The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  “You want me to catalog books in the middle of all of this?”

  “What do you have to lose?”

  Very little, Carragh decided. Only her pride, which was pretty much shot to hell anyway. She would go to the library and lock herself in and work until she dropped. And then she would take the officer’s advice and sleep elsewhere. It’s not as though there weren’t dozens of empty rooms. She could even go into the tower…

  A reflexive shudder passed through her. Not a chance, not without electric lights. She’d rather sleep on the library floor.

  As though she could read Carragh’s mind, McKenna warned, “Keep out of everyone’s way. I’ll be around to keep an eye on things. I’m not going anywhere until those bones are safely removed tomorrow. You might want to slip into one of the empty bedrooms near me.”

  “May I make a suggestion, Inspector?”

  “Only if you’ll call me Sibéal.”

  “All right. Sibéal.”

  “What’s your suggestion?”

  “Once you get that document case out of the stones tomorrow, is there some way you can keep from opening it here? I don’t think the Gallaghers should be part of it.”

  “You don’t trust them?”

  “Do you?”

  McKenna—Sibéal—studied her for a moment. “I’ll make sure it’s not opened here. Can I ask what you think is inside?

  “I don’t really know,” Carragh said.

  Strictly speaking, that was true. But she suspected it was a motive for murder.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Aidan never did anything without extensive research and preparation. But he had deliberately stayed away from learning about hypnosis for memory recall. Now here he was, in a hotel room with Penelope, Glendalough’s Round Tower outside the closed drapes, trying to get comfortable in the armchair while she sat cross-legged on the bed.

  She had been bracingly clear on the limitations of what she could do.

  “I’m not a magician,” she said. “Or an illusionist. This isn’t America in the eighties, when therapists convinced entire courtrooms that hypnosis could recover lost memories. All I can do is help you relax enough to lower your guard. Which, granted, would be no small accomplishment.”

  Not really, he thought. I lowered my guard for Carragh.

  Who’d slept with Philip.

  He said tightly, “Just do what you have to.”

  “I’m not putting you in a trance. I’m not going to control you or command you or draw out anything that you don’t want known. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis in the end. I’m here only to guide the process. It helps if you have a specific goal in mind.”

  “I do.”

  “You should say it aloud.”

  “I want to remember where I saw Kyla the day of the murders.”

  “Good. Then let’s begin.”

  Penelope had a musical voice even in everyday speech—now she used that talent to weave a cocoon of safety around him.

  “Breathe in slowly,” she began, setting him an example. “And out. Pick something small to focus your eyes on and keep breathing in that rhythm.”

  Aidan focused on the inoffensive landscape painting hung above the bed and concentrated on his breathing. He knew he was too alert, he was trying too hard, which meant he was thinking about all of it, and that would never be useful…

  “Aidan, listen to my voice. There is nothing in the moment but my voice.”

  Slowly, delicately, Penelope led him through the process: tightening and relaxing every muscle group from the toes upward, letting his eyes close as they grew heavy, keeping his breath deep and even. She walked him down the steps she’d asked him to visualize—he meant it to be the main staircase of the castle, but his mind kept drifting until he gave in and visualized himself descending the stone steps of the Bride Tower.

  “You’re at the bottom.” Penelope sounded distant now. “There is a door before you.”

  There was—the narrow, pointed-arch door leading to the library. Of course these were the steps he’d needed to come down.

  “Open the door and tell me what you see.”

  “The library.”

  “Describe it exactly as you see it.”

  “I see the shelves on either side of me like a tunnel. I see the spines of the books to my right—I drag my hand on them as I walk past. Aunt Nessa always scolds me for not respecting them.”

  He described it as he went—the books, the shelves, the lighting that never quite banished shadows—until he got to the long library table.

  “What do you see on the table?”

  “Books. Papers. My father’s fountain pen.”

  “What else?”

  “There’s a chair shoved back from the table. Like someone just got up.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I call for my father. There’s no answer.” His breath hitched. “Something’s wrong.”

  He doesn’t need her measured voice now, for he has always remembered this part, despite his best efforts to forget. “I call again, but I know he won’t answer. I walk around the table to push the chair back in but I can’t because there’s something on the floor. Why is my father on the floor? I bend down and his head is all wrong, the shape is wrong, it’s caved in over his ear, and I scream for him to get up, I keep screaming and screaming—”

  “Aidan, stay with me. One breath at a time. What happens after you scream?”

  “Aunt Nessa’s there, and Mrs. Bell. She screams, too, until Aunt Nessa slaps her and tells her to call the police. She’s taking me out of the library and I want my mother, I keep asking for my mother, and Aunt Nessa grabs the cook and tells her to find Lady Gallagher and bring her to the music room.”

  “Very good. Let’s go back now. Before you opened the library door. Where were you?”

  “The tower. I’d just come down the spiral stairs.”

  “Go backward in your memory, up the levels of the tower. How high were you?”

  He could see it now, grainy and jumpy like an old filmstrip damaged by time. “All the way up top. To leave flowers for the Bride. Whenever I went to Glendalough, I brought her something back. It was hedge roses, they kept pricking my fingers. I had to suck the blood off.”

  He could taste the blood, hear his steps echoing in the enclosed spiral staircase…

  He was lucky not to have been seen. He wasn’t allowed up here alone. But he knew the secret of the tower keys: one set in the library, one set in the Bells’ sitting room off the kitchen. He’d swiped that set after asking Mrs. Bell where his father was. No one had ever caught him before he could return them, though sometimes he thought Mrs. Bell knew. Mother said he would have nightmares. Father said he could fall through the floor. But he wasn’t afraid. He liked it in the tower, even when a mouse ran across the floor.

  He climbed all the way up, past the creepy sitting room, to the almost bare top floor where he laid his flowers on the table. Then he pulled open the door to the outside just a crack, and slipped carefully onto the battlements that surrounded the tower.

  He liked to imagine he was a knight defending Deeprath from the English—or other Irish, he wasn’t picky—and played at spotting an enemy approach and preparing his bow to shoot them down. Sometimes he used boiling oil or pitch to chuck over the side, sometimes he allowed the enemy to make it inside so that he had to fight with his sword high in the air.

  He always won.

  When he caught movement below from the corner of his eye, he dropped his sword hand and pressed himself up against the taller buttress so he wouldn’t be seen. The crenellations meant he could peer down at an angle and see the ruined oratory and half the stable blocks. He could see…

  With a gasp like one surfacing from underwater, Aidan opened his eyes. Penelope regarded him with unaccustomed gravity. “You remembered.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  His heart beating swiftly, Aidan fixed her with a level, professional gaze. “No.
”

  She must have known from his expression that he meant to be reckless. “Aidan—be careful.”

  Aidan thanked Penelope and then sat in the Land Rover for twenty minutes, allowing his pulse and breathing to normalize while considering what to do next. What he wanted to do was go after Philip and knock the fear of God into him, and then go to Carragh and shake her until he could understand why she’d slept with the man. Neither were very practical. And if he had learned anything in twenty years, it was practicality.

  So he pulled out his phone and made a list for himself, noting as he did so how similar it was to the one Carragh had found in his mother’s handwriting. They even had a couple of the same reminders.

  1. Father Hennessy

  2. Parish-held family records

  3. General Register’s Office

  4. Kilkenny

  He looked at his watch—almost 7:00 P.M., on a Sunday. Father Hennessy lived just up the road, so he might as well deal with the first two items while he was here.

  Father Hennessy had been the priest at St. Kevin’s parish since Aidan’s own baptism. He was of that priestly school that had little interest in ambition or promotion, who genuinely sought to do good in their parish and were happy to live decades alongside the same families. Aidan had always thought him old, but he couldn’t be more than sixty now. Which meant he’d not been much older at the time of the deaths than Aidan was now.

  Tall, lean, ascetically spare, Father Hennessy welcomed Aidan inside without unnecessary fuss and, without asking, poured him some brandy. Once settled before the electric fire, the priest said, “I expected to be visited by your guest, the young woman working in the library. We had an appointment yesterday afternoon.”

  “Did you?” Carragh hadn’t mentioned it to Aidan. “I’m afraid we were caught across the Upper Lake when the storm blew in. But I imagine our questions might be similar. Though I admit I feel badly coming to you only because I need something.”

  “The nature of the job,” the priest answered cheerfully. “So what can I do?”

  “I have two questions, Father. First, can I see the parish records beginning with the famine years? And second, by any chance did my mother make the same request to you before she died?”

  His gentle smile was answer enough. “Yes, you may, and yes, she did.”

  “What did she want to know?”

  “She told me she needed to see original documentation of births and marriages, those sorts of things, because the family library was missing a large section of those records.”

  So the absence Carragh had noted in the family records predated his mother’s interest. “Father, I know it’s late and I’m imposing. I need to be in Dublin tomorrow morning and I was hoping to have finished here first. If you’ll point me in the direction of the parish registers, I’ll gladly lift and carry and sort through everything myself.”

  “You could look online, you know. It’s all been digitized these days. But I suppose you want to see the original notations, just like your mother.”

  “I do.”

  Unlike some priests, Father Hennessy kept the parish records in good order, including the wrapping and safe storing of centuries old registers. The trunks in which they were kept were dated on the outside, so it was a relatively simple matter to locate the right ones. Soon enough Aidan was tracing the spidery handwriting of the long-dead priests who had presided over the Gallagher family in their religious rites. He noted only one anomaly, which he brought to Father Hennessy’s attention.

  “This lists the reading of the banns for the marriage of Jenny Gallagher and Evan Chase, but not the marriage itself.”

  “They were married in Dublin, at St. Patrick’s,” the priest explained, “by special license, so they could have skipped the banns. But the Gallaghers always liked to keep the parish part of their lives.”

  The next Gallagher event was the baptism of James Michael in May of 1881. A safe twelve months after the wedding; no scandal there. In early January 1882 came Jenny Gallagher’s death and burial in the family plot at Glendalough cemetery. The priest must have bent his professional conscience there a bit, for even then no one seemed in real doubt that she had deliberately jumped to her death. Suicides were meant for unconsecrated ground. The inquest, Aidan knew from his mother’s notes, had officially found for “accident,” sparing the grieving family the additional indignity of being refused a church service.

  No Gallaghers to be found again until the burial of Jenny’s father, the fourteenth Viscount Gallagher, in August 1889. Then the long break until the new viscount grew up and, in his turn, married and had children. His first marriage in 1911, and a son the next year, who became Aidan’s grandfather. Then, after a long time as a widower, remarriage and the birth of a daughter, Nessa, in 1931.

  Aidan stared at the various relevant entries until his eyes began to cross and wondered if his mother had found more in them than he could see. Why the missing fifty years of family documents? And who had removed them, if not his mother in her research?

  After he put everything back the way he’d found it, he went to thank Father Hennessy.

  “I have something else for you,” the priest told him. He had another old parish register open, and it looked as though he’d been taking notes.

  “What is it?”

  “When your mother came asking these questions, she had an additional one you have not asked. I don’t know if it’s at all relevant, but it can’t hurt. She wanted a list of the families who came to the mountains during the Famine and were aided by our parish, and especially the Gallaghers. At one point the family had nearly eighty people living on the estate. Some of them, like the ancestors of the Bells, remained at Deeprath even afterward, with the rest resettled by the thirteenth viscount in one of his factories or shipyards in Wicklow or Wexford. In any case, I thought I’d look them up for you and pass them on.”

  There were five names on the list: Byrne, Farrell, Lynch, O’Brien, and Ryan. “Thank you,” he told the priest warmly. “I wish I could repay you adequately.”

  Father Hennessy studied him without his usual humor. “The Gallaghers and the mountains go hand in hand. It’s a pity for that chain to be broken.”

  Was there anyone in the mountains who thought it a good idea for Deeprath to be sold?

  * * *

  —

  Carragh stayed up as long as she could physically manage, using oil lamps to work in the library. Not only did it pass the time, but she was feeling a sense of urgency. Even though Aidan had delayed the donation of the castle, the thought of all these books being sent away from their home…Okay, it was sentimental and silly. But no more silly than anything else that had happened here.

  Aidan never returned. She finally admitted defeat at two in the morning when her eyes would not stay open. Taking both oil lamps with her, she followed Sibéal’s advice and crept quietly through the Regency wing and into the room next to the police officer. Someone—presumably McKenna—had left a blanket and pillow on the bare, empty mattress. Carragh just managed to take off her shoes before falling asleep.

  An hour later—or three—or maybe just twenty minutes—she woke with a jolt, sitting straight upright in the pitch black straining to identify whatever noise had jerked into her dreams and pulled her out. Simultaneously, she fumbled for the flashlight she’d left next to her pillow and switched it on. The light wavered and jerked and the only thing she could hear was her own harsh breathing.

  “This is ridiculous.” Was she speaking to herself or unseen listeners? She had about as little patience with both just now.

  But damn if she was going to let this go on without figuring out what the hell “this” was. Climbing off the bed, she opened the door to the corridor cautiously. All remained quiet. She padded down the corridor, bare feet flinching from the cold, trying to assemble a map in her head of the castle, to anticipate where she was headed. The Regency wing contained the music room and breakfast parlor on the ground floor before joinin
g up with the Tudor hall that stood in the center of the castle.

  Now she could hear something, a hush and rustle of whispers just beyond her comprehension. Really? Can’t you just tell me what I need to know? But there was that curiosity kicking in, beckoning to her with the seductive promise of a mystery just on the verge of being solved…She definitely hadn’t had enough sleep.

  Long before she reached the appropriate corridor, she knew she was being led back to the library. At least, she hoped it was only the library. If the whispers tried to lure her into the tower, she’d tell them to go to hell.

  But the whispers died away before she reached the library door. In case they started up again, she decided to go ahead and check things out. After which she’d curse them all and go back to bed.

  The smell hit her first. She didn’t want to recognize it, but she did…

  Smoke. She knew better than to fling the door wide, but it was surprisingly difficult to control her adrenaline and merely crack it open. That was enough for her to hear the crackle of flames.

  The library was on fire.

  Fight it, or run for help? Her body made the first decision, heading straight for the fire extinguisher Aidan had pointed out to her the first day.

  It wasn’t there.

  She ran back to the Regency wing, shouting “Fire!” as she went, and found Sibéal already up when she reached her room. “The library’s on fire.”

  The police officer was only a few steps behind Carragh as she ran back the way she’d come. She knew the Bells were sleeping somewhere beyond the kitchens…

  Sibéal ran out the front door, heading up the drive until she could get a mobile signal to phone for help. How long would it take for a fire truck? Carragh wondered. And not just any fire truck, but one that could pump its own water, or access the castle’s water sources and— She had no idea how it worked. But she was pretty sure it would all take time.

  She ran straight into Mrs. Bell coming into the kitchen. “The library—”

  “Aye. We heard you. Rob’s got equipment in the storeroom. Go help him, I’ll wake Lady Nessa.”