by Catie Murphy
Megan blinked, then let out a breath of faint surprise. “I am, aren’t I? It’s something.” More than something maybe. If Liz had been having an affair with Cíara O’Donnell, Cíara might have had access—for no reason that Meg could think of—to post from Liz’s computer. But Megan had been with Simon when the first vlog went live after Liz’s death, and Cíara certainly hadn’t been there then. She had no idea what all that proved, if anything, except that Simon probably hadn’t posted the vlogs himself. There were new comments rolling up on the vlog, accusing him of pulling a publicity stunt, but he didn’t look or sound to Megan like a man engaged in that kind of behaviour. “You should probably tell Detective Bourke about this.”
“What? Why?” Mr. Dempsey looked up from comforting his wife. “What could this possibly have to do with her death? It’s a computer glitch. Some kind of horrible error.”
“Well, I don’t know, but that’s his job, isn’t it? Figuring out if it’s related? It’s kind of too weird to be totally unrelated, right?”
“I think there’s plenty of police activity around Dana’s death already,” Mr. Dempsey said shortly. “I don’t think we should complicate it any more. It really can’t be any more complex than food poisoning, and I’ll be glad when that horrible restaurant is shut down.”
Megan bit her lip hard, stopping herself from defending Canan’s. “Well, maybe I’ll look into it,” she said instead. “At least so we can figure out who’s posting those things and get it to stop. I wonder if there’s a setting to block new posts.”
She went back into the blogging software, searching for something of that nature as Mrs. Dempsey said, “Yes. Yes, please. You obviously understand this internet thing—” a gross overstatement, in Megan’s opinion, but she didn’t argue—”and I want this to stop. Our poor girl, being dragged around like this after her death. All of us being taunted this way. It’s like being haunted by a ghost.”
Megan, almost guiltily, thought now her ghost wheels her barrow through streets broad and narrow, and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from breathing the lyrics aloud. It took a few seconds to promise, “I’ll try to stop the posts. I don’t see anything to just, like, archive the whole thing and set it, so it can’t have any more updates, but I’ll keep looking.”
“You have to do more than keep looking,” Mrs. Dempsey pleaded. “You have to figure out what’s happening. This can’t be related to her death, so I don’t want the police involved any more than they must be. I just want someone I trust to figure out what’s going on.”
How she had gone from car-driving stranger to someone the Dempseys trusted—it should have been an impossible leap, but really, Megan recognized that she must seem like a lifeline to the Dempseys, and maybe to Simon Darr as well. They were all Americans, but the mourning family were strangers in a strange land, one that Megan had been navigating for a while now. She understood how they’d latched on and could neither blame them nor, she knew, turn her back on them. If she had been Liz, she would have wanted someone there to help take care of her family in the worst moments of their lives. Maybe if she were a little wiser, or a little colder of heart, it would be against her better judgement to say, “I’ll do everything I can to figure out what’s happened, Mrs. Dempsey,” but she didn’t have it in her to turn her back on Liz’s bereaved parents.
Grateful tears seeped from the older woman’s eyes. “Thank you, Megan. Thank you.”
Megan nodded, but in spite of the woman’s gratitude, she steeled herself for the likely backlash of what she had to say next. “If I’m going to figure out what’s happened—what’s really happened here—I need to ask some questions you might not like. Maybe—” She glanced at Liz’s parents. “Maybe one at a time or, at least, Simon alone.”
Colour made dark streaks along Mrs. Dempsey’s cheekbones and her nostrils flared, but just as swiftly, she seemed to accept the wisdom of Megan’s suggestion. She stood without speaking, took her husband’s hand, and led him from the room.
As soon as they left, Simon collapsed, though he’d never sat up straight since Megan’s arrival. “Detective Bourke asked me everything anybody could ever need to know.”
“I’m sure he did, but I wasn’t there for that.” Megan sighed. “Do you want me to do this? Poke into Liz’s death and whatever’s going on with these vlogs?”
“Ellen does. I . . .” Simon lifted his face, gaze going to the ceiling. His throat, stretched long, showed the Adam’s apple prominently, and when he swallowed, it looked painful. “I can’t imagine what the vlogs might have to do with her death. Galway, Kerry . . . nothing happened there. We talked to fans at the market, but we didn’t even see anyone while we were out hiking. I want them to stop.” He lowered his head again, eyes fixed on the carpet’s diamond fleur-de-lis patterns. “If you have to look into her death to figure out how to make them stop, I guess that’s okay with me. If you want to, I mean.” He finally met Megan’s eyes. “I realize we’ve been asking a lot of you. This isn’t your problem.”
“No, but I feel—” Megan made a small, useless motion with her hands. “I feel responsible, in a way. Like you were in my squad and . . . even if I didn’t slip up myself, something went wrong, and I want to know what. I want to—” She pulled a lopsided smile. “I want to be able to prevent it from happening again. I know that doesn’t exactly make sense.”
“It does. Sometimes a patient comes in too late to do anything for them, and you know it’s not your fault, that there’s nothing you could have done, but you look for the answers anyway. As if next time, when someone comes in too late, that extra little bit of knowledge might somehow be enough to save them. You said you were a combat medic?” At Megan’s nod, Simon nodded, too. “Then you know what I mean.”
“I do. Okay, then, look. Here’s the first horrible question: Were you two okay? I mean, your marriage was ... ?”
“We were happy,” Simon replied quietly. “We’d had some rough patches. Who doesn’t? But we were doing well.”
“Do you know a Cíara O’Donnell?”
Simon’s entire face shaped itself into a question. “Detective Bourke asked that, too. I have no idea who she is. Why? Who is she?”
“Apparently Liz knew her. Did Liz go off on her own a lot?”
Simon spread his hands. “Define ‘a lot.’ We weren’t joined at the hip. I guess there are people who can live that way, but we always had our own hobbies. And we noticed a long time ago that when we were traveling, if we did everything together, we didn’t have anything new or interesting to talk about and we got kind of sick of each other. So we’d do some of what we were both interested in and some things independently. I went for interviews while she went for hikes, or I’d go to a movie she didn’t want to see while she found a knitting group. That kind of thing. And I left her alone while she wrote, obviously. We weren’t a single unit, but we’d talk about what we did at the end of the day. She never mentioned a Cíara.”
“What does that mean to you?”
For a moment, Simon didn’t look like he even understood the question. Then he blew air between his lips, almost dismissing it. “That she didn’t know her very well, or she wasn’t very important to her. I don’t know. I suppose it could mean the opposite, that this girl was very important to her, but . . .” He shook his head. “As far as I know, Liz didn’t have any romantic interest in other women. I mean, she said once that she’d have run off with Josephine Baker given the chance, but that’s like me saying I’d have run off with David Bowie. Anybody would run off with Bowie or Baker.”
Megan smiled. “And nobody would blame them for it. All right, look, um. How were you . . . financially? I mean . . .” She’d never had any particular inclination to be a cop. Asking Simon a load of invasive questions quenched any thought at all she might ever had had along those lines. “I mean, with her death, I suppose you’re the beneficiary of any life insurance?”
Simon Darr looked so appalled Megan thought he might actually vomit. “I am, yes.
I . . . Jesus. I didn’t need money, if that’s what you’re asking. We have—we had—Jesus. A prenup. Liz didn’t want one. She—I insisted. My parents—” Simon exhaled deeply, his colour deepening. “My parents had a terrible marriage and a disastrous divorce. Liz hated the idea of a prenup, but I’d seen what my parents went through—my mom especially—and I wanted to be sure neither of us would be in that condition if we eventually split up. She said it was because I was going to be a doctor; I’d have made all the money and I’d want to keep it.” His laugh sounded like tears. “What a surprise for her, when her foodie career took off and she ended up being the real provider, while I had hundreds of thousands in student debt. It turned out I was protecting her from me, if it had come to that. It didn’t. It hadn’t. We were happy,” he said, sounding lost.
Megan reached out to put her hand on his knee. “Okay. I’m sorry. Look, I don’t . . . I don’t think I even know what else I should ask right now. I’ll try to find out what’s going on with the vlogs and I’ll see if I can find Cíara O’Donnell and figure out what she has to do with any of this.”
“I can’t believe it hasn’t even been two whole days yet,” Simon said tiredly. “I feel like it’s been forever and no time at all and neither makes any sense. I feel like all the answers should be figured out already, and instead, nothing is.”
“I know. I’ll do what I can to change that.”
Simon nodded. “Thank you, Megan.”
Megan, quietly, said, “You’re welcome,” and slipped out the door.
* * *
Ellen Dempsey met Megan in the hall, standing in front of the Dempseys’ room door like she’d never gone in. “Peter is resting,” she said as soon as Megan emerged from Simon’s room. “I just wanted to say thank you, Megan. This has all been so awful.”
“No, it’s okay.” Megan leaned on the doorframe beside Liz’s mother and folded her arms. “Can I ask you a couple of questions, while we’re talking?” Mrs. Dempsey nodded unhappily, and Megan wondered which prying query to try first. She started with, “Did Liz ever date any girls, in college or high school?” and earned a genuinely astonished look in return.
“Not that I know of, and I think she would have told her mini-me.” Tears filled Mrs. Dempsey’s eyes again and she wiped them away without trying to stop their fall. “Why?”
“She apparently had a young female friend Simon didn’t know, so I was trying to figure out what kind of relationship they might have had. Okay. I know you might not know this, but . . . were she and Simon financially stable?”
A deep sigh shuddered from Ellen’s chest. “Their first few years were terribly hard. Simon’s student debt was almost insurmountable and Liz wasn’t making any real money as a blogger yet. But Simon had a few windfalls and they got on their feet, and then Liz’s career took off. I think they were doing quite well.”
“What kind of windfalls? New jobs or something? Doctors get paid a lot.”
“They do, but not compared to their student loans, not for the first several years. And the interest fees are usury.” Anger flashed in Mrs. Dempsey’s eyes, momentarily drowning the grief, but it returned as swiftly as it had gone. “He said real estate investments; money from his mother, I think. We helped where we could, too, of course. Liz didn’t have too many student loans between her scholarships and what we were able to give her, though, and Simon never wanted us to be paying off his loans, he said. So they relied on their own incomes and his investments. They were even able to buy a house recently, which isn’t common for people their ages anymore, I understand.”
“It’s lucky,” Megan agreed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever own one. Thank you, Mrs. Dempsey. If I think of any other questions, I’ll drop by to ask them, okay?”
Mrs. Dempsey nodded and let herself back into her room. Megan waited until the door clicked shut and then, motivated, marched off to find Cíara O’Donnell.
CHAPTER TEN
Cíara’s apartment, like her own, sat above businesses, and it took a private key to enter the stairway. Megan made a show of searching her pockets every time someone came near, until the door suddenly opened from inside and she gasped a thanks at her oblivious benefactor. The stairs went up five flights in all, and Cíara’s apartment—of course—was on the fourth floor. Or the fifth, if Megan was to count it the way the Irish did, with the ground floor being zero rather than synonymous with first. The floor above it, what Americans would call the second floor, was the first, in Ireland. Almost three years living there and she still went to the wrong floor all the time if directed by a local.
No one answered when Megan knocked, which she did loudly enough to wake the dead or—more likely—hung over; in fact, she did wake the next-door neighbour, who opened the door with a glower that said Megan had awakened him, at least.
Megan, summarily ignoring the scowl, said, “Hi!” brightly. “Do you know if Cíara’s home?”
“She’s not answering the feckin door, so what do you think? I haven’t seen her since Thursday.”
“Do you usually?”
The youth—Megan couldn’t tell from the shaggy hair, skinny frame, and loose clothes whether they subscribed to a gender binary or not—shrugged sourly. “Yeh, we get home about the same time most nights. She was a feckin wreck Thursday, all after crying over somebody dying, and that’s the last I saw her.”
“Did she have a boyfriend or somebody she’d go stay with? Family?”
“Nah, only yer wan she’d been hanging out with. Who the feck are you, anyway?” Suspicion finally worked its way through the haze and irritation of an abrupt awakening, their scowl sharpening into something more personal.
“A friend of her employer’s,” Megan said truthfully. “We were worried about her. What one she’d been hanging out with?” A “wan” in Irish parlance generally meant a woman; “yer man” and “yer wan” had, Megan suspected, some kind of basis in the same kind of institutional sexism in the Irish language that begot the question “Was it a boy or a child?” when babies were born. She hadn’t quite worked up the resolution to try getting to the bottom of the linguistic matter, although it nagged at her whenever she heard it.
“I dunno, a tall wan with gobs of dark hair and a proper tan. Fit, if you like that type, and American. But not like you.”
Megan said, “Okay, thanks. Look, if you see Cíara, can you tell her Fionn’s worried about her?”
The neighbour shrugged and retreated into their apartment. Megan stared at the closed door a moment, then shrugged, too, and trotted back downstairs. Sleuthing had to be easier when you could wave a police badge at someone and demand answers, instead of slinking around, waking up the neighbours without ever finding out if your suspect was even home. Though it sounded like Liz had been to Cíara’s apartment, which could support the affair theory. Or at least a friendship, which seemed more likely, if Simon and Ellen’s beliefs about Liz’s preferences were right.
She pulled out her phone on the walk home, searching for personal information about Liz Darr as she took the long way to her apartment so she wouldn’t pass in front of the garage and catch Orla’s attention. Odds were that her boss wouldn’t try to get her to drive—Orla hated paying overtime more than most people hated liver and onions—but even entering the woman’s line of sight would remind her that Megan had a prohibited dog in her apartment, and an extra ten minutes of walking seemed worth avoiding that potential confrontation.
There were loads of articles about Liz, everything from her own blogs to interviews with the Times, book reviews and fan encounters, pictures dating back to high school, but nothing to indicate whether she’d ever dated women or had wanted to. Which meant absolutely nothing, of course, but from Meg’s perspective, Liz’s mother might not have known everything, and it would have been helpful to find Liz had had a tragic love affair with a college girlfriend to establish the possibility that she and Cíara O’Donnell had been dating. Evidence was leaning heavily toward not, though, and she had to remind herself th
at she’d gotten the idea that there was an affair going on from Niamh, who thrived on the most dramatic possible interpretation of any circumstance.
She tucked the phone back into her pocket as she went up to the apartment and said, “What good is the power of the internet if it can’t deliver relevant gossip to my fingertips when I want it?” to Mama Dog as she came in.
Mama had no answer and couldn’t be bothered to rise up and go for a walk when Megan shook the leash at her, but the puppies wriggled and squirmed blindly as she petted them with a fingertip and tickled their tummies. Then, exhausted from their efforts, they fell asleep again. Megan took Mama on a walk whether she liked it or not and returned home to watch Mama poke her puppies until they woke up and started to nurse. Then she gave a great, heaving sigh like she now carried the unwanted weight of the universe on her little bony shoulders and looked tragically at Megan, who laughed and fell backward onto the couch to study the ceiling as if it might contain some answers.
“Okay. How hard can it be to find Cíara, right? Just to talk to her, you know? That’s what the internet is for.” After another few seconds, she said, “I’m talking to dogs. Wow. Okay, then. Up and at ‘em, Meg. There must be more to your life than this.” She squirmed her phone out of her pocket and did a search on the girl’s name, which led her to plenty of women, none of whom—according to their photographs—were the one she wanted. A few attempts at narrowing the search—even using Cíara’s apartment address—achieved nearly identical hits and engendered a faint sense of exasperation. On one hand, it was probably good she couldn’t find someone armed with only their name and a vague guess at their age. On the other, it was a real bother when she wanted to be able to do that.