The Defender (The Carrier Series Book 2) (21 page)

“Wow,” Drew commented.

“For years after, Alec concocted very strange remedies to
relieve the headaches and violent mood swings in his patients that he thought
were associated with exposure to the space rocks. Soon some of the members of
the community began to think Dr. Ó Meidhir was going insane and convinced local
officials to revoke his medical license. Finally, Alec made a newspaper
announcement indicating his office was closed to the public, and then began
privately and secretly treating his patients.”

“Wow,” Drew said again.

“But what happened to him?” I inquired. “To his patients?”

“I haven’t a clue. That’s where my father’s story always ended.”
He closed the book and placed it back on the shelf. “I do know that our Lord
took Dr. Ó Meidhir when he was—” he calculated in his mind “—thirty four years
of age, leaving behind a young child and a journal full of research.”

I needed to get my hands on that book.

I carefully crafted my words. “What an important piece of
medical history. Do you know what happened to that journal?”

“Last I knew it was lost in the family archives.”

I hoped Myers held it secure in a secret safe in his temporary
office and not in the CBB building that we had blown up. I decided not to press
the issue with the old man on account of him acting so skittish.  

“Thank you for this information. I know this will help us with
our research.” Drew and I turned to leave the book room when the old man
grabbed my forearm forcefully with his weathered, wrinkled fingers. He looked
me straight in the eye and his voice dropped into a frightening tone. “I’d be
careful if I were you. Some people don’t like the skeletons in their closet
rattled.”

I felt a chill down in my bones. “Uhh…thanks. That’s good
advice.” But he didn’t let go of my arm right away. I tried to gently shake it
loose, but the bony fingers held tight. I looked at Drew for help.

“Right, well, we should be going. Thank you, sir.” He grabbed my
other arm and pulled me in the direction of the door. The old man finally
loosened his grip, and I left the room perplexed.

Neither of us said anything until we reached the car, got in,
and slammed the doors shut.

“What the hell was that?” we both said in tandem. Drew laughed,
but I felt too weirded out by the old codger and couldn’t join in. I knew Myers
was nothing to mess around with, but could that elderly clergy actually be
afraid of the ghosts of Myers’s ancestors?  

Drew and I decided to try to find Pluckett Street and search out
the site of Dr. Alec’s old office. The in-dash GPS took us right downtown and
over to Pluckett easily. Several scummy, two-story stucco buildings with dark
brown shingles stood in a row down the block. Each house looked exactly the
same except for their worn-out colors: cream, canary yellow, hunter green, or
light grey.

As if someone was looking over our shoulders guiding us, we came
upon a building with a wooden carved sign hanging from two rusty chains above
the front door. It was quite worn, but we could read it:
Dr. Alec Ó Meidhir,
Medical Physician
. The place looked run down and possibly even abandoned.

Drew slowed the car and stopped just past the house. “Well hot
damn, here we are. We should go knock.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Drew turned off the car and reached below his seat for his
Glock. “You never know what we’ll find in there.” I knew he was right, so I
reached into the glove compartment and retrieved two flashlights.

“Let’s get the journal and get the hell outta there,” Drew
advised as he reached over and grabbed one of the flashlights from me.

“Deal,” I agreed.

Drew knocked on the wooden door and we waited, but heard
nothing.

“Hello?” he called. “Anyone home?”

I looked up and down the street. There was no sign of life
anywhere, and not even a car had passed on the street since we parked in front
of the house.

“Let’s check the back,” I quietly suggested.

There was a small patch of grass behind four rotted wooden
stairs leading up to a back door. Drew climbed the stairs and knocked on the
back door. It swung inward with the force of his knock, creaking the whole way.
“Well, Agent Hill, I think the luck of the Irish is on our side today.” Drew
smiled as he pushed the door open further and called into the house. There was
still no answer. “In we go!” he sang, and disappeared into the house before I could
protest.

I anxiously followed into a very old and dirty kitchen with
filthy wooden floorboards, dusty furniture, and a nasty smell that could only
be described as stale death. I wrinkled up my nose and whispered to Drew, “Go
toward the front of the house; look for something that could be an office.”
Apparently it was empty, but we held our guns at the ready position anyway and
shone our flashlights straight ahead.

There were no lights on in the house, and the curtains had all
been pulled closed. Our feet creaked as we shuffled across the floorboards
through a dark living room, and into another at the front of the house. A long
wooden table sat along one wall, and a desk and antique bookshelf were pushed
into the corner. It had to be the office.

Drew approached the bookshelf and scanned the spines as I opened
the drawers in the desk. There were pens, papers, and a blank prescription pad,
but nothing that looked of importance. I found a picture of a young boy who
looked suspiciously like Ethan Myers. I threw it back in the drawer and picked
up a piece of paper with a handwritten symbol carefully drawn on it. My mind
raced back to the book Brynn showed us at Eneclann. The same symbol was drawn
in the margin of that book next to the name, Ó Meidhir.

I pocketed the paper just as Drew said, “There’s nothing here.”
He had emptied all the books off the shelf onto the floor and was checking for
a false back.

“It’s gotta be here.” I shone my flashlight around the room, and
Drew got down on his hands and knees to examine the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“It is not absurd to hypothesize that the good doctor had a
hidden room built into his office.” Drew pulled a tiny, flat, black gadget out
of his pocket and scanned the floorboards. “Panic rooms and secret chambers date
back to ancient Egyptian times.” The machine displayed a series of colored
lights, but Drew kept scanning. “In the seventeenth century, cathedrals built
priest holes to hide their leaders from the persecution of Catholics.”

Drew stood and scanned the walls deliberately. “I suspect Dr.
Alec knew he was discovering something monumentally important.” Different
colored lights began to flash, and he stopped scanning. Drew quietly knocked on
the wall and listened carefully. Then he used his little device to scan higher
up. “Especially if the public began to rise up against him.” He let out a grunt
as he pulled down on a stubborn light sconce apparently not screwed into the
wall. “And protest his methods.” The sconce shifted down, revealing a lever.

“Ta-da!” he announced proudly. “Would you like to do the honors,
Agent Hill?”

I walked over to the lever, excited nerves rumbling in my
stomach, and I forced it up, half expecting to set off some kind of intruder
alarm. Instantly, a section of the wall in front of me slid sideways,
unsettling a ton of dust and making a loud metallic squeaking noise.

A smile grew on my lips—a secret room.

“What are you waiting for? Let’s go.” Drew led the way through
the doorway, shining his flashlight.

Inside, the room wasn’t much bigger than the bathroom back at
the hotel. There was a desk covered in untidy papers, another ancient medicine
cabinet, and a small shelf of books. Drew searched the bookshelf while I looked
through the medicine cabinet. I rummaged through some antique medical supplies.
Something under a piece of medical gauze caught my eye—a familiar blue rock
about the size of a potato. I picked it up and turned it in my hands for a
moment. Here I held the wretched reason for Ava’s loss of memory. I tossed it
to my other hand. It was also the reason I met Ava. This little blue rock was
our beginning and could very well be our end.

“Harper told me these rocks blow up after exactly twenty years
on earth,” I said, partially to myself. “Apparently he was lying. This one has
been here well over a hundred years.”

“Found it. I found it!”

My heart picked up as I turned to look at Drew. He was holding a
brown leather-bound journal. The cover had little gold foil letters spelling
out the name Dr. Alec Ó Meidhir.

“Yes!” I jumped up and swiped the book out of his hands.

Suddenly something moved above our heads. It sounded like
furniture being scraped across the second floor.

“Someone else is in the house!” Drew whispered urgently. “We
gotta get outta here!”

I threw the blue rock down as we jumped through the secret
room’s entrance. Drew pulled on the lever and replaced the sconce.

Then we heard more footsteps, scraping, and a muffled female
voice. She was walking slowly toward the stairs, no doubt. With hearts in our
throats, we bolted out of the office, gracefully jumping over furniture and
carefully running on our toes toward the back of the house. The stairs from the
second floor came out in the kitchen near the back door. We had to beat the
woman to the stairs, or she’d see us for sure.

“Who’s there? You fluthered fools! Get out of my house!” Her
screechy old voice sounded like it was at the top of the stairs. Drew reached
the back door first and pushed it open just as I tripped on a wooden kitchen
chair and stumbled to the ground right at the foot of the stairs, crashing into
the wall with my shoulder.

“You knackered gouger…manky sleeveen!” I could see her ugly old
face at the top of the long staircase, staring down at me sprawled out at the
bottom. She was clearly drunk, speaking gibberish, and about to topple down the
stairs on her own accord.

“Nolan!” Drew yelled from the backyard, “Come on!”

Shoot
!
The journal! It slipped out
of my hands when I fell!

With my shoulder still throbbing from the fall, I groped around
the dark kitchen floor while the old woman wailed at the top of the stairs.

“Get your banjaxed, minkin—” and then she let out a wail of
surprise as her foot slipped off the top stair and she came tumbling down.
Clouds of dust filled the air as her heavy body crashed into each wooden stair,
cracking and breaking several in the process.   

Drew yanked on my injured arm, pulling me out of the door just
before the old woman hit the landing of the staircase. A sharp pain hit the
back of my shoulder like a knife shoved into the muscle. I screamed as I got to
my feet and ran like hell through the backyard, around to the front, and into the
car waiting at the curb.

Drew had already gotten in and started the engine. I opened the
door and stuck my head in. “No! We’ve gotta go back, I lost the journal!

“Get in the car, Nolan!” He screamed at me.

I reluctantly jumped into the front seat as Drew peeled out of
there as fast as he could. I pulled the door shut, and then banged the fist of
my good arm on the dash. “Dammit!”

“Calm down, Nol. The journal flew out the open back door when
you fell. It practically smacked me in the face!” He pulled the leather book
off of his lap and passed it to me.

I took it, excited. I knew I’d be up all night reading but
didn’t care about lost sleep if it took me one step closer to solving this
mystery. I kissed the cover. “Yes!”

I tried to catch my breath for a second, and then became
cognizant of the hot pain radiating through my arm. “I think I dislocated my
shoulder.” I felt around with my hand. Something was not right.

“Don’t worry, my friend. I’ll pop that sucker back in when we
get to the hotel.” Drew honked the horn twice in celebration. “Wooo! That was
so much fun! I thought the old goat had us for a moment!” Then he laughed a
wonderful laugh and I had to smile—we had Dr. Alec’s journal.

*
     *      *
     *

Thursday, October 23rd

I felt a line of drool flowing down my cheek, and I woke with a
snort. A crack of sunlight shone through the pulled drapes, revealing the fact
that I still had my clothes on from the day before. I was awkwardly sprawled in
an armchair in my hotel room, the small leather journal sitting open on my
chest. It took me a second to figure out where I was.

I shifted to move out of the chair and soreness spread from my
right shoulder and into my upper back.

You fell on your shoulder in Dr. Ó Meidhir’s kitchen like an
uncoordinated doofus,
my brain reminded me.

A painful grunt escaped my mouth as I rubbed my muscles for
relief, replaying the scene in my head.

My phone buzzed on the dresser, interrupting my thoughts. I
carefully stood up and checked the display:
Drew calling.

“Hey there, buddy.” I wiped some sleep from my eyes and let out
a loud yawn.