by Catie Murphy
Heather gave a short laugh. “I’m number three.”
Megan offered a brief smile in the rearview mirror. “Three’s a lucky number.”
“That’s what I tell myself.” Heather wiped her hand across her eyes again, then took Martin’s hand as he turned a wan smile on her and said, “You are my luck. My first wife died,” he said to Megan. “My second . . . Americans call it rebounding, don’t they? It wasn’t a good relationship. I’d given up on love until I met Heather.”
Megan swallowed the impulse to say good lord and managed, “I’m sorry to hear that” instead. “I’m glad you and Heather found each other.” Martin shrugged with the stiffness of a man who couldn’t do anything about the past, and Megan decided it was probably an excellent time to end the conversation, before she said something unforgivably insensitive about middle-aged men and young wives. Heather, similarly disinclined to talk, leaned her head against Martin’s shoulder, and he pressed his lips against her hair. Megan turned her full attention to the road, pulling out of the club’s parking lot and down the short drive leading to the road off the island.
Bull Island’s southern end stretched straight across Dublin Bay, a kilometre-long border that, to Megan’s astonishment, was literally unnatural: the North Bull Wall had been built two centuries earlier to deal with ship-grounding silt building up on the River Liffey’s bottom. In less than two hundred years, the low, flat Bull Island had grown up from that wall, and now curved five kilometres—almost three miles—along the Dublin coast. The “wall” itself wasn’t what Megan had imagined either: instead of being tall and perpendicular like a building wall, it was huge chunks of immense rocks and concrete shored and piled up at an angle, and upon which the road appeared to have been built. She kind of wondered whether it had been wide enough for a road when finished in the 1820s, or if the island’s swift expansion had given them the earth they needed to make a road on.
Either way, the intervening centuries had created a space that was equal parts golf course, sand dune, and marshy wildlife preserve. Seals, geese, hedgehogs, and a half-dozen endangered bird species made their homes there, and there were signs proudly proclaiming it the only biosphere reserve entirely within a capital city’s limits. It all sounded cool enough that Megan was vaguely embarrassed to have only barely known it existed prior to driving the Walshes out there. She looked forward to the better weather tomorrow so she could get out and explore while her client worked.
Right now there were cars parked all along the wall road up until the point, about a kilometre from the mainland, at which vehicles were forbidden. Beyond that lay a beach on the northern side and entry points into the sea along the wall for swimmers. Even in the chilly, misty September afternoon, they were out there, along with kitesurfers and kite fliers out in the water or on the beach.
A long section of the single-lane, wooden bridge leading onto the island was built on the wall, too. Megan couldn’t quite believe people were allowed to drive on the bridge, which right now stretched away from the island into thick fog, as if putting its best atmospheric foot forward for her benefit. Most of the island’s traffic went through a newer causeway farther north, but the old bridge—which replaced an even older bridge a century ago—remained the easiest way to get to the Royal Dublin Golf Course, the first of the two on the island. Driving on it felt, to Megan, like a step out of time; like if a highwayman, or a coach and four, were to come along on it, that would be perfectly natural.
That sensation wasn’t hurt any by the hotel the Walshes had booked for their stay. Barely two miles from the island’s golf courses, the Clontarf Castle Hotel had made Megan laugh out loud when she drove up to it the first time. Like almost any castle hotel, it had modern additions, but there was no denying that a significant chunk of the massive stone edifice was a straight up nineteenth-century castle. As far as Megan was concerned, its looming towers and dramatic bay windows cried out for Gothic romances. She allowed that they were probably in short supply, but there was no point in being an American immigrant to Ireland if she couldn’t cling to the romantic potential of centuries-old architecture. She drove into the castle’s parking lot, killing the engine and taking a moment to watch the little leprechaun dashboard figure do a dance with an epic background.
“I own a house in Dublin,” Martin said suddenly from the back seat. “Haven’t lived in it in years. Not here enough. Silly to leave it sitting empty for me when I can rent it out. And nobody brings dinner to my door at home.”
“I would,” Heather protested, although she followed it with a tinny laugh. “Well, sometimes. Once in a while. Maybe. Although I don’t really like to cook.”
“You do your best work on the green.” Martin kissed her hair again.
“Room service alone justifies staying in a hotel,” Megan said. “Although I guess that’s kind of what takeaway is, only for houses instead of hotels.” She got out, opened the door for the Walshes, and earned a small smile from Martin.
“I never thought of it that way.” He climbed out of the car, straightening his borrowed clothes, and turned to offer Heather a hand. She accepted, looking weary as she stood and smoothed her skort over her bottom. She was a solid two inches taller than Martin, and Megan glanced at their feet to see who had the shoe advantage. Martin did: his leather golfing Oxfords had a half-inch heel, and she wore flat white runners that she probably hadn’t been golfing in. “Tee time is at ten tomorrow, Ms. Malone. Can you collect us at half eight?”
“I can.” Megan dipped her hand into her coat pocket, coming out with Leprechaun Limo business cards. “I know you have our contact information, but please call and let Orla know if you need anything. I’ll take care of it. You’ve both had a hell of a day.”
Martin took the card, furrows plowing across his forehead as he looked from it to Megan. “Have I? You’re the one who had the presence of mind to go into the water, to try to save Lou.”
“Thank you for that. Thank you for trying.” Heather spoke too sharply and her face crumpled with dismay.
Megan, tentatively, touched her upper arm with understanding. “You’re welcome. I did twenty years in the Army. A lot of my training is to run toward trouble, not away from it. I’m sorry I couldn’t . . .” Megan trailed off, but Martin nodded.
“Me too. Thank you, Ms. Malone. We’ll see you tomorrow.” He went into the hotel, leaning on Heather with the posture of a man who had been hit unexpectedly and thought another blow might be coming. Megan exhaled heavily and leaned against the Lincoln’s passenger door, eyes closed as she tilted her face up to the misty sky. Raindrops splattered her cheeks, and she opened her eyes, offended, to say, “Really?” to the uncaring clouds.
Another raindrop splatted right into her eye. Megan blurted, “Augh!” loudly enough to draw attention from other people in the parking lot, one of whom then gave a sympathetic smirk. She wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, grimaced back, and, still blinking to get her eyes feeling right again, crawled back into the car as the skies dropped a deluge of enormous raindrops across the windshield. Megan could hear shrieks of dismay as hotel patrons ran for its safety, and flicked the headlights on as she drove out of the car park to work her way back across Dublin city centre in the storm.
CHAPTER FIVE
The ten-kilometre drive—six miles—took nearly an hour in the late afternoon traffic. Edging along through the city paid off, though, as a triumphant rainbow spanned the clearing skies when Megan turned down Merrion Square East, bordering the St Stephen’s Green park. All along the sidewalks, people stopped to pull their phones out and take pictures, and even Megan risked taking one when she paused at a long traffic light. Rain splattered again outside, and a host of umbrellas and hoods went up, although a really remarkable number of people had neither, and just hunched their shoulders against the weather.
Every time that happened, Megan was reminded of her friend Kate from down the country explaining that you could tell German and American tourists in Ireland because t
hey were the ones with brollies and raincoats. The native Irish, Kate claimed, were the people hiding in shop doors or using newspapers to cover their heads, all the while glaring at the sky, as if in some ten thousand years of inhabiting the small, northerly European island, nothing like this had ever happened before, and it was therefore a great and shocking betrayal. And just like every other time Megan thought about that, she laughed, because it had such a great grain of truth to it. But judging from the number of snap photographers, they didn’t take the rainbows for granted either, and it seemed fair enough to Megan that if you never became inured to rainbows, you could equally never become inured to the rain.
She was still chortling about it twenty minutes later when she pulled into the Leprechaun Limo garage beneath the finally fading rainbow. The garage and the parking lot behind it ran a couple of hundred feet back from the main street, surprising Megan every single time with their depth. She perpetually expected it to be shallow, only twelve or fifteen feet deep, like the cramped company offices that sat cheek by jowl with the garage. A lot of Dublin shops and homes were like that, the result of decades or even centuries of expansion into what had once been gardens or thoroughfares. Not much in Dublin went up: it all went back.
A car was parked over one of the pits that let mechanics get beneath the vehicles to work on them. Another had just been driven through the big, rattling doors at the back into the ten-vehicle covered car park that protected most of the Leprechaun fleet when it wasn’t in use. One window and a door looked in from the office to the garage, but they were both closed off: Orla didn’t think clients needed to see the sausages being made, as it were. Otherwise, the walls were blind, pressed against the buildings next door to them. Big, overhead lights had recently been replaced with LED bulbs, and Megan still wasn’t used to their intensity, although the detailers said it helped them get the cars cleaner. There were a couple of them working now, and a mechanic in the pit. One of the drivers, Cillian, whose shift usually ran so diametrically opposed to Megan that she rarely saw him, kept walking in and out of the garage as she parked, looking at the sky and then coming into the building, then doing it again. Megan called, “Are you looking for the pot of gold?”
“I am so, and it should be in here! I’m going to start a trust fund for Dervla with it.” Cillian Walsh looked as though he’d been purpose-built to fit Hollywood’s idea of a strapping young Irish man, with black hair, bright blue eyes, and shoulders that filled out his chauffeur’s uniform very nicely. Dervla was his three-month-old niece, and he couldn’t have doted on her more if she’d been his own. “The leprechauns must have hidden it here, what with the place being named for them and all, but I can’t find it.” Cillian ducked inside as a gust of wind blew rain in from nowhere, and bumped shoulders with Megan. “What’s the story?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got another dead client,” Cillian said cheerfully. Megan wrinkled her face, half her teeth exposed in a lip-curling contortion, and Cillian’s jaw fell open. “You never! Jaysus, Megan, who now? Jaysus, not me own cousin, Martin Walsh!”
“Martin Walsh is not your cousin!” someone bellowed from across the garage.
Cillian shouted, “Leave me my dreams and my claims to fame!” back, while almost hopping with agitation at Megan. “Tell me it’s not Walsh. I’ve laid a wager at Lad-brokes on him being a Ryder Cup wild card pick!”
“No, he’s fine. He’s . . .” Megan slumped suddenly, the drama of the day finally hitting her. “It was an old friend of his, Lou MacDonald. He died in one of the water holes. It probably wasn’t an accident.”
Dismay crashed across Cillian’s face. “I had a tenner on MacDonald, too! I wonder if I can get over and cancel the bet before they know he’s dead—”
Megan said, “Cillian!” in an only half-joking tone of scolding shock, and the office door crashed open at the same moment to allow Orla Keegan’s outraged, “Who is dead?” to roll thunderously across the garage.
* * *
The entire Leprechaun Limousine Service staff tried to cram into the offices behind Orla and Megan. Orla Keegan might have been barely over five feet tall, but she still, somehow, managed to throw them all out on their ear. Megan was willing to bet that they all remained crowded against the door, those ears pressed to it in hopes of hearing what was going on after Orla slammed it in their faces. She turned on Megan, a ferociously cold, blue look in her eyes. “Who died?”
“Nobody you know,” Megan promised. “Or maybe you do, I don’t know, but they weren’t a client.” The garage door into the office suite opened behind the reception desk, so Megan stepped past the desk and around it, avoiding a low, brochure-covered table to sit in one of the expensive, soft leather chairs that sat beneath a large window overlooking the street. Autumn sunshine spilled in the window right then, warming the leather, and Megan gave a contented little sigh of comfort before straightening up under Orla’s glare. Her boss made her feel like a guilty teenager most of the time, despite the fact that Megan knew perfectly well she was a model employee. “I was following Mr. Walsh around the golf course and we found one his friends dead in a water hazard.”
“And you didn’t think to call me.”
“With all due respect, I don’t think there’s anything you could have done. What were you going to do, ma’am, come out and take the limo away from me? I know you’re concerned about the company’s reputation, but it’s not like I’m going around murdering people.”
Orla’s rattlesnake glare sharpened, and Megan groaned. “Well, I’m not. I promise, I had every intention of telling you what was going on as soon as I got back to the garage. Which I’m doing now.”
“I don’t see how I can trust you to drive a client like Martin Walsh if this kind of thing is going to happen around you.”
“It didn’t happen around me! It just happened! And you can’t cancel my contract with the Walshes, for heaven’s sake. If you think me being adjacent to a death or two is a problem, imagine what’ll happen if you start canceling high-profile clients!”
“Who said anything about canceling? I’ll assign Cillian as his driver.”
Megan pressed her lips shut on another protest. One of the reasons Orla had hired her, an American driver whose commercial Irish license she’d had to help pay for, was because Megan was happy to take early morning shifts. Cillian had never met a lie-in he didn’t like, and vastly preferred driving the clients whose business took them out late at night rather than early in the day. Several of the other drivers worked strictly nine-to-five shifts so they could be home with their families, and Orla knew all that. Arguing with her would only get her back up, and not arguing meant Orla would work it all out herself.
Aggravated color stained the other woman’s cheeks in response to Megan’s silence. Orla had learned her hair and makeup techniques in the eighties and never updated either; the flush of color didn’t go well with her glittering blue eyeshadow. Megan, trying not to be aggravating, said, “Mr. Walsh did say he’d see me tomorrow, so I don’t think he objects to me continuing to drive him. And I’d like to be there to support them if they need it, ma’am. I wasn’t friends with Mr. MacDonald, but I went through the discovery with Mr. Walsh, and that’s a pretty shocking event. I think we might have bonded a little.” She didn’t think that at all, but it sounded reassuring.
Orla thinned her lips. “You’re ma’aming me to make me feel like I’ve control of this nonsense.”
A flicker of a smile danced over Megan’s face. “Yes, ma’am.” Orla’s mouth flattened even more, and Megan’s smile grew. “What you do have control over is whether the contract is canceled. I’d like to think you wouldn’t want Leprechaun Limos to get a reputation for running from a tough job. And it’s not really a tough job. It’s just had an unfortunate turn of events.”
“And why,” Orla said, “would a nice American girl—”
“Woman,” Megan said under her breath.
“—want to keep hanging out where a murder’s taken place?”
Megan, straight-faced, said, “It’s not about the murder, Orla. It’s about doing my job well.” She waited a beat or two, then admitted, “And also I totally want to know what happened, and if you kick me off the job I’ll have to wait for the official report, which you know won’t be as good as whatever dirt I can dish up. I mean, you want to be Johnny-on-the-spot with all the latest gossip, don’t you?”
“Ah, so now you’re only thinking of me.” Humor had finally crept into Orla’s eyes. Megan had seen her charm clients, but that charisma was saved for when she wanted something. In fact, Megan had been charmed by Orla herself when she’d first moved to Dublin; the other woman’s spark and humor had convinced Megan to drive for her. The fact that it all dried up into ruthless business pragmatics as soon as Orla got what she wanted told Megan a lot about her, a little too late. It was nice to see some hint of humanity still in there, since mostly the term “old battle-ax” could have been coined for Orla specifically.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t get a lot of mileage out of knowing details about the whole Darr investigation,” Megan warned. “I bet with the sentencing coming up soon you’re going to be the inside woman for information again, and you can’t tell me that’s bad for business. No publicity is bad publicity, right?”
Orla tipped her head in concession, then pointed a sharp-nailed finger at Megan. “If you learn anything good, I hear it first!”
“You’ll hear it,” Megan promised, and amended, but not necessarily first, to herself.
“And you keep our name out of it!”
“I honestly don’t know why anyone would mention the company, but I’ll make sure of it.” Megan thought there was less chance of keeping that promise than the first, if someone decided to care who was driving Martin Walsh around. Still, Orla’s gimlet stare relaxed and, judging the moment right, Megan made her escape from the office.