The Celtic Riddle (30 page)

"Well, what is?" he yelled. He was totally out of control. It
occurred to me that with this stress and the Irish cooked breakfasts
he'd been eating, he might be on the verge of a stroke. However, I
couldn't stop.

"She's an intelligent young woman. She'll figure it out for herself."

"What if it's too late?" he said.

Too late? Too late for what? "Oh for heaven's sake, Rob. Don't be
such a drip."

I stomped out of the Inn. It was true, I was feeling guilty. But I
still thought he was handling this situation all wrong. I wandered
around the town for a while, holding imaginary conversations with him
and her, and trying to calm down. From time to time, I'd see almost
everyone in town I knew: Conail, out of jail and still drinking, Eithne
and Fionuala-I took some pleasure in knowing Fionuala had persuaded her
older sister to come into town-Paddy Gilhooly, who didn't seem to have
allowed the disappearance of his young girlfriend to bother him too
much. The only person I didn't see was Breeta. I carefully avoided the
rest of them, not in the mood for conversation. I needed to think what
to do.

Finally, in a fit of ill humor, I decided I was going to go to the
music festival, whether I would enjoy it or not, just to spite Rob. I
might even forget all about it, if I tried hard enough, I reasoned. I
walked along the streets until I heard music I liked, the traditional
Celtic jigs and reels, and went in.

The bar was packed, a haze of cigarette smoke, and very, very noisy.
It was a friendly crowd, most of them, I could tell, out for a special
Saturday night at their local pub. Young people crowded around the bar,
and pints of beer, dark and creamy, were passed across to others in the
room. Most were in couples, but there was a small group of women out
for an evening together, and a crowd of young men on the other side of
the room looking them over furtively. For a horrible moment, I thought
I saw Rob and Maeve, which would entirely spoil the place for me, but
when I looked in that direction again, I couldn't see them.

Over in one corner, two old women sat smiling, one toothlessly, at
the crowd. They were of sturdy stock, both dressed in gray, one with
her white hair held back from her face with a barrette, the other's
hair covered by a small gray scarf. From time to time, the barman, a
fellow with a hearty booming voice called across to them, "Ready for
another round, dears?" and the two old woman would laugh and nod. The
barman would then send a strapping youth to deliver the drinks to their
table.

In another corner of the room, seated on a bench, behind a large low
table on which were scattered dozens of drink glasses, some empty, some
full, and several ashtrays heaped with butts, were four musicians: a
raven-haired woman in a black sleeveless top and black pants playing a
squeeze-box; a blonde woman, casually attired in sweatshirt and jeans,
on the bodhran, the Celtic drum; another woman with short-cropped hair
in jeans and sweater, the fiddler; and the leader of the group, a man
in jeans and wool sweater, who played the flute. It was he who
announced the tunes they were to play, or tried to at least, the din in
the bar making it impossible for all except those closest to hear what
he said, and marked out the beat with a thump of his heel on the wood
floor.

Those patrons who wanted to hear the music crowded in a large
semicircle several rows deep around the table, those in front sitting
on low stools. I stood near the back of that group, cheered by the
music, as the musicians began to play. The first piece was a ballad,
sung by the raven-haired woman, a song that all but me seemed to know.
Her voice was clear and sweet, the refrain wafting over the crowd, some
of whom sang softly along with her.

After a few minutes, the musicians broke into a jig, I to a
smattering of applause from the crowd, followed j by a reel, then
another jig. Faster and faster the music ] went, the fiddler leaning
now into her instrument, her j face a study in concentration, the
bodhran thumping I out the beat hypnotically, the squeeze-box wailing,
the I flute notes soaring, the crowd swaying, the man's knee j moving
up and down like a piston marking the time.

Then, I felt something hard pressed against my back, and a hoarse
voice whispered, "Come along with me now, or I'll shoot." I felt myself
being pulled away from the crowd, pushed down a hall, then out a door
that led into an alley. Before I had any idea what was happening, or
could even turn my head, I felt a cloth being placed over my mouth and
the world went black.

I awoke, or perhaps I should say became conscious, to find myself in
a place with no light and no sound. Perhaps this is what death is, I
thought, no clouds or wings or pearly gates, nor on the other hand, the
fires and sulphurous fumes of damnation. Just eternal nothingness. I
thought with regret of all the things I'd left undone, and unsaid, and
wondered if it might be possible to be given another chance, a
reprieve. Dimly, I wondered if Eamon Byrne was somewhere nearby,
wishing, in his case, that there were thoughts he'd left unspoken.

Gradually, however, nothingness became a cold, hard surface, the
smell of dampness, waves of nausea, a glimmer of night sky way above
me, and the roar of the wind outside my prison. And then, in the
darkness nearby, I heard a groan.

"Rob?" I exclaimed. "Rob, is that you?" Another groan. I pulled
myself up on my hands and knees, and felt about in the direction of the
sound. A few feet away from my own resting place, I found him. He was
still not entirely conscious, but he was coming around. I found his
hand and held it.

"Who's there?" he said hoarsely, coming to with a start.

"It's me, Rob," I said. "You're with me."

He said nothing for a minute or two, and I thought he'd lost
consciousness again.

"Any idea where we are?" he said finally.

"Nope," I replied.

He sat up slowly and groaned again. "It's coming back to me," he
said. "The bar, the music, and you disappearing down the back hallway:
I caught just a glimpse of you. It looked odd, somehow, so I decided
I'd better take a look. I got as far as the back door. I wonder if
there were two of them. Hate to think I'd be overpowered by just one.
Must be seriously out of practice. It's all that desk work they're
giving me back home. Has to be. You don't think it could be middle age,
do you? Ether, probably, or something similar if I judged correctly in
the split second between the time the cloth went over my mouth and I
blacked out. And if this ghastly nausea I'm feeling is any indication.
Primitive, but effective. I was out like a light. Whoever it was must
have knocked you out first, and then got at me from behind the door, or
something. Never even saw it coming. I'm definitely out of practice."

"It was nice of you to come after me," I said at the end of his
soliloquy.

"That's what we policemen do. Stop crime, save the damsel in
distress, that sort of thing. Not that I'm doing such a fine job of it
on this particular occasion."

"Did you happen to see who was pushing me out the door?" I asked.

"Unfortunately not. I could just see the top of your head, and the
back of someone else's, but it didn't look right."

"Man? Woman?"

"Couldn't say. How about you? Voice mean anything."

"No, it was deliberately disguised, though, which probably means I'd
know this person."

"Mmmm," he said. I heard him moving in the darkness, and in a
moment, the flick of his lighter and the small flame. "See!" he said.
"There are some advantages to smoking. Don't think I didn't notice that
you don't approve."

We stood up, and as Rob moved the tiny light about, surveyed our
prison. We were standing in a circular structure of some kind, about
ten feet in diameter. The walls, made of stone, curved inward and
upward to a small hole about twelve feet off the ground. There was an
opening, a small door with metal bars, and Rob leaned hard against it.
It didn't budge. He turned off the lighter. "I want to save fuel," he
said, "while I think.

"With these walls curving in like that, it would be virtually
impossible to climb up there to see if we could make a bigger opening
in the top," Rob said softly in the darkness. "You'd have to be a
spider or a fly, or something. Maybe you could stand on my shoulders
and see if you could push some of the top stones away to widen the
hole. But," he sighed, "we still couldn't get up there. Maybe, if I
stood near the wall and pushed you up? Probably not," he said,
resignation in his voice. I was inclined to agree with him.

"I have a question for you," he said after a few minutes of
contemplation, "this being the first opportunity I've had to be alone
with you since we got on the plane."

And who's fault was that, I wondered, what with him spending so much
time with his favorite garda? "Ask away," I said.

"Do you really think I'm a drip, and a-what was that other
unpleasant term you used?-a poop?"

Really, the male ego. "No," I said. "Well, maybe sometimes. If you
could just be a little more relaxed with Jennifer."

"How so?"

"Do you think this is a good time to discuss this?" I sighed.

"Why not?" he declared. "Not much else doing around here, is there?"

"All right. Then I would submit that she's going to grow up, she's
going to have boyfriends. Brace yourself, she's going to have sex. Why,
instead of putting your energy into scaring the boys off, which frankly
probably has the opposite effect of what you intended, why wouldn't you
talk to her about practical things like birth control and STDs and
stuff?"

"That's a mother's job," he replied.

I was tempted to say that since she didn't have one, the role was
his. But of course he knew that, and he had done the best he could with
Jennifer, and not a bad job at all.

"Anyway, I'm not as much of a dinosaur as you think. I know she
probably won't marry her first high school sweetheart the way I did."

How could she when you won't let her have a high school sweetheart,
I wanted to say, but kept my mouth shut.

"Don't say anything," he ordered. "Even in the dark, I know exactly
what the expression on your face looks like right now. I just don't
think Gilhooly is a good place to start," he continued. "She's a little
immature compared to some of her girlfriends. I mean how old is he,
anyway? Old enough to be her father? He can't be ten years younger than
I am. Well maybe ten." He paused. "Okay more than ten, but you get the
idea."

"You're saying he's too old for her, and you're right," I said. As
tedious as a middle-aged man fussing about his age would normally be,
this conversation about age struck me as rather interesting, suddenly.
Could it be, I wondered, what with all this drama about Jennifer and
her older man that I'd overlooked something rather important? How old
would the lost child have been, I wondered. Because it would have had
to be the child, wouldn't it? The mother, father, father's sister, and
grandparents were already dead. Eithne said her parents had been
married for thirty-four years. Byrne had been away a year before that.
That meant his sister's child couldn't be any younger than about
thirty-six, maybe more. Thirty-six to forty, say. Could Padraig be the
lost child? It was possible, I supposed. You'd think that Eamon Byrne
would have objected to his daughter taking up with his sister's son,
assuming he wasn't in favor of a severely limited gene pool. But maybe
he didn't know. He didn't seem to have known about Deirdre, perhaps
because the family feud of his youth meant the families were not well
acquainted. They'd inhabited quite different towns. Was it possible, I
wondered, that the child was alive and had tracked the family down?

"And anyway, I don't want her to get hurt," I heard Rob say. "It's
just a vacation kind of relationship, admit it."

I turned my attention back to what he was saying. If he thought in
my weakened condition I was going to agree with everything he said, he
was sorely mistaken. "And you, I suppose, are setting a good example
for her in that regard? Alex may be the soul of discretion where his
roommate's comings and goings are concerned, but Jennifer knows
perfectly well you've been creeping out very late and returning very
early in the morning. And she doesn't believe the police business
excuse, either!"

"I wish you hadn't said that," he sighed. "You didn't have to. I
know. You're saying I'm a jerk and a poor excuse for a father." He
sounded dreadful there in the dark.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have said that. And no, I don't
think you're a poor excuse for a father, or a jerk. I mean, look at
Jennifer. She's a lovely young woman, and very sensible. You should
take credit for that. As for Maeve, she also seems very competent, and
pleasant." Faint praise, I know, but it was the best I could do. "I
gather the relationship is pretty serious," I added.

"Don't think so," he said quietly. I waited. "Two reasons: She's not
really a widow. Her husband is still breathing. There's been no divorce
in Ireland until very recently, so she bills herself as a widow for the
sake of convention. He lives in Belfast."

"So maybe now she'll get a divorce."

"I think she's a little conflicted-is that the word?- on the
subject, either because she doesn't entirely approve of divorce, or
because she still has some feelings for him."

Oh dear, I thought. We both digested that for a moment.

"And the second reason?" I asked.

He sighed. "The second reason is that I'm not entirely sure that is
where my heart lies. I'm not sure where it does lie, but I don't think
it's there."

I wasn't sure I understood the details of that statement, but I did
understand the sentiments expressed.

"And that fancy pants lawyer?" Rob said into the darkness.