The Celtic Riddle (5 page)

Thinking that even an hour or so locked with the Byrne family in
that dark room with the red velvet and the war paintings and the swords
and spears had put me in a dreary frame of mind, I wrenched my
attention from these gloomy thoughts and turned back to the room.

In contrast to my unease about the world outside, the room had a
very ordinary and comforting feel to it. To the right of the door was a
rough-hewn table pushed against the wall, with two wooden chairs on
either side. There was a pile of books on the table, and a well-worn
sweater had been placed over the back of one chair. At the back, there
was a tiny open kitchen, rather primitive in terms of appliances, just
an icebox and a gas cooktop with two burners, which I took to mean
there was no electricity. There was water, though, an enamel sink with
a pump, and mismatched dishes stacked on open shelves. A doorway led
off to the right, to what I assumed was the bedroom.

I looked about me. "Breeta," I called out. "Come and say hello."

The two men looked perplexed. After a few seconds, Breeta sidled
through a door to the right of the fireplace. She was the kind of young
woman, I thought, that people always made a point of saying had a
pretty face, by way of ignoring her excess weight. She did have many
good features, beautiful dark hair set against flawless pale skin and
blue eyes, but at this very moment, she looked dreadful. I wanted to
take her home to my friend Moira's beauty salon and get her
straightened out. Her dark hair was unkempt, and she kept twisting a
lank tendril round and round her finger. Dressed in black jeans and a
baggy and rather unflatteringly-colored brown sweatshirt, she looked
lumpen. Her pale skin was blotchy. She was suffering, it suddenly
occurred to me, despite her uninterested demeanor, but whether it was
from sorrow at the death of her father, or disappointment at being cut
out of his Will, I couldn't say. "How did you know?" she asked
accusingly.

I pointed toward the floor. "The tortoise. I saw its little brown
head poking out from under the sofa," I added.

"He," she said getting down on her knees and reaching under the
sofa. "It's a he, not an it. His name is Vigs." That appeared to be all
she was prepared to say.

"Vigs," I agreed, as I walked to the kitchen counter. A half-empty
bottle of whiskey sat on the counter. I opened it and sniffed. It
smelled just fine to me. I grabbed four tumblers, and turned to the
others. "How about a get-acquainted drink?" I asked. "We might as well,
it's starting to rain," I added, as the room grew suddenly darker.

"Should these young people be drinking this?" Alex asked severely,
eyeing the bottle of Bushmills.

"This is Ireland, Mr. Stewart," Michael laughed. "We'll be getting
this in our mother's milk. Whiskey was invented here, you know. Irish
monks. For medicinal purposes, of course. Took the recipe to Scotland,
where they've made a bit of a botch of it."

Wisely I think, Alex and I chose not to get into a discussion of the
relative merits of Scotch and Irish whiskey.

Seconds later, the wind was blowing sheets of rain almost
horizontally against the window. Breeta slumped once again in one of
the chairs in front of the fireplace, a large wing chair covered in a
cabbage rose print, and stroked the tortoise's head. I poured. Breeta
sulked.

I felt myself getting irritated. Words cannot express how much I
dislike people who sulk all the time. Mercifully, Jennifer Luczka has
grown out of such a phase. Actually it was not so much growing out of
it as a miraculous transformation when her father's then live-in
girlfriend Barbara vacated the premises. Barbara is a perky blonde I
call Ms. Perfect on account of how she designs her own clothes, irons
everything, even socks, runs marathons, and never serves a salad that
doesn't have a flower of some kind in it, all the while holding down a
job as a vice president of a bank. Come to think of it, I like perky
even less than I like sulky. Perhaps Jennifer does too.

"How about a fire?" Michael exclaimed. He peered into the wood box,
shrugged, and headed for the door. "I'll be right back," he said.

I stood by the window peering out into the mist. It was impossible
to see more than a few feet from the window, and Michael had
disappeared from view almost immediately. The rain drummed on the roof,
and made splintering sounds against the windowpanes. In the distance I
heard a squawk, a gull perhaps, or an animal scurrying from the wet, a
sound that for a moment brought back the edginess I'd been feeling
earlier.

In what seemed rather longer than I would have thought necessary,
Michael returned, soaking wet and very dirty, a pile of dark lumps
about the size and shape of bricks in his arms. "Turf," he said,
noticing my expression. "You'll need to get more, Mr. Stewart. I had to
crawl on my hands and knees to reach the last of it under the house.
We'll have a fire." In a few minutes he had the fire smouldering away,
and stood, his back to it, drying out. Turf, I decided, was the famous
Irish peat.

"Oh, I forgot," Michael said suddenly, taking a rather sodden piece
of paper out of his shirt pocket. "My clue. I didn't tell the others
because they wouldn't tell after you told them yours. They may get over
it," he added. "He gave them hard of his tongue, Mr. Byrne did, on that
video. Maybe put them a bit out of sorts. Anyway, here it is: The
furious wave."

"I am the sea-swell. The furious wave," I said, very much doubting
that the family would get over it, as Michael hoped. They seemed way
too set in their miserable ways for that. "How very obscure. And
speaking of obscure, who, by the way, is Padraig Gilhooly?"

Dead silence in the room: Breeta's hand paused in midstroke over the
head of the tortoise.

"Nobody," said Michael. "Now, my clue has a two beside it. Do you
think that means something?" Deft change of topic, that was.

"I don't know," said Alex, taking his envelope out too. "Mine has a
one."

"Of course it means something," I said, abandoning my attempt to
ferret out Gilhooly. "The clues are in some order. Eamon Byrne was, I
surmise from his comments on the video, occasionally nasty as they may
have been, a reasonably astute judge of character." I hesitated for a
moment before going on, realizing that he had judged Breeta too. She
gave no indication that she was paying attention at all, though, just
went on stroking the head of the tortoise in a monotonous way.

"Knowing you both, he assumed you'd give your clue first, Alex, and
that you, Michael, would be next."

"But what's it mean?" Michael said.

We, and by we I refer to the three of us, Breeta continuing to
pretend we weren't there, went on for a few minutes, speculating about
what it might mean. It was pleasant enough with the flames licking
around the turf, the rain pattering against the windows, the Bushmills
sliding down quite nicely, and entertaining, in a kind of mindless way,
to try to guess what this was all about: a game of twenty questions
with the person who knew the answer gone from this world.

Michael was particularly enthusiastic. "Maybe it's about a
shipwreck, some old ship off the coast here loaded with gold bullion,"
he said.

"Could be," Alex agreed.

"But it's the sea-swell and furious wave, both on top, and not under
the ocean. I wonder if we have to take it literally. Perhaps its an
anagram, a cryptic clue of some sort."

Breeta sighed loudly. "It's a poem," she said, looking at the three
of us as if we were members of a subhuman species, several notches
below that of the pet she still held in her arms.

We all looked at her. "Ah, come now, Bree," Michael said in an
exasperated tone. "Don't just say 'it's a poem' and leave it at that.
What poem? What's the rest of it?"

Still Breeta said nothing. I felt like shaking her until her eyes
bugged out, but resolved not to get emotionally involved in all this.
Alex had his lovely little cottage, I told him, he'd done his part in
giving the rest of them his clue, and now we should get back to having
a holiday and ignore this horrid family.

" 'Song of Amairgen,' " she said finally.

"What?" we all said.

" 'Song of Amairgen.' Pronounced Av-ar-hin, spelled A-m-a-i-r-g-e-n,
or sometimes A-m-h-a-i-r-g-h-i-n. It's very old. Amairgen was supposed
to be a file, that is a poet, of the Milesians, the first Celt to set
foot on Irish soil. He's claimed to have chanted this poem when he
first stepped off the boat in Ireland. It's all bullshit, of course."

"Who are, or were, the Milesians?"

"Don't you know anything?" Breeta replied. My, she was an annoying
young woman. I told myself to be sure to tell Rob how lucky he is to
have a daughter like Jennifer, who was not all that much younger than
Breeta, as difficult as he may occasionally find her. "It's in the
Leabhar Gabala," she said, "if you want to find out."

The Leabhar Gabala. Now that was helpful, almost as useful as the
reply to the question about Padraig Gilhooly. This might be a good
moment to remind myself how glad I was I'd never had children. Being,
like many of my women friends, most of them in business like me, a
little ambivalent in that regard, it was good I had such opportunities
to clarify my thoughts on the subject from time to time.

"Well, if you're so smart," Michael said, sounding as irritated as I
felt, "what's the next line?"

"The roar of the sea," she said smugly.

"Sure must have something to do with water," Michael said.

"The next line is about a stag," Breeta said acidly. At least she
was talking.

"But we don't know that Eamon was using the whole poem, now do we?"
Alex said. "We'd need to see more clues for that."

"Breeta has a clue. Mr. McCafferty-or was it Mr. McGlynn?-put it in
the safe in your father's study, Bree," Michael said. Breeta continued
to look bored.

"Come on, Bree," Michael said, shyly leaning over and touching her
hand. She pulled her arm away. Undeterred, he carried on. "Let's go and
get your envelope. It might be kind of fun to look for this thing,
whatever it is. And if it really is worth something, like your Da says,
and you find it, then everything will be all right. You'll be set, you
know, maybe for life." But Breeta ignored us.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped and the sun came
out. Alex and I went outside to look about. Behind the house, inland,
clouds still hovered over black mountains, but where we were was a
world of bright, lush colors, greens predominantly, but also yellow and
purple, and the intensely dark blue of the sea.

"I could get used to this place," Alex said, looking about him. "It
wasn't what I expected, with a name like Rose Cottage. I was thinking
of something more like an English country garden, or something. But
this suits me better, I think."

"I'm pleased for you Alex," I said. "We can make it really nice."

He smiled. "I think I like it just as it is."

Michael came out to join us. "Don't mind her," he said, gesturing
back toward the house. "She's missing him terrible no matter how it
looks." Breeta appeared at the door, and he quickly changed the
subject. "Right, we'd best be off. We're in for some weather again," he
said, pointing to a new set of black clouds out to sea, and waving us
back to the house.

"Is there another way in here?" I asked looking about me. "Another
road?"

"No," Michael replied. "Although you could put a lane in from the
main road up there," he said pointing toward something I couldn't see.
"You'd have to do a bit of clearing though," he added gesturing toward
brush and rocks. "Set you back a few punt, that's for certain.

"The easiest thing to do is to come in the way we did. Park your car
out at the road near the gate to Second Chance and walk in. They can't
stop you from crossing the property," he added. "There's a right of
way."

But they could make it pretty miserable for us, I thought to myself.
Michael watched my face. "I'd want to put a road in, too," he said,
smiling slightly.

Inside, I collected up the glasses and went over to the sink to
rinse them out, Alex right behind me with a towel, ready to dry.
Michael turned his attention to dousing the fire. As we worked, I
sensed rather than saw Breeta get out of her chair and go over to the
table on the other side of the room. The three of us, coming to the
same realization, all quietly turned to watch as she picked up a book,
leafed through its pages, then with one arm, held it to her chest. With
the other hand, oblivious to our glances, she reached slowly for the
sweater on the back of the chair. After studying it for a few seconds
she brought it up to her nose and breathed deeply, then held it against
the side of her face, a large tear rolling down her cheek. It's her
father's, I thought, her father's sweater. His smell would still be on
it, would remind her of him. Missing him terrible, indeed.

She noticed us watching her at last. She looked directly at Alex. "I
know the Will says the house and its contents," she said, her voice
breaking, "but would it be all right, would you mind, if I kept the
sweater?"

"Of course you may, my dear," Alex said softly.

"Keep the book too. Please take anything you like."

"Just the book, and the sweater," she said, holding both tight.

We were a subdued group as Michael locked up, handing Alex the key,
and we began our trek back to the big house, each lost in our own
thoughts. Breeta would not let go of the book and sweater, so Michael
took Vigs and went on ahead. I rather pensively watched as the rays of
the late afternoon sun caught drops of rain on the leaves and blossoms
of the gorse and heather, transforming them to glittering amethysts and
citrines. It was late afternoon by now, and gulls circled offshore
looking for dinner, or bobbed on the surface of the waves, slashes of
white against the dark water. "Take care," Michael, ahead of us,
yelled. "It's really slippery here." It was indeed. The rain had made
the path very slick and more than once I caught myself sliding down the
incline. I made my way carefully along the edge of the cliffs, turning
back from time to time to see how Alex and Breeta were faring.