The Celtic Riddle (16 page)

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"My name is Lara," I said.

"She's come for Eamon's clue, Mother," Brigid said. "She has the
password, 'the boar enraged.' "

"You're not from around here. How would you know about it?" the old
woman asked suspiciously.

"A friend of mine received something from Eamon Byrne in his Will."

"Who is your friend, and what did he get?"

"His name is Alex Stewart, and he was left Rose Cottage."

The old woman looked surprised, and then peered at me intently.
"Then he must have been a special friend of Eamon's."

"I suppose in some way he was," I agreed. "Alex saved Eamon's life
long ago."

The woman just nodded. "He was a fine man, no matter what they say.
He's been very good to us. Wasn't his fault what happened, you know."

"And what was that?" I asked, but Brigid returned from another room
and handed me a piece of paper.

"None of your gossip now, Mother," she admonished her mother. "Pay
her no mind," she said to me as she lead me to the door.

I'd have loved to ask more, but one thing about this place seemed
clear. If there were secrets here, and there were enough hints they
existed, people were not about to share them, at least with me.

I walked Deirdre back to the car, and got out her bag, and waited
with her until the bus came. As she was about to board, she turned and
handed me the hat-box. "For Breeta, when she's ready," she said.

She was almost on the bus when I thought of one more question. "Who
gets Michael's and John's money now that they're gone, do you know?"

She paused, one foot up on the lower step, perplexed. "Now, that's a
question, isn't it? I can't say as I recall. I was so pleased to be
receiving something I didn't pay much heed to the rest of it." She
shrugged and stepped up on to the bus. "I don't expect it's me."

As the bus pulled out, I opened the hatbox. Vigs was happily
munching on a lettuce leaf inside.

"What am I going to do with you?" I asked him. The simple answer was
give him to Breeta as Deirdre had suggested. There were two problems
with that. In the first place, I wasn't sure this was the best idea.
Michael had gone back to Second Chance to get Vigs at Breeta's request,
and while neither she nor the tortoise could be blamed for what
happened, the sight of the little creature might upset her. The second
was that I didn't know where she was. Sheila, the innkeeper, had said
Breeta had been seen around looking for work and a cheap place to stay,
refusing, even under the circumstances, to move back home.

Rather fortuitously, or so I thought at the time, I caught sight of
Breeta at a table of a small local eatery, and approached her, Vigs in
his hatbox with me.

"May I join you for a moment?" I asked her. A few seconds went by
before she nodded her assent and I sat down across from her and ordered
a coffee.

Breeta went on eating, virtually ignoring me. She was obviously
eating for two, a rather large platter of fish and chips in front of
her, with bread on the side, and a large cola too.

"I'm so sorry about what happened, Breeta," I said. "Michael was a
lovely young man. This has all been quite dreadful." Breeta
concentrated on working on the meal in front of her. It was not so much
eating, come to think of it, as stuffing food in her mouth. She barely
chewed it. I had the feeling that, whether she was conscious of it or
not, she was stuffing herself with food to keep churning emotions,
grief and anger, from rising up and pouring out of her.

"Breeta," I went on undeterred, although the sight of all that
greasy food making its way so rapidly into her mouth was making me
slightly nauseated. "I was wondering, I mean, I'm very worried about
what has happened, and as selfish as this sounds, what it might mean to
Alex. First John, and then Michael. I'm so afraid that being involved
in this Will may be very dangerous for everyone named. I'm sure your
father never thought that such awful things would happen…"

"I hate him," she said vehemently. "Hate him!"

"But perhaps finding the treasure would put a stop to this," I went
on after a few seconds pause after this outburst. "We, Alex and I and
some friends, have found a number of clues already. I have them back at
the hotel. If you would just have a look at them, I'm sure you could
help us. You know so much about Celtic history and…"

"No!" she exclaimed. "Stop. Never. I will never forgive my father
for this. My life… ruined." She looked as if she would cry, but then
stuffed some more chips in her mouth.

"But Breeta, you need the money," I protested. "Please…" I reached
over to touch her hand. She wrenched it away.

"Leave me alone," she said getting up from her chair. "Go away. This
is all your fault. Why did you have to come here?" She almost ran to
the cashier and then out the door. Stung, I let her go. After a few
minutes of feeling awful, I picked up Vigs and trundled him back to the
Inn, where he was greeted with real enthusiasm by Sheila and Aidan's
three young children, and resignation on the part of Sheila herself.
Then I headed for the bar, and ordered a drink: nothing wimpy like
wine, this time-a single malt Irish on ice.

It was depressing to think that Breeta blamed me for what happened.
I told myself it was ridiculous to feel guilty about everything, but
found it almost impossible not to wonder if I had, however unwittingly,
done something that had set off a chain of events. But if this was the
case, then I had to do something to fix it. The question was, what? It
was not lost on me that not everyone shared my enthusiasm for finding
the treasure, but I could not think of what else to do. While there
were dire hints about Byrne's past from time to time, the treasure
remained the most logical place to start. I'd heard lots of tales about
Byrne in the last few days, in this bar and around town. As Deirdre had
said, he wasn't the most popular person in town, but there seemed to be
a grudging admiration for his business acumen. He kept to himself, it
seemed, was not an habitue of the bars the way many in town were. And
the place being what it was, he was still regarded by the locals as a
newcomer, despite the fact he'd arrived in the Dingle a newly married
man many years before. But there wasn't a whiff of anything that would
meet Deirdre's criteria for a curse. The more I thought about it, the
more Deirdre sounded like a superstitious and perhaps not well-educated
woman, and the more plausible the treasure as the key to the question
about why Michael was killed: a clue had been found clutched in his
dead hand, after all. In the end, I promised myself that I'd keep my
eyes and ears open for more on Byrne, but concentrate on the treasure,
though it was clear we were going to have to find it without Breeta's
help.

Even without her, we were not doing so badly on that score. The
first clues had been the easiest to find, all right around Second
Chance. There was Alex's clue and Michael's, and then the one about the
beauty of the plant, the one found clutched, at least part of it, in
Michael's dead hand.

I'd assumed that one would be found in his garden, probably in the
toolshed. When I got there, however, I discovered someone had gone
looking ahead of me. At least, I thought that the only possible
conclusion, because I couldn't believe that Michael, whom I'd watched
meticulously tending his garden, would have left his domain in such a
mess, with garden implements strewn everywhere, and broken pots and
spilled soil in messy little heaps on the floor and worktable.

I was afraid that clue was lost to us, but then Rob saved the day,
although he didn't know it. He'd stopped to admire a vase full of roses
in the entrance-way of the Inn with the words, "quite the most
beautiful of flowers, don't you think?" and I was off to Rose Cottage
moments later. It was a bit of a trek because I was determined not to
cross the Byrne property and went overland from the main road. It was
worth the scratches from the wild berry bushes and the scrapes from the
rocks: once I got there, the clue was quickly located, wedged behind
the door frame.

The next clues took us farther afield and had been quite a bit
harder to find. The Dingle is a peninsula only about thirty miles long,
and is often described as a finger that juts out into the sea, the
farthest point west in Ireland. To me, though, the Dingle is not so
much of a finger jutting out from a hand, but a primordial creature,
mountains for its spine, its undulating torso slipping into the sea so
that only the tip can be seen as the Blaskett Islands off shore, its
head way down in the depths. In reality, it has four mountain areas,
the Slieve Mish Mountains where the finger joins the hand, as it were,
the Stradbally Mountains, Mount Brandon on the north side, and Mount
Eagle to the southwest. In between are fabulously beautiful but
isolated valleys, rocky gorges, and breathtaking vistas. Roads through
the mountain passes rise up steep inclines, then drop precipitously to
the coast, where there are dozens of little towns and hundreds of
ancient sites. In other words, there were a lot of places to search.

Nonetheless, we were making progress. I wouldn't go so far as to say
we'd fanned out across the countryside with military precision or
anything, but while Rob cooperated with the Irish police in the murder
investigation-at least that's what he called it-the rest of us, with a
copy of the poem Alex had dug out of the local library, and Malachy and
Kevin's knowledge of the area, had set out to find the rest of the
clues.

Kevin, who turned out to be rather good at all this, figured out the
hawk above the cliff. "Has to be Mount Eagle," he said. "Hawk, bird of
prey, eagle. Cliff, mountain. Not perfect, but where else could it be?"
Mount Eagle turned out to be a rather big place, a mountain that ran
down to the edge of the sea near Slea Head. Kevin lead our little
ragtag bunch on a merry chase over the hilly terrain. We clambered over
stone fences, dodging sheep and their poop and slogging through the
mud, stopping whenever we came to the remains of some ancient
structure. Dotted over the landscape were ruins of tiny stone
beehive-shaped huts, where centuries ago people had not so much lived
as taken shelter, "clochans" Malachy called them. Many were just heaps
of rubble, but others still stood as little masterpieces of
engineering, carefully placed stones fitted together and angling up to
a peak without benefit of mortar to form stone huts that had withstood
centuries of weather, and various invasions.

"Eamon Byrne liked old places," Kevin said, as we looked about us,
"so I think we should search them." We checked as many of them as we
could, dodging through the low stone doorways and scanning the interior
walls for any sign of a clue. We found nothing, but Malachy wouldn't
give up. Eventually, we came upon the remains of an ancient stone fort
right in the middle of a field. It was there, a tiny roll of paper
wrapped in plastic and wedged between two stones. Malachy and Kevin
were ecstatic.

Jennifer was an able assistant as well. She'd realized right away
that ogham was read from right to left, or bottom to top, and saved us
a lot of time. Who'd have thought that her thinking-outside-the-box
class, and its rather irritating lessons on how to talk backwards,
would have had such practical application?

She found one of the clues by herself. From the vantage point of her
sailing lessons out on the bay, she'd spied a CD store on shore called
Music of the Sea. As soon as she'd hit dry land again, she'd climbed up
a fire escape to get level with the sign, and found the clue taped to
its underside.

The clue at the Boar's Head Arms disturbed me a little. Seven clues
had been handed out, for Alex, Michael, Margaret, Eithne, Fionuala, and
Breeta Byrne, as well as Padraig Gilhooly. The Boar's Head clue was the
eighth line of the poem. Either that meant that every line did not lead
to a clue-and since we only had our own, we didn't know-or that we were
expected to figure out the clues were from Amairgen's Song and look
then for every line of the poem.

Even before the Boar's Head clue, we were still missing the stag of
seven slaughters and the ray of the sun. It was difficult to know
whether to keep looking for them, or to assume someone else had found
them first. Other than the mess in the garden shed and our little
set-to with Conail O'Connor, there had been no signs of anyone else
looking for clues. Maybe Margaret Byrne had been quite sincere in
saying the family wouldn't be participating, and Conail was the only
renegade. Somehow, I doubted it, though. They'd shown themselves to be
quite ruthless, certainly where Alex's inheritance of Rose Cottage was
concerned, something else I still had to deal with. We should keep
searching, I thought, looking about the bar. My eyes alighted on the
painting over the fire, the scene which I found quite repulsive despite
its quality, of a stag, its snout full of arrows, being set upon by a
pack of hounds. Stag of seven slaughters, I breathed, counting the
dogs. Seven, of course. Right under my nose.

Picking up my drink, I ambled over to the hearth in what I hoped was
a nonchalant way, then stood for a minute or two with my back to the
fire, drink in hand, that most Irish of poses. As Aidan entertained the
lads at the bar with one of his stories, and all eyes seemed fixed on
him, I pulled up the lower corner of the painting and took a quick peek
behind. The clue was there, or at least it had been. All that was left
of it was a comer of the paper still secured by the tape which had held
it to the back of the painting. I quickly pulled it away. I would check
it against the paper on which the clues we'd already found had been
written, but there was little doubt my question had been answered and
that at least one other person was, despite all protestations to the
contrary, looking for the treasure just as we were. The question was
who, and just how dangerous were they?