The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  “Nothing can be done in the dark or during the storm. Both will pass and then we will see precisely what needs doing.”

  “What was hit?”

  “At a guess, the Bride Tower. It wouldn’t be the first time. The great advantage of the tower’s age is that it has never been electrified or greatly modernized, which reduces the damage a lightning strike can do. Still, Bell will make a careful search of the castle to ensure no fires result.”

  “I’ll help,” Sibéal offered.

  “As you wish.”

  With a cultivated drawl, Philip said, “We’ve had quite a run of bad luck since you showed up, Inspector. No doubt we’ll be much happier when you are out of our lives.”

  “Your bad luck didn’t start with me. But I will gladly leave—with an arrest made. Surely that’s what you all want?”

  They locked eyes. “Of course.” It was Philip who answered, but she knew he spoke equally for the Gallagher women. The right answer…and a lie. The only Gallagher who was truly interested in justice was Aidan.

  * * *

  —

  Who knew that Aidan Gallagher had so many stories in him? Or could sing? All through that long, dark, cold, and physically awful night in St. Kevin’s Bed, he took up the burden of distraction and entertainment. They ate sparingly of what they had brought and drank even more sparingly. They managed to situate the backpacks into supportive positions and half sat, half lay against the back of the cave. Carragh dozed at some point, then woke herself with a crack to the head when she abruptly shifted position.

  Aidan laughed, then stopped when she swore at him, and perhaps feeling penitent, he began to tell her stories. About Glendalough and the Wicklow Mountains. About the United Irish Rising and how Michael Dwyer had hidden from the British not far from here. Stories of Gallagher ancestors, their far-flung adventures in the world, and how they had always come back to Deeprath. Stories about arts and antiquities crimes, including famous unsolved thefts like the one at the Gardner Museum in Boston. Carragh could add to that one, with her personal knowledge of the museum.

  “It’s very sobering,” she told him, “standing in front of the blank spaces where the canvases had hung. Do you really think they ended up in Ireland?”

  They discussed the intricacies of drug crime, gun running, the IRA, and art theft. He wanted to know about her Irish studies at Trinity, and it turned out he not only knew the words of many ballads, but their melodies. Carragh had a rather shaky alto that he helped her tune to his tenor and they sang “Erin go Bragh” and “The Isle of Inisfree” and “The Battle of Benburg.”

  That was the last thing she remembered before she woke—less violently this time—curled against Aidan. He was still asleep, and she thought it was ridiculously unfair that he should look even sexier after a night in a cave. Then she realized that she could see his face because there was light coming from the entrance. Not a huge amount, for it was still pouring, but at least it was only rain that she heard now instead of the ferocious roar of the storm.

  “Aidan.” She leaned in, touching his shoulder. “Aidan, the storm is passing.”

  They heard the shouting after they left the cave, before they were all the way down. Aidan had gone first, and Carragh half climbed, half slipped into his arms. “I think you’re being called,” she said breathlessly.

  He was, indeed, by a Search and Rescue team alerted by Quinn late the night before. The boat, Carragh saw mournfully, had been smashed by the wind into the rocks. “He’s definitely going to kill me,” Aidan muttered grimly.

  The search team took them across the lake in their own boat, and soon enough they were damp and shivering in the lobby of the Glendalough Hotel as the receptionist rang Penelope’s room. She was downstairs in two minutes, robe thrown over silk pajamas, and shook her head at them as if they were children who had disappointed her.

  “Were you trying to get yourselves drowned?” she asked caustically.

  Aidan simply said, “Could we possibly use your shower to warm up?”

  The shower did warm Carragh up, but it did nothing for her nerves. It was not at all awkward, she told herself afterward, being locked up with Aidan’s former lover while he showered in her bathroom. Not at all. At least Penelope didn’t seem interested in flaunting her former status or in emphasizing the fact that she was gorgeous. And smart. Probably rich as well.

  “How’s he doing?” Penelope asked her without preamble.

  “In the shower? You would know better than me.” Why did she say these things?

  Penelope smiled but refused to be diverted. “Being back at home.”

  “I just work in the library.”

  “You’re an awful liar. Almost as bad as Aidan. Look, I came to Ireland because he asked me, and because I thought he needed help coping. I may have been wrong about that—he appears to be coping just fine. And I don’t need a psychology degree to know you’re part of the reason why.”

  “When you both come from trauma, you can understand one another,” Carragh replied, and stopped herself there. Damned if she was going to spell out her past for this elegant creature.

  “Fair enough,” Penelope said. “Did you know he’s interested in being hypnotized?”

  The non sequitur made Carragh’s already light head spin. “Hypnotized? Why?”

  “It’s a tool I’ve used in my psychology practice from time to time. It’s not what you think, if your horrified expression is anything to go by. It’s a relaxation technique, more than anything. When both the body and the mind are relaxed, it’s possible to recall things one has long suppressed.”

  Pounding on the door…“Let me in, bitch”…Blinking up at her mother from the closet floor…“Be quiet, Mei-Lien. If you’re loud, he’ll find you”…

  Then nothing. A black blankness that doesn’t lift until a police officer breaks open the door of the closet. “Oh sweetheart,” the young man had said to her. “You’re safe now.”

  “Does it really work?” Carragh asked Penelope, endeavoring to sound skeptical.

  “Depends on the person. Sometimes, no matter how much they think they want to remember, they really don’t. I can’t make someone remember something part of them is determined to hide.”

  “What does Aidan want to remember?”

  “You would have to ask him,” Penelope said with a kind finality.

  Would Aidan talk about her to his…friend? Carragh wondered. Counselor? Woman he’d be happy to go back to bed with?

  Penelope gave them a lift to the castle, but Aidan had her drop them at the top of the drive, next to a blue Volkswagen. “No use trying to get down the drive in that,” he said, dismissing her little rental car. “Thank you. I’ll be in touch.”

  “I guess the police are here,” Carragh said, looking at Sibéal’s car after they got out. Aidan didn’t reply.

  They had to pick their way carefully through the storm debris, including several downed trees that would have to be moved before any vehicle could get in or out. “I wonder why Bell isn’t up here yet with the chain saw,” he said uneasily.

  He was right to sound uneasy; when the castle and its ring of cultivated grounds came into view, the reason for Bell’s failure to deal with the trees was immediately evident.

  “Damn.”

  A jagged black line streaked down the proud, ancient face of the Bride Tower as though painted on. But the gap in the crenellated battlements was no artistic statement. Nor was the tumble of damaged stone at the tower’s base. The household stood there as they approached, surveying the damage. Nessa, Philip, Kyla, both the Bells, as well as Sibéal McKenna.

  “Everyone all right?” Aidan called as they drew closer.

  Nessa actually gasped, and then hugged a bemused Aidan. By the time he broke the embrace, the old woman had recovered herself. “We’re perfectly fine. No power yet, but no significant damage except here. It’s a pity, but I suppose even stone can only be struck by lightning so many times over the centuries before giving way.”
>
  “Is the interior stable?”

  “Stable enough for now, but we’ll need an engineer to check things over,” answered Bell. He straightened from his examination of the rubble, and his expression alerted Carragh. Something was not right here.

  Aidan had seen it, too. “What’s wrong?” he asked the estate manager.

  “Not altogether sure.”

  Carragh moved toward the tower, her curiosity stronger than her manners, and Philip pulled on her arm none too gently. “Careful. Wouldn’t want you tripping over anything.”

  She shook him off, aware that Kyla was watching, and stepped out of reach, unwilling to be reprimanded. From where she stood, she could see only the tumble of lightning-blasted stones.

  Aidan crouched down. “Is that…”

  “I think so,” Bell confirmed.

  “Is that what?” Carragh heard one of the women demand. It could have been Kyla or Nessa, or even Sibéal, the voice roughened by weariness and surprise.

  Aidan continued to stare. It was Bell who answered. “Bones.”

  * * *

  —

  Sibéal watched the faces of everyone gathered outside the tower with extraordinary care. Carragh, she could dismiss. Not Aidan, though. A ten-year-old would not have been able to dispose of a baby’s body so cunningly—and those bones could only have come from a very small child. But just because she didn’t think Aidan had committed this crime didn’t mean he didn’t know something about it.

  She knew she was making assumptions. There were probably any number of missing skeletons in the Gallagher family tree that she didn’t know about. After all, the family had lived here for centuries. And these tiny, fragile bones and miniature skull, its hollowed eyes flaking around the sockets, looked too ancient to be relevant to her case. But hell if she was going to take the risk.

  “I need to secure the site,” she announced. “And I need to get somewhere I can get a mobile signal.”

  Aidan looked up from where he knelt, his face white. “Why?”

  “Mysterious bones tumbling out of the same tower where your mother died? You know why, Detective Inspector Gallagher.” Using his professional title was the quickest way she could think of to knock the stunned expression off his face and get his mind working.

  After quick consideration, Sibéal left Bell to watch the site—of them all, he was the most likely not to interfere in anything. Then she hiked to the top of the drive to get a faint cell signal, and when she did, ordered Sergeant Cullen to bring down everything necessary from Dublin. She also instructed him to notify the Wicklow coroner. It didn’t matter where or how human remains were found; they required investigation. All the while, she marveled at what a very strange family the Gallaghers were.

  If it had been McKennas finding bones apparently hidden in their house, no shortage of loud speculation and/or accusation would have ensued. Unless it was political, no one in her family had ever been able to keep their mouth shut about anything at all, least of all something as enormous as murder.

  One could almost believe the Gallaghers were English, with their stiff upper lips and cool control. But beneath the surface, she knew a tempest had to be brewing. She could only try to direct it and hope to bring down their defenses as surely as the storm had brought down the battlements.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  August 1992

  “Now think hard, Aidan. Where do we need to go next?”

  Lily smiled encouragingly at her ten-year-old son as he screwed up his eyes and concentrated. She knew how much her Aidan wanted to get this right, without any help from his mother. He wanted to prove that he was more fun than Kyla, who at fifteen just rolled her eyes at the games and puzzles she’d once loved playing as much as he had. Like their mother’s scavenger hunts.

  He bit his lip and chanced an answer. “The globe in the library.” His voice wavered on the end, not quite allowing it to be a question.

  “Bravo!” She clapped her hands. “Lead the way, my brilliant explorer.”

  They trooped through the castle, passing Art Deco clocks and fragments of Roman mosaics and Louis XV sideboards and Gainsborough paintings—things that still sometimes made Lily blink twice and wonder if she really lived here. For a girl raised in a minimalist steel-and-chrome New York penthouse, Deeprath Castle had been a revelation. Cillian still teased her that she’d said yes to the house rather than to the man. Which he could tease about, because he knew how wildly she loved him.

  She allowed Aidan to lead the way into the library, shoving rather hard at the carved oak door while trying not to let the effort show. He was so anxious to grow up, and she was so anxious for him not to…Look, she’d been a terror herself as a teenager. She had complete faith that all of them would survive Kyla’s hormonal moods and surges of independence, but when Lily thought of her sweet boy descending into the silent indifference of typical teen males she wanted to hold back time by force of will.

  Aidan went directly to the standing globe hand painted by one of his ancestors and hesitated only briefly before triumphantly snatching up the square of paper she’d tucked beneath the stand. He’d successfully reached the end of the scavenger hunt, and his reward, the paper told him, was a mother-and-son picnic at Glendalough.

  “Really, truly?” he asked. “Just us?”

  “Just us. Mrs. Bell has everything ready in the kitchen. You go put on your best walking shoes and bring a jacket. I’ll meet you in the hall in twenty minutes.”

  Aidan shot off, all eagerness and light. What a contrast to his sister. Lily was shaking her head over it when someone spoke from one of the darkened bays.

  “Lucky boy, getting you all to himself.”

  If it had been her husband, it would have been a compliment. But coming, as it did, from the arrogant—and young—mouth of Philip Grant, Lily put on her “lady of the manor” air. “Shouldn’t you be working?”

  What, exactly, the boy did, she wasn’t sure. Cillian had agreed to have him as an intern this summer because Philip’s father was a banker and MP with whom he’d done business in the past and hoped to do again in the future. It seemed to Lily that mostly Philip had spent these weeks idling in the gardens, turning Kyla’s head with entirely inappropriate flirtations, and seeing just how close he could come to crossing the line of propriety with his boss’s wife.

  “Lord Gallagher sent me here in search of this.” He held up what looked to be some sort of old ledger, though it may have just been the most convenient thing at hand for him to grab in excuse. And yet…he always seemed to know when to rein it in. Proving, perhaps, that he was a politician’s son.

  In a less familiar tone, he continued, “Your son is very lucky. I would have liked to have my mother’s full attention at his age. Well, at any age, really. She’s always been rather more concerned with her charities.”

  Which was common gossip in society, and made Lily forgive him more easily than she otherwise might have. “I consider myself the lucky one. Best go off with that…my husband has many virtues, but patience is not one of them.”

  It was as well, she thought, that Kyla was not there to see the utterly charming smile Philip gave her as he left. Except no, there she was, coming into the library as Philip exited. It was like Kyla had a magnet attached to the boy that drew her everywhere he was, and at the most inconvenient moments.

  She heard her daughter’s laugh against Philip’s low murmur and wished she could just ignore all of this and go on her picnic with Aidan without anything to trouble her mind. But if she wanted that, she was fifteen years too late, she thought mordantly. And erased the treacherous thought as she looked at Kyla. At fifteen, her daughter had lengthened into a Gallagher height that passed Lily by three inches, making her long and leggy in the shorts and miniskirts she insisted on wearing even when she had to top them off with a wool sweater in the Irish summer. Beneath the sulky roundness of her cheeks, she had the good bone structure of her great-aunt Nessa and the same abundant russet hair that appeared in p
hotos of her late grandmother.

  The only thing of Lily’s she shared were the brown eyes, something Kyla had been known to lament, complaining that striking blue eyes and sooty black lashes were wasted on her little brother.

  “Aren’t you too old to be flirting with someone half your age?” Kyla asked her mother, attempting the bored expression of a society lady. But beneath the hostility, Lily could always see the frantic little girl who was afraid of being overlooked. Most of the time, that allowed her to keep her temper.

  And she absolutely refused to be drawn into Kyla’s games about Philip. “I’m off to Glendalough with Aidan. Have you finished your summer essay assignment on Montaigne?”

  “You just want to keep me shut up in my room so he can’t get near me!” she cried with all the melodrama of youth.

  “You’re not Rapunzel, darling.” And for certain Philip is no Prince Charming, Lily added silently. “But Philip is expected to work during working hours, so you might as well do the same.”

  Her husband’s first instinct upon realizing Kyla’s crush had been to forbid personal contact between her and Philip, but Lily could see that their daughter half wanted him to give that order just so she could flout it and have another excuse to play the persecuted heroine. Cillian had been persuaded to the compromise of keeping Philip on a very tight leash while he worked, insisting that he attend family dinners with all of them, and sending him back to Dublin or his family on the weekends.

  Just ten days to go until Philip left Deeprath for good. And two days later Kyla would return to boarding school. They had almost made it. And maybe, in this next year, Kyla would grow into her own confidence. Maybe then she’d be less likely to treat her mother as the enemy.

  “Be a good girl, darling,” Lily said as she passed. “Write your essay. You can work in here or the dining room or the music room, if you like. It was never me who said it had to be written in your room. The house is yours.”