by Lisa Alber
“She didn’t work?”
“I got the impression she was between jobs or maybe on hiatus.”
“How long has she lived in the area?”
“Not long—a year?”
“Where did she move here from?”
“I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I’m not sure. Wait, let me think.” He continued rubbing his side. “Today is, what?”
“Early Saturday morning.”
Nathan closed his eyes. “Thursday, then. Thursday night. Or Friday early. She took a look at my toe.”
“You’re sure about that?” Danny said.
“That’s what I remember.”
Which was the problem. Nathan’s memory.
Danny softened his voice. “Friday morning, yesterday, after you had locked yourself in your room, Zoe mentioned your antics. Is that what Zoe meant? That she’d heard you go to Annie’s house in the middle of the night?”
Nathan shook his head, but he couldn’t hide his uncertainty. “I must have gone the night before, then. Wednesday night.”
Benjy’s voice rose. “Careful!” Two men approached the house carrying a stretcher. “Don’t step on the bloody bouquet. There’s meaning there.”
Danny excused himself from Nathan. The men eased their way past the withered bouquet. Danny overheard one of them grumbling about Benjy the Bagger needing his bloody nicotine fix and Danny caught up with Benjy as he lit another cigarette near his car.
“What was that about the meaning of the bouquet?”
“The meaning of the flowers more like,” Benjy said. “Red roses mean love and such like. That’s one bloody strange-looking gathering of flowers over there. Find out what they mean. Symbolism, yeah?”
Benjy had a quirky, unscientific streak that never failed to surprise Danny.
“They’re withered,” Benjy called after Danny’s retreating back. “Too withered. And I know what that means. Unfortunately.”
“What then?”
“Rejected love, that’s what.”
forty-four
Nathan overheard the pathologist calling out to Danny: rejected love. He rocked and concentrated on his throbbing toe, the way the pain radiated up his foot with the same pulse as his heartbeat, making his head ache and his teeth chatter. The last time he’d seen Annie, he’d stumbled in out of the rain, flinching against the glare of the outdoor lights. Annie had appeared in the doorway like a waxen effigy, her skin pale and tight over her face. “I’m glad it’s you, but you gave me a startle like to scare the bejesus out of me. It might be good if you forewarned me next time.”
She had beckoned him into the house without stepping backward. She let him brush against her and grabbed him in a fierce hello hug. “Frightful messes, the two of us,” she’d said and let him go.
She took one look at his toe and pronounced him fit for a doctor. “You’ll lose the nail. Do you sleepwalk?”
“I’m not sure. Zoe might know.”
“But night terrors for sure.”
It wasn’t a question so Nathan didn’t respond. Lately the terrors had worsened with a vengeance.
Annie helped him along the passage to her front room. Two sofas sat at right angles to each other in front of a fireplace. Wall shelves laden with books rose to the ceiling. The vase he’d given her sat on a side table in front of a picture window. “I’ll tape the toe to its neighbor but that’s not a long-term solution. Promise me you’ll go to a doctor.”
“I promise.” He spied a spiral-bound notebook opened to a page filled with writing. “I interrupted you.”
“Just my journal.” She tucked the journal into an antique escritoire.
He’d never have guessed her for a scribbler in the dark of night. Scribbling his thoughts had always felt dangerous, as if consigning his nightmares to paper rendered them more real. At the behest of his therapist in the psychiatric hospital, he’d tried, only to feel more paranoia than relief.
He asked her when she returned with bandages, “Do you find journaling helpful?”
She cut a length of bandage. The security lights that he’d triggered were still on and they shone through the window. Their harsh light made the grey in her hair glow. “I do. Writing helps me process my thoughts.”
She’d fixed him tea then, and they’d sat for a while in the dark when the security lights clicked off. Now, back in their glare, he thought about her journal. She’d probably processed a few thoughts about him. It would be odd if she hadn’t, given his erratic behavior. A knot tightened in his stomach. He tried to tell himself that it made no bother what she’d written about him. It was none of his bloody business.
But it bothered him. He saw the way people reacted to him, with impatience, with wariness, with fear as if he were contagious. However, Annie had seen past his teetering surface to his core, a core that he knew could be as solid as one of his fired vases. He longed to feel that strength, to know what she saw in him. Annie’s insights would reveal the truth about himself; reading her journal would be his own personal firing process. He wanted that journal.
Nathan forced himself to loosen his grip on the wall when Danny returned and sat down next to him. “How are you?” he said.
“I can’t feel my feet.”
“You’re in shock, I expect. Can you show me the text message you received?”
That was easy enough. Please come. Hurry.
“Annie’s in your contacts list, I see,” Danny said. “You knew to come here when you read her text?”
“Seemed logical.”
“When you arrived, what did you do?”
“The bouquet made me uneasy, and her indoor lights were off even though her car is here. I checked.” He pointed to a detached garage with windows. “I rang the bell for five minutes straight. After that, I called the guards.”
“You didn’t go inside?”
“No.” Nathan shifted, wincing. “Am I free to leave now?”
“Hold tight,” Danny said. “Not long now.”
He excused himself again, and Nathan hoped to Christ that would be the last of it. He didn’t want to have to lie again. His vision was already blurred around the edges. He was in for a bad night made worse because, although he’d searched, he hadn’t found Annie’s journal in the escritoire. Or in the office desk. Or in the night table.
She lived alone. She wouldn’t hide the journal under a floorboard. She’d store it someplace easy. All he wanted was a piece of her to keep for himself, to help himself, but someone had gotten to the journal ahead of him.
Nathan averted his gaze from the desiccated bouquet. His teeth chattered. Yes, tonight was going to be horrific.
forty-five
The receptionist at Cornmarket Psychotherapy ignored Danny in favor of beaming her smile at O’Neil. “Dr. Browne is with a patient at the moment, but she can see you after her session.”
Danny wandered to the windows and gazed down at the Clare People newspaper office across the street. He pulled out his mobile, checking for a message from the hospital about Ellen’s transfer back to Ennis. The roundtrips back and forth to the Limerick hospital were killing him. He tried to keep up with the paperwork for the investigation after the children went to bed but found himself nodding off at the kitchen table. This morning he’d studied the bags under his eyes in the mirror and for a moment entertained the idea that he was going mad like Nathan.
“Dr. Browne will see you now,” the receptionist called.
She led them out of the reception area and down a corridor with in-session signs hanging on several doors. Eileen Browne met them in her antechamber. Soothing choral music played on a hidden sound system and a deck of playing cards sat on a side table, ready for nervous fingers.
Without word, the doctor beckoned them into her inner sanctum, where a couple of ergonomically correct chairs stood in front of her desk. She tucked stray hairs into the braids that encircled her head and considered them with a neutral expressi
on.
“Thank you for seeing us on short notice,” Danny said.
“You’re fine. I keep Saturday mornings free for emergency appointments. This counts.”
“As I mentioned on the phone, we found your weekly appointments listed in Annie Belden’s calendar. Why was she seeing you?”
Browne’s professional expression broke. She grabbed a tissue from a box on her desk and dabbed her nose. “You don’t need me to answer that question.”
“How do you figure that?” Danny said.
“Her journal. It’s all there, I’m sure.”
Danny glanced at O’Neil. He shook his head, his puzzlement evident.
“We didn’t find a journal,” Danny said.
Browne crumpled her tissue. “That’s odd.” She twirled her chair so she faced the window and blue sky that peeped through rainclouds. “Or maybe it isn’t. Do you have a cause of death yet?”
“Not yet, but soon. She looked peaceful though.”
“Indeed. As she would.”
Danny leaned forward with waning patience. What was it with medical professionals? They spoke in half thoughts and left the most important bits of thought out of the equation altogether. “Come on, then,” he said. “Say what you mean.”
Browne tapped her fingers on the desk. “There’s a confidentiality issue here, as you know.”
Danny clamped his mouth shut and let O’Neil take over. Danny knew when to unleash O’Neil’s natural lady charms.
“We encountered a couple of oddities when we arrived at Annie’s house,” O’Neil said. “And now there’s the missing journal to consider. We’re hoping you can help us sort through what might be happening. It seems that you were as much a friend as a therapist. We could use your insights.”
Browne threw her tissue into a wastebasket. “I hate that Annie died. She wasn’t meant to. She was meant to live. In many ways she was improving.” She rose. “Please leave now. I’ll meet you at Charlie Stewart’s on along Parnell Street. Give me twenty minutes.”
Out in reception, Dr. Browne shook their hands. “I’m sorry I can’t help you. You’ll need to go through the courts like everyone else.”
Dr. Browne arrived at the pub on time to the minute. She sat down without removing her coat. “There’s an unofficial truism in therapy circles: Don’t trust depressives when they’re past the worst. Why? Because that’s when they’re most vulnerable to suicidal ideation. They have the energy to follow through on it, you see?”
“Suicide,” Danny said, testing the notion.
“Annie was diabetic,” Browne said. “An overdose of insulin would look peaceful, indeed.”
“Ah,” O’Neil said. “I’d best let Benjy know to check for insulin.” He pulled out his mobile and excused himself to make the call outside.
“We found syringes in the house, unused, but no medications,” Danny said. “Was she on any other medications?”
“Antidepressants.”
“Did Annie talk to you about what she wrote in her journal?” Danny said.
“Not always. I often recommend that patients write as if they’re talking to me, which is self-serving. I find that if they’ve pretended to talk to me in their journals, they’re more apt to talk to me in reality.” She smiled, showing dimples that turned her face impish. The smile fell as soon as it had risen. “Annie was too smart to fall for that trick.”
“Why is that?” Danny said.
“She worked as a psychiatric nurse in Dublin before moving here. Fleeing here, more like, to begin fresh.”
“Why isn’t it odd that her journal went missing?”
“She would have destroyed it. That I can say with certitude.”
Danny thought about the missing journal, about what it contained that Annie might not want anyone to read, and likewise what it contained that another person might want to read.
O’Neil slipped back into the pub and sat down. Outside, a laden raincloud parked itself over Ennis and began emptying itself out. The rain tap-tapped against the windows. Browne tapped her fingers in a similar rhythm.
“Annie worked in Dundrum,” she said. “The big psych hospital in Dublin. Harrowing work, to hear her tell it. Acute care, mind you, for the mentally ill and criminally insane. She had one patient on her watch, a man named Cedric Gibson. You’ve heard of him?”
“Vaguely,” Danny said.
“The north-end kidnapping, on the quays,” she said. “Cedric Gibson was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He played a pretty game of it with his claims of diminished capacity. Fooled the lot of them, and he was young, too. Nineteen at the time. A mad genius, really, landing himself in the psych hospital. Should have been life in prison, full stop.”
Danny remembered the case now. Gibson kidnapped the daughter of a Swiss diplomat after stalking her for months. She died while tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse. According to his defense, he hadn’t meant to hurt her. He’d only wanted to know her better. He would have let her go. The usual shite. She’d died of heart failure, a fatal combination of terror and a congenital defect.
“You’re saying that his insanity was a load of bollocks?”
“He knew what he was about. He was that sane he could have won a political election, or maybe that’s a bad example. He knew how to play his game, anyhow. In Dundrum, he was a model patient, working through his anger-management issues and his mommy issues and his substance-abuse issues and taking his meds.” She shook her head. “Along the way, he hooked poor Annie well and good. She became his number-one supporter for the review boards.”
“Please don’t tell me she fell in love with him.”
“She did, unfortunately. He was assigned to her because she was the most senior psych nurse on staff. She saw him in session almost every day. I suppose it started there, the slow squirreling into her fond graces. But Jesus.” She shook her head again. “Have you been?”
“To Dundrum? No.”
“The place is grim, might as well be in the Middle Ages. We’ll see what the coming mental health reform does.” She sipped her beer. “Right, then. Annie. She advocated for Cedric Gibson to the review boards, swearing by all that was good and right that his years in the hospital had worked wonders on him. He was fit for the life outside, first at a residential outpatient home, and then another year later as a free man. She fought hard, and she believed his line all along.”
Browne pulled off her coat and fanned her flushed face with a menu. “What’s the first thing Mr. Cedric Gibson does as a free man?”
Danny shook his head.
“He abducted Annie,” she said.
forty-six
When Merrit agreed to let the Earrach Festival be held in Liam’s back field, she hadn’t understood the magnitude of the event. First of all, she’d had to learn how to pronounce Earrach, Irish for “spring.” ARR-ack, with trilling rs and an impossibly hard k from the back of the throat. She’d given up saying the word aloud—she sounded ridiculous—and reconciled herself to the Event, capital E intended, now a little over a week away.
Merrit had pictured a tent raised against the inevitable spring showers and portable heaters to lessen the chill. She hadn’t given the logistics much thought until now.
She perused the showroom of Imperial Marquees, astounded by the diversity and extravagance of the available “tents” for hire. These weren’t tents; these were temporary structures. She stooped to peer at a scale model of the Faery Light Marquee with a clear roof and strands of lights strewn throughout.
“Or we have the French Vintage Marquee,” Louise, the event manager, said. “And then you must consider the liners and leg drapes and a platform.”
“Platform?”
“The floor, dear. You can’t have your guests stepping on sheep dung.”
Feeling lightheaded, Merrit excused herself and wandered toward Liam and Zoe. They sat on chairs, perusing spec sheets and portfolios. Zoe held Liam’s hand. She smiled and waved with the other hand.
“We found
one that might be perfect,” she said.
Liam slipped his hand out of Zoe’s. He had insisted on coming along, that he was grand, and that Zoe should come, too, if Merrit was going to be such a bloody nuisance about his welfare.
“It’s called the Chill Zone Marquee,” Zoe said. “See? It has seating areas rather than formal table settings, and an area for the band.”
“What band?” Merrit said.
Zoe peered at Liam. “Did I misunderstand?”
Liam shook his head. “Bank holiday on Monday, so why not let the festivities go long into the night? The Matchmaker’s Festival includes traditional music.”
“But this isn’t the Matchmaker’s Festival,” Merrit said. “This was supposed to be—I don’t know—a little party.”
“Ay, a little party.”
Merrit retreated back to the models, cursing the Irish tendency for understatement. “A wee bit of craic” could mean an all-night blowout. “Down the road” could mean five miles to the next village.
She found the model for the Chill Zone Marquee. It looked fine to her. Glancing up, she caught Zoe holding Liam’s hand again. They spoke in a private manner, and Merrit suspected that if she approached, they’d go silent on her.
Liam had taken to Zoe, to be sure. Merrit understood the appeal. He needed variety and stimulation. But still, she didn’t care for Zoe’s overfamiliarity and didn’t care for how she felt not liking it, as if she were missing out on something herself.
Merrit continued past more scale models toward the toilets. A long row of wall panels hid the toilets and offices from view of the showroom. Zoe and Liam sat on one side of the partition while Merrit hovered a few feet from them on the other side. Zoe’s vanilla scent drifted on the air.
Zoe laughed. “Off with you, then. What more do you need?” Her voice turned serious. “I can’t keep doing it, though. I worry about my dad. How he might leave me again.”
Liam hmmed like he did when people came to him to be matched. An open invitation. Merrit settled in, eager to know Zoe beyond her shimmering blue scarves and butterfly accessories.