“Aye,” Casey said warily. “I would be that.”
He crossed the room depositing the tea and buns onto the small bedside table. The constable turned his hat in his hands, obviously taken aback by Casey’s presence.
“I only wanted to be certain ye were doin’ alright then, lass.”
“I’m fine,” she reassured him, trying not to give in to the urge to look at Casey and see how he was assessing the situation. Though never overtly friendly, he was generally courteous to all who crossed his path. The neighborhood he’d grown up in, however, considered friendliness to the local constable an act of treason.
Constable Fred seemed to think now was time to make good his escape.
“We’ll see ye when yer able to work again then, lass. An’ I don’t see that anyone will bother ye with questions until yer stronger.” He gave her a look of complicity and she nodded, knowing he would now accept whatever explanation she gave him. With luck, it could be swept under the rug as an accidental shooting by some overzealous farmer.
“Thank you for coming by, it was kind of you.”
“Good day to ye,” he said to Casey, who nodded tersely in his direction. Constable Fred bobbed his bald head in reply and then beat a hasty retreat out the door.
Casey handed her the tea. It was hot and sugary, and she sipped it gratefully. The warmth spread out from her stomach to join the tendrils of pain medication purling through her blood, creating a sense of fuzzy-edged well being.
She turned her head to find Casey looking at her with an odd smile on his lips.
“Ankle better too, darlin’?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said with grim satisfaction.
“Why?” The tea in her stomach shifted uneasily. She didn’t like the look on Casey’s face at all.
“Because now we’re goin’ to talk about this.” He held up a fist that had a red, blue and white scarf wound around it. “An’ about whose blood was all over yer hands.”
Chapter Sixty-seven
The Brotherhood of the Ring
PAMELA HAD BEEN UP AND ABOUT for two days, since coming home with her ankle casted. Casey had sternly insisted that she be on bed rest for the first few days out of hospital, despite her assurances that she felt completely fine. She half wondered if he had banished her upstairs in an effort to avoid her. He was still angry, she knew, and it was well evidenced in the fact that he attacked every chore he could find with more than usual vigor. While Casey enjoyed physical labor, she knew he also used it as an avoidance tactic when something was bothering him.
Once she had come downstairs he had spent the majority of his time, when he wasn’t at work, outdoors. Mending physical fences while ignoring emotional ones.
This morning she was determined to beard the lion in his den, which today appeared to be the chopping block, where he was splitting wood with a force that made her wince. She paused for a moment on the threshold of the door, admiring the easy arc of his swing that cleaved the wood with one blow.
The day was warm and he was clad only in a thin t-shirt and worn jeans. The long moving lines of his muscles could be clearly seen and the t-shirt clung to his torso with a fine dew of sweat. He paused momentarily to brush a forearm across his brow and then resumed his work. He still made her weak in the knees, both literally and figuratively, just as he had from the moment they’d met.
It took her this way at times, the enormity of what was between them, both physically and emotionally. Time and observation had taught her that what they shared was, as Pat had said, no common thing. Like any couple caught up in the demands of home, jobs and active revolution, she sometimes forgot how fortunate they were to have found such a thing.
She took a deep breath, cutting her pleasant ruminations short. He might well choose to sleep on the sofa tonight, but she was going to clear the air with him one way or the other.
He caught her eye and winked. She kept clear of flying chips, but picked up the pieces that had fallen farther off and carried them to the neatly blocked woodpile Casey had built at the side of the back porch.
He split a fresh log and the smell of pinesap filled the air with a sudden golden tang. “Well, what is it? Ye’d best out with it or it’ll go straight to yer spleen.”
She stifled a sound of annoyance at this pre-emptive strike from his corner. She carried more wood over to the growing pile, placing each piece carefully one on top of the other. Behind her she could feel Casey watching her, and knew the time to come clean had arrived. She turned back, dusting slivers of wood from her arms.
“I think you’d better sit down,” she said, taking a long breath.
“That bad, is it?” There was a sudden fear in his eyes, and she felt the familiar lurch that came when she suspected he half-knew about Love Hagerty.
“I have to go get something, just give me a minute.” She went in the house and retrieved the letter from under a partly knit sweater in the bottom drawer of the sideboard.
Outside Casey sat on the chopping block, looking confused and a little annoyed.
“What’s this?” he asked as she handed him the letter.
“Just read it, you’ll understand.”
It seemed to take a small eternity for him to read it. When he was finished, he looked up, face pale above the dark green of his shirt. His eyes were blank with shock.
“How—how long have ye had this, woman?”
“Since October,” she said, dreading the next question even as she saw it forming in his face.
“And how did ye come to have it?”
“Someone told me where to look.”
The dark eyes narrowed. “An’ where exactly was it that ye looked?”
“The file room at the Tennant Street station.”
Casey took a deep breath and rubbed his temple with his left hand, while the right still held the letter. “Christ, Pamela.”
“I believe that’s what Pat said when I showed him,” she said in a small voice.
“Why didn’t ye tell me sooner?”
“Because you’ve had enough to deal with since being held on that damn ship and because I thought you’d be angry with me. I was afraid what you might do once you found out. Not to me,” she added hastily, “but to whomever did this.”
“Angry—maybe a little, but I know ye a bit after these years together, woman, an’ I know if ye get a notion in ye there’s no force on earth that’s goin’ to stop ye from followin’ it to the bitter end. Angry that ye put yerself in harm’s way so many times—definitely. But I’ve forgiven ye that a few times, and” he gave her a rueful smile, “likely will a few times more.”
He re-read the letter again, pausing on certain parts longer, his brow furrowed in concentration. She thought she could recite the sentences verbatim that he kept going back to, for they were the same that had made her read again and again, in growing anger, when she’d found the letter. Then suddenly he looked up, eyes dark with pain.
“Were ye—were ye out lookin’ for answers when ye lost the baby? Was that what ye were doin’ with Jamie at the monastery?”
She took a deep breath and met his eyes, “I was, but I—I was going to lose the baby anyway, Casey. The monk at the abbey confirmed it, but I think I already knew it was just a matter of time.”
Casey nodded, a sigh escaping him as though he were trying to breathe out a bit of his pain each time they spoke of the lost child. She knew he had taken the loss very much to heart, feeling that if he’d been free the miscarriage might somehow have been prevented.
“I’m sorry about the letter,” she said quietly.
Casey looked up, startled. “Sorry for the letter?”
“For what it says. For the knowing. Which, as it turns out, isn’t always better than the wondering.”
He shook his head. “I suppose it’s no more than I suspected, but didn’t want to face. He was never one for walkin’ away from someone in need. No matter what the consequences of helpin’ that person might be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes he’d help people with legal issues, did he think there was injustice bein’ done. It became a sideline really; he never got paid for it, though near the end it was takin’ up most of his evenings and weekends. There was one man he was helping maybe four, five months before he died. He started showin’ up at our house at all hours, an’ Da’ was real uncomfortable with him. He was always a good judge of character, but I think he felt he’d made a mistake by formin’ an acquaintance with this man. Told Pat an’ I we were to stay well clear of him should he come around when Da’ was workin’ or if we chanced upon him in the streets.”
“Any idea why he was so leery of him?”
“Well, Jewel, the man did come round one day while Da’ was gone, an’ I thought it maybe had somethin’ to do with his likin’ for young boys.”
“Why, did he do something inappropriate?”
“Mmn, it was more a feelin’ an’ the way he looked at Pat put the hair up on the back of my neck. Ye know when ye can’t explain it logically, but somethin’ stirs at the top of yer spine an’ ye know that the person is not quite right?”
She nodded. She had known more than one person that stirred the cluster of nerves that sat in the core of the primal brain. Instinct, survival, a sixth sense—ignoring those signals had led to tragedy more than once in her own life.
“We told Da’ the man had been about, an’ later I told him I didn’t like the way the man had eyed Pat. He seemed like a hungry wolf scenting prey. Well Da’ got all white-faced an’ left a few minutes later. Came back an hour later, calm but with an edge to him that I’d never seen before. He told me that were the man to come again, we weren’t to open the door, an’ were to call him right away. Though it seemed he really didn’t think the man would be comin’ back. An’ then a month later my father was dead.”
“Do you think the man had something to do with it?”
Casey shrugged. “He came round after the funeral, an’ Pat was home alone. I came in an’ he was sittin’ in the kitchen drinkin’ tea an’ Pat was lookin’ mighty uncomfortable. I went to my room an’ took down the pistol da’ had always kept up top his closet, an’ I put it to the man’s head an’ told him my father had never liked him, nor was I disposed to, an’ if he valued his life he’d not show his face near our door again. He turned back as he was walking down the front path, an’ laughed at me. Didn’t say a word, just laughed. Sound chilled me to the core, an’ I did wonder at the time, did it mean he’d somethin’ to do with my Da’s death? Though we were assured it was an accident.” This last was said with no small bitterness, as the police hadn’t been particularly sympathetic towards two young men whose father had been a known Republican.
Though the day was relatively fair, Pamela shivered at the faint breeze that moved her hair against her neck. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she was missing some small corner of the picture that would make sense of the whole.
Had Brian stumbled across some dark secret that was so volatile he’d been killed to ensure his silence? He wasn’t a man to have stood idly by and allow evil to flourish.
“Listen, Nancy Drew, enough, yer not in a novel here. Sometimes there are questions that don’t have an answer.”
“There’s one other thing. The man who was killed, he gave me this before he died. I don’t know if it means anything.” She reached into her coat pocket and handed the ring to Casey. “But I’ve seen the insignia elsewhere.”
Casey had an odd look on his face, and was suddenly very pale. “Where did ye see it?”
“William Bright. He had the ring on a chain around his neck.”
Casey stood and walked into the house. She could hear him run up the stairs and come down again a few moments later. He walked toward her wordless, dropping something in the palm of her hand.
She looked down, an icy feeling crawling up her spine. In her palm was a silver ring, plain but for the etched harp and the engraved BOR.
“Casey,” she said sharply, “where’d you get this ring?”
His face was grim when he answered. “It was my father’s.”
NEITHER THE BLAZING FIRE CASEY LIT nor the hot tea Pamela made had done a great deal to warm either of them.
“Who were they?” she asked, worried by the distant look he’d worn since dropping the ring in her hand.
Casey shook his head. “Myth, legend, a band of men that no one was ever certain existed. They seemed like a fairytale—Catholics and Protestants, from all levels of the community, working together to come to a peaceful solution. No one really believed they were any more real than Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws. Some thought it a joke, you know the odd things people will scrawl on buildings that have no basis in reality, but it starts a buzz going.”
“Well now we know they did exist and it seems there aren’t many of them left.”
“Anyone who was part of it, Jewel, wouldn’t admit to it these days. Ye said it yerself, most of the people on that list are dead, an’ none of them from natural causes. My Da’ included. I’m awfully surprised William Bright would wear it on his person.”
“I think he intended I should see it. I don’t think that man does anything without forethought.”
Casey breathed heavily through his nose, brows drawing down in anger. “What the hell were ye thinkin’, woman, to go an’ see such a man? He’s feared throughout Ulster, an’ for good reason. In a land of hard men, he’s king.”
“I know, I just thought he might have an answer for me.”
“So he knew my Daddy, did he?” Casey asked softly. Under his words she could hear the half-eager, half-sorrowed note of a child who had lost their parent too soon, and would always be searching for the bits of that person that remained behind in other’s memories.
“He did, and rather liked him too. Which I think, considering the source, is no small compliment.”
Casey nodded, squeezing her cold hand in reassurance, his own only slightly warmer. In the uncertain light of the fire she saw that he was staring into the distance, seeing not the stones of the fireplace, nor the walls or windows, but a memory that would not let him go.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said, hand resting over the beat of his heart.
“I am thinking,” he replied quietly, “that one man can never really understand the heart of another. Even if that other is his own father. I loved him, lived with him, near to worshipped the ground the man walked on, but there were many things, it would seem, that I didn’t know about him.”
“Are you angry with him?”
“No, Jewel.” He laid his hand over her own. “Even a father has a right to his secrets. I suppose I’m feelin’ a little lost is all. I know for certain now that he was murdered. What do I do with that knowledge?”
She felt the familiar clutch of fear in her intestines. And yet how could she deny him his right to know, when she’d risked her own life to try and get at the truth of what had happened to Brian?
“I don’t think there are any clear answers. Maybe if I’d had a chance to talk to that man before they killed him I would have gotten the answers.”
Casey raised a black brow at her, underneath which was a very black look. “I swear to God, woman, if I have to have ye kneecapped to keep ye in place, I’ll do it. An’ I know the men to do the job.”
She swallowed and managed a tremulous smile. There was only one bit of unfinished business that needed attending to and if that didn’t yield any more leads as to what exactly had happened to Brian she would call it a day.
In her pocket, where it had burned from the second William Bright had palmed it, was a piece of paper with an address on it. Under the address was the information that this address was the last place Brian Riordan was known to have visited before his untimely death. Why he hadn’t told her this during their terse interview she did not know, but suspected that even William Bright was not entirely free from fear of the past.
“Is that all, woman? Are a
ll the skeletons free from the closet now?” Casey’s tone was light, but the look in his eyes was not. And for a moment, she considered telling him about Love just to have it out in the open, so that it would no longer have to fester in her soul. But knowing just as surely that it would fester in his, she did not say the words he asked for, but rather the ones that would keep him safe.
“It’s done.”
Chapter Sixty-eight
Childhood Ghosts
I AM NOT,” CASEY SAID, FOR THE FOURTH TIME in as many minutes, “goin’ to a doctor.”
“Why in heaven’s name not?” Pamela asked in frustration, feeling a strong need to kick something.
“It’s only a wee cold,” he insisted stubbornly. “I’ll not die from it.”
“Here,” she said, and stuck a thermometer in his mouth, feeling his forehead with her palm. He was burning up, eyes glassy with fever. He sat now, mutinously, on the bed with a blanket wrapped tight around him, shaking despite his avowal that he was perfectly fine.
“Casey Riordan,” she said in exasperation, “you make a terrible sick person.”
“I’ve never been sick before, I don’t know how to act,” he said grumpily, thermometer bobbing up and down with the force of his words.
“I know you’ve said it before, but really?” she asked in disbelief. “Not a cold or an earache even?”
He shook his head, the movement precipitating several violent sneezes.
“Not even chicken pox?”
“Is that the one with the itchy red rash all over ye?”
“Yes.”
“Oh aye,” he nodded. “Pat had that one. I slept beside him every night an’ never got so much as a spot. Poor little bugger scratched himself silly, though.”
“You must have the constitution of an ox,” she said, rubbing eucalyptus oil vigorously between her palms until it was slick with heat.
“Well,” he said, eyeing her hands dubiously, “Daddy always did say as I’d the skull of one.” The red-tipped nose sniffed the air as she approached. “That’s evil-smellin’ stuff, are ye certain it’s not gone off?”
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