The Angel (20 page)

Before she could get out of her car, her cell phone rang, and a man with a heavy Irish accent identified himself as Seamus Harrigan, a detective with the Irish Garda. “I’m returning your call, Detective Browning. What can I do for you?”

Abigail remained behind the wheel and shut the car door. “I’d like to talk to you about a case on the Beara Pe

ninsula.” She hesitated a fraction of a second. “It involves an American named Keira Sullivan.”

Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland
8:00 p.m., IST

June 23

Eddie O’Shea hunched his shoulders against the fierce wind and lashing rain. A proper gale had kicked up since the guards and the Americans had left. How poetic, he thought, holding his cap on his head as he pushed on up the dirt track. He’d left his pub in his brother Patrick’s hands, but there wouldn’t be a crowd—surely he wouldn’t manage to burn the place down before Eddie could get back. Rain pelted his face with such force it might have been hundreds of tiny needles. The landscape was all gray and green. It seemed fine and normal to him, but he expected that Keira Sullivan would have found a way to capture it in a painting and make it feel special. Eddie had lived on this land his entire life. His ancestors went back a thousand years or more on the Beara, or so his mother had insisted—

and who was he to argue?

A Yank with Irish blood coming to the village because

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of an old story about fairies and other such nonsense wasn’t all that unusual. Eddie didn’t pay attention to such things, typically.

But this story, and this Yank, were different. He came to a dip in the upward sweep of the hills and crossed a wooden bridge over a winding stream, just as he had ever since he’d first sneaked off from his mother the first time at three years old.

He paused at the fence and caught his breath, shifting to keep the wind at his back. The grass and the rocks would be slick. The ground would be muddy. There’d be manure piles to navigate. Eddie had no illusions that he’d have ever made a good farmer.

I don’t want to go into the pasture
. But he knew he had to, if any measure of peace of mind was to be his.

The guards, Keira and the big man—Simon Cahill—

had crawled around in the old ruin without finding a thing except the bloody remains of a dead sheep. Eddie had pried at least some of the details from Seamus Harrigan, a regional detective with the Garda who’d stopped by the pub for a bowl of soup. Harrigan didn’t know what to make of the American folklorist and her tale, but they hadn’t found her backpack in the rubble—or, he’d said, any Irish artifacts. Nothing. Harrigan had said “artifacts”

with a scowl. But he didn’t disbelieve her. He’d told Eddie that Keira had been sincere—and quite beautiful. He just didn’t know what was fact and what was imagination. Harrigan had liked Cahill, too. Everyone did. Eddie frowned at the fence. He’d stalled long enough. He’d have been over it by now as a boy. He stood on a rock to give him more height, and felt a pull in his thigh as he climbed over the fence, catching his trousers on a sharp 184

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barb. He could just hear his brother snorting with laughter—not Patrick, the brother minding the pub. He was an aimless, jobless ne’er-do-well if there’d ever been one, but always cheerful, not a bad word to say about anyone. Eddie couldn’t say that about Aidan, a farmer and the eldest of the O’Shea brothers.

Three of them—just as in the old story their grand

mother had told their mother and she had told her sons. The same story that had lured Keira Sullivan to Ireland, and her mother before her.

Has to be. It’s all that makes sense.
Eddie’s boot sank two inches into the muck and manure on the opposite side of the fence, but he managed not to fall. He preferred to stay in the pub on such days. Whip up a mutton stew, sweep the floors or just sit with a pint and contemplate his life.

More by instinct than memory, he found his old boyhood trail that ran across the open pasture above the stream. He and his brothers had taken it a thousand times. There were several more fences to cross and more wind and rain to brave. When Eddie started down into the trees, he felt a mix of trepidation and excitement. He was out of the worst of the gale now, and he could see matted grass where Keira, Simon and the guards had come through. Eddie had known they wouldn’t find anything. Thirty years ago, Keira’s mother had gone exploring out in this same spot. She took the bus from Dublin and camped in the hills by herself, and Eddie and his brothers, just teenagers themselves, hadn’t bothered her. These were the days before Ireland’s economic boom—long before the Beara Way, the nearly two-hundred-kilometer mix of marked trails, lanes and roads that snaked down one side of the peninsula and back up again. It was popular with

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walkers and bikers, and Eddie had seen a boost in business, thanks to its proximity to his pub. But the isola

tion and remoteness of the Beara hadn’t seemed to bother Eileen O’Reilly.

She hadn’t been pretty—certainly not the striking beauty her daughter was—but Eddie remembered she’d had a nice manner about her. She’d talked to his mother about the story of the three brothers and their dance with the fairies over the stone angel. Even then, his mother was apparently the only one left in the village who’d ever heard of the tale. She believed, as Eileen did, that the back-and

forth between the brothers and the fairies would resume if the angel were ever found. That it was meant to be. Eddie had never spent so much as two seconds of his life looking for the thing.

He didn’t believe the stone angel existed, and he didn’t believe in fairies, either.

So why are you here instead of in your warm, dry pub?
Disgusted with himself, Eddie crept through the wet grass and undergrowth to the ruin, as gray as the sky above him. The place was no secret to him. No great discovery. He and his brothers had come out here many times. If there’d been an ancient angel to find, surely they’d have found it. But he hadn’t been out to the ruin in years, and he knew his brothers hadn’t.

In her last hours, his mother had begged Eddie to tell her the story she’d told him and her mother had told her.

“The one about the farmer, the hermit monk and the ne’er
do-well. Tell me that one, Eddie, my good boy.”
He’d sat on a wood stool by the fire and told it to her over and over as he watched her fade away.

“I’m going to the angels, Eddie…I can see Saint Ita
now…”

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His mother had been a faithful churchgoer and believed in angels, and in fairies, too. None of it mattered to Eddie. She died two days after Eileen O’Reilly had gone home to Boston.

The rain eased, and Eddie walked closer to the ruin. A fallen tree lay half in the stream—Seamus Harrigan had de

scribed how he and Simon had dragged it there from in front of the hut’s open doorway. They’d discovered the remains of the ladder Keira had built for her escape, but nothing else.

Eddie felt terrible that she’d been up here, trapped and frightened, and he’d been none the wiser. He and his brothers would have gladly come to her rescue. But that was another part of her tale that Harrigan had found both amusing and curious—Keira’s insistence that for most of the night and day she was stuck in the ruin, she was unafraid, confident of her ability to get out of there on her own. Having known her just a short time, Eddie was nonethe

less unsurprised by her strength and determination, never mind how those same qualities could also lead her astray. He approached the entrance to the old hut and saw clearly how the hillside had eroded under the front corner on the chimney side. Keira had been lucky, indeed, not to be killed or seriously injured.

But what was this?

Eddie frowned, gingerly making his way to the spot where the uprooted tree had been. A holly tree grew up the hill close to the chimney—or what remained of it—and there, leaning into its waxy leaves and healthy branches was a shovel, as if a farmer had abandoned it moments ago. Had the guards used it to dig in the ruin when they’d looked around here this morning?

But no, Eddie thought, rubbing his fingertips over the

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top of the shovel’s sturdy wooden handle. It wasn’t left here by a farmer or the guards. He couldn’t say who’d left it, but he knew it had been left for him, put there against the holly tree as if whoever had done it had known he would come and figured he’d be fool enough to miss it if it wasn’t right there under his nose.

Rain ran off the end of Eddie’s cap as he squatted for a closer look. Bits of gray mortar were stuck to the blade and there were fresh nicks, indicating the shovel had been used recently.

There you have it.

Eddie rose and pulled off his cap, smelling the wet wool as he ran his forearm across the top of his head. Someone had been digging here. And the digging had caused the old hut to cave in while Keira was inside, escaping her black dog.
Digging for what?

But Eddie knew the answer to that question. Digging for the stone angel in his mother’s story. He remembered how Eileen O’Reilly had returned to the village that fall, and never mind the wool cape she wore, it was easy enough to see she was expecting a baby. She’d stayed for a week that time, roaming the hills in every manner of weather, speaking to no one. Eddie had wanted to help her, but what could he do? He and his brothers had just buried their mother.

“Ach,” he said aloud, “that was a long time ago.”

Eddie picked up the shovel and placed it on his shoulder. If it’d been left for him, then it was up to him to figure out what to do with it, wasn’t it?

When Eddie was within a few yards of the dirt track, something by the rocks on a steep incline above him drew his eye. The rain was pounding again. The wind howled, and 188

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fog surged down from the hills like a live thing. He pictured himself back at the pub with a mug of coffee laced with whiskey and whatever Patrick had prepared for supper—

it wouldn’t be any good, whatever it was, but it’d be hot. Wiping rain off his face with cold fingers, Eddie tried to make out what was up there on the hill. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong there or he wouldn’t have noticed it. Dread tightened in his chest.

I don’t want to go up there.

But even as he formed the thought, he was on his way. The hill grew steeper, and he lowered the shovel and used it as a walking stick, although he knew he’d be destroying any trace evidence on it. He watched the detective shows. He knew about such things.

He was panting now from the exertion, and the rain was coming down so hard, whenever he took a breath he’d get a mouthful. Rocks abounded, big enough to serve as places to sit and look out at the landscape, in fairer weather and if he ever had a mind for gazing at the scenery. He didn’t see anything but rock, grass, sheep and sheep dung. He leaned on the shovel, ready to give up—eager to believe whatever he’d seen had been a trick of his imagination.

As he stood up straight, he felt his heart skip and his chest tighten further, so that his breaths came only in shallow gasps, as if his body was responding already to what his mind couldn’t grasp.

Slumped amid the rocks was a dead sheep—or what was left of her. Her woolly coat soaked up the rain. Even from where he stood, Eddie could see she’d been dead for at least a few days.

She hadn’t died of natural causes.

He saw that, too. Saw that some evil bastard had brutal

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ized the poor creature, tortured her without mercy until she breathed her last.

He’d never seen such a sight in all his life. Eddie made a sign of the cross, grabbed the shovel and ran, slipping on wet rock and grass, stepping in dung and mud as he tried to keep his footing on the steep slope. He had to get the guards, call Seamus Harrigan and tell him what he’d just seen.

And he had to get that image out of his mind, he thought desperately, although he knew he never would. The image of that sorry, innocent beast would be with him until his dying day.

Eddie arrived at his pub soaked to the bone, with the shovel heavy on his shoulder and his heart still racing from fear and horror. The rain had stopped, and he decided he’d get warm and dry before he called the guards. As he lowered the shovel from his shoulder, he auto

matically glanced at the picnic table next to the pub entrance to see if Patrick hadn’t cleaned up out here. It would be just like him to forget. Even with the rain, people would come outside for a smoke.

Eddie noticed a backpack on the table’s back bench. It wasn’t the first time a hiker or cyclist had left one behind. He set the shovel down and had a look, unzipping the main compartment, welcoming the chance to do something ordinary—something to take his mind, even for a moment, off the shovel, the dead sheep…his deep uneasiness about what was to come.

He found a flashlight, a compact emergency blanket, a Boston Red Sox cap.

His heart thumping, Eddie dug deeper into the backpack and pulled out a sketchpad and a plastic bag of artist’s pencils. 190

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He stood up straight, shocked down to his toes and no longer cold or hungry.

It was Keira’s missing backpack, sitting out here in front of his pub as big as life.

Boston, Massachusetts

4:00 p.m., EDT

June 23

A part of Keira knew she was dreaming again. Another part was convinced that Simon was making love to her. That the feel of his hands on her was real. His mouth, his tongue. They’d come together in the sunlight—somewhere. She didn’t know where, but it didn’t matter. He was unrelent

ing, caring, so incredibly sexy. He thrust deeply into her, and she gave herself up to a thousand different sensations, a want that was as emotional as it was physical. A noise jolted her awake.