Kilmoon: A County Clare Mystery

by Alber, Lisa

  Danny waited. After a moment, her gaze returned to his. Slowly, he pulled her mom’s notebook out of the portfolio. “Your mother. She never got over Liam, did she?”

  Merrit stared through the mirror at the frayed notebook cover with its psychedelic rainbow. After several seconds in which nothing moved except Merrit’s chest, she heaved a breath with such force Danny dropped the notebook and grabbed her shoulders to help steady her as she bent over. “Inhaler?”

  She stood stiff, battling her breaths. Her breath hiccupped with each painful sound. “I—I—am—f-f-f-ine.”

  Danny retreated to give her space. His surprise attack had backfired, not that he was surprised. He had retrieved the notebook out of Kevin’s truck, read it, and by the last page understood one thing: he’d never unravel the bandages that lay over Merrit’s heart—or anyone else’s for that matter. The truth was, he was just starting to pick at his own.

  ***

  Warm air hissed through the Peugeot’s vent, but Merrit shivered. Fatigue lay on her like a fog layer, and her body ached anew after her mini-attack in the bathroom. If only she could think straight. If only she could talk to Liam. Now.

  Danny knew her for a liar, that much was obvious, but she refused to alleviate his frustration. Since Lonnie’s death, the truth had become even more momentous and personal, especially when it came to her mom. Surely Danny grasped this now that he’d devoured her mom’s words.

  “Can I have my mom’s notes back, please?”

  “You made it through a panic attack without an inhaler.”

  She should be happy for what her doctor would call a breakthrough. All she felt was breached and sick to her stomach.

  “Pages back,” she said. “Please.”

  “Not yet. They’re evidence.” Danny pointed out the window. “That’s the Poulnabrone Dolmen.”

  They passed a three-legged tabletop tomb that glowed in the dawn and dwarfed grazing cattle. Low clouds diffused pink and orange hues over an already dappled terrain of mixed limestone and fields. They were miles from anywhere, certainly miles from Liam’s house.

  “Over five thousand years old,” Danny continued, “and the slab lying over the three legs weighs five tons. Amazing prehistoric feat of engineering.” After a few more silent miles, he said, “Back to the blackmail.”

  There he went, circling around her again with his astute blinks, ever closer like a vulture that had caught the whiff of death from miles away.

  Danny’s mobile chirped before he could continue. He snatched up the phone. “Ahern here. O’Neil, that you? You sound like shite.”

  Merrit rocked forward when Danny braked and pulled into a dirt lane. His uh-huhs ground out between increasingly clenched teeth. “I have Merrit Chase with me. I’ll have to bring her along, and then we’ll figure it out from there. Thanks for calling me.”

  He clicked off and threw the mobile into the back seat. “Son of a bitch.” His palms smacked the steering wheel. “Son—of—a—bitch. You’ve a good instinct, Merrit Chase. I might not need to cajole the rest of what you know out of you, after all.”

  Outside, lowing sheep and hectoring magpies answered for her. A farmer rounded the corner of the house at the end of the track and paused to stare at them with hand shading his eyes. Danny ground the car into gear.

  Merrit rolled down the window and stuck her head out, watching rock walls and sheep and a castle keep speed past. She pulled her head in when Danny accelerated away from Lisfenora and further into the countryside, toward the coast.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A crime scene.” He spared her a businesslike glance. “I don’t like what’s going on here, but I’d say you’re a lucky one.”

  She held her breath.

  “Kate Meehan is dead.”

  Julia Chase’s notebook

  Sometimes I wonder who I think I’m fooling. My mother? Even she doesn’t buy my career aspirations. Her latest letter includes this: “Did you know that Erica Wallace—you remember she went through a ‘commune’ phase—announced her engagement with the most lavish afternoon party I’ve seen in years. And to David Mitford, no less. He always pined after you, but too late now! As ever, I patiently wait for you to come to your senses (as you will!),” etcetera …

  Her letter had me so infuriated that I welcomed Andrew’s appearance outside the post office and our subsequent respite from the crowds in a nice little pub over in Doolin. He’s an interesting man, what with his experience in the Far East. I didn’t catch all the details because I was thinking I could solve my writer’s block by pretending that Liam had matched me to Andrew. Pure fiction, but what does it matter? When I broached the topic in the middle of our second pint (maybe I was a little drunk), Andrew positively beamed.

  We moved on to other topics, but on the return drive, he said, “You’ll see yet. This Liam, he’s not the man he seems.” I had to laugh at his gallant certainty. Mother would approve of a man like Andrew McCallum. He’s just her type.

  But Andrew, he’d never take me against a standing stone or under Kilmoon’s watchful eye. He’d never run amok with me, scattering sheep before us. He’d never toss me into the air like a beach ball again and again until I about faint with laughter. He’d never breach his finely wrought decorum to kiss my callused feet.

  • 36 •

  Danny parked and ordered Merrit to stay put. Before he’d finished his sentence, however, she was out of the car and rushing toward a break in the hawthorn through which one of his men had just disappeared. Danny caught up with her as she stumbled to a stop with a sharp intake of breath. Following her gaze, he saw Kilmoon through the hawthorn branches, looking as broody as ever. The church stood off the roadside, and the overgrown hedgerows had hidden her from view.

  Merrit stared at Kilmoon’s cracked facade, patting her chest, her expression settling somewhere between dismay and horror. “Kilmoon Church,” she said. “Of course. It had to be.”

  Before Danny could pursue this most interesting statement, O’Neil appeared to block her path. Worry lines appeared between his eyes.

  “Excuse me, sir.” He sneezed. His nose and eyes were red. “Clarkson is stuck in a meeting, but he said he’d be here in about two hours. Meanwhile, the scene needs a superior officer—”

  “Did Clarkson tell you not to call me in?” Danny said.

  “No.”

  “Then we’re covered, but I still plan not to be here when he arrives. Hold Merrit in my car.” Merrit still stared at the church behind its drystone wall perimeter. He thought he could hear her lungs rattling with each breath. If Danny hadn’t been with her since early on, he’d have suspected her of killing Kate. In fact, he still suspected her of something, he just wasn’t sure what. “Switch that. I want her in my sightline at all times, but off church grounds.”

  Danny made his way toward Kate’s body while O’Neil led Merrit around the outside of the drystone wall that surrounded the church.

  Kate Meehan could be a pictorial for high-fashion demise in her black skirt and silk blouse. Makeup stark against death’s pallor looked as if she’d taken care. And her arm in arabesque, hip tilted toward the bent leg−such grace. She wanted only for a hint of a smile to achieve aesthetic perfection. Her macabre beauty displayed in a graveyard rendered the scene all the more grotesque.

  “Oh, she’s a fresh one, this one,” said the state pathologist, also known as Benjy the Bagger. A spry old bastard, he’d been around long enough to watch his hair fade to silver and his peers succumb to politics. Danny liked him for his irreverent outlook. A moment later Benjy didn’t disappoint.

  “Chee-rist, no Sunday confessionals for this one I’ll be betting.”

  Danny retreated to let Benjy get on with his examination. He felt Merrit’s watchfulness grinding into his back. Unorthodox her presence may be, but all the better to see her reaction to these events. He shifted so that he could view her. She appeared subdued but not exactly stricken with shock.

  Benjy peered at
a grave marker so weathered no epitaph remained. Over the centuries half of it had sunk into the earth so that what appeared above ground was a triangle of limestone sharp enough to do serious damage. A camera flash from one of the scenes of crime officers illuminated blood on the headstone then flashed again to capture Kate’s broken shoe. Benjy dropped a stiletto heel into a bag and handed it off to the exhibit officer. Next, he crouched on his hands and knees and lifted Kate’s head to peer beneath it.

  “Almighty beauty that one. I wager I’ll find a fractured skull, intracranial bleeding.” He hummed under his breath. “Heard Clarkson’s riding you harder than a rutting bull.”

  “And I’ll be taken off this case once it’s linked to Lonnie’s death. Clarkson’s sidelined me well and good.”

  “You seem sure.”

  “That I’ll be packed off to lesser duties or that the two deaths are linked?”

  “Both.”

  “Of both, I’m sure. Call it a rumbling from my gut.”

  Benjy crawled toward Kate’s legs and pressed latex-covered fingers into the flesh around one of her ankles. “She injured her ankle within the last few days, not bad, but enough she’d have been wobbly.” He shook his head with a tsk. “Who the devil wears shoes like hers anyhow? And take a look at this.” Benjy slid open Kate’s blouse to reveal a smooth pane of white skin, a push-up bra, and a perfect circle of a bruise.

  “Hey!” O’Neil shouted, and Danny pivoted to see Merrit climbing over the rock wall. She stumbled over a gravestone and ran toward Kate as if the church grounds were nothing but a bloody obstacle course. Danny caught her by the arm. Breathing hard, she stared at Kate with a hand pressed against her mouth.

  “O’Neil!” Danny said at the same time the sheepish detective arrived with apologies about a coughing fit. “Get her out of here.”

  Danny rubbed his hands over his face and felt its unwashed, stubbly surface. His eyeballs itched from lack of sleep. He should have known Merrit wouldn’t stay passive for long.

  Benjy returned to humming, while around them, various officers combed the grass for evidence and dusted nearby gravestones for fingerprints. Danny swiveled away from Kate. Her stiffening corpse disturbed him in a way that Lonnie’s hadn’t. It was the perfection again, this time in timing. She’d granted everyone the favor by dying, especially Little Miss Scene Compromiser.

  Danny weaved his way toward Merrit, whose wilted posture hinted at something, but, once again, he wasn’t sure what. “Someone did you a favor.”

  A worry-wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows, but she banished it fast. “Really, is that what you think?”

  “I suspect both Lonnie and Kate would still be alive if you hadn’t come charging into our fair village like one of the four horses of the apocalypse. Now come with me.”

  • 37 •

  Still clutching her inhaler, Merrit followed Danny as he led them toward an old standing stone that stood sentinel over the cow paddies. First Danny, then she, then O’Neil, stepped over the stone’s shadow that pointed like a grim reaper’s finger back toward Kilmoon Church. You started this, it said. Our Lady held her ground against the accusation, unyielding, and Merrit vowed to remain likewise. She hugged herself as closely as the church did. She visualized strong walls. All she needed were defenses like Kilmoon’s for a little longer. All she needed was to keep her cool with Danny.

  In reality she longed to sink to the ground, gnash her teeth, and wail with childish abandon. This church, Kilmoon, with its weathered walls, looked just as it had on the living room wall in California. Its impenetrable window eyes followed her just as they had when she was a child. I see you, they seemed to say. I know something you don’t know.

  Danny gazed at her with his own brand of impenetrability. “Earlier you said something about Kilmoon Church—‘it had to be.’ It had to be what exactly?”

  “It’s nothing. Family stuff.”

  “And your family stuff is why we’re in this shit storm.” He swung his gaze toward the church. “She’s a mighty relic, that one, and you seemed mighty comfortable jumping her wall. Been here before?”

  “Believe me, I wish I’d never seen this church before today.”

  Danny raised his eyebrows with a look that said he was willing to wait all day and that he would.

  “Fine,” she said. “I feel like I know this place because we had a picture of it in our living room while I was growing up. As soon as I read about Kilmoon Church in my mom’s notebook, I knew it must be the same place.” Danny nodded for her to keep going. “I’ve been meaning to visit it, but it’s not listed in my guidebook—”

  “It wouldn’t be. And?”

  “And the reality of it is more—I don’t know—alive than it should be. Like it’s been waiting for me. Idiotic, I know, but—”

  She clamped her mouth shut before revealing her mom’s sadness and Andrew’s insistence that the picture remain on the wall. “Call me sentimental,” he’d say, “for the site where our relationship truly began.”

  “And you’re saying you’ve never been here before today?” Danny said.

  She nodded.

  “Why did you trespass the crime scene?”

  “I had to see Kate up close.” Merrit recalled the red splash of Kate’s scarf on the night she had caught Merrit outside her cottage, and her low voice in the hospital as she revealed secrets. “She was my sister, after all.”

  Which had made this Merrit’s last chance to view something of herself in Kate—slant of bone under skin, arch of eyebrow, curve of lip—but all she’d noticed was the color red like a blinking light unsure whether to stop or beckon. Between Kate’s lipstick, sandals, and belt, the color completed her ensemble. Unfortunately, the color also tinted her bruised ankle, discolored her hair, and stained the headstone.

  Guilt leaked through Merrit’s strong walls. The problem with Danny was that he had hit too close to home when he’d said that she was the lucky one. A part of her had wanted Kate gone, and now she had her wish. Perhaps she had caused Kate’s death. Somehow. Danny was certainly staring her down as if she had.

  She took a seat where Danny indicated. He was the person she feared most at the moment, not because he might consider her the puzzle’s key—which she wasn’t, because if she were, she’d have all the answers—but because his presence was too warm. “I wish you’d give me time to sort things out for myself.”

  “Why, do you think she killed Lonnie?”

  She shrugged and hugged her purse, where, if he insisted, Danny would find a folded sheet tucked into her passport holder, safely hidden away along with Liam’s precious address. The folded sheet hid the third article she’d swiped from Kate’s cottage, the one Merrit had not shown Danny because it led to conclusions that Merrit wasn’t ready to examine closely. And she wasn’t about to remind Danny about a news item that was published during his childhood, back in 1980. Now that Danny had read her mom’s notes, he might just jump to the same conclusions that she had about Kate’s motivations.

  ***

  Danny watched Benjy cinch paper bags around Kate’s hands and over her head. Then he straightened her limbs so that her remaining bit of humanity disappeared. Now she was a cadaver. A team of crows settled on a church wall in hopes of fulfilling their part of nature’s plan. Beside him, Merrit gripped her purse like a stuffed animal.

  “Danny,” Benjy called, “we’ve got a missing puzzle piece over here.”

  The crows ruffled themselves in a gust of wind and then resettled. Something Danny couldn’t make out dangled from Benjy’s fingers. “Watch her,” he ordered O’Neil, who sneezed in response.

  “Didn’t you tell me this was missing off Lonnie O’Brien when I worked on him?” Benjy said when Danny arrived at his side. “I found it under the deceased’s shoulder.”

  The six-inch braid that used to touch Lonnie’s shoulder hadn’t held together well despite the rubber band someone had wrapped around the snipped end. Benjy grinned. “Clarkson will like this. He’d l
ike to close the case of the dead O’Brien heir.”

  “Kate had motive enough, I suppose.”

  “Ay, and by the looks of her broken shoe, that wankstain Clarkson will declare that our deceased beauty accidentally fell and hit her head. Two cases closed for the price of one.”

  Danny bagged the braid and handed it off. “Easy answer.”

  “My point exactly. We know all about Clarkson back in Dublin—notorious ass kisser and politician, he is.” Benjy gestured toward the men who systematically combed every inch of Kilmoon’s grounds. “We’ll see if they find anything that points to answers, and I’ll see what I see when I cut her open. That’s all I can do.”

  Danny sat back on his haunches for a last look at Kate before Benjy body-bagged her. He pulled out his mobile. “There’s one person who needs to witness this scene. Grant me this last shot at answers before Clarkson arrives.”

  Julia Chase’s notebook

  Liam doesn’t want to see me after tonight’s pub crawl. We sat in his car before his evening session, enjoying the view of the Burren’s limestone terraces receding toward the ocean. Upon unveiling my brilliant idea to use Andrew as my surrogate match, he revved the car into gear and careened along narrow lanes, nearly colliding into oncoming traffic, and never mind the wending cliff-side dangers, he never slowed, and all this with hands lax upon the steering wheel while I yelled that it was only for the article, that this relieved him of the task of matching me, that there was no reason to be jealous.

  He drove until sweat dripped out of his hair. He drove until we completed a roundabout circuit back to Lisfenora and pulled up in front of my hotel. Balled muscles gathered along his jaw. “I’ll not have it,” he said

  “Not have what?” I replied. “Andrew’s seeing Adrienne anyway.”

  “Like hell he is,” he snapped and then caught himself with a head shake. He kissed me on the forehead, saying that after the evening’s activities he’d sojourn, alone, to Kilmoon Church, his favorite thinking spot.