Whispers in the Mist (16 page)

Shy but pleased, Gemma signed
thank you
and popped open the box. Her smile froze into something more closely resembling a rictus. The box tilted down her slackening hand.

“Gemma?”

In a slow slide, the box tipped off Gemma’s fingers and somersaulted toward the carpet. Her pained gurgling, so scratchy and feeble, was nevertheless the most shocking noise Ellen had ever heard. The girl stared down at the carpet where the scattered stones blinked like animal eyes out of the dark. Ellen snatched up the accursed things. Gemma had felt their taint, no doubt about it. Ellen could have torn her hair out over the misstep, and just when the girl was feeling at home with her.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll flush them right now, away they go forever, never to be seen again. Forget you ever saw them.”

If anything, Gemma’s pinched and stricken expression intensified. With taut fortitude, she pulled Ellen’s hands toward her. Her clammy fingers stumbled over Ellen’s. She continued gurgling, her skin flushing with the effort.

Finally, with a stamp of foot, she scrawled another note and shoved it at Ellen. The jagged letters yelled their desperation, their frantic need.

Where did you get these?

Sunday

Becoming a father isn’t difficult,
But it’s very difficult to be a father.

Wilhelm Busch

TWENTY
-
FIVE

D
ANNY SAT IN THE
incident room with his men, trying to lead by example with what he hoped was a cooperative expression. In front of the chalkboard with its lists of assignments and follow-up tasks stood Superintendent Clarkson. They’d already wasted an hour debriefing.

“In other words, you have nothing,” Clarkson said.

Danny explained that now that they’d almost confirmed the victim’s identity, maybe they could move forward.

“It’s a confused family story. I don’t understand the half of it yet, but I’ll be running the victim’s cousin Dermot McNamara through the wringer as soon as we’re finished here. He’s been puking his guts out since last night, but I expect he’s right enough now to answer questions and make his ID official. Other than this, we’ve found few people who spoke to the victim, and those who did notice him didn’t mark him as anything other than a lad in for a festival shag. We’ll continue asking around the pubs, though.” Danny paused. “One shop owner, Malcolm Lynch, seemed to think the victim might be a petty thief.”

“Right then,” Clarkson said. “What about the missing boy, Brendan Nagel?”

Danny outlined the incident with Bijou late Friday night. Once again, nothing on forensics and no witnesses except for the dog.

“No way Brendan larked off to make his fortune in the big city or even to follow a lassie,” O’Neil added. “He’d ask old Seamus—that’s his father—for permission to shite before he’d make a decision like that on his own.”

Clarkson nodded, looking pleased with O’Neil. “We’ll proceed as if they’re separate cases until we get indications otherwise. On with you then. We’re done here for now.”

“We haven’t discussed Malcolm’s complaint,” Danny said. “Yesterday, he opened his shop to find
limp dick
painted across his windows.”

“Go on.”

“Malcolm blamed Seamus Nagel for the mischief. There’s tension between them about Seamus’s son, the missing Brendan, who works at Malcolm’s shop. In any case, whoever wrote the message was no artist.”

“And then there’s Merrit’s car,” O’Neil said. “Someone also painted the word
slag
on Merrit Chase’s car in a color I’d describe as magenta, the same color as
limp dick
on Malcolm’s shop window.”

“And Merrit Chase—wasn’t she the one from last year, the American?”

“Oh ay, that would be her, all right,” O’Neil said.

Danny ignored the sideways looks the rest of the men aimed at him.

“How does she connect to Malcolm and the rest of it?” Clarkson said.

Good question. She’d better not connect. “She shouldn’t connect,” Danny said.

“Except that she went to Malcolm to repair her necklace,” O’Neil said.

A few men wandered out of the room, Clarkson on their heels. “A phantom graffiti artist isn’t our priority—unless the messages are related to the murders, of course.”

“What a ponce,” one of the men muttered after Clarkson exited the room.

“A ponce who fancies O’Neil,” said another.

Danny stood to the sound of kissy noises aimed at O’Neil. “Off to the morgue to confirm the ID on our lost boy.”

As he left, Danny thought about the color magenta, and what kind of temperament you’d need to use that color for graffiti. Creative, perhaps? Nathan Tate popped into his head. The newcomer artist with the haunted look around his eyes, the artist who Seamus had boasted was good enough to get into Malcolm’s shop, where Brendan had worked and where Lost Boy had loitered.

TWENTY
-
SIX

D
ANNY STOOD NEXT TO
Dermot in the morgue. The scent of decay held in momentary abeyance coated his tongue. Next to him, Dermot covered his mouth and gagged with a dry, hacking noise.

Witnesses arrived with preconceived notions about the vessel called the human body. Danny knew from past experience that most of them imagined that a soulful essence remained just under the skin. Danny was used to the flash of disillusionment that crossed most of their faces before despair engulfed them. He expected the same out of Dermot.

Lost Boy’s physical form lay under a pristine cotton sheet, as snowy white as baptismal linen. To Danny, the sheet always appeared innocent of its function and out of place, like it should be lifted with a flourish—
voilà
—to reveal nothing. But, alas, Benjy pulled back the sheet and Lost Boy’s head appeared.

Instead of the usual disillusionment, Dermot raised his bloodshot gaze toward the ceiling. He tracked along the darkest shadows to the darkest corners with lips pressed together. Danny had seen that too—the fight to keep the howls inside. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did he die?”

“A blow to the head.”

Dermot covered his mouth again and rushed out of the room. The door swung shut against the sound of retching. Danny waited in silence while Benjy searched his pockets for a cigarette. When the retching stopped, Danny poked his head out the swing doors.

Dermot leaned against the walls with eyes shut. “John McIlvoy. That bastard. He snapped, I think, when he killed our mom. You’d have to be crazy for that to happen, wouldn’t you?”

“Momentary insanity doesn’t change his guilt. Do you want more time with Toby?”

Dermot pushed himself off the wall and followed Danny back into the viewing room. He spoke through ragged breaths. “For the longest time, Toby insisted he was psychic. He believed in ghosts. He said his totem—
totem
, I ask you—was the sparrow.”

Benjy fingered an unlit cigarette, his silence loud as he nodded at Danny.
You see?
He moved to cover Toby, but Dermot pushed his hand away.

“
I watch
,” Dermot said, more to himself than Danny, “
and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top
. Our granny, she loved nothing better than to wash her hair nets in the kitchen sink while Toby sat on the counter watching her. She’d quote that psalm like it meant something, and maybe it did.”

Dermot reached out as if to pat Toby’s head but dropped his hand. “She used to call Toby ‘sparrow,’ and I used to get jealous because she said it with such pride. But then one day a sparrow entered her house and perched on the piano, staring around until it flew at Toby’s head. Later I heard Gran tell Aunt Tara that when a sparrow enters a house, a death shall come. She was an eerie old thing with her lores and fables.”

He choked a little but continued. “That day, the day the sparrow swooped at Toby’s head, Granny said, ‘There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow,’ and never spoke of sparrows again. Maybe she knew Toby’s fate.”

“From Shakespeare,” Benjy said. “That quote.”

Danny stepped away from the rolling cart upon which Toby lay. Toby, in the air, in his imagination—it didn’t matter—seemed to hover around them. He resisted the urge to check the room for fluttering feathers. Don’t be daft, he told himself. There wasn’t even a window.

“Do you confirm that this is Toby Grealy?” Benjy said to Dermot.

Dermot nodded and stumbled out of the room.

“Didn’t I tell you this was a strange one?” Benjy said.

Danny led the way along various corridors until they reached the hospital’s staff lounge. They sat in the quietest corner away from the vending machines. The artificial glow from the overhead lights leached the color from Dermot’s already green complexion.

Danny left him sagged over the table and returned with tea. “Let’s talk about Toby. You weren’t what I’d call coherent yesterday.”

After a few forced swallows, Dermot said, “I can’t remember what I told you.”

“Start with the reason he came to Lisfenora.”

Dermot groaned.

“Okay,” Danny said, “start with your mother then, Siobhan. She was widowed, divorced—?”

“Widowed.”

“And then?”

Dermot spoke in a robotic voice. “She married John McIlvoy, but don’t get excited. I went through all this with your lot back in Dublin. They couldn’t find anything on him, and what family he had didn’t want anything to do with him. He fell off the Earth after he killed my mother. The investigators figured him for crossing into Northern Ireland and then who knows where.”

Dermot shoved his teacup aside. The brown liquid sloshed over the edges.

“Go on,” Danny said.

“What do you want to know? My mother was the trusting sort, and lonely and overworked and susceptible. She didn’t need any man’s money, not that McIlvoy had any. He was a rough sort, looking for his ticket to the good life. After my father died—heart attack—my mother became sole proprietor of a high-end tourist shop on Wicklow Street, just off Grafton.”

Danny nodded his understanding, Grafton Street being the prime pedestrian thoroughfare between Trinity College and St. Stephens Green. Excellent hotels and restaurants and shops jammed the warren of lanes off Grafton Street, as Danny well remembered from his honeymoon, that joyous time in his marriage.

“Give me the timeline,” Danny said. “What year was this? How old were you? How old was Gemma?”

“My dad died in 1990 when I was seventeen and Gemma was seven. I hate to say this about my mother—God rest her—but she didn’t fare well without a husband. I tried to help, but she wouldn’t hear of me not going to university. I had my heart set on business, hoping to get out of being just a shopkeeper.” He fiddled with the teacup, sloshing more liquid over the sides. “I had dreams and plans. Maybe I still do—sometimes I can’t tell anymore. It’s been difficult to grow my life what with Gemma—not that I regret it, not at all.”

But he did. Danny caught a whiff of resentment and conflicted loyalties.

“Your mother was lonely,” Danny said.

“Utterly. She ended up at the matchmaking festival in 1991. She was determined that I not worry about her or the shop while I completed my education. She returned with McIlvoy in tow, as jolly and beer-laden as you please.” He shuddered. “But he didn’t seemed bad at first. By then I was away at the UCD School of Business, my first year, living on campus and quite the little man. I managed to get through most of that school year without laying eyes on McIlvoy, except for Christmas, but the bastard still seemed okay then, or maybe he was on good behavior while I was home. In fact, I know he was, because Gemma has since told me this was the case.”

While Danny listened, Dermot related how it became obvious once his mother had died that she’d been protecting Dermot from the true McIlvoy, whose opportunistic nature became apparent over time.

“Mom and Gemma would take to coming up with day trips or Sunday brunches rather than have me visit the house. Mom didn’t like to worry others, you see, and Gemma is that way also.” Dermot stuck his finger in the tea and flicked out a few droplets. “Are we done now?”

“No.” Danny’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. He forwarded it to voicemail with a quick click. “How was your mother killed?”

“By rage. McIlvoy had her by the neck.” He stopped to take a deep breath. “He banged her head against the kitchen counter as he was choking her.”

Danny waited until Dermot nodded the okay before continuing with the next question. “Fast forward many years and Toby arrives in Lisfenora. What day was this?”

“Saturday. And then Gemma and I arrived Monday. I thought he’d spoken to Liam. The story had always been that he matched McIlvoy to my mom.” He slumped in his chair. “At least, that’s the happy story my mom told.”