Death of an Irish Mummy

by Catie Murphy

  There were more bedrooms beyond the storage room, and a narrow servants’ stairway that led both up and down. Megan looked at the dogs, one of whom wanted to go up, and one of whom preferred down. “We’ll go down next,” Megan promised Thong, and climbed the stairs, testing their strength before putting her weight on each one. Someone else had come up them relatively recently, and more than once: even her single torchlight from her phone showed a man’s footprints, or what she assumed was a man’s, from the size.

  The wee small upper bedrooms managed to be damp, cold, and stuffy, as if the last summer’s heat had made the air stale in a way it couldn’t recover from. The first couple had rusting metal bed frames in them, and the next few were empty, but one at the farthest corner, where as much of the driveway as was possible could be seen, had a futon mattress in it and modern, unmade bedclothes. Megan stopped short in the doorway, staring incredulously at a pile of clothes peeking out from under a satin baseball jacket. Her heart accelerated along with her breathing and she edged forward, casting nervous glances in every direction at once. No one approached on the drive, no one came up the stairs behind her, no one leaped out from behind the door. She whispered, “That’s a little anticlimactic,” at the dogs, who were busy sniffing around and didn’t care.

  Megan ought, she felt, to be able to recognize something that would tell her instantly whose room it was. The clothes fit the description that Omondi, the taxi driver, had given her, but there were no identifying features to them, and she probably shouldn’t just dig through them to find things, much as she wanted to. She did take pictures of the whole room with her phone and texted them to Paul, saying I found the bad guy’s lair in the Lough Rynn house, then tiptoed a little farther into the room, still looking for identifying objects. The unmade sheets rumpled over something square. Feeling somewhere between guilty and thrilled, Megan pushed them back a few inches.

  Cherise Williams’s little blue diary lay there, proof positive that Megan was in a murderer’s room. She clapped a hand over her mouth and did a nervous dance back, then forward again, trying to decide if she should pick the book up.

  The correct answer was obviously no: this was, if not exactly the scene of a crime, certainly the discovery of evidence. On the other hand, somebody had taken that diary for a reason, and there might be a clue. On the third hand, she wasn’t supposed to be investigating clues, what with being a limousine driver rather than a detective. On the fourth hand—

  By that time she’d picked the diary up, curiosity being far greater than sense. She could put it back, if Detective Bourke needed it to be in situ for his purposes. Diary clutched against her chest, she scurried downstairs in a flurry of dogs. They nearly pulled her down the second set of steps, but she tugged them toward the storage room instead, and they course-corrected in little kicked-up tufts of dust. “I found it! I found the diary!”

  The sisters met her at the storage room’s door, all three of them trying to crowd out while Megan and the puppies tried to crowd in. For a few seconds the air filled with excited, disbelieving cacophony. Megan fell back, giving the Williams women room, and they burst forth like chickens escaping a coop. Raquel snatched the diary from Megan’s hands and hugged it, tears streaming down her face. Sondra visibly tried not to take it from her, while Jessie all but hopped up and down, crying, “Where was it? How did you find it? What’s going on?”

  “I found it upstairs,” Megan said over the noise. “We’ll have to put it back because I think it’s evidence, but I wanted you to at least see it. Someone’s living in the house.”

  All three women went shockingly silent, leaving the puppies’ exciting whining the only—and very loud—sound. Raquel whispered, “Who?” while Sondra braced herself like she expected to have to defend her younger sisters from an unknown adversary.

  “I don’t know, but—” Megan held her breath, wondering how much she should say. She decided against mentioning the clothes, since she didn’t think anybody had given them a description of the man who had last been seen with their mother. “It looks like they’ve been here a little while, anyway. I think we should leave the room totally alone, but I wanted—you thought you might be able to find something in the diary,” she said to Raquel. “Something that might make sense of everything.”

  “A map that might match one of Patrick’s, here.” Raquel opened the diary with trembling hands. “It won’t match very well. These are Gigi Elsie’s diaries, not Geepaw Patrick’s. But he told her so many stories . . .” She turned pages with delicate fingers, her sisters and Megan all hovering over the diary and trying to restrain themselves from touching. “See, here. He talked all the time about the lakes, the big one and then the smaller one nearer to the druid’s circle. She drew a picture from his descriptions.” Raquel turned the book so the rest of them could see Elsie’s sketches.

  “That’s not what it looks like, though,” Megan said. The others frowned at her and she shook her head, tracing her finger in the air over the drawing. “This is a proper standing stone circle, with—actually there are more stones here than there are in the one I saw yesterday. There are only five up there, I think, and four of them are stacked up and leaning against the fifth. This is . . .” She trailed off, whirling her finger above the sketch again.

  No one could call it Stonehenge-like, but the seven stones in the drawing were placed in a circle, with three of them standing upright, two broken, and the remaining two fallen over. “It doesn’t look anything like this at all.”

  “This is . . .” Raquel turned the book around again, reading the pages. “This is how he described it from when he was a child. So it’s been . . . over a hundred and twenty years, right? It could have changed?”

  “It would be more surprising if it hadn’t,” Sondra said. “What else does it say?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing helpful.” Raquel flipped through the pages, pausing at drawings. “More about treasure hunting when they were children. Oh. Oh! And about the evil—oh, it does say earl. I guess I didn’t know what an earl was when I was little, so I decided it said king. It talks about the bad earl and . . . I don’t remember any of this. It does talk about how the next earl tried to make things better, but he—Patrick—had decided to leave by then. He didn’t want any part of his family’s legacy.”

  “He wanted enough to be remembered that he told Elsie the stories, though,” Sondra pointed out.

  “But he wasn’t the heir to the land,” Raquel said in astonishment. “The bad earl left it to a cousin instead of the nephew who got the title, and the cousin said the new earl could work the land in—in Donny-gall?” She gave a quick, relieved smile as Megan nodded at her pronunciation, then went on. “And they . . . it looks like the cousin and his family, they were the ones who lived here in Leitrim, and none of the land ever went back to the earl’s ownership. So . . .” She looked up, eyebrows furled. “So Anne Edgeworth . . .”

  “Anne is the heir to the land,” Megan said as the sisters tried to work through it. “You’re the heirs to the title.”

  “And Anne just offered to leave the whole estate to us,” Sondra finished. “Returning the title and the land to the same holders.”

  “Oh my god, could it be any more convoluted?” Jessie made a short, sharp upward motion with her hands, like she was throwing everything away, and knocked the diary out of Raquel’s grip.

  Everybody shrieked and lurched for the flying diary, and later Megan thought they couldn’t have made more of a hash of it if they’d tried. Jessie, her hands already lifted, snatched at the little book and effectively punched it toward Sondra. Sondra screamed and her attempt at catching it turned into trying to keep it from smashing into her face. It flew higher and Raquel’s hand shot upward, nearly catching it, but she misjudged slightly and hit the spine instead of catching it. The book flew toward the door as if it had sprouted wings, and cracked against the frame. Megan ducked, trying to grab it before it hit the floor, and poor little Thong, in a panic, threw herself into
Megan’s hands. Megan pulled her back just before the diary clobbered her in the head, and the diary splatted onto the dusty floor with an audible crack. Dip rolled onto his back and peed in the air again, making everyone scream, and Sondra, in a bid to save the book from a spray of dog urine, kicked it into the storage room. It spun across the floor, leaving a trail in the already-disturbed dust, and came to a whacking stop against one of the portrait frames.

  The ensuing silence broke with Jessie’s high-pitched giggle and turned to gales of whooping laughter that bordered on hysteria. “We couldn’t have done that if we tried. Oh my god. Is the book all right?” She went forward to get it while Sondra said, “Is poor Dip all right?” and crouched to rub the puppy’s ears while he made the most pathetic puppy-dog eyes imaginable at her. “Yeah,” she said to him. “Don’t worry about peeing on this house. It’s old enough to have seen worse.”

  “Still, I’m sorry,” Megan said weakly. “I’ll go out to the car and get something to clean up with.”

  Sondra, rising, gave her an unexpectedly sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry about it. If we were a little less controlled we’d probably be doing the same thing. This has been a difficult week.”

  “Guys,” Jessie whispered. “Guys, um, look. Look, guys.” She turned, displaying the diary, its spine now broken, and the aging cotton binding inside the front covers now split both at the glued top seam and down the middle.

  Papers, the ink on them faded to almost the same colour as the folded sheets, slid from the split material, held in place by nothing more than Jessie’s grip.

  CHAPTER 20

  Hairs rose on Megan’s arms. She and the other two Williams sisters all took a step forward, as if the revealed paperwork had an irresistible pull, but she stopped to let the others go first. Jessie kept the book flat, not daring to do anything else, while Raquel—evidently the appointed diary-handler—cautiously pulled the papers free. Even Megan, a few steps behind the rest of them, could see that the handwriting on the outer sheet wasn’t Gigi Elsie’s, and it didn’t take any of them more than one breath to guess it belonged to Patrick Edgeworth.

  Sondra pulled a few papers from one of the emptier boxes and turned it over, making a table to rest the papers on. Raquel unfolded them reverently, and Megan crept closer to stand on her toes and look over the sisters’ shoulders as they peered with their torches at century-old correspondence.

  The inner sheets, except for along their creases, were remarkably creamy pale, with bold, browned handwriting scrawled across them. And they were correspondence: letters to home, addressed to Patrick’s cousin, to his uncle, even to a sweetheart called Nancy. None of the letters had ever been sent, nor, it seemed, had even been intended to; the last of them said If only I could send these on its final line, and everyone skimming through them, even Megan, gave a soft, sad gasp, as if a fairy tale had come to an unexpected ending.

  Raquel, without speaking, turned the diary to its back interior cover, touching the top seam. Like the front, it was glued down and bulky in the way that older, hand-bound books could often be. The front cover, though, had—now obviously—been modified to hold the letters. The sisters all looked at each other before Sondra said, testily, “Well, go on.” Raquel slid a fingernail along the glue, breaking it, and after a few seconds, eased another small stack of folded pages free from the diary’s back. Jessie whispered, “Shit!” as Raquel unfolded the pages, and Megan, biting her lower lip, was inclined to agree.

  These were the maps Elsie had written about. Megan recognized the general lay of the Lough Rynn lands from having seen them online, with the grand house a centrepiece even in Patrick’s sketches. Elsie’s drawing of the druid altar inside the diary had clearly been inspired by seeing Patrick’s, although his were rendered with the skill of a craftsman, and hers were amateur doodles by comparison. There were a dozen of the sketches, highlighting different parts of the grounds, including a huge, elegant garden that must, Megan thought, have long-since gone to ruin. It lay off to the left of the house, as they were facing it, and neither she nor the sisters had gone anywhere near it. But Patrick had written X-marks-the-spot-style X’s at one corner of that garden and in various other locations, including the druid’s altar, all around the grounds.

  “They can’t really be treasure,” Sondra said in a kind of disbelief that asked to be corrected.

  “No, they . . .” Raquel trailed off, obviously unsure of herself, and turned the maps, examining them. Then she spread them out, trying to make a whole picture of all the drawings. None of them were much larger than postcards, and their folds made the edges wing upward, so laying them flat seemed harder than it should be. Her sisters and Megan all cautiously put fingertips on their corners, flattening them to study the sketches. “There’s too many for treasure.”

  “And there are these . . .” Jessie brushed her fingertips over squat circles drawn in the borders of several of the maps. “What are they? A key? There’s something drawn on them.” She moved her phone closer, squinting at the one nearest to her, then laughed. “There are faces and something that looks like runes. Didn’t the old Irish use a runic written language? Ogham or something?” She said the word correctly, OH-am. “Maybe he found some. What?” she said irritably, at her sisters’ glances of surprise. “I’ve got a degree in anthropology, you know. I learned some stuff in college.”

  “I don’t think they made ogham coins, though,” Megan said slowly. “The Vikings used runic coins. But I don’t . . . that looks like a Roman numeral to me.”

  “Yeah, but that’s different from the runes, see?” Jessie thrust a fingertip at the drawing she meant. “I don’t know what any of them mean, but I’m pretty sure that’s ogham writing. The numbers—oh. Oh!” She suddenly gathered the papers up, changing their order swiftly while her sisters made small, agonized sounds of protest at her apparent lack of care. Then she laid them out again, pointing triumphantly at the Roman numerals. “There! Look! Now they’re in numerical order! That’s got to mean something!”

  “It means the whole landscape is a jumble.” Sondra was clearly trying not to sound exasperated. “Before we had it laid out more like the grounds are actually shaped.”

  “Yeah, but who would make a treasure map easy to read?”

  “Who would put a treasure map in the back of their daughter-in-law’s diary?!”

  “Gigi Elsie put them in here,” Raquel said, clearly exasperated with her sisters. “I think that’s pretty clear. She must have found them after Geepaw Patrick died and decided they were too precious to be thrown away, but also known he didn’t want them shown around. She talks about hidden trea—” She laughed a little and shook her head. “About hidden treasures. That’s what she meant. She was talking about these old papers of his, not treasures. I’d bet you anything.”

  “Well, what’s all this for, then?” Jessie demanded. She gestured at the papers, but moved away with her sisters while they argued. Megan bent over them more closely, holding her phone up to the various sketches and trying to make sense of it all. The puppies, bored, tugged on their leashes, and she mumbled a promise that they’d go soon, but kept studying the papers until her eyes crossed from concentration. The drawings on the coins, particularly, looked familiar somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d seen them. She straightened away from the drawings, rubbing her eyes as Sondra said, “I’m certainly not staying in Ireland long enough to go dig up every one of those X’s. I have a board meeting on Tuesday, Raq. I can’t miss it.”

  “On Tuesday? Are we even going to have Mama buried by then?”

  “We’re going to have to,” Sondra replied sharply. “My company is riding on this, Raquel.”

  “Oh, who cares about your stupid comp—”

  “I do!” Sondra’s bellow silenced her sisters and made Dip fall over again, although at least this time he didn’t pee. “I realize,” Sondra continued, frostily, once she’d gained everyone’s attention, “that my life seems pathetic and rigid and uninteresti
ng to you, Jessica. I’d love to tell you all the ways it isn’t, but I don’t think you’d even believe me. What I can tell you is that I will lose my job and everything else that I’ve managed to hold on to in the past two years if I am not back there on Tuesday to present at the board meeting. That may not matter to you, but it matters very much to me. It’s all I’ve got left.”

  “You have us,” Raquel whispered.

  Sondra gave her a bitter, almost scathing look. “Do I? It’s a nice sentiment, Raq, but when was the last time you weren’t angry with me? When was the last time you listened to me, instead of just taking Mama’s side?”

  Guilt flushed Raquel’s face. “You were just so hard on her, Sonny.”

  Sondra said, “Someone had to be,” but without conviction, as if she knew it was an argument she’d lost long ago.

  “Look,” Jessie muttered, “if we’ve got to get Mama buried by Monday we’d better stop hanging around here trying to—whatever. Find treasure. We already found Mama’s diary, for heaven’s sake.” The colour drained from her face as if she’d finally realized what that meant. “Wait. Jesus, Sonny. Megan found Mama’s diary. Does that mean the person who killed her is living here in this house? We have to—to get out of here, or to—to—to catch them! We have to—”

  Megan yelped, “Coins!” The Williamses turned to stare at her and she said, “Coins,” again. “I thought of it when I was looking at them but I didn’t even hear myself think it. The circles. The circles on the maps. They’re drawings of coins. Old coins. Anne Edgeworth has a stack of old coins on her kitchen windowsill! I bet they’re the key to the maps!”

  All three sisters spasmed toward the door, then stopped as abruptly, their voices rising in a discordant argument—or maybe just questions—about what they should do. Go back to Anne’s house, call the police, just get out of the house where a killer was apparently living, go upstairs and see if they could learn anything—