by Catie Murphy
Megan’s phone buzzed, then began ringing, on her arm. Jelena waved and trotted off to the changing rooms, letting Megan untangle her phone, see who was calling, and fumble it to her still-sweaty ear. “Niamh. Kill me now. Also, what are you doing up at this hour?”
“Fionn texted and told me everything, but I couldn’t call her back, I knew she’d be asleep, so I called you because you never sleep. Why am I killing you?”
“Oh, because I’m a moron who can’t talk to people after a gym workout.” Megan grabbed a towel and wiped down both the weight benches and herself before trotting out the door and jogging toward home.
“Hmph,” said Niamh. “Anyway, what’s the story, tell me what you know about Fionn and it all. Over coffee.”
Megan squished her phone between her ear and her shoulder, a location that no one had ever intended a mobile phone to sit, and unlocked the street-level door that led up to her apartment. “Someday I’m going to get a headset that works as a mic for my phone, too.”
“You still don’t have one? You do know we’re well into the twenty-first century, like? Where are you?”
“At home, now.” Megan climbed the stairs two at a time, opened her own front door, and threw her gym bag under the kitchen table as she came in. It was a nice little flat, with an unusual-for-Ireland open-plan kitchen/dining room/living room. A table for one sat beneath the kitchen window, a tiny kitchen with a half-size fridge nestled beside an under-counter washing machine, comfy chairs and stacks of books dominated the living room, and an en suite bedroom overlooked an alley. “You don’t want to have coffee with me until I’ve showered.” She’d stripped off most of her gym gear by the time she reached the bathroom—the advantage of living alone was nobody cared if she left sweaty clothes on the floor—and put the phone on the bathroom sink, set to speaker.
“Are you showering in my ear?”
“I am so.” Megan lifted her voice over the sound of water and used the Irish phrase on purpose.
Niamh laughed. “You’re mental. Look, I’m in city centre, will you meet me at Accents at nine?”
“Are you trying to make me eat peanut butter cake for breakfast? Yeah, I’ll see you there.” Meg let Niamh end the connection and scrubbed her fingers through her hair, feeling the sweat of her workout loosening and washing out. She didn’t even have to hurry; Dublin’s city centre was a twenty-minute walk from her apartment, and Niamh’s favourite cafe was on the near side of it to her. And how the mighty had fallen, that she even considered distances in terms of what could be walked: Meg had never walked as much in her life as she did in Dublin, with a job as a limo driver. But Dublin’s core was only a few miles across, and most days it was easier, faster, and cheaper to either walk or take public transportation than it was to drive and find parking.
Forty minutes later, clad in sandals, flowing linen trousers, and a crop top to try to eradicate the tan lines on her shoulders, Megan swooped into the little cafe near Grafton Street that Niamh liked so much. It had two kinds of seating: enormous, squishy, faux-leather couches and bean bags, although the latter were downstairs and usually only in use by people under the age of thirty.
Usually: Niamh, already downstairs, had dragged a beanbag from the corner where they were stored and collapsed across it, her feet propped on the comfy chair she was saving for Megan. When Megan appeared, Niamh unwound—it was a production with her, although she wasn’t tall, just long-limbed and ballet-dancer-fit—and swayed across the wooden floors to embrace Megan. “You look gorgeous, darling.”
“I look passable. You look gorgeous.” Megan air-kissed Niamh’s round cheeks and fell into the chair beside her beanbag, smiling. Niamh was all dramatic features: large brown eyes and a slightly crooked nose, full lips and a strong jaw that belied the delicacy of her bones. She wore bright colours almost all the time, setting off the warmth of her light brown skin, and looked as at home in highly tailored outfits as flowing sundresses, one of which she wore now, in red.
“I am gorgeous,” Niamh conceded immodestly, “but you’re more than passable, my sweet. Now, tell me everything about last night.”
“I thought Fionn already told you.” Megan looked up to thank the waiter who brought her a latte with a bear face as the foam art, then summarized the previous evening’s events a bit more juicily than she’d related them to Orla. Niamh, clasping a cup of herbal tea, listened with the air of a child hearing a particularly good bedtime story, then settled back into her beanbag with a contented air.
“That’s desperate, every word of it. But you don’t even know the best part, Megan. Elizabeth Darr was having an affair.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What?” Megan set her coffee aside and sat up straight, staring at Niamh. “Are you sure?”
“Sure as I can be,” Niamh said easily. “A load of friends have said they’ve seen her around with some young thing, a girl no less. Sneaking off to dinners and shows and the like. One girl—you wouldn’t know her—said she saw them together at the protest last weekend, and one of the lads saw them at the Gate when he was working the box office.”
“Niamh—” Megan, trying not to offend, swallowed the first few things she wanted to say. Sometimes it seemed that Niamh knew everyone in Dublin, from actors to politicians and everybody in between, including protesters and itinerants and people who were a little of both. It often meant she had insights those with fewer friends, across narrower spectrums, couldn’t lay claim to.
It also often meant that no one wanted to let the truth get in the way of a good story. Megan had seen an exasperated look reach operatic proportions in the retelling, making mountains of molehills. “Niamh, if you’re sure, you need to tell the guards.”
The actress shifted her shoulders backward, nonplussed. “Well, I’m not as sure as all that.”
“Two seconds ago you were!”
“That was a bit of craic, Megan. I don’t want to get involved with the guards. They already know my name.”
A sliver of humor cracked Megan’s surprise. “Power to the people, babe. Besides, everybody knows your name. It’s what happens when you’re famous.”
Niamh lifted a hand in the Mockingjay salute. “I don’t mind being a troublemaker, love, but I don’t need the press coming forward with information about a suspicious death. They already look for my face in a crowd.”
“That’s because it’s usually at the front,” Megan said wryly. “Everybody knows you’re politically active, Nee. It hasn’t exactly hurt your career. But okay, look, I’ll . . . I don’t know, I’ll tell them I heard a rumour. Or I’ll go ask . . . I don’t know. I can’t exactly ask Simon if it’s true, can I? I dunno, though. I’ve been driving them on and off for months, and they seemed happy. I didn’t see her sneaking around.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? She wouldn’t call up the driver who knows her and her husband and say ‘me and my bit on the side want to go down to the shore for the day,’ would she now?”
“She’s American. I don’t think she’d say ‘bit on the side’ at all.”
“Oh, ffsh.” Niamh waved a hand, and this time Megan smiled more readily. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” Meg scrunched her eyes shut a moment, considering what an affair might mean. Nothing good, probably, but the gardaí would want to know. As if they wouldn’t find out themselves, but it wouldn’t hurt to check into it a little. She yawned suddenly and popped her eyes back open. “Holy moly. I need more coffee and to stop sitting in a warm, dimly lit cafe after only four hours of sleep.”
“Oh! I should have stayed upstairs, then. I thought you’d gotten in earlier, somehow, although I don’t know why. Fionn texted late enough. How is she? How’s Martin taking it?”
“He said ‘Closed? For three days? At the weekend? ’” Megan did her best impression of the restaurateur’s voice, and Niamh laughed.
“Did you tell him that’s how it works?”
“I refrained. No, and honestly, it’s not even fair of me to
be snide. The poor man—”
“Martin Rafferty is not a poor man,” Niamh said dryly. “He’s worked long and hard to make sure of that.”
Megan made a face. “All right, the unfortunate man. The unfortunate man had just learned an internationally renowned food critic had died on his restaurant’s doorstep, and that would rattle even the best of people.”
“Which Rafferty is not.” Niamh’s eyebrows rose, leading Megan on.
“Nee, you’ve barely even met him.”
“Ah, sure, no, but I know of him. The self-made man from Bray, a proper Irish success story, and if there’s one thing we resent, it’s someone who’s gotten above themselves and made good.” The deprecating humor in Niamh’s voice faltered almost inaudibly, and she added, “I should know,” in a mutter.
“I’ll never understand that,” Meg said, honestly. “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, building a successful business, it’s the American ideal.”
“Sure it’s one thing to go to America and do well,” Niamh acknowledged. “You’d best come home again the same person you were, though, without any notions. We’re a contrary lot, we Irish.”
“I hadn’t noticed. But anyway, I know I don’t like him very much, but that’s different from him not being a good person. I read somewhere that sometimes we instantly dislike somebody because our brains actually work on slightly different wavelengths and it causes antipathy.”
Niamh, who didn’t wear glasses, mimed pulling down a pair and looking over their top edges so expertly that Megan half-doubted her own eyes and felt maybe Niamh did have glasses on, and she just couldn’t see them properly. “And here I thought I was the mad actress who’s supposed to have neohippie shite ideas.”
“Well, I don’t know, it might not be true, I just read it somewhere. Regardless, I know restaurants usually run on a really narrow margin, so I’m sure being closed for days on end is going to be a near disaster for them. I’d probably be asking kind of stupid questions, too.”
“But you weren’t. You were asking if it was food poisoning and finding out Liz Darr was having an affair.”
“It’s easier to be clear-headed about somebody else’s disaster. And I wasn’t finding out that she was having an affair, I mean, not like I was sleuthing and hunting for clues. I just have gossipy friends.” Megan yawned again. “Oh, man. I really do need another coffee.”
“And to not be in the windowless basement where the beanbags are.”
“But you love the beanbags.” Megan shook herself and stood, offering Niamh a hand up. She took it and sprang upward, pushing through her toes to leap straight up instead of just standing. Megan, used to that kind of behavior by now, took enough of a step back that Niamh didn’t land on her toes—not that Niamh would—and pulled her into a laughing hug when she was earthbound again. “And that’s why you love them. I think you’re six, at heart.”
“Six is a fine age to be. Look, Meg, if you do mention the affair . . .”
“I won’t bring your name into it,” Megan promised, and gratitude lowered Niamh’s shoulders a centimeter or two. “I’ll see you later, all right? With all the gossip.”
“You’ll raise my social credit to the stars,” Niamh said happily. They parted ways on the street outside, Niamh striking north toward her dance studio and Megan heading east toward Simon’s hotel, only a few minutes’ walk from the cafe. The city had woken up while they were inside, parents and businesspeople mixing with tourists and disaffected youth along the streets.
There were an awful lot of sunburns on pale shoulders and exposed chests, and even more Irish brogues moaning about the appalling heat as they sweated their way through town. “Twenty-three degrees,” she heard someone say grimly, “and it’s meant to climb to twenty-eight today. I’m dying, I am.”
Twenty-eight was about eighty-three degrees in American terms. Megan, grinning at the gasps and misery around her, gloried in the warmth on the short walk to the Shelbourne.
* * *
Simon Darr opened his hotel room door almost before Megan knocked, like he’d been watching through the peephole since she’d called from the front desk to make sure it was all right to visit. He obviously hadn’t slept, or had only collapsed in the heavy, deep fog of grief and awakened sometime later, still harrowed. He wore the previous night’s clothes, his hair a wrecked spiderweb drifting from his scalp, and exhausted, crust-lined, reddened eyes. “Her parents will be here in a few hours,” he said hoarsely. “Can you get them from the airport for me?”
“Of course. I’ll set it up with the car service.” Megan came in at his gesture, taking in the still-made, king-size bed with its covers barely rumpled, the writing desk scattered with papers, and an enormous, heavily framed mirror doubling the apparent size of the already generous room. The television on the desk was on but muted. Overstuffed chairs sat across a small table beneath the window, and a door led to the bathroom. Everything coordinated, all in shades of sage and moss, though at least the room’s floor didn’t have the slightly dizzying triangles-and-waves pattern of the blue-and-green hall carpeting.
Megan took one of the chairs, hoping that if she sat, Simon would, too. He did, dropping bonelessly into the other chair as if his strings had been cut, and rubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, making the spiderweb effect worse. “Have you eaten?”
“I don’t think I can. Coffee is turning my stomach.”
“Coffee is acidic.” Megan rose, moved papers around on the desk until she’d unburied the room phone and called room service for plain toast and cold water. Simon’s face creased with the weary expression of someone who didn’t want favors done for him but recognized they were probably necessary and slumped deeper in his chair. Megan glanced at the TV—commercials—and sat again. “What else can I do for you?”
“Make them stop talking about it.” Simon nodded at the television. “It’s all over the news. No,” he said sharply as Megan reached for the remote. “Leave it on. I wrote a blog post for her last night,” he added. “After I’d called the family and our closest friends, so they wouldn’t find out from a news story. I don’t know if I said it right. Liz was the people person, not me.” He flickered his fingers at a closed laptop on the desk. Megan took it as an invitation and got up to open it.
Elizabeth Darr’s website had a slick, modern design that somehow also managed to be friendly and welcoming. Photographs, some professional and others candid, but all of them curated to give a sense of approachability, surrounded the main text of the blog. A fierce, shocking pang of loss cut through Megan’s chest, taking her breath, and she had to brace herself, fingertips against the desk, before she could read Simon’s post.
It was simple, saying only that Elizabeth had died suddenly in Ireland a few hours earlier, the cause of death was unknown, and that he would post more when he could. He asked if people might be willing to share their stories about Liz and take comfort in seeing how many lives she had touched.
The post had over four thousand comments.
Megan sat at the desk, not daring to open the comments page. She hadn’t known Elizabeth Darr well, but just seeing photos of the food critic vibrant and alive had caught her off guard with grief. Odds were that stories from thousands of fans would leave her sobbing, and she didn’t think she had the emotional wherewithal to deal with that just then. Simon, wearily, said, “Comments began coming in the moment I posted it. I started reading them, but it was too much.”
“They’ll be there later.” Megan left the computer open, watching the page refresh itself and update the number of comments on Simon’s post for a moment before she turned away. “I have a . . .” Halfway through the sentence, she wondered just what she thought she would accomplish by asking Simon if Elizabeth had been having an affair. It would break his heart if he didn’t know. It might break it even if he did know. He looked at her expectantly, if an expression so defeated could even be expectant. “I have a pickup to do in a little while,” Megan lied. “What time i
s your in-laws’ flight in, so I can get them?”
“Four o’clock. Aer Lingus. Their names are Peter and Ellen Dempsey.” A pained smile pulled his lips. “Liz’s first name was Dana. Her mom used to say she married me just to keep the alliteration going, but then she used Elizabeth professionally. She said it was less bouncy, easier to take seriously.”
“As an alliteration myself, I understand. I always wanted to be a Samantha, but I got named after a grandmother instead. And then there was a while there when being Sam Malone wouldn’t have been great either, because everybody would have expected me to know their name.”
Simon’s blank look told her an eight-year age gap could be insurmountable at times. Megan waved it off with a smile. “I’ll get the Dempseys at four, then. Will I bring them back here?”
“Please.”
“All right.” Megan rose, then startled as a knock sounded at the door. “Oh, the toast. I’ll get it for you.” She collected the food, which had a pot of tea she hadn’t ordered but which she imagined the kitchen offered in sympathetic hope that it would cure all ills. “Try to eat it, okay? And try to rest, maybe.” She put the tray on the table beside his chair, but he leaned around her, anguished horror drawing his face long.
Behind her, Elizabeth Darr spoke.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I’m in Galway today,” she said cheerfully. “There’s a terrific Saturday market that’s been going on for centuries, I’m standing in the middle of a centuries-old tradition, and it doesn’t matter how many old markets I go to around the world, this never ceases to amaze me. It’s a vibrant, exciting space, and oh, man, I cannot tell you how good it smells—”
Elizabeth Darr was, in life, a tall, big-boned presence in whatever space she entered, even the bustle of Galway City’s Saturday market. She’d never been sharply thin, the way some food critics were, like they didn’t dare indulge in the very thing from which they made their livelihoods. Instead, she carried her weight in soft-padded muscle, and often brought her viewers on the hikes up mountains and scuba-diving explorations she pursued to maintain that muscle. She wore her brown hair in a flattering and easy-to-maintain pixie cut, and had more pairs of glasses than anyone Megan had ever met. She’d been wearing her purple ones on Saturday, matching a lilac sundress that showed off golden shoulders gleaming just a little with sunscreen. Liz, at least, had not gotten burned during the unusual heatwave.