Hot Whispers of an Irishman Read online

  Vi could imagine.

  “You’re welcome to come along,” she said as she inventoried the cleaning supplies beneath the sink. Since Mam had enough to last to Armageddon, she’d not miss some liquid soap and a sponge or two. Vi emerged with her pilfered goods. “I have to say, Da, handsome as you are, you’re also overdressed to help me.”

  He glanced briefly at the sales brochure still on the table. “I was thinking more of a visit in town today…a look-see for new opportunities. Hard to believe I grew up there, what little I’ve been back.”

  Often enough to settle a friend’s jetsam on her, that much was certain. She found an empty grocery sack in a drawer by the back door and tucked her supplies inside. That done, Vi opened the fridge. It seemed that Mam’s priorities lay with cleanliness. Nothing had appeared in the refrigerator since last night except some rashers, and she’d leave the pig-nibbling to Roger.

  Like Da, she settled for a glass of juice—the bottled, watery type that he preferred. The first swallow brought a wince. The second was enough to force surrender. Vi dumped the rest of the juice into the sink.

  “Twenty minutes and we’ll be gone,” she said.

  “Time enough,” her father replied.

  Twenty minutes beyond that, as they headed toward Duncarraig, Da made his plans better known. “I doubt I’ll be as long as you will,” he said. “How about we drop you at your nan’s and I take your car back into town?”

  Vi glanced over at him and was pleased to see that he appeared nearly content. He wasn’t a man to wear his unhappiness on the outside, and he hadn’t looked well in the days that she’d been home.

  “Just promise to be back for me before sundown, if you could.” Candlelight was a fine thing, but not enough to clean by.

  “Of course.”

  They drove on in her da’s favored state—quiet—and soon made Duncarraig. Town was bustling under the thin sun. Mothers had babies out in prams, and in a sign of optimism, had rolled back the babies’ clear plastic weather shields that were nearly perpetually in place. Unwilling to travel the baby path any farther, Vi returned her focus to the road. Town dwindled, fields took over, and the narrow and rutted bothareen to Nan’s appeared.

  As Vi neared the house, she spotted a new addition. A rusted red container almost large enough to hold her car sat beside the house. It seemed that in matters of trash, if not of the heart, Liam was better than his word. She parked in front of the house, then climbed out, leaving the motor running.

  “C’mon, Rog,” she said, opening the back door. He hopped out, and she gathered her cleaning supplies. Da came around to the driver’s side.

  “I’ll be back no later than teatime,” he said to Vi.

  “Bring food,” Vi said over the grumbling of her stomach, which was noting its disapproval over both last night’s sparse supper and this morning’s tease of a breakfast. “Scones, and lots of them,” she called as he closed the car door and drove off.

  With luck, he’d know that she was serious. Otherwise she would be left to forage among those of Nan’s herbs that had managed to reseed and survive encroaching weeds over the past decade. Vi bent down. Using her free hand, she pinched a leaf off a plant close to the weed-clotted stone walkway.

  “Peppermint,” she said to Roger after rubbing the leaf between her fingers and inhaling its fragrance. “Nan always said it helped bring love.”

  Roger lifted his leg, marked the plant, and trotted on.

  Aye, and then there was that view, too.

  Vi and dog entered the house, then headed back to the kitchen, where she’d made a decent dent in the chaos the day before. Sitting next to the sink was Nan’s garden journal, just where Vi had left it in her haste to avoid being too late to supper.

  “Behind as I am, a few pages more of reading will make no difference,” she said to Rog.

  Yesterday she’d made a nest of sorts for herself in the back bedroom—a chair that Nan had painted white and blue in a wild pattern, tucked into an old writing desk. Vi settled in and read, smiling at the knot designs her grandmother had imagined but never quite coaxed from the soil. Some of the herbal cures she’d listed had seen more success. Nan had even managed to persuade a few down Vi’s stubborn throat, and Vi in turn had given them more recently to her cold-ridden friends.

  It was warm and quiet in the small room, with the sun shining in the south-facing window. She felt almost as though Nan’s comforting presence was with her. As the minutes passed, much needed sleep crept up on her. She closed the journal, folded her arms on the desk like a schoolchild, then cradled her head and finally, blissfully slept.

  Liam wasn’t the sort to think much about God, though having a preteen in-house had tempted him to take the Creator’s name in vain more than once. When he’d been a child, God was the anonymous entity whom he’d involuntarily visited each Sunday in Duncarraig’s church. He’d spent his time stuck mid-pew among siblings and cousins, fantasizing about a hidden talent that might separate him from the pack whispering and elbowing about him.

  Now grown, Liam found God in science, another view his traditional mother would deem near heretical. Whether it was the beauty of the formulae that permitted him to know just how deep he could dive and how long to decompress, or the complex mechanics involved in righting a damaged ship, it was all glorious religion to him.

  This morning’s marvel was the ground-penetrating radar unit that had arrived at Nora’s market yesterday. It was a fine rig, more than adequate for his purposes. As it should be, since he was out nearly forty-five hundred euros for the pleasure of owning it. This with business bills mounting would seem irresponsible to some. For Liam, it was a necessary cost. Necessary to keep his mind moving as his regular work ground to a halt, and most of all, necessary to give him hope.

  “Hope,” Liam said aloud, thinking what a small word it was to balance against the unpleasantness in life.

  As Liam drove the slight distance from town to Nan Kilbride’s house, he mentally reviewed what more he’d learned this morning in his two-hour-long phone session with the GPR technician. It was already past noon and he had yet to do what he most craved—take the unit for a stroll on Nan’s potentially treasure-rich land.

  Oh, he was aware that Vi owned the land now, but it was easier to nose about when he thought of himself as offending only Nan, who surely had better things to do than watch over him. Otherwise, he’d have been obliterated by a lightning bolt through the heart the day she died. Since he hadn’t, she was either occupied elsewhere or didn’t share Vi’s beliefs regarding his behavior that last Duncarraig summer.

  Nosing looked to be an easy task today. No car was in front of the house, and the massive rubbish container he’d had Cousin Brian drop early this morning still sat untouched. Liam pulled past the dwelling and as far toward the open land behind it as the ruts in the road would permit. When at the lane’s end, he parked.

  Using a mallet and stakes he’d also borrowed from Brian’s construction supplies, he marked the perimeter of the field in the grid pattern that the equipment’s training manual had instructed. Once done, it was back to the car. He fiddled for a while, coordinating the GPR unit’s wireless function with his laptop computer, all loaded with software to help him interpret what he might find.

  Liam didn’t give a dead rat about fashion, but even he had to admit a certain amount of unhappiness with the next step. Thankful there was no one to witness him, he strapped the unit’s belt-and-brace rigging about his waist, shaking his head at the little black metal arm that now protruded in front of him. An aluminum foil cap and antennae for his head and he’d be bait for the local Gardaí to question. Luckily, Duncarraig had always been protective of its madmen, or half his family would be in trouble.

  “Ready, then,” he said to himself. Liam locked the GPR unit onto the arm. This being part man and part machine definitely felt more natural in the sea than it did on land. He switched on the unit, gave one last check of his laptop, and then settled the computer
on his car’s roof.

  For the third time in less than a week, he walked Nan’s field. This time, though, he was far less interested in its topography than in what might be hidden beneath the surface. This land had passed down woman to woman for as long as anyone knew. And while Nan’s decrepit house was hardly modern, neither was it old enough to have been standing in the days of legend.

  His shiny new GPR would map not only metal, but also remnants of former structures that Liam’s untrained though careful eyes might not discern. Ancient foundations, cisterns, and other voids beneath the earth’s surface would be revealed without so much as a needless shovelful of dirt being turned. Technology was miraculous, indeed, especially for a man with limited time to devote to a task.

  If Liam found nothing, he could confess to Vi what madness he’d been up to…how he’d begun a chase based on a jeweler’s notations regarding sale of gold by a Rafferty in the 1800s. Hell, for all Liam knew, that long-ago Rafferty had sold a British general’s gold teeth rather than a piece of a trove long disappeared.

  After Vi had cooled—for he knew she’d initially respond with fire—they would laugh it off as a grand joke. If he found something, well, that would be the more difficult conversation. Not that anything involving Vi had ever been easy. But up until the end, it had always been worth the price.

  Liam walked to the northwest corner of the field and began his square grid pattern, keeping one eye on the GPR screen and one on the rough, pitted sod knotted with weeds below his feet. It was slow work, and mystifying, too. The bluish bars on the small display dipped and wavered from time to time as he tromped along. He had no idea what it meant, but his heart still jumped when the image in front of him did. After nearly an hour, he’d completed a quarter of the field.

  As he made a right angle turn to cover the next quadrant in his grid, Liam stumbled. Once he’d caught his balance, he looked back to see what he might have caught his foot on, but the ground was no worse than what he’d already tread upon. Less rocky, in fact.

  Odder yet was the sense that someone was watching him, even though he knew he was out of range of human eyes. As an Irishman, he was honor-bound to believe in the possibility of ghosts. As a man of science, he was equally compelled to believe that there was a concrete, rational explanation for these sensations. Either way, he didn’t like it. Head down, he walked on and tripped on nothing again. This time, it seemed that the watcher was laughing at him.

  “Damn obnoxious annoyance,” he muttered to the thing that either existed or not, and thus could either hear or not. “Go the hell away.”

  Vi woke abruptly. She sat up and rubbed the side of her face, which was numb from having been pressed against the desk’s wood surface. She wasn’t quite sure what had snapped her from her dream—the first she’d had in months.

  “Rog?” she called, thinking perhaps he’d been whining to get out. But then she spotted the little dog sleeping fat-belly-up on a bit of carpet to the room’s far left.

  Something had brought her from that place of lush beauty back to the everyday, and it wasn’t just the ferocious growling of her stomach. Vi pushed away from the desk and surveyed the cluttered room. It was exactly as unattended as she’d left it.

  As she glanced past the window, a bit of black caught her attention. Vi moved closer. It was a car parked at the back of the property…the same black car that yesterday she’d seen hung up on a rock. In the field beyond, a figure appeared from behind the car, walking a steady line parallel to the house.

  Image traveled from eyes to brain, and Vi felt so muzzy-headed that she began to doubt she’d awakened at all. If this were the old days, Liam would be a farmer out to plow his field and she would be his love. Except neither this land nor she were his, and that was no plow he wielded. It was a modern thing, a flat black rectangular box growing off him in a most absurd way. She assumed that it must have some sort of screen, the way he was down peering at it.

  “You were right about the man,” she said to Roger, who’d awakened and come to stand at her side. “Nothing with a Rafferty is ever as it seems, now is it?”

  What, exactly, the reality was remained to be learned. Fueled by the anger that came from being trespassed against, Vi stalked out the front door, Roger on her heels. Having Liam briefly out of sight did nothing to dissipate the feeling. Vi clenched her hands, and her blunt-cut nails nipped at her palms.

  She rounded to the back of the house. As she walked, her trousers’ legs brushed against the lavender that bordered what was once Nan’s cutting garden. The plants were spent, their stalks now more silver than green and their long and slender flower heads gone to seed. Still, their perfume wafted into the cool air as she passed.

  Nan would have told her that the scent was for meditative relaxing, and she would have been right to a degree. At the moment, Vi would have to roll about in a mound higher than Nan’s house to relax.

  Vi hurried her pace, preferring to meet Liam head-on while temper gripped her. He had seen her and was frozen like a mad bit of statuary midfield.

  “I don’t suppose you’re divining for water, now are you?” she asked as she approached.

  His mouth curved into a brief smile that she’d call embarrassed if she didn’t know its owner. Nothing in life had ever embarrassed Liam Rafferty, not even when they’d been discovered naked by German tourists in Castle Duneen.

  “Actually, I’m looking for Rafferty’s gold.”

  Well now, perhaps he’d found something sufficiently ripe to match that smile. She hesitated before speaking, waiting to see if he’d say it was a joke and that he was…

  She frowned at the rig he wore. God knew what else he could be doing. Perhaps God also knew how she could be finding Liam Rafferty handsome when he looked half a lunatic.

  “Really, Vi, this is ground-penetrating radar. I’m treasure seeking.”

  It was a blessing that she’d chosen not to view this man as more than a potential source of long overdue sexual gratification. “I’ll give you credit for honesty, if not a brain working full-time.”

  “The legend’s real. I’m sure of it.”

  She knew the legend as well as she did her own name. When young, she’d heard the story from Liam’s grandda, and a rather more female-centric version of it from her nan. Either way the tale was told, it had been the sort of thing to pique a young girl’s fancy. She and Liam were like history’s legendary Deirdre and Naoise, star-crossed Irish lovers attached to opposing factions.

  No matter that the Raffertys weren’t overtly warring with her nan over treasure no one had ever actually seen. And while Vi had loved Liam with a passion that frightened her, she’d hardly have dashed her brains out on a rock for the loss of him the way woeful Deirdre had for Naoise. It had been enough to know that destiny held a hand in Vi and Liam’s romance. Or so that naïve, lust-addled teenager had thought.

  Vi pulled herself back to a rather confusing present. “And this from a man whose mother would have done better to name him Thomas, with all the time you’ve doubted the tale?” she asked. “Why the change?”

  “I didn’t have proof before.”

  “And you do now?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated, and Vi watched as a muscle in his jaw flexed as though he were gritting his teeth. “At least it’s the closest I’ve seen.”

  “Care to tell me about it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “No? You’re walking my land, looking for treasure that’s more mine than yours, and you don’t intend to tell me what brought you into the realm of believers? I’m thinking you don’t grasp our respective positions, here.”

  He settled his hands on his hips, a position that added little to his believability with that thing poking out before him. “I meant no, I don’t care to talk proof now, in the middle of this field. And I’ll tell you what I am grasping. I’m grasping that the gold is called Rafferty’s gold for a reason.”

  She laughed. “Aye, so your family could feel begrudged over bloody nothing
but their own bad behavior for generations.”

  Liam’s blue eyes narrowed, not that Vi was feeling especially concerned. He switched off his radar-thing and began walking toward his car. Vi stayed even with him, stride after stride over the uneven ground, even though the effort was making her dizzy. She should have drunk more of Da’s wretched juice.

  “This doesn’t concern you,” Liam was saying. “Had you not shown up in Duncarraig, you’d know nothing of what I’m doing.”

  For once in her life, timing had been her friend.

  “Odd how that worked out, isn’t it?” she asked, giving him her pet “the spirits like me better than you” smile.

  She got a scowl in return for her comment before he picked up his pace. Roger trotted along just fine, but Vi began to falter. Liam started lecturing her about something or another, and she couldn’t seem to focus on the words.

  Stars and tiny comets danced in front of her eyes. She blinked, then blinked again. It was no help. Her knees grew weak, and she sat on the damp earth before she would fall.

  “Vi?” she heard Liam or perhaps the rock nearest to him asking.

  “Head between knees,” she managed to say, then slumped forward, doing her best to make action follow words.

  Bloody damn hell, she was not a woman who fainted.

  Until now.

  Chapter Five

  The traveler has tales to tell.

  —IRISH PROVERB

  Never before had a woman gone unconscious at Liam’s feet. He might have fantasized about it once or twice, but definitely not with the participants clothed. Neither had his fantasies included this level of alarm.

  “Vi?” he asked over the slamming of his heart.

  He bent down to get to her, but his newest appendage prevented him from reaching the ground. Her little dog was trotting back and forth above her head, worry on his face, to the degree a dog could look worried.

  “Stinking pot of boiled sheep shite,” Liam muttered as he unbuckled, unhooked, and wrenched off the GPR unit that stood between him and Vi. He knew little of where she’d been or if she’d been well these past years. It was a hard fist to the stomach to think even for a moment that she was ill. By the time he was kneeling beside her, though, she had begun to stir. Liam wasn’t sure who was more relieved, himself or Vi’s dog.