by Dicey Deere
“I mentioned, then, feeling helpless and guilty, about Natalie driving without a license. To that, after a moment, she said, ‘I am cognizant, Kate Burnside, of how to handle such affairs. It wit be taken care of.’” Kate looked at Torrey. “She meant she knew people, she would pull strings. The license problem would quietly drop down a … an oubliette.”
Pacing again, Kate began absentmindedly unplaiting her dark, luxuriant braid. “The accident was on Tuesday night. Natalie had mentioned that Tom Brannigan would be returning Wednesday morning from his brother’s wedding in Drumcliff. ‘We’ll marry right away!’ Natalie had told me, driving furiously through the rain toward Dublin, ‘We’ll be happy! I know it!’
“I’d taken the late bus back to Ballynagh on Tuesday night after the accident. So in the morning, Wednesday morning, I telephoned the hospital and learned that Natalie would be released in the late afternoon.”
Kate Burnside took a deep breath and looked at Torrey. “It was my first encounter with evil. That is, if evil is at all costs to override everyone else’s human feelings. Having her own way. I mean, of course, Sybil Sylvester.
“Anyway, Wednesday noontime I drove over to Sylvester Hall. I wanted to offer to drive Tom Brannigan to Dublin in the convertible to pick up Natalie at the hospital. But I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t upstairs in the coach house. The door to his room was partly open but he wasn’t there. The room looked somehow so empty. Just nothing on the dresser, and no personal things about. There was only the chauffeur’s uniform and cap on a hanger.
“At the hall, I found Mrs. Dugan, the housekeeper, in the kitchen and asked if she’d seen Tom Brannigan. She looked at me funny and said no. I had the feeling, though, that she was lying, that something was wrong and she didn’t want to say.
“Anyway, at about three in the afternoon, not knowing where Tom Brannigan was, or what Sybil Sylvester had told him about the accident, if anything, I drove in to Dublin to pick up Natalie.
“It was a bright, beautiful, sunny day in early October, this time of year. At the hospital, Natalie was waiting in the reception room, her arm heavily bandaged. She was pale, but otherwise looked … she’s really quite beautiful. And a nurse had brushed her butter-colored hair smooth, she couldn’t have managed it with her one arm. ‘I’m rather a mess, Kate,’ she said. She looked down at her sweater, a coral sweater; it had a streak of grease on the shoulder. ‘I’ll never get that off!’
“I’d put the convertible top down, it was such a beautiful, breezy day, just warm enough. But the traffic was horrendous and noisy, and I had to pay attention to my driving, I’d had the convertible only two weeks. So it wasn’t until we’d gotten onto Route N-eighty-one going south that we were able to talk. So I said—because I was a little puzzled, I couldn’t think why Tom hadn’t rushed to the hospital to see Natalie when he heard, unless—and it was a horrible thought—unless he didn’t know about the accident! Maybe Sybil Sylvester hadn’t told him! So I said to Natalie, there on the motorway, ‘I went to the coach house this noon, looking for Tom. But I couldn’t find him. I was a little worried.’
“At that, Natalie said, ‘Tom?’ And then again, sounding puzzled, ‘Tom?’”
Kate stopped unbraiding her hair. She looked at Torrey. “I didn’t understand. I said again to Natalie, ‘Tom.’
“She didn’t answer. I risked a sideways look at her. There was a puzzled frown between her brows. Then she laughed.”Oh, the new hound! The pup! So they’ve named him? But what’s wrong? He looked perfectly healthy yesterday. Or … was it yesterday? No, of course not! The day before?’ She rubbed her forehead.
“At that, I was bewildered. There was no new pup. The last litter had been five months ago.”
In the O’Sullivan’s barn, Kate raised her shoulders, and hugged her arms, chilled. “You must understand, Ms. Tunet, I’d no idea. But I knew something was wrong. ‘No,’ I said to Natalie, ‘Tom Brannigan.’
“‘Oh?’ Natalie said, ‘What have I missed? I’ve only been gone a couple of days! Or a day?’ And she laughed and ran her hand along her bandaged arm. ‘Who’s this … Brannigan? You did say Brannigan.’
“It frightened me. I gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to hold on to reality: the car, the road, the traffic, the wind blowing our hair about. I didn’t understand. I’d never heard of retrograde amnesia. Now I know it happens often with a concussion. A whole section of recent memory sheared off as though it were part of a cliff that falls into the sea. Something like that. Anyway … gone. But I was seventeen! I didn’t know. I could hardly drive, I was so aghast. Tom Brannigan no longer existed in Natalie’s mind.
“I left her at the steps of Sylvester Hall, I didn’t want to go inside. I watched Natalie walk up the steps, that broad half-moon of granite steps. The door closed behind her. What had happened to Tom Brannigan? I didn’t know.”
34
Twenty minutes after leaving Kate Burnside, Torrey wheeled her bike down Butler Street. The village seemed unreal, made of pasteboard, an Irish picture postcard splashed with October colors. The reality was what she’d learned from Kate Burnside.
At Coyle’s the Greengrocer’s, she skirted the outdoor bins of squash and potatoes and inside she bought the asparagus Jasper had asked her to bring home; he was making asparagus on toast with a Mornay sauce of Gruyere cheese for their lunch. By now he’d have finished his “Jasper” column.
“Your change, Ms. Tunet.”
“So,” Torrey said to Jasper, who was sorting the stalks of asparagas at the sink, “at the cairn, Kate told Ricard that Natalie had retrograde amnesia and wouldn’t remember that Tom Brannigan had ever existed. At that, Ricard laughed. He didn’t believe her! ‘What do you take me for?’ he’d asked her, ‘You’re lying, you’re just trying to protect your friend. That’s it, isn’t it?’
“And then, Jasper—here, use this towel. And then this Ricard character insisted to Kate that his extortion was more moral than Natalie’s action in keeping Dakin’s true patrimony a secret!”
Jasper, running cold water over the asparagus, gave a snort of laughter. “Someone was keeping Dakin’s true patrimony a secret. Only it wasn’t Natalie.”
“What d’you mean?”
“After Natalie’s accident with the Rolls, her great-aunt took her abroad on a trip to Italy, right? That’s what you told me. Sybil Sylvester had plans. Quite frankly, an embryo had to be gotten rid of, an embryo of which its possessor, Natalie, was ignorant.”
“Yes, that must’ve been what she—”
“But there was always the possibility that Natalie might get over her amnesia and remember Tom Brannigan. Then there’d be hell to pay.”
“Ummm.” Torrey nodded. “Sybil must’ve felt she was walking a high-wire. I can see that. Besides having to search out, and find, before too late—”
“Yes. But in Italy, she ran into a bit of luck. At their hotel in Florence they met Andrew Cameron. Good family, right religion, successful architect. And only thirty.”
Torrey put an arm around Jasper’s waist; he felt warm, solid, comforting. He was cutting up the Gruyère for the sauce. “Do go on.”
“You’d have thought that the stiff-necked Sybil Sylvester would’ve disapproved of such a speedy romance. But she didn’t. Not at all, my dear young friend. You can imagine why not.”
“Without half trying.”
“Indeed, Ms. Sybil couldn’t have been happier. And she allowed Natalie to marry Andrew Cameron in a matter of weeks. Allowed? Likely she pushed it. Pushing Tom Brannigan out of the picture, for sure.”
“Yes.”
“From what I’ve picked up in the village, Andrew Cameron was a handsome, strong-hearted, loving gem from Scotland. So Natalie was lucky, there.”
Torrey was silent, watching the steam begin to rise from the skillet. She was thinking how at Sylvester Hall there’d been a dictatorial progenitor who looked like a porcelain doll with a rosebud mouth, and who dined out and played bridge and guarded a secret. She sai
d, “Jasper, Kate Burnside mentioned that Sybil Sylvester died when Dakin was about eight years old. What’s that saying in the Bible about ‘Bread eaten in secret is pleasant’? So for more than eight years Sybil Sylvester had her pleasant-tasting bread.”
At three-thirty, Jasper left for Dublin, where he had an editorial meeting. Leaving, he turned in the doorway. “Did Kate Burnside say how that blackmailing bastard knew that Tom Brannigan was Dakin’s father?”
Torrey shook her head. “Kate said she’d asked him and he’d only said, ‘When hard-pressed, you can always find a golden egg.”
“Or a slashed throat,” Jasper said. The door closed behind him.
Alone, after some minutes, Torrey got up and took the jump rope from the hook beside the door. She pushed the kitchen chair out of the way and began skipping rope. It would steady her.
But almost at once the phone rang. Myra Schwartz calling from Interpreters International, the Boston office. “Torrey? Don’t you ever check your E-mail? Did you get my message?”
“Oh, no. Actually, I’ve been—” She stopped. Been getting myself entangled in a murder case. “Sorry, Myra. What’s up?”
“Money, honey.” Myra never wasted words in the one language she spoke, which was pure American. “A back-to-back assignment: Russia, directly after Budapest. October twenty-eighth. Five days, same Eastern European payment. Ginny will arrange the flights. What about that?”
“Yes. Terrific.” She dropped the jump rope, picked up a pen from her desk, and scrawled notes about the Department of Commerce, Rossya Hotel, Moscow.
When she hung up, she looked at the calendar on her desk. Budapest was six days from now. As for Moscow, luckily her Russian was fluent, she wouldn’t have to buckle down for that, just a bit of vocabulary concerning commerce. And a smidgen of Georges Simenon. Even so, time was short.
Dakin.
Was it because of Dakin that, against all odds, and making no sense, she stubbornly wanted to believe that Natalie Cameron was not the killer of her blackmailer?
“Well, yes,” Torrey said aloud. “Now that you ask.” From the top kitchen drawer she took out a chocolate bar with almonds. Tearing off the silver paper, she sat down at the kitchen table to think.
35
In the upstairs west hallway at Sylvester Hall, Jessie said, “Dakin? I seem to have found this key. Can’t think what it belongs to. So old and all! It was just lying there beside the grandfather clock.”
Dakin stopped; he’d been on his way downstairs. He took the key from Jessie. Antique sort of thing, thin, lacy looking. Could be the key to the escritoire opposite the grandfather clock, that seventeen-century escritoire with the inlaid kidskin top. “Let’s see.” He fitted the key into the lock and turned it. At once, a click. “That’s it, Jessie. Thanks. I’ll give the key to my mother.”
Jessie gone, he stood holding the key. He wasn’t going to look for his mother. He knew where she would be: in that dim corner in the old coach with its four-sided, beveled-glass lamps. She had, lately, a dreaming face; an elsewhere face, as he thought of it. Always before, she’d been there, attuned to him. Now she seemed to hesitate over even calling him by name. It bewildered him. He remembered that once, in his happy childhood days, when he’d been eight or nine, he’d asked her, “Why am I named Dakin? Is it from Daddy’s family? Or from your side?”
“Neither,” she’d told him, smiling. “I don’t know why. It just sprang to my mind when you were born. When they put you in my arms, I said, ‘Here’s Dakin! Here he is!’”
He looked down at the key in his hand. He felt as unsteady as though the earth had shuddered under his feet. Next month his mother would have been marrying Marshall West, whom she loved. But instead she’d be indicted for the murder of the blackmailer. Motive unknown.
Dakin sat down on the top step of the great staircase and put his head in his hands.
36
“Nurse Huddleson? Inspector O’Hare here. How’s our patient? Brannigan. Tom Brannigan. Conscious and lucid enough for me to—What? A relapse? His cousin? This morning?”
Two minutes later, Inspector O’Hare slammed down the receiver. “Goddamn it!”
Sergeant Jimmy Bryson looked up. He was sitting on the bench beside the door, blacking his shoes. Nelson was snoozing at his feet. It was five o’clock Thursday afternoon.
Inspector O’Hare said, “A young woman claiming to be Tom Brannigan’s cousin showed up at Glasshill Hospital ten o’clock this morning. Blather, blather, blather, the two of them, Exhausted him, he’s out of it again. A young woman, claiming—”
“Her,” Jimmy Bryson said. “Torrey Tunet.”
“Of course. Slim, with a pixie face, big gray eyes, all excited about—goddamn it!”
“Obstructing justice,” Sergeant Bryson said. He carefully ran the blacking sponge around the edge of the sole. It made all the difference in the look.
“We’ve no grounds for arresting her.” O’Hare said. “We never have.”
“Always mixing in,” Sergeant Bryson said. He blacked the heel. “That old chest in my uncle Frank’s storeroom? Ms. Plant says I should take a picture of it and send it to Sotheby’s. Could be worth something, she thinks. Sometimes they’ll put a photograph in their brochure for an auction, she says. She says they take about a third, their share. Christie’s, too. Same thing.”
Ms. Plant! Ms. Plant! O’Hare was sick of hearing what Ms. Plant said, believed, and knew. She was supposed to leave today for the antiques show in Cork, and he’d thought, Godspeed! Or the devil speed her. Whomever. But unfortunately, Monday evening, after dinner at Finney’s with Sergeant Bryson, she’d turned her ankle on the cobbled street. A bad sprain, it turned out, lots of swelling. She couldn’t drive, not for several days. Her rented Saab was parked out back of Nolan’s. Sergeant Bryson was sympathetic, and in O’Hare’s view, too damned attentive. Twice his age. Almost. As O’Hare had said to Noreen last night, “I thought that was more in France, a young man and an older woman. “Cheri,” Noreen had answered,”Colette. It was a book. And what about Helen Lavery’s sister, Maeve, forty, and married to the younger Forrest boy, twenty-six? So there you are.”
The phone rang. In his stocking feet, Bryson went to his desk, answered, and turned to Inspector O’Hare. “Gilbert Sanders, forensics at Dublin Castle.”
Inspector O’Hare pressed the button and picked up his phone. “Gilly?” He listened. “Yes … yes. Thanks, Gilly.” He put down the phone, shook his head, and blew out an exasperated breath. First, Ms. Tunet at Glasshill Hospital, and now this! Newsmongers like the Daily Mirror and the Irish Sun would delight in blowing it up big. His phone would be ringing every two minutes. Bad enough that photographers and journalists were already showing up in Ballynagh. “Damn them all! I’ve a job to do!” But at least it would soon be over: within the month, Natalie Cameron would be indicted for murder.
“Something up, Inspector?” Bryson was giving him his alert, intelligent look, that birddog look.
“Nothing that’ll send the apples spilling out of the cart, Jimmy. Dublin Castle has the report on the murder weapon. The penknife. Natalie Cameron’s fingerprints on it, of course. And Ricard’s. But at some time two other people handled that penknife. Unidentified fingerprints. We’ll check out Dakin Cameron.”
37
“Nurse Huddleson? This is Ms. Tunet, Tom Brannigan’s cousin. I hope he’s better since yesterday, I’m planning to visit him again as soon as—Oh, Inspector O’Hare? Did he? Well, actually, cousins by marriage, his sister married my—A relapse? I’m so sorry! No visitors, under the circum—? I’ll call again in a day or so to see when I can—Oh, I see. Inspector O’Hare. Well, thank you anyway, Nurse Huddleson.”
Torrey hung up the phone with such an angry jerk that the phone cord knocked over her teacup. Tea spilled across the kitchen table and down onto her jeans. Damn it, altogether!
But mopping the tea from the table, she couldn’t help suddenly grinning. O’Hare’s face would have gotten red with
anger when he’d learned of her visit to Glasshill Hospital, his gray-white eyebrows would have bristled, he’d have used that darling Sergeant Bryson as a sounding board to his rage. “That meddler!” he’d have grated out to Jimmy Bryson. And he’d have added a few other choice and unrepeatable words regarding that snoop, Ms. Torrey Tunet.
“Well, too bad, Inspector,” Torrey said aloud. But minutes later, in the bedroom, changing into her only other pair of jeans, she’d thought, with chagrin, So close. So close! In the hospital, voices outside in the corridor when before leaving, she’d asked Tom Brannigan, “Who struck you down? Who could have done it?”
On the coverlet, Tom Brannigan’s hands had clenched. His voice was bitter. “A man I hate! He must’ve seen my name on the register at Nolan’s. So he’d’ve known I had come. And why. The bastard! Ricard’s his name.”
He’d have known I had come. And why. At that, Torrey had leaned toward the hospital bed. She only half heard the crack of approaching footsteps in the corridor. “Why did you come back?” she asked, but the door was opening, Nurse Huddleson and the harrassed-looking young doctor came in. Nurse Huddleson looked discomfited, the doctor’s face looked grim. “No exceptions! No determinations made by staff members!” he was saying over his shoulder to Nurse Huddleson, “Visitors’ hours only! As stated. A hell of a way to run a … .” and so on.
Two minutes later, Torrey, chagrined, was standing at the bus stop outside the Glasshill Hospital, thinking, Why? Why had Tom Brannigan come back? Never mind! Tomorrow she’d return here for the answer.
So she had thought! But now! Now Inspector O’Hare had talked to Grasshill Hospital and destroyed her chance of learning anything more from Tom Brannigan. She’d be barred from visiting him. Still—
A man I hate. He must have seen my name on the register, so he’d have known Id come.