The Irishman (A Legacy Novella) (The Legacy Series Book 7)

by Sheritta Bitikofer

  But Samuel, though he loved the boy like his own son, was leaving nothing to chance. His daughter was dead and he needed someone to blame. Someone to take responsibility.

  Chapter Three

  The stench of wet dog was what first crashed through the veil of unconsciousness. Within seconds, more scents and sounds crowded in, congesting and overwhelming until Dustin’s head throbbed. And he hadn’t even opened his eyes yet.

  He groaned and let his head list to the side, only to be met by the soft, wet tongue of that dog he smelled. His face puckered in disgust and he blindly pushed the mutt away before squinting up into the canopy of leaves that shaded him from the morning light.

  His first thoughts were not as he quite expected. He didn’t wonder where he was, why the scruffy face of a dog was still trying to lick at his face. Nor why he seemed to hear and smell everything in such sharp, specific detail. He first thought of Cassandra and why she wasn’t by his side.

  With this question came a deep, visceral stirring within him that said something wasn’t right. Though his very bones ached with the presumed hangover, Dustin pushed himself up. The dog that had awoken him scuttled a few paces away and warily watched him with dark brown eyes.

  Dustin lifted his hand to his hair and felt the matted, oily tangles. Twigs and leaves were lodged in his locks and it took only another moment of reflection to realize that he was completely naked. The late summer winds didn’t bother him so much as the splotches of dark blood sprinkled across his body.

  Suddenly more awake, he inspected every part of himself to make certain that the blood didn’t belong to him in any way. No wounds. Finally the cascade of logical questions flooded in. Though, he had no answer for anything.

  He searched his memory, scrambling for any recollection of why he would be stranded in the middle of the forest outside of town with no one around and covered in blood that was obviously not his own. There were no wounds, not even a scratch anywhere on him. He had gotten drunk before, but never this drunk.

  He stood to his feet, testing the stability of his legs before he tried to orient himself. The voices of the villagers seemed to be coming from the north, but he saw no buildings or fences to tell him that anyone was close by. For as far as his eyes could see, there was nothing but trees and dense bushes. He didn’t even spy a well-worn path through the forest for him to walk down.

  Beside him, the dog let out a shrill whine. Dustin looked to him and the sad eyes that stared so fixedly. He knew all the dogs in Glengarriff, but this must have been a stray without an owner or farm to serve on. By the look of the mutt, it must have been a stray for a while. It looked just as shabby as he did, but skinnier and in need of a good meal.

  “Are you going to tell me where I am?” he asked with a sardonic turn of his voice.

  It only tilted its head and continued to stare.

  He gave up on the dog and turned to the north. Pushing through the underbrush and being poked ceaselessly by thorns and sharp twigs that he was sure would leave a mark, he thought he’d come upon Glengarriff in no time at all.

  He was wrong.

  He wasn’t sure how long he had been walking. Maybe just over half an hour. All the while, the sounds of a livelier village than even Glengarriff became louder in his ears. But, he still couldn’t see the town. No farm, no hedgerows, not even a road. The clanging of metal from a blacksmith shop, the shouting of two men haggling over the price of some leather stock, the cry of a hungry infant, all of it made him believe he might have been going mad. He could hear it all with such precise detail, but there was nothing to show for it.

  The dog continued to trail behind, taking advantage of the path he created through the woods. Dustin was sure the rangy mutt could easily slip through this foliage better than he could. Why the dog followed him, he couldn’t begin to guess.

  With each step he took, Dustin continued to strain his mind to remember what had happened. He remembered the wedding, which was before he started drinking. He remembered the reception, taking Cassandra home, getting her in bed… But there was something else. Something just out of reach on the edge of his recollection that refused to be acknowledged.

  It was as if his mind had been completely wiped clean after he started to take Cassandra’s clothes off. Why wouldn’t he want to remember something like that and what must have surely followed? Then again, did they even get that far? What could explain the blood and his waking up in the woods?

  Then, he realized that he didn’t even suffer from a hangover. His head didn’t pound the way it often did after drinking too much the night before. Even the residual ache in his body subsided the more he walked toward town. If he really drank enough to make him fall unconscious as he did, why wouldn’t he have a hangover?

  And what could account for this perversion in his senses? It wasn’t just the sounds, but the smells too. The dog was several feet behind him, but he could smell its rancid breath as its tongue lulled out from its muzzle. He could smell the blood on him so strongly, as well as the various scents of the forest. Bird feathers, tree sap, crushed berries, flowers of all kinds, the rich soil, the dried and earthy essence of crumbled leaves that had fallen from the branches and even the bark on the tree trunks he passed by. No matter what he was drinking or for how long, it could never inspire such miraculous abilities overnight. If anything, drinking dulled his senses, not heightened them.

  Relief eased the anxious turning of his stomach when he spotted a break in the trees ahead and the road that must have led to the source of all this noise, though he still couldn’t see a single thatched roof or gleaming white stone building. Such hopes were completely dashed when he found a road sign fixed on the shoulder of the road.

  Kenmare was a mile away to the north.

  Dustin stared at the sign for what seemed like ages before the dog came and nudged its hairy muzzle against his fingertips to draw him out of his daze. Kenmare was in County Kerry, at least thirty miles north of Glengarriff. How had he traveled that far in one night? Why did he?

  His legs, though they were not tired in the least, gave out on him and he barely had time to catch himself before falling on his arse along the edge of the road. All the way in Kenmare, at least a day’s walk from his wife. God only knew if she was all right.

  Dustin could scarcely order his own thoughts anymore. This was all too strange, too inexplicable to understand. The blood, the senses, the distance, the damn dog, everything.

  He looked to his hands which still looked as if they had been drenched in the blood of whatever nameless victim or assailant he had encountered the night before. What happened? What had he done?

  Glancing to the dog, who sat patiently waiting for whatever it was he expected from the human, Dustin knew he couldn’t stay. If he left now, then perhaps he could make it back to Glengarriff before sundown and all would be revealed. He hoped it wasn’t something utterly embarrassing that would become some infamous story told at the pub for decades to come.

  With shaking effort, Dustin rose and left the dog where it was. “I don’t have any food for you,” he said without a hint of apology. “Go back to wherever it is you belong.”

  The dog didn’t move, but Dustin was going to take his own advice. He belonged in Glengarriff with his wife, and that’s where he was headed, even if it meant walking through the pouring rain. He had to make sure she was all right.

  Dustin first sighted the white steeple of the church as he crested the all too familiar hill just north of Glengarriff. He let out a breath of relief, but the sounds and smells that drifted on the wind toward him stole away what hope he had for a joyful homecoming.

  The journey from Kenmare to Glengarriff was not as long as he initially expected. He managed to find a pair of trousers and a shirt on an obliging clothesline from an isolated farmer along the way, but that didn’t solve his troubles.

  When he felt well enough, he tried to run down the path, only to find that whatever happened the night before had also given him something
else. He had always been a fast runner, though there were plenty of sprinters in Glengarriff who were faster, but what he managed to do was borderline insane. Dustin could run faster than any horse he knew and struggled to maintain a slower, steady pace so that he could actually keep track of where he was.

  If the prodding urgency to get back to his wife allowed him, he would have walked the whole way just to be safe. But even though this new inexhaustible endurance in his legs scared him, he continued his efforts to run without crashing into a tree or go toppling down a hill that he didn’t see up ahead of him.

  He arrived to Glengarriff shortly past noon and he hoped, with it being a Monday, he’d get to see his sister at the church with the children. At least the sight of their happy faces would ease the constant fear of what had happened to him.

  Dustin still couldn’t explain any of it and each hour he spent trying to think of a rational answer, he came up with nothing. Only Cassandra could fill in the blanks in his memory.

  But as soon as he stopped and strained his ears toward the town and the church, that incessant nagging in the back of his head that everything was totally and utterly wrong was finally validated. There were no children in the church that day, no happy voices outside playing in the yard as he was accustomed to hearing around this time.

  Instead, there was a procession coming up the dusty road. A funeral. Laughter was displaced by the weeping of mourners. The pounding of little feet in the soft grass was substituted for countless slow, shuffling feet.

  From his vantage point on the high hill, masked in the shadows of the woods, he watched the pallbearers carry the casket toward the cemetery behind the church. Leading the way, he saw Samuel who walked with his back straight and chin up, as if trying to prove to them all that he wasn’t falling apart inside. Beside him, was Katherine, a white handkerchief pressed to her face and eyes squeezed shut, fighting the same tears that others let loose freely.

  Dustin looked for his wife amongst the black gowns and veils, but he couldn’t see her bright blonde hair anywhere. It looked as if the entire town showed up for this funeral, the procession line stretching on well out of sight down the road toward Glengarriff.

  He waited, watching for any sign of her. Another startling development was that he could see better than he ever could, able to pick out and distinguish faces from yards and yards away. He would have seen Cassandra perfectly amongst the mourners as they made their way toward the church. She wasn’t there.

  The preacher, the same one who had married them the day before, took his place near the freshly dug grave with his Bible in hand. Dustin groped for the support of a nearby tree. Though all he wanted to do was run to his fellow townspeople and interrupt everything to demand that they tell him where Cassandra was.

  After listening to the first few opening lines of the ceremony, he had his answer.

  Cassandra was dead.

  A rush of cold invaded his body as his limbs finally grew too weak to keep him standing. Dustin hardly felt the impact on his knees as they hit the ground. The world seemed to spin out of focus and the words of the preacher became nothing more than a dull, meaningless roar in his ears that faded into a ringing noise. His chest felt as if a great weight were dropped upon it, making it almost impossible to breathe.

  A few moments passed, but the nightmare didn’t end. His lips parted, face contorted with the coming despair as tears stung at the corners of his eyes. They blurred his vision until the scene of the funeral was nothing but a watery mass of colors.

  This couldn’t be happening. Cassandra couldn’t be dead. She seemed perfectly fine the day before. This had to be a joke. They were married now, everything should have been right with the world.

  Dustin shut his eyes and turned to lean his head against the tree he had braced himself against earlier. The cold droplets fell over his cheeks and his shoulders began to quiver with his sobs.

  He had to know what happened, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. Not just yet. The funeral carried on in the valley below and the townspeople of Glengarriff paid their respects as Cassandra was lowered into the ground. Attendants came to toss the dirt and soil over her coffin, but Dustin wanted to scream for them to stop. Stop the madness and this heinous joke. She couldn’t be dead. She just couldn’t be.

  The sun continued to shine overhead, a despicably beautiful afternoon for such a terrible day as Dustin’s entire world shattered into bits. He wanted to scorn the sky that was just as blue as Cassandra’s lovely eyes. Eyes that would never open again.

  When Dustin finally looked back to see the mourners were leaving the churchyard and solemnly walking back to town, something caught his eye in the grass in front of him. Tiny white petals that caught the sunlight just right so he’d notice them. A few sprigs of bog stitchwort grew up amongst the weeds, swaying in the breeze that he had turned numb to.

  His heart ached as he stared at that pathetic, but elegant flower. He reached out and plucked it just as he had done with one similar two days ago. Back then, the future was decided. Cassandra was to be his bride and he was to have a happy life with her. Now, he was the victim of some cruel fate that he couldn’t even put a name to. He had lost his Cassandra, and in her place came these strange new enhancements to himself. What kind of trade was that? He’d give it all up if he could have seen her smiling face one more time.

  Torn between treasuring Cassandra’s favorite flower and crumbling it to bits, he chose to do neither. Instead, he somehow found the strength to push himself to his feet and took one step after another until he was walking to follow after the townspeople, toward the only ones who could give him any kind of explanation.

  Katherine was glad that Shawn understood her need to stay at Samuel Flanagan’s for the evening. The close connection between the Keiths and the Flanagans was made perfectly clear to him before they ever married and she told him straight out that if the need came, she’d be at Cassandra or Samuel’s side in an instant. Now was no exception. Besides, Shawn could never bear funerals. He attended the burial with her, but no more. He was much more inclined to stay home or go to the pub until the whole hysteria blew over. Their two little ones needed looking after either way.

  Samuel put on a brave face for the funeral, but once the mourners were gone and they were shut up in his house, he was nearly inconsolable. He simply sat by the fireplace, staring at the chair where Cassandra used to sit and knit during her free time when she wasn’t doing chores or going off with Dustin.

  The old man barely responded to her questions and when he did, they were in single syllables that were sometimes unintelligible to begin with. Katherine gave what little comfort she could, but she knew that she couldn’t stay forever. After she started up a big pot of soup and gave up on any type of conversation, she set to straightening up the house and cleaning it to the best of her ability, knowing the man wouldn’t get around to cleaning it himself for quite some time. From what Dustin told her, Cassandra did all the cleaning in the past.

  Her thoughts continually came back to what had become of her younger brother. No one had seen him after the reception. Not a single sign or word from him at all. If he was around, hiding somewhere, he surely would have come for the funeral. Katherine wondered if he had befallen a similar fate as Cassandra and his body just hadn’t been found yet.

  But, she forced out that thought and scrubbed down the dining table even harder, as if pouring herself into her task would silence those disturbing whispers of melancholy. There was quite enough sadness to go around and she wouldn’t add to it with her own suspicions. Men were already out searching for Dustin and she was sure that they would find him, alive and well.

  As if her own thoughts on her brother had been spoken out in the open, Samuel replied to them.

  “He did it,” the old man grumbled. “I know he did.”

  Katherine straightened and fisted the washcloth in her hand. “What was that?”

  Samuel blinked slowly and then rubbed the heel of his palm into hi
s eye. It did little to hide the tear that leaked out and curled under his chin.

  “He did this to her. I know he did.”

  Her brows pinched together in confusion. “You’re saying Dustin…” She couldn’t even speak the words. It was inconceivable. Dustin loved Cassandra more than anything. She remembered in the early days of their attachment when he’d go on and on, speaking in such poetic prose that she thought he had lost his mind. He said that she was the reason he breathed, the only bit of happiness he could ever hope for in life – no offense meant to Katherine or their family as a whole.

  To think that Dustin could have killed Cassandra in such a brutal, savage way… It was impossible.

  “It was the beast,” Samuel muttered, so soft that if Katherine hadn’t stopped her cleaning, she would have never heard him.

  “Beast?”

  Samuel dropped his face into his hands, but he didn’t give himself over to the frenetic crying like she had expected to witness in the course of the evening. Instead, he fell silent again and didn’t utter another word. First he said Dustin killed Cassandra, and now he said it was some beast? No one else had mentioned seeing a beast or even an animal when they went to the Keith homestead late last night.

  Katherine let out a tired sigh and gave up on understanding the grief-stricken father. He didn’t know what he was saying. Her own father had become the same way when her mother preceded him in death. He followed soon after, and Katherine wondered if Samuel’s broken heart would drive him to an early grave too. He might not have been in the best of health, but he still had several years of living left to do.

  She left the man to whatever confused musings were rolling around in his head and took the bucket from the back door to fetch water. The few dishes they owned were all dirty and needed washing before she could even think about leaving.