She walked slowly back to Sullivan’s, where she found that Mick had finished erasing all signs of the scuffle. The old clock over the bar read half past midnight, but she suddenly felt too exhausted to move. She dropped onto a bar stool and shut her eyes.
“Yeh look like yeh could use a cuppa.” Mick’s voice broke through the fog.
She opened her eyes again and managed a small smile. “The Irish solution to everything: a cup of tea.”
Mick busied himself with making the tea. “It’s hot, it’s sweet, and it’s got caffeine in it. What more could you want? Better for yeh than a shot of whiskey, fer sure.”
“I wasn’t going to ask for that—I’m not much of a drinker.”
“I’ve noticed.” He slid the mug of tea across the bar toward her, and Maura wrapped her hands around it. “And you runnin’ a pub.”
“If I’d known that was what I’d be doing, I might have developed a taste for it. Luckily most people only want their pint.” She sipped. Mick was right: hot and sweet seemed to be working. “What just happened here?”
Mick poured himself a glass of whiskey from a bottle on the top shelf and came around the bar to sit on a stool next to her, resting his elbows on the bar, cradling his glass. “I’m thinkin’ the proper phrase would be, ‘You apprehended a criminal.’”
“Hey, I didn’t do much of anything. I just stared at the guy while everybody else did the work.”
“You faced him down, did you not? Knowing who he was and what he might have done?”
“I guess. What else could I do? Hide in the loo?”
Mick’s mouth twitched, and he took a swallow from his glass. “And leave me to take him on alone?”
Maura waved a dismissive hand at him. “Ah, you could’ve taken him, easy.”
Mick nodded. “I might have done. Point is, you didn’t run or hide.”
Maura swiveled on her stool to face him. “This is my place. I’m responsible for it, and for the people who work here. Including you. And don’t tell me you can take care of yourself, because I know you can, and this isn’t about that. I own this place; I run it. So I have to be ready to deal with thieves and killers and God knows what else. Do you get that?”
“I do, Maura,” he said quietly.
Maura fell silent, drinking her tea, staring at the ranks of bottles on the shelves behind the bar. Most of them were dusty. The people who came to Sullivan’s were not fancy drinkers. Most of them could stretch out a single pint for an hour or two, but she felt no need to hurry them along or to force more drinks on them. She wanted Sullivan’s to be a place people were happy to come to, and she didn’t want them to feel rushed or pressured once they were here. Was that the best thing for her bottom line? Probably not, but she wasn’t going to fiddle with the system.
The sugar and caffeine finally kicked in, and getting herself out to her car and driving home didn’t seem to be quite the mountain it had a few minutes earlier. She straightened up on the stool, but before she could gather herself to stand up, Mick laid a hand on her arm.
“Maura,” he began, then stopped. But didn’t remove his hand.
She turned to look at him. “What?”
“Are yeh seein’ Sean Murphy?”
That she hadn’t expected, not here, not now. “Seeing, as in dating? Going out with? Whatever it’s called around here? Is that what you’re asking?” Where had this come from?
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate, but only watched her, his eyes dark.
Oh. Well. That was complicated, mostly because she didn’t know why he was asking and she wasn’t sure she wanted to explore what that might mean. Or what she wanted to tell him, for that matter. And why had he picked this of all times to get into it?
Maura took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Sean and I have been out on exactly one date, when he took me to dinner in Skibbereen, though we barely got to eat before he got a call from the station. Which everybody in the village knows. He’s asked me to go with him to one other thing, if we ever get all this . . . stuff here sorted out. Why do you want to know?”
Mick shook his head, more to himself than to her, as he turned to stare into what was left of his drink. “I didn’t want to put myself in the middle of anything.”
Maura was beginning to be glad that she hadn’t had anything alcoholic to drink, because even sober she was unprepared for this conversation. Was Mick trying to ask her out? “There is no ‘anything,’ at least, not yet. But I haven’t noticed you putting yourself into anything either. What are you asking?”
Her question hung there in the air between them. As the silence went on, Maura again realized how little she knew about Mick Nolan. He had to be in his midthirties—but no attachments, other than his grannie Bridget, that she knew about. He was always here at the pub when he said he’d be, and he didn’t seem to mind covering for Jimmy, who was far less dependable. But she’d never heard him talk about family or friends or much of anything else—which, she realized, was a lot like her. But she was the outsider, the intruder, and she had no ties with the living around here. Why was Mick so closemouthed about his life?
He still hadn’t answered her question, so she plunged ahead. “Mick, why are you still here? Not tonight, but in general? I know you must have hoped that Old Mick would leave you Sullivan’s, and you should be mad at me for snatching it away from you the way I did, even if I didn’t mean to. But there must be something else you could be doing that has more of a future for you than this place.” She’d stopped herself just in time from saying “this dump.”
“So now yer givin’ me career counseling?” he asked with a slight smile. “If you want to know, I did wonder how Old Mick had left things, not that we’d ever talked about it. And then you showed up, looking like a half-drowned kitten, and it took a bit to sort out what was what with the ownership.”
“And once you knew, you still could have cut and run,” Maura said.
He nodded. “I could have done. But it was clear that yeh were in over yer head, and I wanted to see how you took to runnin’ the place.”
“Do I pass?”
“There’ve been a few bumps in the road, but yer gettin’ the hang of it.”
“And you’re still here,” Maura said bluntly.
“I am.”
This is a very lopsided conversation, Maura thought. He’d opened the can of worms but he wasn’t going fishing with them. God, what a pathetic metaphor—she must be more tired than she knew. Well, from everything she’d ever heard, Irish men were kind of slow, at least when it came to women. There was probably a long history to that, but that didn’t help her at the moment, when she was sitting in a pub past midnight confronted by a thirtysomething man who seemed to be trying to tell her he might be interested in her as something beyond his boss. Did she really want to get into it, here and now? If she shot him down now, would there be another chance? They could always blame whatever came out of it on the stress of the moment—all that life-and-death stuff they’d been dealing with for days. But should she? Did she want to? She didn’t know.
She was surprised when Mick suddenly began speaking again. “Sean Murphy is a good man—smart, hardworking, ambitious. He knows the people around here. He likes his work. He’s got a strong family behind him.”
“True. But?” Maura demanded.
“But . . . he seems a bit young,” Mick answered.
And Maura knew exactly what he meant. She’d had the same thought many times. Sean did seem kind of . . . innocent, for all that he was a policeman. Though being a policeman here meant something very different from what it did in Boston. “And you’re saying I’m not?”
“Not in the same way. You’ve seen more of the world, or mebbe I mean the darker side of it. You haven’t had an easy life, especially lately, but yer tough.”
What few romantic fantasies Maura had entertained in her life, none had included being called “tough.” “Well, I’ve had to be,” she said cautiously. Where was he going with this?
Mick seemed to be choosing his next words carefully. “It seems there’s no one you’ve left behind in Boston—no relatives, I know, but no friends either?”
Or lovers? Maura added mentally. “Not really. Looks like I’m a misfit, right? No attachments.” Except for Gran, and she was gone. “Mick, I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. Was there something else you wanted to say?”
He gave her an odd look, and Maura knew she wasn’t playing by any rules that he would recognize. Heck, she’d never figured out the him-and-her rules back home either, and the best she could do was to be direct, and try to be honest.
And now she seemed to have scared Mick off, because he said only, “You’re right—it’s late. I should let you get home. Will you be all right, driving the lanes?”
Right now she wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or disappointed, but she knew this was not the time to decide anything. “I’ve been managing fine—I know the way.”
Maura slid off her stool and stumbled, and Mick was quick to grab her arm to steady her. They stood for some indeterminate period, inches apart, frozen. Maura felt something like panic: did she lean in and let happen what maybe they both wanted, or did she do the sensible thing and run for the hills? In the end it was Mick who stepped back, gently. “I’ll lock up, and I’ll be in early tomorrow. Slán abhaile.”
Safe home indeed. Maura tried to make her exit look like anything but flight.
Chapter 28
Maura wasn’t sure how she got home, but it seemed she knew the way without thinking now. Or maybe the car knew the way, and it was probably older than she was and had done the drive plenty of times. Whatever the case, she arrived home and fell into bed without thinking of anything other than sleep. Not Sean, not Mick. That was for another day.
The next morning, Thursday, she overslept, in part because it was raining—not a gentle, misty rain, but rain that was determined to darken the day and soak everything. Maura fought against letting the weather dampen her mood, but in truth she was confused and a bit overwhelmed after the events of the day before. She dragged herself out of bed, pulled on sweats and socks, and wandered downstairs to boil water for tea. Then she sat at her table and stared at nothing, trying to figure out what had happened.
The bare outline was simple enough, at least at the beginning. Donal Maguire, recently identified as a low-level soldier in the drug trade in Cork city, had shown up at the door of Sullivan’s at closing. He’d demanded to be let in, and she had no idea what might have happened next if Old Billy hadn’t hobbled in and confused and distracted Maguire, and then Billy and Mick had held him down until the gardaí rode up on their white horses—well, police cars—to her rescue and carried Maguire away to the station to do whatever they needed to do to hold him.
She had been warmed to learn that she had Old Billy’s official stamp of approval, that he now considered her “one of them”—“them” being the people of Leap, or West Cork, or maybe all of Ireland. She hadn’t known she needed it, but she was glad she had it, and she owed him big-time—at least free pints for as long as he wanted them, and a permanent spot by the fire in the pub.
And then she and Mick . . . that was where she got confused. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember what had happened, but that she didn’t understand it.
She sliced some bread for breakfast, to keep her hands busy, but she couldn’t stop thinking. Mick had asked, in a roundabout way, if she was interested in Sean, and she had somehow managed not to answer the question. Was she? She liked Sean. He was a good guy—honest, decent, kind, thoughtful, a whole string of positive things. He clearly liked her, since he kept asking her out. He could probably have his pick of neighborhood girls, and he’d be a desirable boyfriend, since he was actually employed, unlike most of the few young men who were still around. So why’d he pick her? She didn’t know, and she hadn’t asked.
Come on, Maura—can’t you at least be honest and get to the point in your own head? Did she “like” like Sean? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t been looking for any kind of relationship because there was so much else going on in her life that she had to get sorted out first, and it wouldn’t be fair to anyone else to give them only a small part of her.
Uh, Maura—that “honest” part? her inner voice reminded her. All right. First of all, she’d never given her real self to anyone who mattered. Second, she . . . wasn’t quite sure that Sean was the right one. She liked him, she trusted him, sure. Still, she didn’t want to give him false hope or send him the wrong message. He deserved better. But were there any sparks? None that she’d noticed. Not that that meant there might not be, eventually. But not yet.
And that was where things had rested until yesterday, when Mick had jumped into the middle of it. For a start, he’d put his finger on one thing that had troubled Maura about Sean: Sean seemed young. It wasn’t just his age: he seemed kind of unfinished, untested. He was going in the right direction, but was he there yet? When would he be a real grown-up? What, like you, Maura? You’re not exactly a prize in that department.
And what the hell was Mick trying to signal by indicating that he was interested in her? She sure hadn’t noticed any sign of that in the six months they’d known each other. Maura sat, her tea cooling, and reviewed her interactions with Mick over the past six months—and came up with nothing. He’d been polite and punctual; he’d always done what he’d been asked; and he had kept the pub running while she was learning the ropes. He hadn’t asked for much of anything from her. As she’d said to him, she had started out thinking that he was kind of pissed about not getting at least a part interest in the pub from Old Mick. At least Jimmy had been up front about his resentment, since he’d wanted a share too, although he seemed to be coming around. Mick she’d never been able to read.
He hadn’t volunteered much of anything either. She knew very little about him. He was a nice-looking, eligible bachelor; why hadn’t some woman snapped him up by now? He couldn’t be gay, not if he was coming on to her. If “coming on” was the right term—she still wasn’t sure about that, because he’d been so vague. Did he have some deep dark secret? A dead wife? A not-dead wife? A divorce or three? No, this was Ireland, and divorce wasn’t all that easy. Illegitimate children scattered all over County Cork? A fatal disease? A criminal record? Sean would know that last one, but how could she ask Sean? Or was Mick just a very private—or did she mean secretive?—person who didn’t like to share personal details? And who was she to criticize that? Because she was the same way. Except that everybody in Leap knew her life story before she opened her mouth.
God, she was a hot mess.
Or had been when she arrived. Since then, she’d been working on it, and she’d learned to open up a little more; to let people in and to trust that they wouldn’t take advantage of her. It was hard. And she’d had an awful lot on her plate, hadn’t she? A new country, inheriting then running a pub in an unfamiliar place, trying to make friends. She’d been overwhelmed, and that was only now beginning to fade.
Maura, you’re making excuses. All right—she felt more settled in Ireland; the pub was running smoothly and she’d even made some small improvements, and the music this past weekend had been amazing and at the same time had handed her a solution for how to keep the pub in the black; and she had friends. And not one but two guys asking her out. She was going to have to take a hard look at herself and figure out what she really wanted. One of them? Neither?
She wished she could talk to Bridget, but wasn’t sure she should. She had a nice relationship with the old woman, who’d kind of stepped into the role Maura’s grandmother had held. Did she want to jeopardize that? And hadn’t it seemed that Bridget kept nudging Maura toward Sean Murphy rather than her own grandson? Was she imagining that? Was Bridget concealing something about Mick? Or was Maura simply being paranoid and reading too much into simple things? How unsettled was she about everything that had gone on during the past week? Just when Maura had t
hought she was getting a handle on the situation, everything had shifted. Like bringing the music back: it had seemed like a good idea, but it had brought a whole batch of problems along with it. Well, it looked like those problems had been solved—with help from Sean and Mick. So maybe the music could go on without anything else going wrong.
Enough, Maura! She slapped both hands on the table and stood up abruptly. She’d get dressed and then she’d go talk to Bridget and tell her about facing down a wanted criminal, and maybe test the waters about the Sean versus Mick problem, and then she’d go to the village and open her pub and see what surprises that might hold for the day.
Ten minutes later she was knocking on Bridget’s door. Bridget opened it promptly. “Come in, come in, before yer soaked through.”
“I’ll get your floor all wet,” Maura said. “It’s really coming down out there.”
“And the floor’s never been wet before?” Bridget asked. “The tea’s in the kitchen—take yer coat off and tell me all the news.”
“What’ve you heard already?” Maura asked cautiously, as she shed her coat and helped herself to a mug of Bridget’s strong tea.
“That grandson of mine called me this morning and said you’d had a bit of trouble last night but that it was all settled. Does he have any part of that right?”
“More or less.” Maura outlined the events of the prior evening, but ended lamely with, “Then Mick and I talked for a bit and I came home.”
Bridget gave her a searching look, but said, “Ah, Billy Sheahan—he was a fine lad in his day. I’m sure he’s pleased as punch to be able to help you out. Have you heard from Sean Murphy yet today?”
“Shoot, I haven’t even looked at my mobile. I suppose I’ll have to give my official side of the story sometime today, unless there’s enough to hold on to Donal Maguire without it. I mean, they’ve got breaking and entering, assault, kidnapping, and maybe even whatever they call accidental murder in Ireland to charge him with. But there are bound to be loose ends to tie up.” Maura sipped her tea. “Did you hear we’re planning on having another do this weekend, a wake to honor Aidan Crowley? Niall Cronin’s putting it together. If the gardaí have their killer now, all the more reason to go ahead with it, I guess. And I’m still trying to decide whether it’s worth taking on planning music events like we just had.”
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