by Alber, Lisa
• Part II •
Sunday, August 31st – Saturday, September 6th
“Even well-honed instincts can come undone.”
—Liam the Matchmaker
Gull’s Hollow Community Gazette, Monday, July 17, 1989
Hero’s Death Continues to Baffle Locals
Officials continue to investigate the death of local philanthropist Julia Chase McCallum. On June 7, McCallum was killed after her BMW collided with an oncoming Ford truck in the worst crash this area has seen in a decade.
The truck’s driver, Chris Jones, 18, sustained massive head trauma and remains in critical condition at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Sources close to the investigation say initial evidence shows McCallum drifted into the oncoming lane. McCallum’s husband, Andrew McCallum, president of the privately held Mid-Pacific Consulting and Trading Company, headquartered in San Francisco, could not be reached for comment.
“Julia was an esteemed member of our community,” said Mayor Danny Wyatt, “and we feel her loss immensely. This is a tragedy.”
McCallum chaired the local equestrian club and was a show-jumping champion.
“Her expertise will be sorely missed,” said Marilyn Cooper, cofounder of the Wine Country Equestrian Club. “She almost single-handedly raised the $20,000 sponsor-donated prize money for our first show-jumping competition.”
McCallum has also been praised for her work with migrant families, especially in the area of literacy. “Julia loved children,” said Sheila Ortiz, president of Migrant Worker Relief Fund. “I’ve always admired her commitment to literacy. She was not the type to lose track of her driving. She had too much to live for.”
Inquiries into factors in McCallum’s collision yielded nothing from her peers. The police won’t speculate except to say that they are investigating all possibilities. Until the accident, McCallum had no record for traffic-related or other offenses.
McCallum was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 22, 1945, to Percival and Mary Chase, distant relations to the Chases of Chase Manhattan Bank fame. Prior to marrying Andrew McCallum and settling in Gull’s Hollow, she worked as a journalist.
A memorial service was held at St. Rose Catholic Church in Santa Rosa, on Saturday, June 24, 1989, at 1:00 p.m. and was attended by more than 300 mourners. Her 13-year-old daughter, Merrit Lane McCallum, led the eulogies. In lieu of flowers, Andrew McCallum requests donations to the Migrant Worker Scholarship Fund established in his wife’s name.
• 10 •
The sun had risen high enough to reflect off the dirty dishes by the time Danny blinked his way to the sink to rinse out his coffee mug. Another four cups might rouse him, but the second brewing pot might also give him away. He pictured his wife drop-kicking him all the way to County Galway because he got ploughed at the Plough during Liam’s party.
He plugged the sink and cupped his hands to drink while the basin filled. The water’s metallic warmth went down easy.
“Do stop,” Ellen said from behind him. “Do you want to set a bad example for the children?”
Mandy and Petey were outside, but Danny remained silent in hopes he wouldn’t accidentally touch off his wife. Calm for the moment, she stood by the window overlooking the backyard where the playhouse Kevin had built no longer stood. Tangled blackberry vines seeped over the rock wall that bounded their land and overwhelmed the flower beds Ellen used to tend.
The children pressed funny faces against the outside of the window. Their church clothes were already dusty, and blackberry juice stained their lips. Danny stooped under the windowsill as Ellen moved away. Giggles turned into incipient hysteria. Just as the children were about to give up on him, he stood and pushed open the window. The smell of over-ripening berries rushed into the kitchen. He leaned out the window, grabbed each child in a one-armed tickle hug, and lifted them into the house.
Mandy, at eight, considered herself the expert on rules. “You’re still in your bathrobe. It’s too late for that.”
She held one of Danny’s hands in both of hers while Petey hugged his leg. “A deal then,” Danny said. “I’ll wash and change into my play clothes if you do the same.”
Their identical smiles almost broke his heart. Mandy clapped her hands, then stopped. She approached Ellen, who had retreated to her spot at the kitchen table. “Mum, can we use your shower today, please? Instead of the bath? Please?”
Ellen’s expression was lost to Danny, her head tilted as it was to gaze at her oldest child’s freckled hand, but he knew its angled contours, the melancholy she tried to hide from their observant daughter, who now leaned close to Ellen and whispered, “Please, Mummy, I’ll be ever so careful with Petey.”
Ellen cupped Mandy’s face. Danny shared Mandy’s happiness for the kiss his wife planted on her nose. “Go on then. I’ll be in to wash your hair.”
“And Petey’s too?”
“And Petey’s.” She sank back into a slouch as the children ran from the room. “You didn’t miss anything at Mass today. The church was half empty, and Father Dooley talked about the body as temple even though he undoubtedly drank as much as everyone else at the party.” She rubbed a finger through bread crumbs on the table. “How was door duty, by the way?”
Danny returned to the dirty dishes. Squeals and water gurgles issued from their master bathroom. “What you’d expect.”
“Anything unusual this year?”
“By which you mean with Kevin. What’s got you asking?”
“Just that I bumped into Emma outside the church. She looked awful, simply done in. All she wanted was to clear the air with Kevin. After a year, that’s not so much to ask, is it?” She licked her finger. “For anyone but Kevin, that is.”
Ellen liked to forget that Kevin might as well be Danny’s brother. Danny opened his mouth to object and just as quickly Ellen shut him down. “Don’t say a word, don’t you do it. You always defend your men friends.”
Ah, here we go then. Like clockwork a checkmate occurred, twice, three times a week. Danny’s presence was all the accelerant Ellen needed to vent her despair, her anger, and her gripes against him, everything from the towel rack he hadn’t repaired to his pittance salary.
Hoping to waylay yet another fight, Danny said, “You go splash, and I’ll finish up the dishes. Then we ought to pick some of those berries. Petey’s been pleading for tarts.”
“You’ll be here to make the dough—won’t you? I don’t think I can manage the dough today.”
He nodded, relieved that her flare-up had dissipated as quickly as it had emerged.
“Mummy, Mummy, you’re here,” Mandy shouted a few moments later, and Petey in mimic, “You’re here!” If anything, their delighted surprise depressed Danny, as did the abandoned garden, as did last night’s drunkenness. He dry-swallowed aspirin, pulled flour out of the cupboard and mixed it together with the rest of the dough ingredients. Over the past few years, he’d become a decent cook much to his not-so-delighted surprise.
His mobile rang, displaying the number for his superior in the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He put the phone on speaker and continued mixing the dough. NBCI’s Clare division superintendent, Eric Clarkson, worked out of county headquarters in Ennis. He didn’t bother greeting Danny. “Problem out your way. The state pathologist and scenes of crime team have already left Dublin. You need to get on securing the scene for them, and do it well because I’m talking about Lonnie O’Brien here. Apparent homicide at his Internet café.”
Danny froze with his hands in the dough bowl. “You’re having me on.”
“Indeed I’m not. Son of a friend, I might add.”
A spurt of adrenaline drove Danny to hurry with the dough.
“I question whether you can handle this—” Clarkson said.
“Good call on your part, keeping this with me.” Danny knew well enough that Clarkson was on the brink of calling in a more experienced detective. Any detective inspector out of Dublin would do. “The locals won’t cozy up to an
yone but their local lads. Plus, the matchmaking festival starts tomorrow.”
“Ah, shit, that’s right, isn’t it? Just what we need, hundreds of bottom-feeders circling the action. Bloody nightmare. And mind you take care with the O’Briens. After last year’s buggery, they’ll want a quiet arrest. O’Brien Senior has an idea for a suspect. That Kevin fella we had trouble with last year.”
But of course. Danny could have predicted that one.
From the bathroom, Ellen’s voice called out for the children to hurry now. Danny patted the dough into a ball while Clarkson wasted precious minutes letting Danny know that O’Brien and Clarkson went back a ways and that Clarkson would be the one to keep O’Brien abreast of developments. Danny got the hint. Clarkson would receive the back slaps after he, Danny, solved the case.
“So O’Brien Senior found Lonnie?” Danny interrupted.
“What? No,” Clarkson said. “Some employee of his did and called O’Brien.”
Ivan. He was just the type to call the big man instead of the Garda. Lately, Ivan had appeared more ratlike than usual as he scurried about Lisfenora on Lonnie’s behalf, and now Danny wondered why. Ivan, who’d arrived just over a year ago, spoke stilted English, and lived above Lonnie’s shop the last time Danny had checked.
Danny wrapped the dough in foil. He turned to see Ellen staring at him from the hallway with the children on either side of her. He held up the dough. “Work,” he mouthed.
“That’s convenient. You’ll use any excuse to get away, even door duty, won’t you?”
He covered the phone. “You like to remind me that I’m due for a promotion. So which is it? You can’t have both the money and a house husband.”
“That’s the way with you then, push it all back on me.”
Back on the phone, he begged Clarkson’s pardon, ending with, “I’m on my way.”
“You’d best be,” Clarkson said. “And Ahern, no fucking about on this. You’ve had a rough go, but I don’t want to hear any family excuses.”
“Yes, sir.”
He rang off. The children retreated to their bedroom, no doubt to avoid witnessing another fight. They took their plastic berry-picking buckets with them.
***
In a rental cottage that had seen better days, Kate Meehan peeled back her sleep mask. The clock read half nine, and normally she was not one to sleep past seven. Even so, she snuggled deeper into her body heat, closed her eyes, and luxuriated in a well-deserved lie-in. She still couldn’t believe her luck and congratulated herself for her quick thinking during Liam’s party. She fancied herself the only person with a bird’s-eye view of the current drama, from 1975 to the present, from Liam to Lonnie.
She reached under her pillow to be sure of her souvenir and thought about how she might use it to benefit herself. She stroked its smooth surface—it looked so innocent from the outside—then let herself wallow in a self-indulgent doze. For once, she felt replete.
She’d come up with a plan. She always did.
• 11 •
The scene that met Danny at Internet Café only half surprised him. He’d expected his men to arrive ahead of him and start securing the scene. He’d also expected Ivan, but he hadn’t expected the attractive American who gawked at him as if he’d swanned in wearing a tiara. He shrugged off her reaction only to catch his reflection in the closest computer monitor. That was some slump to his shoulders. He looked like what he was—henpecked and hungover—which wasn’t any better than wearing a tiara.
“Ivan,” he said to the man whose hair stuck out in all directions except for lumps caked to his head with hair gel. Driving in, Danny had noticed a Closed for Repairs sign taped to one of the shop’s windows and written in what looked to be a hasty foreign hand. Ivan’s, no doubt, and what else had he touched along the way?
And feck if those weren’t latex gloves on his hands. “Tell me Garda O’Neil gave you those, or I’ll have to wonder.”
“He was wearing them, all right.” O’Neil nodded toward Ivan’s cohort. “So was she.”
The woman sat with O’Neil at the front of the shop while Ivan waited with Garda Pickney at the opposite end. In identical moves, the witnesses held up their hands and turned them over like magicians. Abracadabra, we’re innocent, see?
Ivan pointed to one of two doors located behind the counter. “I keep a collection in my workroom. I am careful not to put finger oils on the computer parts. When I saw Lonnie—of course, I have seen the television shows. I know what I am to do.”
He looked toward the woman for confirmation. “American cop dramas,” she said.
These two, they reminded Danny of Mandy and Petey talking around each other to hide the fact that they’d pilfered the last biscuits.
“You still live upstairs, correct?” Danny said to Ivan.
A nod.
“Did you hear anything last night?”
A vehement shake. “I drank too much.”
“And you didn’t check the premises before going to bed I take it.”
Ivan twitched. The movement might have been a shrug. “I never do. Lonnie does not pay me enough to be security guard.”
“And you,” Danny began, taking in the wavy hair floating over the woman’s shoulders, similar to Ellen’s hair.
“You’re in charge of the case?” she said before he could continue.
“I’d say that’s obvious.”
“It’s just that I saw you at the party last night. You were sitting next to Kevin Donellan at the bar. The matchmaker’s son?”
Now he recognized her. “And you’re the Good Samaritan who sits with Marcus.”
“He’s my friend.”
Danny eyed her wrinkled party dress. “And you are Lonnie’s friend too? Seems like I recall that your date with him ended badly.”
She grimaced. “As everyone knows by now, thanks to Mrs. O’Brien. You’d have thought I knocked over the presents on purpose. She thrives on drama, for sure.”
O’Neil snorted. “That’s putting it lightly.”
“Tell me about your date,” Danny said.
“It wasn’t a date.” Merrit crinkled her nose. “At least not by my standards of the word. Mrs. O’Brien butted her head into my social life, that’s all.”
“Mmm-hmm. What’s your name?”
“Merrit Chase.”
“And what brings you here this morning?”
“It’s a habit of mine, to check my email first thing. Ivan heard me knocking on the back door—I’m staying just across the alley and down a few doors—and he let me in. I think I woke him up.”
“I overslept today—how could I not?” Ivan said. “And I substantiate that she checks her email.”
Pickney rolled his eyes toward O’Neil. “Hear that, he can substantiate Miss Chase’s email usage. And I’ll venture other habits as well?”
“We hardly know each other,” Merrit said.
“For a couple of strangers, you seem to know each other well enough,” O’Neil piped up. “Wouldn’t you say, sir?”
“Maybe so,” Danny said.
Danny glanced around the room at the quiet computers and dimmed overheads, then toward the noncoastal where Lisfenorans and tourists had started their rounds. Through the blinds, he could just make out flits of color as people passed the shop.
“Gents, hold on to our two witnesses while I take a look at our victim.” He studied Merrit’s tensed jaw and averted gaze. “Problem with that?”
She shook her head.
Garda O’Toole was already in Lonnie’s office taking preliminary notes. A quick scan showed Danny nothing obvious except the knife in the chest and grubby euro notes littering the floor. Lonnie lay with eyes aimed at the door and jaw hanging as if he’d been in the process of saying something when the knife plunged into him.
“I know there’s a cat in here somewhere,” Danny said to O’Toole. “Before the day’s out, grab it up and drop it off at the hotel. Mrs. O’Brien can take care of it.”
“Yes
, sir.” O’Toole pointed to Lonnie’s chest. “The knife is unusual.”
“So it is.” Danny bent over Lonnie for a closer look at the knife’s inlaid wooden handle. “Shit.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Thinking aloud, as painful as that is.”
He crouched next to the body. In doing so, he caught sight of a white plastic canister under the desk. He swung himself into the other room. “Which one of you has asthma?”
“Not me, and neither did Lonnie,” Ivan said.
“You?” Danny said to Merrit.
A purse the size of a backpack perched on her lap. Her hands twitched toward it and fell back. Something was off with her, but he sensed it wasn’t the obvious. Criminals don’t usually let themselves get caught wearing their latex gloves.
“No asthma,” she said.
“Pickney, isolate Ivan,” Danny said. “There’s a storage room in back. Get his statement there. And Ivan, we’ll talk about your brilliant move to call Mr. O’Brien instead of the Garda. Makes you appear guiltier than ever.”
“I am not guilty of anything except healthy fear of the authorities,” Ivan said as Pickney walked him away. “Of course I called Lonnie’s father first. That is the proper respect.”
“Respect, right.” Danny frowned at Merrit, who sat prim as a schoolgirl with feet together and hands now resting atop her purse. Her eyes were a shade of hazel so light they appeared to glow, and her gaze hinted at depths she tried hard to conceal. “O’Neil, I need a second’s worth of help with our illustrious dead man, then get Miss Chase’s initial statement. Don’t move, Miss Chase.”
Out of Merrit’s earshot, he directed O’Neil to watch Merrit carefully for signs of uneasiness or relief. “She’s hiding something.”
He returned to the corpse with a worsening hangover headache. Walking around the body, he noticed another oddity. Instead of the usual items found missing from a dead person—the gleaming watch, the wallet—it looked like Lonnie would be interred without his braid. Someone had snipped it clean away.
• 12 •
On Sunday evening Kevin lounged with Liam. This was their last quiet evening before the festival chaos consumed them for the next month. Not that Kevin felt relaxed. He’d been tense for the past few weeks anyhow, and then this morning he’d woken up agitated by thoughts of Emma.