by Maddy Hunter
Michael Malooley? What was he doing in there? Bus drivers never took the tour with the guests. They always hung out in the nearest café with the other bus drivers so they could drink coffee and tell bus driver stories. Pinpricks of unease rode my spine. I didn’t like this one bit. Michael and Ira had to have something heinous planned, and I figured Gladys was the target. Ira Kuppelman wouldn’t be the first well-to-do senior to want to knock off his wife. He looked good enough to attract younger women. That had to be the scheme. Get rid of Gladys in favor of a younger, prettier trophy wife. Gladys probably didn’t have a clue what was in the works, which meant that by the time the shuttle returned to pick us up, she could already be dead. I needed to warn her, and I needed to do it fast.
I stuck my pinkies in my mouth and let out an earsplitting whistle. Chatter ceased. Bodies wheeled around. I waved my hand above my head so everyone could locate me, then raised my voice so I could be heard. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think we can make better use of our time than to stand around here for twenty minutes waiting for a bus. We could all use the exercise after that meal last night. I say we walk. Are you game?”
“I’m not game,” said Jackie. “How far a walk is it? I’m not wearing the right shoes and I already have a blister on my foot from yesterday.”
“I’m game,” said Nana. “We’ve sat on buses long enough as it is.”
Alice Tjarks nodded. “I agree with Marion. Besides, that shuttle will need to be aired out before anyone boards it again. Did you see?” She lowered her voice. “Our bus driver is on it.”
“All those in favor of walking say, ‘Yea,’” Osmond Chelsvig instructed. Osmond had served as the president of Windsor City’s electoral board for decades, so he was a natural to call for votes, though with his hearing loss, I feared we might be facing a lot of recounts. “Opposed, say, ‘Nay,’” he continued.
“Nay,” shouted Jackie.
“By my count we have a bunch of yeas and no nays, so the yeas have it. We walk.”
Jackie thrust her hand into the air. “Wait a minute. I said nay!”
“Give it a rest,” I advised. “You’re outnumbered.”
“My vote was properly cast. It shouldn’t be discounted on someone’s whim. That’s only supposed to happen in presidential elections.”
“Maybe we should line up according to height,” Tilly Hovick suggested, directing people with her walking stick. “Short people in the front, tall people in the back.” I suspected Tilly might have taught kindergarten before she hit the college circuit, but I noticed confusion in the ranks as people stood shoulder to shoulder, trying to decide who was taller. Everyone had shrunk to about the same height. Uh-oh. We might never get out of here if a few people demanded to have measurements taken.
“Tell you what,” I called out. “Just start walking. You don’t have to be in any kind of order.” Tilly shot me a disapproving look, then shook her head in a way that suggested if mass chaos broke out, she would not be held liable. Jackie let out an exaggerated sigh beside me.
“Well, I’m not doing any more walking. I walked enough yesterday. I’m staying put and waiting for the next bus.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll see you down there.”
She sucked in her breath. “What? You’re going to go off and leave me?”
“Come on, dear,” Nana shouted to me. “You don’t wanna be left behind.”
“Duty calls.” I waved my forefinger at Jackie in farewell and caught up with Nana and Tilly as they began the downhill march to the shore. We fell in line at the back of the group, soaking in sights that were completely alien to the Iowa landscape. A mountainous slope of lichen-encrusted rock flanked us on the right, while to our left, a wide border of scorched yellow grass skirted an endless span of shoreline where rocks were strewn helter-skelter, seaweed blackened even the palest stone, and the midnight blue waters of the North Atlantic churned up foam as thick as the froth on a pint of Guinness. The waves made a whooshing sound as they rushed onto shore, and I found their soothing, steady rhythm rather hypnotic. The locals probably had some secret way of determining whether the tide was coming in or going out, but I’d have to live around the ocean for a long time before I’d ever be able to figure it out. The sea certainly inspired romantic notions, but for overall practicality, the Tidal Wave at the water park a few towns over from Windsor City suited me just fine.
I threaded my arm through Nana’s, like a hitchhiker catching a ride on a speeding train. “How many days a week does your exercise class meet?” I asked, breathless from trying to keep up.
“Three days a week usually, but I opted for the accelerated class, so we meet every day except weekends.”
“Great,” I panted, feeling a stitch in my side. I wondered if Nana’s class was open to nonseniors.
A gull circled above us and let out a whining shriek as it glided on a downdraft. I wondered if gulls always shrieked like that, or if this was its gut reaction to Nana’s new hairdo.
“I found some information about the castle for you, dear. Just like you asked. I woulda had it sooner, but that power outage last night messed me up. You’re right to be suspicious about the place. Either Ballybantry is home to one mean ghost, or there’s an awful lot a sick people takin’ vacations in Ireland when they should be in hospitals back home. Folks are dyin’ left and right in that place, Emily. Mostly since the renovations were done.”
“The extensive redecorating inside the castle may have angered one of the ghosts in residence,” said Tilly. “Or worse yet, it may have disturbed a supernatural presence that had lain dormant for centuries and released it into the world. Either way, the cluster of deaths at Ballybantry Castle is far too great to deem it a natural occurrence. It’s statistically impossible for that many people from different parts of the world to die from heart disease at one chance location.”
“Is that how the deaths were explained?” I asked.
Nana took up the story. “The village paper printed notices of the deaths. They were all members of various tour groups, all in their seventies and eighties. Most a the write-ups said that the deceased had probably suffered a heart attack. I guess if you’re eighty years old and you drop dead suddenly, people always think it’s your heart. But there wasn’t no mention of the police doin’ any more investigatin’.”
“How many deaths have there been?” I asked.
“Forty-eight,” said Nana. “Over two years.”
“FORTY-EIGHT?” My God, the Irish might have a lack of curiosity, but you’d think that forty-eight deaths in one small castle might raise the eyebrows of someone in law enforcement. Or was the castle simply located in too remote an area to raise any blips on the radar screen?
“I found some death notices when the castle was a bedand-breakfast,” Nana continued, “but only one or two over a period of some twenty years.”
“That’s more consistent with statistical probability,” Tilly added. “Tell her about the exorcism, Marion.”
“Oh, yeah. Back in 1832 the owners of the castle sought out the local village priest to perform an exorcism. They complained of wanderin’ spirits who slammed doors, cried in the night, left footprints on the floor, and were a general nuisance. So the priest performed the exorcism and blessed the castle, and everything seemed pretty peaceful for over a hundred and sixty years.”
“Until the remodeling project,” I offered. We were narrowing the field, but I still had lots of unanswered questions. “A board of American investors share part ownership of the castle. Did you happen to find out the names of any of the board members?”
“I didn’t run across no information about a board of investors, dear. If you like, I’ll check when we get back.”
“Were you able to find out anything about the Englishman who was the original owner of the castle?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure there’s a portrait of him and his children hanging in my room. And the children all share a really peculiar trait. Their toes are stuck together.�
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“No kiddin’,” said Nana.
“Syndactyly,” said Tilly.
“Sin-what?” I asked.
“Syndactyly,” Tilly repeated. “It’s a birth defect in which two or more fingers or toes are fused together, either with partial or total webbing. If I recall the statistics, the condition occurs one in every three thousand live births in the United States. Fusion of the third and fourth digits of the hands is most common. Fusion of the toes is more rare, but I can’t be specific about how rare. And it doesn’t happen out of the blue. The condition is an inherited trait, passed on from one generation to the next in a family bloodline.”
“So if Ballybantry’s original owners showed signs of the defect back in the sixteen hundreds, their descendants would still exhibit the defect today?”
“Not all of them, of course. The condition seems to manifest itself randomly within families, but yes, the defect would certainly exist. Though it would have been impossible for the family who originally built Ballybantry to have passed the trait on.”
“WHAT?” I screeched to a grinding halt, nearly tearing Nana’s arm out of its socket as she continued forward. “Why couldn’t they have passed the trait on?”
Tilly paused in the middle of the roadway and turned around to face us. “You haven’t finished your story, Marion. Go ahead. Tell her what you found.”
Nana rubbed her shoulder protectively. “I enjoy walkin’ with you, dear, but these quick stops are murder on my joints. All right, then. The rest a the story. The man who built the castle was an English lord by the name a Ticklepenny. He had three children. We know one daughter died tragically after he disowned her, and he didn’t have a day a luck after that. His wife and two remaining children fell victim to a fever some months later, and they died within days of each other, so with no family to keep him here, he abandoned the castle and moved back to England, where he pretty much became a recluse. He didn’t have no other relatives. He was last in the line a Ticklepennys, so when he died, the family name died with him.”
“How did you find all that out?” I asked in amazement.
“You can find anything on the Internet, dear, so long’s you know where to look.”
“So you see, Emily,” Tilly recapped, “it would have been impossible for the Ticklepennys to pass on their congenital anomaly because, unfortunately, with the death of the children, the entire bloodline was wiped out.”
My mind was working at warp speed. “What about his wife? Could she have been the one to carry the gene? Could she have had siblings who passed on the condition?”
Nana shook her head. “There wasn’t no good information about her on-line, except that she was the only child a Lord and Lady Pluckrose a County Sussex, England.”
“She was an only child?” Drat. So if it wasn’t a Ticklepenny or Pluckrose ancestor who was making the bloody footprints in the castle, who was making them? Why couldn’t I connect any of the dots? Why wasn’t any of this making sense?
As we broke into a near run to catch up with the rest of the group, the terrain grew more dramatic. In the distance, set against the blue of a cloudless sky, a plateau of sheer rock rose hundreds of feet into the air, then sloped toward the sea in uneven terraces that were as jagged as sharks’ teeth. Horizontal bands of red rock striated the cliff and looked like open wounds slashed into the stone.
Tilly pointed to the cliff with her walking stick. “You see that bright ochre color in the stone? The rock here has a high iron content. That’s why it’s red. And if you look very closely, you can make out a single column of rock on the first terrace below the plateau. That’s known as the ‘chimney stack.’”
I squinted at the column in question. It looked like another Cromwellian ruin to me.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to hurry ahead and tell the others. They might not have noticed.” Off she went at double-time, leaving us in the dust. I stared after her.
“Is Tilly in your exercise class too?”
Nana shook her head. “She gets a real good pension from the university, so she hired a personal trainer.”
“And how does she know so much about this place if she’s never been here before?”
Nana unzipped her fanny pack and pulled out a cream-colored pamphlet. “She read the brochure. Maybe you didn’t get one. They were in a plastic dispenser on the wall in the visitors’ center. You wanna borrow mine?”
I hesitated as a sound echoed out from behind us. Clop-clop. Clop-clop. Clop-clop. I scooted Nana toward the shoulder of the road and whirled around, expecting to see a horse galloping toward us, but it wasn’t a horse.
“Wait up!” Jackie ran awkwardly toward us in her wedges with the high wooden heels. “It’s no fun waiting up there all by myself!”
“However do you run in those shoes, dear?” Nana asked when she caught up to us.
Jackie bent over at the waist, clutched her side, and sucked in air. “These are nothing,” she gasped. “Good thing I didn’t wear my two-band leather stilettos. Those would have been a real bitch.”
We waited long enough for her to catch her breath, then took off down the road again. “We’re really laggin’ behind,” Nana fretted. “By the time we get to the causeway, it’ll be time to head back. I hope George takes good pictures. That might be the only way I’ll get to see anything.”
“How was George able to maneuver his way onto the bus when the rest of you couldn’t?” I inquired.
“The bus driver made a special concession for him ’cause of his leg. It was painin’ him some today.”
I recalled George’s leg aching last year in Switzerland too. “The pain has something to do with barometric conditions, doesn’t it?”
“I suspect it has more to do with all the cloggin’ he done last night.”
“George was clogging? With his prosthetic leg?”
“He’s very agile and light on his feet, dear, even with the prosthesis. When the dance captain asked for volunteers, George was the first one up there. Him and Bernice. His steel-toed boots worked out real good for cloggin’. He mighta danced all night if the power hadn’t went out. He told me later he mighta had a career in competitive dancin’ if his leg hadn’t got blown off in the war. He done real good up there with the pros. And you know, Emily, I never noticed before, but George has one fine heinie on him. All the ladies were commentin’. The bubble-butts get all the praise, but I’ll take a tomato-butt like George’s any day.” She locked her hands about a foot apart in the air. “I like somethin’ substantial to grab on to.”
Oh, God. Was this normal? Did other people’s grandmothers discuss men’s heinies with such enthusiasm? Maybe I should check out what she was reading these days. Whatever it was, I bet it wasn’t on the Legion of Mary’s ten hot picks for summer. “So how did Bernice do?” I asked in a quick change of subject.
“She done good until the power failed. She lost her balance in the dark and butted heads with the dance captain. Knocked him out cold. And it didn’t help none that the other dancers ran into each other and accidentally stomped on his face.”
Jackie smacked my arm. “You see? I told you that could happen.”
“Bernice wasn’t hurt, was she?”
“She’s fine, dear. Bernice’s head is like a rock.”
Far ahead of us, at the foot of the great stone plateau, where the rock had eroded to lesser heights, a rugged spit of land knifed into the sea, its choppy terrain visible even from where we were. “That has to be the causeway,” I said by pure deduction. Not only did the road terminate at that point, but the blue shuttle bus was parked there and loading up passengers.
“You s’pose I could ask you girls’ opinion about somethin’ before we join the others?” Nana asked somewhat reluctantly.
“I love rendering my opinion,” gushed Jackie, abandoning my side to tag along beside Nana. “Fire away.”
“It’s about George.” Nana sighed. “I think I’m losin’ him to Tilly.”
“No,” I soothed, cu
rling my arm around her shoulders to lend moral support. “What makes you say that?”
“Men like hot babes, Emily. I’m not hot anymore.”
“And Tilly is?” I questioned.
Jackie made a pshaw sound. “Shoot, Mrs. S., you’re a lot hotter than she is. If I were a guy, which, of course, I’m not, but if I was, or ever had been, you’d be the babe for me.”