Death on the Green

by Catie Murphy

  The sportscaster nearly punched the air, promised the time slot, and went away trying not to wiggle like one of the puppies. Heather, watching her go, said, “No one will be surprised to hear I’m filing for divorce, but she’ll be happy to break the news.”

  “File for it in America,” Megan advised. “The Irish government won’t even consider allowing a divorce until you’ve been formally separated for three years, even if you didn’t get married here.”

  “We didn’t, and I will,” Heather promised. “Thank you for everything, Megan. I’m sorry we brought so much drama into your life.”

  Megan, thinking of Jelena’s comment, smiled. “Well, at least it wasn’t boring.”

  Heather laughed. “I guess not. Look, I’m going to go get changed, but I can get a taxi back to my hotel.”

  “No, it’s fine, I’ll drive you.”

  “Mmm. Well. You have a friend here, so you can decide while I’m changing.” Heather sent a pointed look across the course, and Megan followed her gaze to see Paul Bourke, wearing jeans and a camel-colored sweater under a blue jacket and rather resplendent in a scarf matching the coat, coming across the green. “That,” Heather said, “is not a detective here on business,” and scooted off under the weight of Megan’s bemusement.

  “Ms. Malone,” Bourke said as he reached her.

  “Detective Bourke.” Megan looked at his feet. “Your shoes match your sweater. How do you even do that?”

  “Would you ask a woman that question?”

  “Probably not,” Megan admitted. “On the other hand, I’d probably ask where she got the shoes, if they were cute. Those aren’t cute, they just match.”

  Bourke put a hand over his heart. “I’m wounded.” He pointed with his chin after Heather. “How did she do? I wanted to get out here for the game, but I was too busy trying to match my jumper and shoes to be on time.”

  Megan laughed. “She came in second, which is better than anyone expected, with all the turmoil. What happened with Martin and—” She waved her hands in the air. “And everybody? Give me the dirt.”

  “You’ll never believe it.”

  “Try me.” Megan glanced in the general direction of the docks, a couple of miles away on the other side of the peninsula. “Heather’s set me free for the afternoon. Want to go get some fish and chips at Dorans on the Pier and tell me all about it?”

  “Only if I get to hear the entire story of how you ended up wet and naked with someone else’s wife in the front seat of a hired car.”

  “We were not naked,” Megan said primly. “We had our underwear on.”

  “And I heard it all anyway,” Bourke pointed out. “Give me the salacious version.”

  “Not unless you adopt Mama Dog.”

  Bourke stuck out his hand. “Deal.”

  “Oh, well, crap.” Megan laughed and shook his hand. “All right, fine, in that case, uh, let me see. Obviously, Heather and I have been carrying on a torrid but secret love affair for months.”

  “That’s much too obvious. There must be a better story.”

  “I’ll work on one,” Megan promised. They struck off across the course, only pausing when a shrill whistle blasted behind them. They turned, and Heather Walsh, dressed in civilian clothes, waved vigorously from the clubhouse door.

  Megan waved back, then pushed her hands into her pockets as Bourke said, “That woman has been through more than she knows. Once Walsh got started he wouldn’t stop confessing. Sean Ahern had been looking for a way to stop Saoirse’s interference with his development plans for weeks, but he was too queasy to take a hit out on the girl herself.”

  Megan barked a disbelieving laugh, and Bourke shrugged. “People are funny like that. So Walsh put it into his head that if Lou was killed, she’d be too brokenhearted to even realize the development was back underway. They hit on hiring Oliver Collins to do the deed when the both of them who had motive were able to produce impeachable alibis.”

  “Why Collins?”

  “Partly because he’d do anything for a bit of flash, partly because he’s such a snob they thought no one would imagine he’d get his hands dirty, and partly because he’s got a deadly golf swing. He went out on the green after Lou and sliced a ball into the back of his skull. Even if the impact hadn’t killed him, knocking him unconscious into the water hazard would finish him off. But it gets better.”

  “Better? How? Somebody else was involved?” Megan peered sideways at Bourke, whose thin smile told her she’d guessed correctly. “No! What? Who? When?”

  “Do you know anything about Lou MacDonald’s wife?”

  “I know she got Lou into golfing and died in a hit-and-run.”

  “Martin Walsh confessed to driving that car.”

  Megan stopped dead, staring at the detective. “He never.”

  “Like he was dying to tell somebody,” Bourke confirmed. “He hated Kimberly MacDonald.”

  “Why?”

  Bourke shook his head. “For having more influence over Lou than Walsh himself did. For getting him into the game and proving Lou was better than Walsh. For living longer than Walsh’s first wife. For existing, apparently. He took a junker car off a wrecking lot, fixed it up enough to drive, kept an eye on Mrs. MacDonald’s schedule, and caught her on a blind bit of road one night.”

  “Jesus. Heather doesn’t know yet?”

  “Not yet. Neither does Saoirse, but it’ll all come out. He’s a piece of work, is Martin Walsh. Look, Megan, I want you to promise me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t get caught up in any more murders.”

  Megan turned a smile up at the blue afternoon sky. “Know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to promise anything.”

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of the third book in

  the Dublin Driver Mystery series ...

  Death of an Irish Mummy

  A Dublin Driver Mystery

  CHAPTER ONE

  The body lay in a coffin eighteen inches too small, its legs broken and folded under so it would fit.

  Megan stood on her tip-toes, peering down at it in fascinated horror. Dust-grey and naturally mummified, the body in the box, nicknamed “The Crusader,” must have been a giant—especially for his era—while he lived. Next to him, in a better-fitted coffin, lay someone missing both feet and his right hand. Megan didn’t quite dare ask if he’d gone into the grave that way or if his parts had been . . . misplaced over the centuries. Given that there was a tiny woman called “The Nun” lying beside them both, Megan assumed nobody in ancient, Catholic Ireland would have had the nerve to divest the fellow of his limbs under her supervision. The fact that he was buried here, in the church, suggested he’d been a decent sort of fellow in life, although he was known, according to both the tour guide and the plaques in the crypt, as “The Thief.” The final body, a woman, was referred to only as “The Unknown,” which, Megan felt, just figured.

  “Are any of these the Earl?” A brash American voice bounced harshly off the crypt’s limestone walls and echoed unpleasantly in the small bones of Megan’s ears. She, being Texas-born and not quite three years in Ireland, knew brash Americans. Cherise Williams fell squarely into that bracket. Megan had been driving Mrs. Williams around Dublin for two days and recognized the brief, teeth-baring grimace the young tour guide exhibited after knowing the woman for only ten minutes.

  Like Megan had done dozens of times already, the guide turned his grimace into a smile as he shook his head. “No ma’am, the earls are interred here but not among the mummies on display. As you can imagine, the Church can hardly condone breaking open coffins to display the mummies, so those we see here are . . .”

  He hesitated just briefly, and Megan, unable to help herself, suggested, “Free-range?”

  The poor kid, who was probably twenty years Megan’s junior, gave her a startled glance backed by horror. As he struggled to control his expression, Megan realized the horror was at the fear h
e might burst out laughing, although he managed to keep his voice mostly under control as he said, “Em, well, yes. Free-range would . . . yes, you could say that. I wouldn’t,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself, “but you could. Their coffins have slipped, decayed, or been damaged over the centuries, and in those cases we’ve chosen not to, em . . .” He shot Megan another moderately appalled look, but went along with her analogy. “Not to, em, re-cage them, as it were.”

  “But I need the Earl’s DNA,” Mrs. Williams said in stentorian tones.

  “Yes ma’am, but you understand I can’t just open a coffin at the behest of every visitor to the vault—”

  “Well, what about one of these?” Mrs. Williams made an impatient gesture at the wall, where nooks and vaults held crumbling coffins of various sizes, and the floor, where a variety of wooden coffins had succumbed enough to age that mummified legs and arms poked out here or there.

  “Yes ma’am, some of these are the Earls of Leitrim, but—”

  “Well, let me have one, then! I only need a sample. It’s not as if I’m going to carry an entire skeleton out of here in my handbag, young man, don’t be absurd.”

  The kid cast Megan a despairing glance. She responded with a sigh, taking one step closer to Cherise Williams. “We’d better be leaving soon to get to your two p.m. appointment, Mrs. Williams. You’re meant to be speaking with officials about this, not a tour guide. You know how difficult it is for young men to say no to the ladies. We wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.” She wanted to say it was difficult for young men to say no to women who remind them of their mothers, but Cherise Adelaide Williams wore her sixty-three years like a well-bandaged wound and seemed like the sort who could imagine no one thought her old enough to be a twenty-year-old’s mom.

  Just like that, the guide’s gaze softened into a sparkle and he bestowed an absolutely winsome smile upon Mrs. Williams. His voice dropped into a confiding murmur as he offered her his arm, which she took without hesitation. “Sure and she’s right, though, ma’am. It’s breaking me own heart to see the distress in yer lovely blue eyes, but if I lose this job it’s me whole future gone, yis know how it is. It’s true university’s not as dear in Ireland as I hear it is back in the States, but when you’re a lad all alone, making his own way in the world, it’s dear enough so. I’d be desperate altogether without the good faith of the brothers at St. Michan’s and I know a darling woman like yourself would never want to see a lad lost at sea like.” He escorted her toward and up the stairway, both of them ducking under the stone arch that led to the graveyard. He lay the Irish on so thick as they mounted the rough stone stairs that Megan lifted her feet unnecessarily high as she followed them, as if she might otherwise get some of the flattery stuck on her feet.

  By the time she’d exited the steel cellar doors that led underground, the guide had jollied Mrs. Williams into smiles and fluttering eyelashes. “We have a minute, don’t we?” she cooed at Megan. “Peter here wants to show me the church’s interior. Maybe I can convince the pastor”—the tour guide bit his tongue to stop himself correcting Mrs. Williams on the topic of priests versus pastors, an act of restraint Megan commended him for—“to let me have a finger bone or something, instead of going through all this bothersome legal nonsense.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Williams.” Megan could imagine no scenario in which that would happen, but she followed the flutterer and the flatterer into the church.

  Parts of St. Michan’s church looked magnificently old from the exterior. A tower and partial nave had survived since the 17th century and looked the part, all irregular grey stones and thick mortar. The rest of the nave had been repaired with concrete blocks that, to Megan’s eye, could have been as recent as the 1970s, although apparently they dated back to the early 1800s. She had expected the interior to be equally old-fashioned, but its clean, cream walls and dark pews looked as modern as any church she’d ever seen. Arched stained glass windows let light spill in, and a pipe organ—one that Handel, composer of the Messiah, had evidently played on—- dominated one end of the nave. Megan shook her head, astonished at the contrast with the narrow halls and sunken nooks of the crypts below.

  But Dublin was like that, as she’d slowly discovered over the years she’d lived there. Modern constructions sat on top of ancient sites, and builders were forever digging up the remains of Viking settlements when they started new projects. Even this church, well over three hundred years old, was predated by the original chapel, built a thousand years ago. According to the literature, the ground had been consecrated five hundred years before that.

  Any temples or building sites that old in the States had been razed to the ground, and all the people who’d used them, murdered, around about the same time St. Michan’s had been built.

  “Cheerful,” Megan told herself, under her breath. Peter the tour guide had introduced Mrs. Williams to the priest, who currently had the look of a man weathering a storm. He actually leaned toward Mrs. Williams a little, as if bracing himself against the onslaught of her determination, and if he’d had more hair, Megan would have imagined she could see it waving in Mrs. Williams’s breeze. He had to be in his seventies, with a slim build that had long ago gone wiry, and a short beard on a strong jaw that looked like it had held a line in many arguments more important than this one.

  “—grandfather, the Earl of Leitrim—” Cherise Williams persisted in saying Lye-trum, though the Irish county was pronounced Leetrim. Megan—also a Texan—couldn’t tell if Williams didn’t know how it was said, or if her accent simply did things to the word that weren’t meant to be done. Everyone who had encountered the Lye-trum pronunciation had repeated Leetrim back with increasing firmness and volume, while also somehow being slightly too polite to directly correct the error. So far the attempted corrections hadn’t taken, leaving Megan to suspect her fellow Texan didn’t hear a difference in what she said and what everyone else did.

  The priest had interrupted with a genuinely startled, “Your great-grandfather?” and Mrs. Williams simpered, putting her hand out like she expected it to be kissed.

  “That’s right. I’m the heir to the Earldom of Lyetrum.”

  The tour guide and the priest both shot Megan glances of desperate incredulity while Mrs. Williams batted her eyelashes. Megan widened her eyes and shrugged in response. A week earlier she hadn’t known Leitrim (or anywhere else in Ireland, for that matter) had ever had any earls. Then Mrs. Williams, styling herself Countess Williams, had called to book a car with Leprechaun Limos, the driving service Megan worked for. Megan’s boss, who was perhaps the least gullible person Megan had ever met, had taken the self-styled countess at her word and charged her three times the usual going rate for a driver. Megan had looked up the Earls of Leitrim, and been subjected to Mrs. Williams’s explanation more than once since she’d picked her up at the airport. In fact, Mrs. Williams had launched into it again, spinning a fairy tale that drew the priest and Peter’s attention back to her.

  “—never knew my great-grandfather, of course, and my granddaddy died in the war, but his wife, my granny Elsie, she used to tell a few stories about Great-Granddaddy, because she knew him before he died. She said he always did sound Irish as the day was long, and he used to tell tall tales about being a nobleman’s son. We’d play at being princesses and knights when we were little, because we believed we had the blood of kings.” Mrs. Williams dipped a hand into a purse large enough to contain the Alamo and extracted a small book, its pages yellow with age and a faded blue floral print fabric cover held shut with a tarnished gold lock. The key dangled from a thin, pale-red ribbon tucked between the pages, and Mrs. Williams deftly slid it around to open the book. She opened it to a well-worn page and displayed it to a priest and a tour guide who clearly had no idea of, and less genuine interest in, what they were looking at.

  “Granny Elsie never seemed to take it at all seriously, but after she died we found this in her belongings. It’s all the stories Great-Granddaddy Patrick
used to tell her, right down to the place he was the earl of, Lyetrum. She said he never wanted to go back because of all the troubles there, but that was then and this is now, isn’t it? So all I need is a bit of bone from one of the old earls so I can prove I’m the heir, you see?”

  As if against his will, the priest said, “But, em, your father?”

  Creases fell into Cherise Williams’ face, deep lines that cut through her makeup and drew the corners of her mouth down. “Daddy died a long time ago, and the Edgeworth name went with him. If I’d only known it meant something, of course, I’d have kept it, but when I got married I changed my name. Everyone did in those days. But my girls and I, we’re the last of the Edgeworth bloodline. My middle daughter, Raquel, is coming in this afternoon to be with me for all of this. We meant to fly together, but she had an emergency at work.” She turned a tragic, blue-eyed gaze on Megan, who was surprised to be remembered. “Ms. Malone is going to get her at the airport while I speak with the people at Vital Statistics about getting an Edgeworth DNA sample from the mummies here, aren’t you, Ms. Malone?”

  “I am, ma’am.” Megan was reasonably certain the Irish version of Vital Statistics was called something else, but neither she nor the two Irish-born men in the church seemed inclined to correct Cherise on the matter. “And I don’t mean to pressure you, Mrs. Williams, but we really should be going. I’d hate to be late collecting Ms. Williams.”

  Cherise Williams gave the priest one last fluttering glance of shy hope, but he, sensing rescue, remained resolute. “I do dearly hope you find what you need at the CSO, Mrs. Williams.”

  “I’m sure I shall.” Mrs. Williams sniffed and tossed her artistically greying hair. “I’m told the Irish love to be accommodating, and no one can resist the Williams charm.” She swept out of the church, leaving Megan to exchange a weak, wry glance with two Irish people who had proven neither accommodating nor susceptible to the Williams charm. Then she hastened out in Mrs. Williams’s wake, scurrying to reach the car quickly enough to open the door for her client. “I can’t imagine why they couldn’t just—” Mrs. Williams waved a hand as she settled into the vehicle. “Surely a little finger bone wouldn’t be missed.”