by Catie Murphy
“I don’t know,” Sondra said bitterly. “Irish who hate the British, maybe. There are people who still do.”
A horrified little silence filled the back half of the car before Raquel, chirpily, said, “But at least the title isn’t extinct!”
“Which we can’t prove without a DNA sample that no one is inclined to give us,” Sondra said. “I don’t know why it matters to any of you.”
Raquel’s attempt at cheerfulness failed and she snapped, “Well, maybe if you were more involved with the family it would matter more to you.”
“I am more involved than you will ever know.”
“Right, because you and Mama weren’t even speaking —”
Megan, in the tone of a driver who couldn’t hear family spats, said, “Would you like to stop for lunch? We’re just outside of Mohill now.”
“Oh my God, Mohill! I know somebody there!” Jessie’s enthusiasm startled the dogs, who woke up from their naps with whuffs and whines. “I’ve got an Ancestry dot com friend who lives there. Oooh, I have to text him!”
She whipped her phone out while her sisters stared at her in brittle silence. Sondra finally broke it by saying, “Lunch seems like it might be a good idea. I’m sure the dogs could use a chance to stretch their legs too.”
Megan gave her a genuinely grateful smile in the rearview mirror. “Probably. I’ll take them for a walk while you ladies eat, and we’ll drive the last few miles after lunch.”
“Flynn says to meet him at the Soup Bowl Restaurant,” Jessie said a moment later. “He says it’s brilliant.”
“We’ll all walk the dogs,” Raquel offered. “Then you can eat with us, Megan. It wouldn’t be nice to leave you out of everything.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Megan promised. “I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“Apparently Jessie’s got an internet boyfriend who’ll be intruding already, so one more person won’t hurt. And I’d like to help walk them.”
“He’s not an internet boyfriend,” Jessie spat, but much to Megan’s relief, they were in Mohill and finding a place to park before the argument could really take off.
CHAPTER 10
Sondra lifted the carrier into Megan’s hands when Megan opened the car doors, and crouched to meet the dogs as they came out of the carrier, shaking themselves and stretching. Megan had taken them on road trips before (in rented cars, not the Leprechaun vehicles), and knew they traveled well, but reaching their destination with no car sickness or accidents still came as a relief. Thong stretched long and leaned heavily into Sondra’s hand when she offered it to her, and Dip ran in circles yipping and jumping for attention. Megan clipped leads on them and they tried going in opposite directions with her in the middle, until Jessie, smiling, took Thong’s leash. “It looks like sort of a one-horse town.”
“Pretty, though,” Raquel said. Mohill, County Leitrim was a pretty town, built straight along a main road with some afterthoughts spidering out to the sides, as many Irish villages were. Hardly a building to be seen stood over two stories in height, and often the upper stories were painted in another colour to the lower, or covered in brick and stone that gave each establishment a personality of its own. By the time they’d finished walking the dogs, Megan thought they’d seen most of the village, including a visit to a statue of the last Irish bard, O’Carolan, who sat forever playing his harp to the Mohill streets. Everybody, even Sondra, had paused at the brown-framed tourist information signs that cropped up in most Irish towns, highlighting local history and sights of interest, and Megan knew more about Lough Rynn when they got back to the car than she had when they’d started out.
“Someone here in Mohill must know something about the Edgeworth family,” Jessie said eagerly. “We can tell them we’re related to the old earls and see what they know about the Lough Rynn House and who lived there.”
“No, we can’t,” Sondra said. “We have no proof and it’s idiotic to go prancing around saying Cleopatra was your ancestor.”
“I thought people always claimed to be Cleopatra reincarnated, not her descendants,” Raquel objected, and Sondra’s mouth tightened.
“Whatever. You get the idea. I don’t want to be spreading absurd stories around.”
“It’s not absurd! We’ve got all of Gigi’s diaries—”
“They’re only anecdotal, Raquel, and we don’t even have them with us.”
Megan said, “You—” and swallowed it, not actually wanting to get involved in the argument.
Sondra didn’t hear her at all, and continued on just as sharply as before. “Without genetic testing we don’t know for sure, and people in Ireland are forever hearing about how some tourist’s great-great-grandfather was Irish-born and they feel such a connection and all of it and I won’t have it. Especially with Mom’s death. What if it is related to this earldom nonsense? I don’t want my baby sisters going around making themselves targets.”
“I’m not a baby!”
“You’re still my baby sister!”
Megan turned her attention down the street toward the café they were meant to lunch at, trying not to show any expression as the women fell into another argument. There were a few walkers along the road, mothers with buggies stopping to chat to each other, and older people making their way along, alone or in pairs, to whatever business they had that day. Maybe, she thought hopefully, maybe she could just suddenly dash down the street and join them, leaving the sisters to fight among themselves.
Jessie was saying, “I don’t know what the big deal is, if they’ve all heard ‘omg I’m Irish’ before,” and Raquel, whose larger-than-life personality of the first hour Megan had known her was apparently permanently buried, kept murmuring, “Let’s not fight, let’s not fight,” until both Jessie and Sondra turned on her, instead. Tears welled up and Raquel’s jaw trembled stoically as she knelt to pay attention to Thong, who had come to press against her ankles. Megan wondered if the three of them had fought so bitterly when their mother was alive, or if grief exacerbated latent tendencies.
“We don’t have to mention the Edgeworth connection,” Raquel said, mostly to Thong. “Sonny’s right about not having proof. We don’t even have any of Gigi Elsie’s diaries with us, and I don’t think we’re going to get the DNA sample we were hoping for. But even if it is just a fairy tale, it’s nice to believe in, so maybe we should just be happy with that. Why don’t we have a look around the grounds so we can get an idea of what it might have been like when the earls lived here, and maybe that’s enough.”
Megan, for the second time, started, “You have—” but Jessie overran her, demanding, “What happened to doing this for Mama? Have we come this far to stop now?” and Megan went quiet. There was no good time to say anything; she was the hired help, not part of their conversation, even if having someone there to interrupt might be what they needed.
Raquel looked up, her face full of tears and her voice sharp. “I don’t know, Jessie! Maybe!”
“Jessie . . . ?” A young man in a raincoat, one of the locals Megan had noticed earlier, approached, a tentative smile on a face pink with anxiety. “Jessie Williams? Hey, hi, it’s . . . it’s Flynn.”
“Flynn!” Jessie shrieked in delighted recognition and threw herself at the young man. “Oh my god, hi! I can’t believe I’m really meeting you! Raq, Sonny, this is my friend Flynn from Ancestry. He’s really nice and I can’t believe you’re actually here!”
“We hooked up on Ancestry because she was looking into local genealogy,” Flynn said to Sondra. “Nobody really looks for information around Mohill, so we got to talking, and—it’s mental you’re here,” he said to Jessie. “Why didn’t you say you were coming? You disappeared off social media and then all of a sudden you’re here?”
“You hooked up?” Sondra asked incredulously. “What is this, taking advantage of Mom’s death for an international booty call? And now I have to wonder if Reed was the cheater or if you were cheating on him!”
Jessie bellowed, “Oh my Go
d, will you lay off!” at the same time Flynn’s pleasant features went white with horror.
“Your mom died? Oh my god, I didn’t know. I should get out of here—I have to get out of here! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean that kind of hookup! We’re just friends! Oh my god, Jess, I’m so sorry! I’ll leave you all alone!” Flynn backed up several steps, looking around as if the one-street town would offer somewhere to flee without anyone being able to watch. Everyone was watching, though: people had come out of shops and paused on the street to watch the commotion.
Jessie, if she even noticed, didn’t care. “You can stay right here, Flynn!” He froze like a rabbit in headlights, waiting to be squished. Jessie swung toward Sondra, still yelling. “First off, you hate Reed so much I figure you’d be happy if I was hooking up with somebody else, and second, Flynn and I have been friends online for like three years now and it’s really incredibly super-nice that he’s willing to meet me on no notice. And you know what, maybe it would be a hookup if Mom hadn’t just died and maybe it would be anyway if you weren’t so frigging judgmental—”
Flynn’s expression flew through emotion, from excited hope to moral horror at his own hope and through to embarrassment about the whole thing. It was like watching Charlie Chaplin in a silent movie, his every aspect furthering the story. Jessie, oblivious, kept shouting. “Because—oh my god, I could use something nice right now—” Flynn lit up at this—“and all I want is to just live my life without people scolding me for it—”
Sondra thundered, “Enough!” so loudly that Dip, who had been sniffing along the sidewalk’s edge, rolled over on his back and peed in the air. Everyone fell silent, Megan crushing a relieved giggle that no one else felt the need to show quite as much submissiveness as the dog did. A muscle twitched in Sondra’s jaw, like part of her saw Dip’s display and wanted to apologize to Megan, who would be cleaning pee off the puppy before they could go anywhere, but also didn’t dare break the spell she’d cast with her roar. “We are going to lunch now,” Sondra said through her teeth. “Just the three of us, with our driver. Flynn, go home.”
Jessie hissed, “Flynn, don’t go home!” and Megan saw barely contained fury flash through Sondra’s face. Flynn, who was about twenty-seven and should have been able to read a room well enough to make a decision on his own, froze, rolling his eyes from one woman to another and finally alighting on Megan, at whom he looked as if she were a source of reason in the midst of chaos. She lifted her hands about a quarter of an inch, abstaining from the whole mess, and panic settled in his gaze.
Raquel, the peacemaker, said, “Maybe Jessie can see you later, Flynn, but this isn’t a good time.” The young man took it as gospel and fled, leaving other locals to duck their heads together and chuckle about the whole scene. Raquel whispered, “Why didn’t you tell us you had an internet boyfriend?” to Jessie, who bugged her eyes as a refusal to respond.
“Well,” Sondra said acidly, “all we need now is your actual loser boyfriend to show up, and everything will be perfect.”
A car honked down the road, and Jessie’s actual loser boyfriend drove up and parked beside them.
* * *
Megan put a hand over her face, knocked the tip of her nose, and remembered, with eye-watering clarity, that Dip had caught his tooth inside her nostril a day earlier. She’d obviously not needed to blow or rub her nose since then, because it hadn’t bothered her at all, but it hurt so badly she missed Reed exiting his car. All she heard was the door closing and his hopeful voice. “Jess? I tried to catch you guys when you texted that you were coming up here, but I missed you, so I rented a car and drove like hell to get up here. Are you okay, babe?”
Jessie wailed, “No!” and Megan’s vision cleared enough to see the young woman throw herself, theatrically, into Reed’s arms. He looked as unwashed and travel-worn as he had earlier, which, given the time constraints he’d been under, wasn’t surprising, but Megan thought if he’d made an effort, even Sondra might have thawed toward him a little. Bobbing into an emotionally-fraught family tragedy while looking like a beach bum didn’t win him any points, even with Megan, who had no particular horse in the race.
She wiped her eyes and went to get a rag to clean Dip up with so he could be put back into the kennel, then quietly collected all the dogs and snuggled them into the kennel before putting the whole thing back into the car. Dip gave her the guiltiest look ever and she ducked her head over him, whispering, “It’s okay, baby, you didn’t do anything wrong, that was scary,” and rubbed his head. Thong squirmed forward for some of that love too, and Megan stayed where she was, crouched by the side of the kennel and reassuring her puppies, while everyone else shouted at each other.
“—two hours to get up here, you couldn’t have rented a car and driven up here and arrived a few minutes before we did without endangering everyone on the road—” Even without looking, Megan knew that was Sondra.
“—trying to support Jessie, I thought you’d appreciate that—” Reed protested.
“—can’t we just stop arguing?”
“God, Raquel, will you stop trying to make peace. You can’t make peace with a war hawk, and so what if he sped a little, Sondra, he’s here for me—” Jessie’s irritation at Raquel made her sound almost like their oldest sister.
“Like your little Irish boyfriend is?” Sondra snapped.
“Wait, what Irish boyfriend?”
“I don’t have an Irish boyfriend, Reed, obviously I don’t, I just have a friend who was concerned when I dropped off social media—”
“Wait, I came all this way and you were hooking up? On your mom’s deathbed?”
For an instant all three sisters were united in disgust. Megan, watching from the corner of her eye, thought the only reason Sondra didn’t slap Reed hard enough to send him spinning was that Jessie stood between them. Reed inhaled and exhaled like a pretentious yogi, even bringing his arms up and around as if pressing away negative energy. Sondra’s lips hardly parted, but she still managed to bare her teeth, her contempt of his affectations palpable.
“Jessie,” Reed said, evenly, “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for, and gross. I shouldn’t have said it and I hope you can forgive me.”
The youngest Williams girl wiped her eyes surreptitiously and grunted, “Yeah. I’m not hooking up with anybody, Reed.”
He sighed. “Of course you’re not. It was ugly of me to be suspicious. Look, I don’t know how we always end up on the wrong foot—”
Sondra made a sound that indicated she had a few ideas, but Raquel elbowed her hard enough to be considered assault in some states, and she shut up. Reed continued as if oblivious to their byplay, which Megan thought he could very easily actually be. “—but I’m willing to let bygones be bygones—”
Neither Raquel Williams nor, Megan suspected, any other force on Earth could have stopped Sondra’s derisive snarl that time, but she didn’t engage with Jessie’s boyfriend, just went to the car and stood by the door as if expecting Megan to hold it for her. Raquel wailed, “But we need to eat, Sonny,” and the oldest sister looked suddenly tired, like she’d forgotten that in her pique.
Reed, on the other hand, looked genuinely surprised by Sondra’s anger. Apparently he felt he was the aggrieved party, and couldn’t imagine anyone thinking otherwise. “I just want to support Jessie. It’s got to be weird, trying to face family you’ve never known, never mind having to do it when someone you love has just passed away.”
“Well, we’re not really facing anybody.” Jessie’s fire seemed to have dulled. “The original family doesn’t even live on the land anymore and we don’t have any proof anyway.”
“What about the diaries?”
“Nobody thought to bring any of them with us.”
Reed cast a startled glance at Megan. “But your driver said Mrs. Williams had one with her.”
All three of the sisters looked toward Megan in astonishment. She rose, the dogs closed into the kennel. “She had a little blue diary with her
on Wednesday at St. Michan’s. Wasn’t it in the hotel room?”
“No.” Raquel’s voice rose to an edge. Hairs rose on Megan’s arms, her heart suddenly beating too fast as Raquel spoke faster and faster. “No. I know exactly which one you mean, and it’s not with Mama’s things, not at the hotel or at the hospital. Where is it? Where is it?”
“I don’t know, but we’ll find out,” Megan promised.
“How?” Sondra sounded sharper, angrier, than Raquel. “How can we find one little diary in all of Dublin?”
“We can find it because we know when it disappeared,” Megan said steadily. “She had it when she went into the CVS office at just before two pm on Wednesday, and didn’t have it three hours later. Detective Inspector Bourke is already reviewing hotel security tapes and tracking your mother’s movements between me dropping her off and five pm. I’ll let him know he should be looking for that diary too. Had any of you read it? Do you know anything about what it said?”
“I read them all when I was a little girl,” Raquel whispered. “The blue one with the gold heart on it, it was the most romantic of them and I read it like it was a novel, like Laura Ingalls Wilder. But I haven’t read it since I was about fourteen.”
The sky above darkened, spatters of rain slapping down, and Jessie suddenly took over the role of oldest sister, her jaw setting grimly. “We’re not going to remember anything standing out here in a downpour. Let’s go into that café and get something to eat, and then we can . . .” Her confidence faltered and Sondra took over, as if offended that her position as bossy sister had been usurped.
“And we can see what nonsense Raquel remembers. I don’t see what possible use it could be.” Her own jaw set and for a moment, she and Jessie looked very alike. “But if someone killed Mother and took it, there must be something useful in there. Reed . . .” Her nostrils pinched as she sighed. “You may join us for lunch.”
Megan, in Reed’s place, would have been hard-pressed to keep a civil tongue in her head at Sondra’s holier-than-thou tone, but Reed only smiled in relief and murmured, “Thanks,” to the oldest Williams sister. Megan tucked the dogs’ kennel into the car, rolled the window down a few inches to let fresh air in, and followed the other Americans down the street to the restaurant.