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“It’s true, Mam,” Caitlin said. “All I hear from her is how boring it is in Cragg’s Head.” She eyed Kate for a moment. “It’s very quiet, especially in the winter. If you’re looking for excitement, you’ll not find it here.”
“Kate’s not here for excitement,” Annie said. “She’s writing about Moruadh Maguire. Big American magazine, right, Katie?” She laughed. “Just think of it, a celebrity right in my sitting room.”
Kate grinned, thinking about her maxed-out credit cards and depleted checking account. “Hardly.”
As Annie went on to tell Caitlin about a mutual friend she’d seen that day, Kate looked around the cozy room. Overstuffed armchairs, flowered curtains drawn across the dark night outside. A feeling of well-tended comfort. The kind of room in which you’d curl up with a good book. Her eyes moved from Annie, presiding over a small table set with a china teapot and plates of sliced cake and sandwiches, to Caitlin pouring milk and tea into teacups, and then to Rory who was staring into the fire. Kate watched him for a moment. At first glance, he appeared at ease, but his fingers rapped a continuous tattoo on the back of the couch. He reminded her of an engine idling—motion barely contained, ready to bolt in an instant. When Caitlin offered him a teacup, he jumped as though he’d just realized she was there. His head, Kate was almost certain, was not in this room.
“Come on, Kate.” Annie broke into her reverie. “Tea? A bit of treacle bread. It’s nice. I made it just this afternoon.” She held out the plate. “A bit overdone, I suppose. Took my eye off the stove for a minute and the next thing I knew I was smelling smoke.”
“How did you hear about Moruadh then?” Caitlin sipped her tea and looked at Kate. “Was she popular in America?”
“She wasn’t really well-known, but I wrote about her three years ago and we talked on the phone a few times.” Kate glanced down at the slice of cake Annie had just put on her plate. “Even though I’d never met her, I felt as though I knew her somehow.”
“Moruadh could make you feel that way,” Annie said.
“She could.” Patrick spooned jam onto a piece of bread. “And she had a way of making you think there was no one in the world she’d rather be talking to than you yourself.” He laughed. “Even a tubby old baldy like me.”
Caitlin smiled at her father. “Da had a little crush on her.”
“Tell me a man under ninety who didn’t,” Annie said. “She was a pretty girl. I don’t think Hughie Fitzpatrick ever got over her marrying Maguire.”
Kate thought of the reporter she’d met in Dooley’s, the bitterness in his voice as he’d spoken about Maguire. Time had obviously done little to lessen his hatred for the man.
“Hughie and Moruadh were sweethearts, until she started making a name for herself,” Annie said. “The next thing I hear, she’s married to Maguire, and they’re living in Paris.”
“A cool one, that Maguire,” Patrick said. “I suppose his money won her over in the end.” He looked over at the couple on the couch. “How would you describe Niall Maguire, Rory?”
“Ah, he’s just…” Rory’s forehead creased in a frown. “Sure, I don’t know how to put it. He can look right at you and it’s as though you’re not even there. And you’ll never see him having a laugh down at the pub or out kicking a football. He’s just never been one of the lads.”
“But he’s lovely looking, though,” Caitlin said with a little smile. “Those eyelashes of his. No matter how much mascara I used, I couldn’t get mine to look that long. You’ve not met him yet, Kate?”
“No. I’m going to try and see him tomorrow.” She’d left her notebook upstairs, but made a mental note to jot down the comments she’d heard as soon as she got back to her room. At this rate, and given her own suspicions about Maguire’s guilt, it was going to be hard to maintain even a semblance of objectivity.
“He’s very polite.” Caitlin examined her nails. “Makes you feel as though what you’re saying is really important to him.”
“Very polite.” Rory traced circles in the air near his temple. “Go and varnish your nails or something, Caitlin.”
“What’s the matter with that?” Caitlin asked, wide-eyed. “I’m just saying he has nice manners.”
“Sure, Caitlin,” Rory said quietly, his head bowed, “if he’s got nice manners, he couldn’t possibly have pushed Moruadh down the cliffs, could he? Not without saying ‘pardon me’ as he shoved her over.”
“Rory.” Caitlin slapped his arm. “That’s terrible, no one knows that for sure.”
“I’m no fan of Maguire, mind you, but in my opinion, Moruadh fell,” Patrick said. “She was a great one for the outdoors. Out there every day she was, in all weather, going for her walks. For years, people have been clamoring at the council to put a fence up. ’Tis a tragedy that it took this to make it happen.”
“He’s right.” Caitlin looked at Kate. “People should stop all this gossip about Mr. Maguire. It isn’t nice. Wait till you meet him, Kate. You’ll fall in love with him, I’m telling you.”
“Oh, but Kate’s married,” Annie said, smiling. “Aren’t you, Kate?”
Kate and the bartender exchanged glances. Time for her to bow out, she decided.
“No.” She grinned. “I like to play the field. Love ’em and leave ’em, that’s my motto.” She stood and put her teacup on the tray. “I’m going to say goodnight. I’m about to fall asleep on my feet.”
BUT AS TIRED as she’d felt downstairs, when she got to her room Kate was suddenly wide-awake. Fully dressed, she stretched out on the bed, her eyes fixed on the repeating pattern of the wallpaper. Tiny sprigs of white flowers against a yellow background. Her thoughts drifted back to Moruadh. At home, she would listen to Moruadh’s clear high voice as she drove. Haunting and ephemeral, the music weaving its spell as it conjured visions of mists and hills, yearning and heartache. Of sadness too unbearable to endure.
“And tell the world,” Moruadh sang. “That I died for love.”
After Kate’s article came out, Moruadh had called her a few times from Ireland and Paris. Usually in the early hours of the morning. For the most part, Moruadh talked while Kate listened. Inevitably, the topic turned to men and relationships and love. Moruadh fell in and out of love with a succession of men. Nothing lasted, and she would talk about the howling-in-the-wilderness bouts of loneliness that gripped her in the early hours. “Ah God, I could die of it,” Moruadh said once. “I’ve crawled into the beds of men who meant nothing at all, just to have someone’s arms around me.”
Her last call had been short and perfunctory. She was marrying a man by the name of Niall Maguire, she’d told Kate. No time to talk, but she would call again soon.
But she never had. Kate had read about Moruadh’s death in the obituary section of the Times. A small reference just a couple of paragraphs summing up Moruadh’s career. While walking along the cliffs near her home in Cragg’s Head, the article said, Moruadh Maguire had fallen some three hundred feet to her death. Ruling it an accident, the Gardai had blamed wind and rain and the unstable cliffs. Kate had thought about love and loneliness and had been unable to get Moruadh off her mind.
Restless now, she got up to examine the framed prints that hung on the walls. Sylphs and sprites in a field of bluebells. A gnome on a toadstool. More sprites and bluebells. Everything felt oddly unreal and slightly off-kilter, as though she’d been dropped into the middle of another world that bore a superficial resemblance to her own but functioned in a way she didn’t entirely understand. Unanswered questions. Confused directions and screwed-up road signs. The shadowy figure up on the cliffs. The young Garda in the car. The way the gray-eyed man had suddenly appeared out of the fog.
The sensation was similar to the way she felt after she’d taken her car to be washed at one of those full-service places. She’d get back in and find that everything—radio, seats, mirrors—had been slightly changed. Not enough that she couldn’t drive, but sufficient to send her neuroses into overdrive. Kind of the way she felt right now. Just a little thrown off. She yawned again and moved back to the bed. On the other hand, maybe she’d just overdosed on Celtic intrigue.
Through the closed door, she could hear the soft murmur of conversation from the sitting room below. Like a video, images of the evening ran through her head. The play of firelight on the faces around the room. The clink of flowered china teacups and saucers, the crackle of flames. Patrick dozing in his chair. The smells of baking and fresh flowers.
Annie bustling around. Smiling, urging food on everyone. Annie had a natural warmth—an openness that instantly turned strangers into friends. A quality Kate envied but couldn’t master herself. Probably because it required a certain willingness to let yourself be vulnerable. Her own defense mechanisms were too finely honed to allow that. Compared to Annie, she felt world-weary and a little jaded.
A fleeting childhood memory drifted across her consciousness. A night spent at a friend’s house. A girl with lots of brothers and sisters. The house was full of warmth and light and people laughing and talking. It had seemed perfect, like a page from a storybook. When she grew up, Kate had vowed, she would have a house just like it. Full of happy children. A smiling husband.
More memories, dim and fragmentary. Herself at ten, wakened from sleep by raised voices coming from downstairs. Her father’s voice, cold, dispassionate. No, he wouldn’t be back. He had fallen in love. A student in one of his classes. Her mother’s sobs.
A memory of walking home from school after her parents divorced. Looking through brightly lit windows of other houses. The little rituals she had developed that, if followed exactly, would make everything all right again. If she touched every mailbox on her street as she passed, her mother wouldn’t be crying when she walked in. If she skipped for four blocks, she would smell cookies baking when she opened the front door. If she held her breath for two minutes, her mother would be sober.
She got up, dug out a robe and toilet bag from her suitcase and walked down the hall to the bathroom. It was after her mother committed suicide that she’d pretty much stopped believing in magic. Or love.
TO CALL BUNCARROCH CASTLE gloomy, she decided the next morning, would be like calling Trump Tower upscale. She stood in the damp air, craning her neck to look up.
Niall Maguire’s ancestral home stood at the crest of a small hill, surrounded on three sides by the ocean. Massive and vaguely misshapen, it sprouted various architectural embellishments that she guessed had been added over the years. Battlements, gargoyles, wartlike turrets. One wing, jutting awkwardly like a broken limb, seemed in imminent danger of crashing into the ocean.
Niall Maguire was not home. Or at least he wasn’t answering the doorbell. She rang it again, glanced around the graveled circular driveway. No cars, but she wasn’t sure what that meant. Did castles have garages? Again she rang the doorbell and waited. After a few moments she walked back across the gravel, climbed onto Annie’s elderly Raleigh and pedaled down the hill again.
She would try later, she decided as she rode through a waste of rock-and-boulder-smattered heather into the village. Although Maguire had ignored her letters, which suggested he didn’t want to talk to her, he might be less inclined to turn her down if they actually met face-to-face. On the other hand, if he was as aloof and detached as Patrick and Rory had described him, maybe not.
She thought of what Hugh Fitzpatrick had told her about Maguire’s attractiveness to women. Objectivity was becoming difficult. Her tendency was always to root for the underdog, and Niall Maguire with his castle and money and fawning women appeared to be anything but.
As she passed Sullivan’s Butcher Shop, a man in a navy, striped apron sweeping the pavement looked up and waved.
“Fine day,” he called.
“Terrific,” Kate called back and caught her reflection in a shop window. Warm, if not particularly fetching, in her dark green parka and old black cords. An errant strand of hair had escaped from the black woolen cap she’d jammed on and it flew out behind her like a long red ribbon.
Earlier, at Annie’s insistence, she’d eaten an enormous breakfast of Irish bacon, eggs, tomatoes and soda bread slathered with butter. More calories than she ate at home in an entire week, but it was amazing what food and a decent night’s sleep did for the disposition. Last night Ireland had seemed strange and a little disconcerting. Today, in the glow of early-morning sunshine, all was well. A ride to burn off some of the calories and then a couple of interviews she’d scheduled. After that, she would try Niall Maguire again.
She pedaled through the village. Only a few of the brightly painted shops along the high street were open this early, but the area was already busy. Horns tooted, car doors slammed. From Claddagh Music came the trill of a flute, as pure and clear as birdsong. From Joyce’s Bakery, the aroma of warm bread rose to mingle with the peat smoke and the salty tang of the harbor.
It all seemed quite idyllic. Far removed from the police sirens and gang shootings and other staples of her daily life in Santa Monica. She rode past the small harbor where men in heavy jerseys and oilskin trousers were dragging a small boat onto the shingles. Then past the Connacht Superette and Kelly’s Garage.
A mile or so out of the village, the road narrowed and acrid farm smells filled the air. A light breeze moved the clouds overhead. Except for the faint sigh of the wind and the hum of her tires on the road, the silence all around her was absolute. It hovered in the air like a presence—a peaceful hush that made the whole countryside appear to be sleeping.
Back home in Santa Monica, Kate worked to the constant chatter of the all-news radio that played in her office. When she drove, it was to the accompaniment of the assorted tapes she carried in her car. When you live with noise around you, she’d heard a radio shrink say, it drowns out the knowledge that you’re alone.
Deep in thought, she heard a whoosh of air and a sharp squeal of brakes. The dark green Land Rover seemed to materialize from nowhere. She swerved wildly, slammed on the brakes and toppled over into a patch of grass. For a moment she just sat there, stunned, her nose filled with the smell of burned rubber. The car’s driver, a tall, dark-haired man, made his way over to where she sat.
“Are you all right?” He reached to help her up.
“I’m fine.” Ignoring his hand, Kate pulled herself to her feet and brushed grass from her pants. “No thanks to you. God, you could have killed me.” She glared up at him, but he towered over her by at least a foot, which meant that she had to crane her neck and squint into the sun to see his face, something that further incensed her. “Perhaps it never occurred to you that not everyone might be zipping along in a fancy car?”
“It’s usually only a problem,” he said, watching her, “when people ride on the wrong side of the road. Which you were.”
She felt her face flame. Tap-dance your way out of this one. Rooted to the spot, unwilling to break eye contact and concede the point, she stood there until she saw he was fighting to keep a straight face. And then she recognized him.
“The man on the cliff,” she said.
“The Mace bandit,” he said.
“Mace bandit.” She shook her head at him. He wore an open black leather jacket over a black sweater. The somber color accentuated his fair skin and dark hair, set off the fine-boned features and clear gray eyes. His hair was clean, slightly curly and just a shade too long. The shadow on his jaw suggested he’d neglected to shave that morning. He also had a truly sensational smile, which he was turning on her now.
“I’m not sure about you,” she finally said. “Last night you nearly scared me to death. Today you knock me off my bike.”
“I’m bad news all around,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told.”
“I bet you have.” She tried not to smile back at him. He looked wildly attractive, a kind of unstudied sexiness that perked up her hormones and pheromones and God knows what other mones. Something about the way he was looking at her told her the attraction was mutual.
“How can I make amends?” He gestured at her bike. “What about this then? I’ll see what the damage is.”
“There’s no damage.” Even if there were, she’d rather walk the damn thing back to Annie’s than drive up in his car, looking like a fool because she’d forgotten which side of the road to ride on. She smiled. “It’s fine.”
“You’ve not looked.”
“Trust me. I know these things.”
Moments passed. A breeze rustled the grasses, tousled his hair. A car went by. Her knee started to throb, and her hands smarted where she’d landed on them. She shoved them in the pocket of her parka.
“You’re all right, really? No broken bones.”
“I’m all right, really,” she said, imitating him. “No broken bones.” Given his looks, the lyrical accent was overkill. This guy was too cute by half.
“Where are you headed?”
“Cragg’s Head.”
“That’s the opposite direction from where you’re going.”
“Well…” She glanced at him from under her lashes. “I was taking the scenic route.”
“Actually, you’re on the road to Dublin.”
“The scenic and very circuitous route,” she amended.
They looked at each other until neither one of them could keep a straight face. It occurred to her that she could stand there indefinitely trading lines back and forth with him. And he seemed in no hurry to leave, either.
“If you think you’re going to get me to admit I’m lost,” she finally said, “give up.”
“Ah, I didn’t think for a moment you were lost.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward her a little. “But I’ll tell you a secret. Cragg’s Head is that way.” He gestured with his arm. “Straight ahead. You can’t miss it.”
“I think I’ve heard that before.” She bent to pick up her bike and felt him watching her. Either she could prolong the exchange, shift it up to the next gear or do the safe thing and ride off. In a split-second decision, she chose the latter. He’d told her something she already knew. He was bad news. His sort always was. That attractive got-the-world-by-a-string type. They were like strawberries. When you were allergic to them, it didn’t matter how tempting they looked, heaped into pies, dolled up with shiny red glaze and whipped cream. The fact was they screwed up your system and caused endless misery.
They were something to be avoided.
“Can I at least give you a lift?”
“No, thanks.” She climbed on the bike. “I can make it on my own steam. I’ll try and remember to stay on the right side.”
“Just remember, the right side is on the left.”
“Got it.” With a smile and a glance over her shoulder, Kate started off down the road, praying the wheel wouldn’t fall off while he was still watching her. The final image of him burned in her brain. Sunlight and shadows dappling his head and shoulders. The quizzical smile. For a moment, she almost turned around and rode back. Maybe she’d been too flip. After all, he had seemed genuinely concerned.
She kept riding. No, better this way. Better not even knowing his name. What was the point anyway? A little more than a week and she’d be back in the States.
CHAPTER FOUR
ON HER WAY back to the Pot o’ Gold, Kate passed the redbrick building that housed the tourist bureau where Annie worked part-time. Through the window, she could see Annie working at her desk. She rapped on the window and Annie motioned for her to come in.
“You couldn’t have stopped by at a better moment,” Annie said. “First off, if you wouldn’t mind making sure Rory gets the sandwiches I made for him, I’d be grateful. He’s mad for cold chicken and I had some left from last Sunday’s lunch.”
“Sure, no problem,” Kate said. “Do you want me to take them down to the station?”
“If he doesn’t drop by first.” Annie held up a poster for her to see. “And now I’d like your opinion on this. Tell me what you think.”
“The Cragg’s Head Fleadh,” Kate read aloud, mentally shoving aside thoughts of her encounter with the man on the cliff. “A festival of fiddles, flutes and concertinas. It looks great.”
“Flah,” Annie corrected. “Rhymes with hah,” she said with a smile. “That’s all right, though, you’re not the first to say it wrong. I’ve so much to do I can hardly see straight and now, with this worry over Elizabeth, it’s all I can do to keep my mind on anything.”
“You still haven’t heard from her?” Kate asked.
“I haven’t directly, but that was a friend of hers on the phone just now. Swears she saw Elizabeth at a coffee bar this morning. Would have spoken to her, she says, but she ran off. Still, it’s good to have even a wee bit of news.”
“I’m sure it must be.” Kate glanced again at the poster. “So you’re in charge of putting this whole thing together?”
“I am. Well, we’ve a committee, of course, but in the time it takes for them to decide on anything, I can already have it done.” She retrieved a slim blue book from under a pile of papers on her desk and handed it to Kate. “Sometimes I wonder why I bother, though. Last year, Cragg’s Head wasn’t even in here. This year they put a little note that said it wasn’t worth a detour.”
Kate riffled through the pages and smiled up at her.
“Well, we’re never going to have the crowds flocking here,” Annie said, returning the smile. “But it’s home. I’d never leave. My sister left for America, a few years back. Boston. Pat and I went over there for a holiday and they took us to an Irish bar of all places.” She shook her head. “All of them singing ‘Danny Boy’ and shedding tears for dear old Ireland as though they’d go back in a minute, if they could. And few of them ever would.”
