Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (99 page)

“Now I don’t think—” he began in protest, but just then Casey returned, hands full with tea and buns. He froze at the sight of the constable. It was the first time he'd encountered anyone from her work and Pamela felt a nervous ticking set up under her eye.

Constable Fred turned and his face drained of all color. Casey met his look with one of his dark inscrutable expressions that always made people nervous.

Pamela didn’t think even one of Casey’s looks could explain the paleness of the Constable’s visage. The man looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

Perhaps he
had
seen a ghost. Though Casey didn’t look as much like Brian as Patrick did, still there was a very strong resemblance to his father. So Constable Fred was the link; something very much like relief flooded through her.

“An’ you must be the husband?” Constable Fred said quietly, voice trembling ever so slightly.

“Aye,” Casey said warily. “I would be that.”

He crossed the room depositing the tea and buns onto the small bedside table. The constable turned his hat in his hands, obviously taken aback by Casey’s presence.

“I only wanted to be certain ye were doin’ alright then, lass.”

“I’m fine,” she reassured him, trying not to give in to the urge to look at Casey and see how he was assessing the situation. Though never overtly friendly, he was generally courteous to all who crossed his path. The neighborhood he’d grown up in, however, considered friendliness to the local constable an act of treason.

Constable Fred seemed to think now was time to make good his escape.

“We’ll see ye when yer able to work again then, lass. An’ I don’t see that anyone will bother ye with questions until yer stronger.” He gave her a look of complicity and she nodded, knowing he would now accept whatever explanation she gave him. With luck, it could be swept under the rug as an accidental shooting by some overzealous farmer.

“Thank you for coming by, it was kind of you.”

“Good day to ye,” he said to Casey, who nodded tersely in his direction. Constable Fred bobbed his bald head in reply and then beat a hasty retreat out the door.

Casey handed her the tea. It was hot and sugary, and she sipped it gratefully. The warmth spread out from her stomach to join the tendrils of pain medication purling through her blood, creating a sense of fuzzy-edged well being.

She turned her head to find Casey looking at her with an odd smile on his lips.

“Ankle better too, darlin’?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said with grim satisfaction.

“Why?” The tea in her stomach shifted uneasily. She didn’t like the look on Casey’s face at all.

“Because now we’re goin’ to talk about this.” He held up a fist that had a red, blue and white scarf wound around it. “An’ about whose blood was all over yer hands.”

PAMELA HAD BEEN UP AND ABOUT for two days, since coming home with her ankle casted. Casey had sternly insisted that she be on bed rest for the first few days out of hospital, despite her assurances that she felt completely fine. She half wondered if he had banished her upstairs in an effort to avoid her. He was still angry, she knew, and it was well evidenced in the fact that he attacked every chore he could find with more than usual vigor. While Casey enjoyed physical labor, she knew he also used it as an avoidance tactic when something was bothering him.

Once she had come downstairs he had spent the majority of his time, when he wasn’t at work, outdoors. Mending physical fences while ignoring emotional ones.

This morning she was determined to beard the lion in his den, which today appeared to be the chopping block, where he was splitting wood with a force that made her wince. She paused for a moment on the threshold of the door, admiring the easy arc of his swing that cleaved the wood with one blow.

The day was warm and he was clad only in a thin t-shirt and worn jeans. The long moving lines of his muscles could be clearly seen and the t-shirt clung to his torso with a fine dew of sweat. He paused momentarily to brush a forearm across his brow and then resumed his work. He still made her weak in the knees, both literally and figuratively, just as he had from the moment they’d met.

It took her this way at times, the enormity of what was between them, both physically and emotionally. Time and observation had taught her that what they shared was, as Pat had said, no common thing. Like any couple caught up in the demands of home, jobs and active revolution, she sometimes forgot how fortunate they were to have found such a thing.

She took a deep breath, cutting her pleasant ruminations short. He might well choose to sleep on the sofa tonight, but she was going to clear the air with him one way or the other.

He caught her eye and winked. She kept clear of flying chips, but picked up the pieces that had fallen farther off and carried them to the neatly blocked woodpile Casey had built at the side of the back porch.

He split a fresh log and the smell of pinesap filled the air with a sudden golden tang. “Well, what is it? Ye’d best out with it or it’ll go straight to yer spleen.”

She stifled a sound of annoyance at this pre-emptive strike from his corner. She carried more wood over to the growing pile, placing each piece carefully one on top of the other. Behind her she could feel Casey watching her, and knew the time to come clean had arrived. She turned back, dusting slivers of wood from her arms.

“I think you’d better sit down,” she said, taking a long breath.

“That bad, is it?” There was a sudden fear in his eyes, and she felt the familiar lurch that came when she suspected he half-knew about Love Hagerty.

“I have to go get something, just give me a minute.” She went in the house and retrieved the letter from under a partly knit sweater in the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

Outside Casey sat on the chopping block, looking confused and a little annoyed.

“What’s this?” he asked as she handed him the letter.

“Just read it, you’ll understand.”

It seemed to take a small eternity for him to read it. When he was finished, he looked up, face pale above the dark green of his shirt. His eyes were blank with shock.

“How—how long have ye had this, woman?”

“Since October,” she said, dreading the next question even as she saw it forming in his face.

“And how did ye come to have it?”

“Someone told me where to look.”

The dark eyes narrowed. “An’ where exactly was it that ye looked?”

“The file room at the Tennant Street station.”

Casey took a deep breath and rubbed his temple with his left hand, while the right still held the letter. “Christ, Pamela.”

“I believe that’s what Pat said when I showed him,” she said in a small voice.

“Why didn’t ye tell me sooner?”

“Because you’ve had enough to deal with since being held on that damn ship and because I thought you’d be angry with me. I was afraid what you might do once you found out. Not to me,” she added hastily, “but to whomever did this.”

“Angry—maybe a little, but I know ye a bit after these years together, woman, an’ I know if ye get a notion in ye there’s no force on earth that’s goin’ to stop ye from followin’ it to the bitter end. Angry that ye put yerself in harm’s way so many times—definitely. But I’ve forgiven ye that a few times, and” he gave her a rueful smile, “likely will a few times more.”

He re-read the letter again, pausing on certain parts longer, his brow furrowed in concentration. She thought she could recite the sentences verbatim that he kept going back to, for they were the same that had made her read again and again, in growing anger, when she’d found the letter. Then suddenly he looked up, eyes dark with pain.

“Were ye—were ye out lookin’ for answers when ye lost the baby? Was that what ye were doin’ with Jamie at the monastery?”

She took a deep breath and met his eyes, “I was, but I—I was going to lose the baby anyway, Casey. The monk at the abbey confirmed it, but I think I already knew it was just a matter of time.”

Casey nodded, a sigh escaping him as though he were trying to breathe out a bit of his pain each time they spoke of the lost child. She knew he had taken the loss very much to heart, feeling that if he’d been free the miscarriage might somehow have been prevented.

“I’m sorry about the letter,” she said quietly.

Casey looked up, startled. “Sorry for the letter?”

“For what it says. For the knowing. Which, as it turns out, isn’t always better than the wondering.”

He shook his head. “I suppose it’s no more than I suspected, but didn’t want to face. He was never one for walkin’ away from someone in need. No matter what the consequences of helpin’ that person might be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes he’d help people with legal issues, did he think there was injustice bein’ done. It became a sideline really; he never got paid for it, though near the end it was takin’ up most of his evenings and weekends. There was one man he was helping maybe four, five months before he died. He started showin’ up at our house at all hours, an’ Da’ was real uncomfortable with him. He was always a good judge of character, but I think he felt he’d made a mistake by formin’ an acquaintance with this man. Told Pat an’ I we were to stay well clear of him should he come around when Da’ was workin’ or if we chanced upon him in the streets.”

“Any idea why he was so leery of him?”

“Well, Jewel, the man did come round one day while Da’ was gone, an’ I thought it maybe had somethin’ to do with his likin’ for young boys.”

“Why, did he do something inappropriate?”

“Mmn, it was more a feelin’ an’ the way he looked at Pat put the hair up on the back of my neck. Ye know when ye can’t explain it logically, but somethin’ stirs at the top of yer spine an’ ye know that the person is not quite right?”

She nodded. She had known more than one person that stirred the cluster of nerves that sat in the core of the primal brain. Instinct, survival, a sixth sense—ignoring those signals had led to tragedy more than once in her own life.

“We told Da’ the man had been about, an’ later I told him I didn’t like the way the man had eyed Pat. He seemed like a hungry wolf scenting prey. Well Da’ got all white-faced an’ left a few minutes later. Came back an hour later, calm but with an edge to him that I’d never seen before. He told me that were the man to come again, we weren’t to open the door, an’ were to call him right away. Though it seemed he really didn’t think the man
would
be comin’ back. An’ then a month later my father was dead.”

“Do you think the man had something to do with it?”

Casey shrugged. “He came round after the funeral, an’ Pat was home alone. I came in an’ he was sittin’ in the kitchen drinkin’ tea an’ Pat was lookin’ mighty uncomfortable. I went to my room an’ took down the pistol da’ had always kept up top his closet, an’ I put it to the man’s head an’ told him my father had never liked him, nor was I disposed to, an’ if he valued his life he’d not show his face near our door again. He turned back as he was walking down the front path, an’ laughed at me. Didn’t say a word, just laughed. Sound chilled me to the core, an’ I did wonder at the time, did it mean he’d somethin’ to do with my Da’s death? Though we were
assured
it was an accident.” This last was said with no small bitterness, as the police hadn’t been particularly sympathetic towards two young men whose father had been a known Republican.

Though the day was relatively fair, Pamela shivered at the faint breeze that moved her hair against her neck. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she was missing some small corner of the picture that would make sense of the whole.

Had Brian stumbled across some dark secret that was so volatile he’d been killed to ensure his silence? He wasn’t a man to have stood idly by and allow evil to flourish.

“Listen, Nancy Drew, enough, yer not in a novel here. Sometimes there are questions that don’t have an answer.”

“There’s one other thing. The man who was killed, he gave me this before he died. I don’t know if it means anything.” She reached into her coat pocket and handed the ring to Casey. “But I’ve seen the insignia elsewhere.”

Casey had an odd look on his face, and was suddenly very pale. “Where did ye see it?”

“William Bright. He had the ring on a chain around his neck.”

Casey stood and walked into the house. She could hear him run up the stairs and come down again a few moments later. He walked toward her wordless, dropping something in the palm of her hand.

She looked down, an icy feeling crawling up her spine. In her palm was a silver ring, plain but for the etched harp and the engraved BOR.

“Casey,” she said sharply, “where’d you get this ring?”

His face was grim when he answered. “It was my father’s.”

NEITHER THE BLAZING FIRE CASEY LIT nor the hot tea Pamela made had done a great deal to warm either of them.

“Who were they?” she asked, worried by the distant look he’d worn since dropping the ring in her hand.

Casey shook his head. “Myth, legend, a band of men that no one was ever certain existed. They seemed like a fairytale—Catholics and Protestants, from all levels of the community, working together to come to a peaceful solution. No one really believed they were any more real than Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws. Some thought it a joke, you know the odd things people will scrawl on buildings that have no basis in reality, but it starts a buzz going.”