Whispers in the Mist (13 page)

“That’s the point, you sodden fool.” Alan swiped up the Jameson and poured what remained of the whiskey into the fire. The fire flared. “Get your head out of your arse.”

By firelight, Alan’s skin looked glazed and semi-hardened, like he’d been removed from a kiln too early. He stared down at the bottle, at the warped orange glints caught in the glass, then tossed it up in the air. Catching it by the neck, he considered it again, hefting it, then with a grunt smashed it against the stone hearth, leaving a jagged weapon still fisted in his hand.

“No one harms me or mine,” he said. “That’s the given. I thought everyone in the village knew this about me.”

Danny eased the broken bottle out of Alan’s white-knuckled grip. “Give me that.”

Alan’s hardening yielded. “Right. Come with me then.”

They left Seamus almost passed out by the dying fire.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Alan said.

A few minutes later, torches lighting the way and Bijou unleashed but keeping close, the men turned right out of the plaza and made for the church. Danny kept his mouth shut while Alan ruminated aloud that, given the right circumstances, Bijou might consider herself the alpha. Perhaps she’d lunged at someone who’d made threatening moves toward Brendan.

The dog led a slower than usual pace toward the church grounds. They entered the parking area and circled around three clergy flats and onto a little green located at the back of the property. A rock wall more ornamental than protective, and with a wrought iron grille atop it, hid them from view of the buildings on the next street over.

“This is where Brendan takes her,” Alan said.

Alan’s feet shushed over the grass accompanied by Bijou’s pants. Other than this, Danny heard nothing, not even a rustle from within the clipped junipers that lined one wall.

Alan waved to him, and Danny caught up. A damp dog pile sat in the middle of the grass.

“That’s hers, all right.” Alan pulled a plastic baggie from his pocket, and with a guilt-ridden glance at Fitz’s flat, bent to clean up Bijou’s mess. “We know they made it this far.”

“No, leave it for now,” Danny said. “We shouldn’t touch anything—even that.”

Alan grimaced. “If you say so, but Fitz’ll have me for dinner when he finds it.”

Bijou sniffed the pile and, uninterested, wandered away.

“Could she track Brendan?” Danny said. “Seamus can give us a personal item for her to smell.”

“She couldn’t track her way out of a doghouse.”

The light from their torches stretched Bijou’s shadow toward the corner of the enclosed green. They followed her to a recessed portion of the wall, where a wrought iron gate hung open. The passage deposited them onto a lane of mixed shops and homes. A faint glow from behind a few second-story curtains exacerbated rather than relieved the dank sensation lurking about in the dark.

“We could knock on doors,” Alan said.

“I’ll get my men on it. You go home.”

Alan stooped beside Bijou. He pulled a treat out of his pocket and she licked it up in her dainty way. “Home to an ice pack and aspirin for the dog.”

Danny caught a movement from within misty tendrils. Lost Boy, he thought, and half expected a sparrow to glide out from under the eaves. He waved the torch to dispel the figments and turned away from dark windows that winked back at him, seemingly in on the joke of his haunting.

“What’s got you?” Alan said.

“An overactive imagination.”

EIGHTEEN

L
ISFENORA WAS JUST STARTING
to wake up when Danny received a call on his mobile from a fretful Malcolm. “This is urgent,” he said. “I need you at my shop. Please.”

As luck would have it, Danny was just down the street waiting for O’Neil in front of the church. They were set to question Father Dooley and Archdeacon Fitzgerald about late-night foot traffic in the church green. Brendan still hadn’t returned and, with sinking hope, Danny suspected that the randy lad wasn’t sleeping off a drunk in some randy lassie’s bed.

Now Danny stood in front of Malcolm’s shop staring at lines of paint marring one of his windows. More graffiti, which was an annoyance but not exactly urgent. The words announced
limp dic
with the missing
k
nothing but a downstroke that veered off to the right, undone.

“This is outrageous,” Malcolm said.

Nathan Tate slouched into view with hands in his pockets. “Someone doesn’t like you.”

“Which makes no sense at all, and not just because I work perfectly well in
that
department.” Malcolm smiled, looking as if he was trying to force a good mood on over his irritation. “I can’t think of who dislikes me. It must be a mistake, or a prank, wouldn’t you say, Danny?”

But Danny was thinking about the graffiti on Merrit’s car.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it,” Malcolm continued, “the way some people need attention?”

“Indeed, some people crave it and don’t even know it.” With a wave, Nathan sauntered toward the pub. “Cheers.”

Malcolm eyed Nathan’s retreating form. “His pottery isn’t even that good, did you know? Seamus is the one after me to take on his sloppy work, but he wouldn’t know quality if it poured itself into his pint.” Something lit within him. His skin flushed. “Seamus.”

“What about Seamus?” Danny asked.

“Nothing.”

Malcolm tapped his lower lip with a finger, lost in thought. He was thinking something, all right, but he must not have heard about the
slag
painted on Merrit’s car. Seamus wasn’t a likely suspect for that bit of vandalism. Danny waited.

“Fine then,” Malcolm said. “It’s not nothing, but if this is what I think it is, then I can take care of it myself. Nothing but an intimidation tactic, and after the way Seamus has taken advantage of my generous nature too. Taking on Brendan, when what I really need is a shop employee with initiative, organizational skills, customer savvy—”

Danny held up a hand. “Stop. Brendan Nagel is missing. You saw him yesterday, correct?”

“Missing? Oh, dear.” Malcolm blinked. “I saw him yesterday, as usual, in the shop. He closed for the day on his own, and I suppose he went on his merry way to the pub after that.”

“If you think of anything else, don’t hesitate to call again. I must go now.”

Malcolm nodded as he turned away to study his marred shop front. “Look at this. I try so hard to create a pretty façade for my customers. I insist that you question Seamus about my window, yes?”

Danny felt a sigh ascending from his diaphragm. The intimate nature of village life never failed to aggravate petty annoyances. That said, the next time Danny saw Seamus and Malcolm, they would be drinking together with the rest of the crows, right as a couple of pigs in muck.

Ten minutes later, Danny sipped Earl Grey from a porcelain teacup that felt fragile as old parchment in his hands. He sat in Father Dooley’s flat along with Deacon Fitzgerald, whose girth overwhelmed the antique chair upon which he perched. Everything about this room, from the tea set to the chair, bespoke an old lady with a Victoriana fetish rather than a celibate who kept a flask filled with the best cognac.

“Last night?” Father Dooley said. “Might as well be in a cloistered order for all I heard. And you, Fitz?”

The rear window of the flat provided a view of the green. A flutter of wings shot past the window, startling Danny. He set his cup aside and wiped errant tea drips off the back of his hand, trying not to show his sudden sense of urgency.

The deacon’s chair squealed when he shifted. He tilted his head so he looked at Danny from between teetering eyeglasses and furrowed forehead. “I didn’t hear a thing. Something about this incessant drippy greyness has me sleeping harder than usual. Too early in the season for it, I tell you.”

“You’re used to Brendan coming around with Bijou then,” Danny said.

“Can’t miss them, though he only does it under cover of night.”

“No harm in it,” Father Dooley said. “A little fertilizer doesn’t hurt anything, does it?” He grinned in response to Fitz’s scowl.

“How often did Brendan bring Bijou around?” Danny asked.

“Every night since the festival started,” Fitz said. “Patrick here is too lenient by half, letting that brute empty herself on our grounds. At least Alan taught Brendan to clean up the mess. This may or may not be helpful, but he always arrived a little after eleven.”

“Did he ever meet anyone or bring a friend along?”

The clergymen shook their heads in unison. “Here and gone in under five minutes, thank Christ,” Fitz said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve shooed kids from our grounds over the years. I don’t know what they hope to accomplish back there—I can only imagine—”

“You’d best be only imagining,” Father Dooley said. “And you might want to confess some of those thoughts, also.”

Fitz’s voice rose; he was not to be sidetracked. “Last week a couple of lurkers decided our green was just the place for an—interlude—and they woke me clear out of a sound sleep. I knocked on the window to warn them off.”

Father Dooley’s tone turned thoughtful. “Brendan Nagel. Did you know that he about wore a path on the grass using our back gate for a shortcut? He lives a few streets over, and he’d run through with a wave every morning on his way to classes. Since starting at the shop, I’ve seen less of him. I suppose he lets himself in at Malcolm’s back door rather than circle to the front through our gate. I always thought him a good lad. Not a genius by any means, but well-meaning.”

With a nod and thanks, Danny let himself out, leaving the clerics to continue their ruminations without him. He’d already had the same discussion with himself. According to Alan, this was the second year Brendan had helped out with Bijou during the festival.

“Detective Sergeant?”

Dermot McNamara stood in the parking lot in front of the clergy flats. The fog had thinned, begrudging them a smudge of yellow sun, just enough to spotlight Dermot’s bloodshot eyes and sallow skin.

“I don’t have time now,” Danny said. “I’ll find you later. You’d best not have been drinking in front of my children.”

Dermot staggered and caught himself with a hand on the wall. “If you’ll listen, I can explain about last night—”

“Stumbling into my home dead drunk?” Danny retorted. “Mad, with children in the house. And here you are ossified once again.”

“I can explain.” Dermot sucked in his cheeks. His next words came in a cloud of beer breath. “I saw the newspaper last night. Your victim, the boy in the police sketch. I can identify him.”

NINETEEN

“
S
EE?”
M
ERRIT SAID.

Detective Officer O’Neil perused her driver’s side door. In the States, vandalism like this didn’t rate a house call, so she was glad to see him pull out his mobile to snap some pictures. Afterwards, he pressed a few buttons and held his mobile up alongside the
slag
. On the tiny monitor, Merrit caught a glimpse of a shop window with
limp dick
arrayed in big, sloppy magenta letters. The same color paint, no doubt about it, and the same loopy letter
l
.

“I’m not the only one then,” she said.

“You sound relieved.”

“Maybe I am.” Merrit hadn’t realized how paranoid she’d become. “But this makes it even more weird, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure. No offense to you, but I wasn’t worried about your grievance, only now we’ve got Malcolm in the mix, and he’s a right local citizen—a right
mouthy
local citizen.”

“What? I don’t count?”

“Not entirely.” O’Neil smiled to lessen the sting.

He was a handsome guy. Like most Americans, Merrit was fussy about good teeth, which he had—but she suspected that he was highly aware of what he could get away with because of his looks.

He scraped paint into a little plastic bag. “Any idea what you could have in common with Malcolm?”

“You mean besides rubbing some mysterious person the wrong way?”

O’Neil grinned. “Ay, that wouldn’t be hard. Could be anyone. Wouldn’t take much—look at a person sideways like.”

Before Merrit could think of a witty comeback, O’Neil was on the move, trotting back to his car. “Twisted day. I’ll let you know if I find out anything.” He paused beside his open door. “Where were you and Liam last night?”

“In the Thistle and Burr, matchmaking as usual. Why?”

“I assume you know by now that Brendan Nagel is missing.” She nodded. “Did you see him? Hear anything about him?”

“Sorry, no.”

With a wave, O’Neil accelerated away, leaving Merrit to ponder Seamus Nagel, who’d been so proud of his boy and ready for a wife. Unsettled, Merrit taped a large garbage bag over the graffiti to preserve it for a few more days.

Leaning against the car, she breathed in the moist scent of all things green. She imagined moss and peat on the breeze, and let the gentle touch of Ireland soothe her nerves. Beyond Liam’s plot of land, the hills rolled away from her, losing themselves in a peaceful mist like a faerie-tale place.