Dervla called you. You’re late enough getting here, though. I expected you after the first time I called.”
Brian Rourke walked from the doorway beside the bar and stood in front of him. Michael would never have recognized him. Fourteen years. Fourteen years in which Michael knew he had aged, yet somehow had expected Rourke to remain as he’d last seen him. But the man had changed. Bulky muscle was going to paunch and hair disappearing altogether. He was still threatening enough, but not the figure of Michael’s nightmares. Perhaps that man had been a creature of his own making—all the hatred and sorrow of his youth rolled into his own private demon.
“So what do you want, Mickey?”
“I’ve come to bring an end to it—to work a truce.”
Rourke’s laugh ended with a phlegmy cough. “An end to it? Just what kind of stupid bastard are you, to think there’s an end to any of this?”
But there was an end, and Michael was ready to lure Rourke to it. He shrugged. “Not so much stupid as desperate.”
“Take it from Dervla, desperate’ll get you dead.”
He eyed the man before him, face and belly bloated from drink. Eyes flat, already dead. Taking him the rest of the way would be almost a pleasure. “I didn’t kill her, and I sure as hell don’t mourn her.”
“Well, I do.” Rourke’s fist connected with Michael’s nose, rocking his head.
With a slow, deliberate motion, Michael used the back of his hand to wipe the rivulet of blood that worked its way from his nostril to his upper lip. “More the fool, you. Come outside with me, Brian. We’ve matters to discuss.”
“And who do you have waiting outside, the Gardai? They’ve nothing on me, you know.” He smirked. “Nothing yet, at least.”
“I came alone.”
“Well now, that’s exactly what Dervla used to say about you. ‘Too quick on the draw, that boy.’ Did you ever really think she’d let you have her?”
Michael set his jaw, holding back ancient humiliations. “Meet me outside or spend the rest of your days looking over your shoulder.”
Eyes fixed on Rourke, the bartender moved toward the ancient black telephone hanging behind the bar. “Do you want me to call Coyne?”
Rourke shook his head. “I’ve already got trouble enough with Coyne. Besides, this is nothing. I’ll handle it myself.”
First one outside, Michael glanced up and down the deserted street as he waited for Rourke. The wind blew stronger now. Maybe colder, too, though Michael couldn’t feel it. He wiped at his nose again. The blood was slowing already. The fool couldn’t even land a good shot on an open target.
Rourke stepped from the bar to the empty sidewalk. “So you think to end this?”
“You shouldn’t have bothered me, Brian. And you never should have threatened those I love.”
“You don’t know shit about love, and you won’t until you’ve seen someone you love with her brains half-gone. Rory was aiming for you that night, did you know?”
Michael offered a two-word answer. “He missed.”
Veins stood out on a bull-thick neck. “You killed her as sure as you pulled the trigger yourself.”
This was what he wanted—Rourke past thinking. He curved his mouth into a smile. “Dervla wasn’t worth the stain she left on that rug.”
Rourke barreled at him, his head catching Michael in the gut.
Michael rolled and pinned his attacker to the ground. “You think I don’t know about love, you poor, pitiful bastard?” He closed a hand over Rourke’s throat and squeezed. “I’m giving it all up—everything—to keep her safe. The second you threatened Kylie, you became a dead man.” His breath came in hard gusts as he squeezed tighter. “Dead.”
Rourke lay passive, so he loosened his grip, then felt his lip split under Rourke’s fist. Never underestimate a killer, he reminded himself.
“Harder to crush than a cockroach, aren’t you?” Using an anger that the older man could never match, Michael dragged him to the alley. Cursing and struggling, Rourke spat into his face. Michael hauled him up against the wall. Bracing one arm against the man’s throat, he searched his pockets with the other. He tossed Rourke’s revolver into a nearby trash bin.
“Never did learn to fight fair, did you, Brian? Explosives against children. Dragging down innocent women. Well, this’ll be fair. I’m using nothing more than my fists.”
And so he did, until he was forced to adjust his grip to hold Rourke upright. Then he saw it—a small blue box at Rourke’s feet. Kylie’s ring. Michael’s breath whistled from his lungs in exhausted gasps as he took in the sacrilege of what he was seeing. Averting his eyes, he looked at his own fist, crimson with blood and somehow not a part of him. Yet it was. And that fist—and the rage driving it—was no better than his victim.
Ah, it would feel grand to kill Rourke. He’d fantasized about it for years. But to do it in the name of a woman who’d die before having harm done in her name? It would be the worst sort of lie.
Furious with himself, with circumstances, with life, he loosed his grip and watched Rourke crumple to the ground. He needed a clean, honest kill.
“A clean, honest kill,” he repeated aloud to Rourke, who was alive but i
n no condition to fight.
A clean, honest kill. Another lie, because there was no such thing. Before Kylie, he’d have taken that kill, dirty and brutal though it was. But now? To do it would tear down everything he’d built, destroy everything Kylie had said he could be.
He hungered for that kill, but he would not take it.
After the strife, the anger, and the emptiness, Kylie had made him whole. If the best he could do was love her in return, he would love as no man ever had.
As he leaned down to pick up Kylie’s ring, he heard Rourke stir and groan. “You’re a dead man, Kilbride.”
With his clean hand, Michael dusted off the box and tucked it into his pocket. “No, Rourke, I’ve just begun to live.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Study the river before you go into the middle of it.
—Irish Proverb
It was Kylie’s own slice of misery, having Da underfoot after a wretched day at school. Before she could even start an evening meal, he’d criticized her housekeeping, commented on her “drab” furniture, and shot a few volleys at Breege, who’d simply responded, “We’re all praying for you, Johnny, m’dear.”
More alarming, for all his complaints, Johnny seemed to have settled in, his worn bag parked in the middle of the sofa. Kylie frowned at the sight. It was time to give him a firm shove toward the door.
“Let’s get you back to town, Da.”
“Why’d I be going there when I’ve not even been fed?”
“To move into your room, or whatever accommodations you’ve found for yourself.”
“Haven’t made any. Couldn’t seem to find a spot with any of my mates,” he said, then finished with a mournful—and somehow expectant—sigh.
Ah, she knew this moment well, the one where she was to be rendered helpless with pity and obligation. Pity for Da she’d already spent her day’s allotment on herself. Though the encounter with Gerry had been horrible, it was Mairead’s warning about Michael that truly galled her. This afternoon, she’d found herself scrutinizing the mothers when they’d arrived to gather their children, and wondering who was whispering about her. Given the speed of sound in Ballymuir, probably all of them. Before today, she’d always felt safe in her little world at school. Now it was sullied, too.