Twanged (3 page)

The two men listened intently as Malachy blathered on about fiddles and storytelling. Finally they got to the good part.

“HE GAVE IT AWAY!”
Chappy moaned as he pounded his desk.
“BUT TO WHOM?”

“Play on, Brigid!” Malachy said.

“BRIGID?”
Chappy cried. “Ignore the curse? What was he talking about?”

“Listen,” Duke said, his ear cocked. The sound of a door opening and the wind whistling came through the tinny machine. “That’s my entrance,” he noted excitedly.

“You are an idiot,” Chappy said as he scratched his face. “Brigid. Brigid was the name of the girl he was playing with at the pub. The bartender said she’s about to become a real star.”

Duke sighed. “Lucky duck.”

“We’ve got to find her. Somehow we’ve got to find her. Maybe you should go back to Ireland.”

“But I’m tired right now,” Duke complained. “And I’ve got a suitcase of dirty laundry.”

“Tomorrow, then.” Chappy leaned over his desk and growled at his employee and fellow thespian. “Don’t forget. I’m doing this for Chappy’s Theatre by the Sea, and you know what that means.”

“You’ll hire no directors who won’t cast both of us.”

“That’s right, you moron. Now go do your wash. Tomorrow you’re headed back to Shamrocksville so we can find Brigid and that cursed fiddle once and for all!”

T
hat night Chappy lay in bed with the big fluffy quilt pulled up around his chin for comfort, one hand exposed just enough so the ever-present remote control could be aimed at the big-screen television opposite the king-sized bed. The cavernous boudoir was designed with every creature comfort as yet thought-up by man. Ocean breezes blew through the large window, and if nature couldn’t be depended on to lower the temperature in the room to a pleasant sixty-five degrees, an electronic cooler kicked in. The place was built to look like a castle but behave like the starship
Enterprise.

Bettina was in the bathroom, nearly a city block away, engaged in her nightly ritual of applying creams and potions, anything on the market that laid any claim whatsoever to staving off the aging process. It was at this time every night that Chappy would lie there, the remote control in his hand giving him a heady sense of power, and zap from one station to the next. Most of the images went by in a blur. His limited attention span presented a particular challenge to broadcasters. If he wasn’t enticed within seconds, like a child with a new toy, the program on the screen was passed over for the next offering.

Tonight he felt positively peevish. Peevish and restless. “And miles to go before I sleep,” he kept thinking. “And miles to go before I sleep.” I won’t rest until I have that fiddle, he thought. I know I won’t.

Normally he enjoyed the nice feel of his Brooks Brothers pajamas and “one hundred and ten” percent cotton sheets, as he liked to call them. But all he could think about was the stick of wood from a dead tree back in Ireland that was enjoying its incarnation as the Fiddle of the Cliffs. It intrigued him that not only did it bring good luck, but it also carried some kind of curse. It only made him want it more.

Zap! went the remote control. “Good evening. On werewolf hour we have as our special guest—”

Zap! “ . . . To find out about your hidden potential, call our operators at 1-800-. . .”

Zap! “ . . . When I found out he liked to wear my nightgowns around the house, I must admit I got a little worried. . . .”

“How distasteful,” Chappy muttered. But it was the next zap that changed Chappy’s life. At least temporarily.

“ . . . Country Music Cable is here in Nashville, and we’re talking to Brigid O’Neill, who with a heated performance won the fiddling contest at Fan Fair just yesterday. Brigid, tell us how that feels.”

“Oh, it’s just the greatest, Vern. My mentor in Ireland gave me his fiddle. He’d won the all-Ireland fiddling contest over there with it. It’s a very old, magical instrument, and when I got up there at the contest yesterday, I felt like I was being swept away by its power. Legend has it that this was made from the wood of a special tree. . . .” As the bubbly redheaded chanteuse held up the fiddle for the camera, Chappy let out an ungodly moan.

“I’ll be right there,” Bettina yelled from the bathroom. “Every year this takes longer and longer.”

Chappy sprang from his bed as the initials CT jumped out at him from the fiddle on his enormous-screen TV. With trembling fingers he quickly pressed the
RECORD
button on his ever-ready VCR. “This is it,” he mumbled. “This is it!”

“We’ve heard that this fiddle is supposed to have a curse on it if it leaves Ireland,” the interviewer said to Brigid.

“Well, isn’t that the silliest thing, Vern? I just won the Fan Fair fiddling contest with it. If that’s a curse, then I want to be cursed all the time. . . .”

Vern laughed. “I suppose you’re right, Brigid.”

When the brief interview, which in his excitement he had barely focused on, was over, Chappy yanked the tape out of the machine and ran like a man possessed from his room and into the hotel-sized hallway, nearly bumping into a table that had been moved by the feng shui expert. In a blur he raced to the wing where Duke was now dead to the world, resting up in his room for the trip to Ireland he would no longer have to take.

3

AT A DINER ON THE ROAD BETWEEN

BRANSON, MISSOURI, AND THE HAMPTONS

H
e stared down at the little article in
USA Today
that heralded the addition of Brigid O ‘Neill to the Melting Pot Music Festival in the Hamptons on July the Fourth.

Nervously he slurped his coffee. “Hey, waitress,” he called in a squeaky voice. “How about another cup of joe? I’m running low here.”

“No prob,” she called back as she added up the check she was about to plunk on the counter where another lone diner had just partaken of his breakfast. Scooping up the coffeepot without even looking, she walked to the booth and started to pour. “So, hon, can I take these dishes away for you?” She asked.

“Not done yet,” he said.

She looked down at the thick white dinner plate, practically licked clean except for the thinnest coating of egg yolk she ‘d ever seen in her twenty-odd years of slinging hash. He’d mopped it mighty hard with his English muffin. It didn ‘t faze her, though. She’d seen it all in this job. Especially on the late-night shift. “Another muffin?” she asked.

“Nope,” he answered as he slurped his freshly refilled cup.

“Holler if you need me.” She walked off, her white rubbersoled shoes squeaking slightly on the grimy floor.

He stared down at the paper again. The Melting Pot Music Festival in the Hamptons. Melting Pot, my foot, he thought. You’re allowed in the Melting Pot only if you ‘ve got a lot of gold to throw in with you.

But Brigid O ‘Neill was coming to the Hamptons with her fiddle. That’s all that counted. Right after he was so rudely thrown in jail, her hit song, “If I’da Known You Were in Jail (I Wouldn‘t a Felt So Bad about You Not Callin’),” had come on the radio. It was the first time he had heard it. He was sure she was sending a message to him.

Now he was in love with her. If he could just get the chance to be alone with her, he was sure she would feel the same way about him. Like in the movie
The Sheik,
which his mother liked to watch. Rudolph Valentino had kidnapped the girl and carried her off to his tent in the desert, and she fell in love with him. Why couldn‘t that happen to him with Brigid? He hadn’t been able to get close to her at Fan Fair or in Branson, where he’d camped out in the woods. But she was coming to the Hamptons, where he lived in a shack off the beaten path. Another sign from her! He would find a way to get to her there!

Time to get back on the road and head home. He ‘d done enough wandering around this week.

4

FRIDAY, JUNE 27

LOS ANGELES

R
egan Reilly sat at the scarred wooden desk in her perfectly adequate office on the fourth floor of an old building on Hollywood Avenue in Los Angeles—home to her private investigative agency. Battered files lined the opposite wall, old-fashioned black-and-white tiles covered the ancient floor, and a small window offered a somewhat limited view of the Hollywood Hills.

To Regan it was the perfect home office—actually the only office of her one-woman operation. She had contacts all over the country to help her out when she needed it, and her handy computer with all its databases to find out everything you wanted to know about who were checking out and were probably right in being afraid to ask.

Investigating suspects’ past, uncovering their present, and maybe altering their future gave Regan great delight. Her parents, Nora and Luke Reilly, concluded that the choice of occupations of their thirty-one-year-old only child could be attributed to equal parts nature and nurture. “You were born with an antenna for gossip,” Nora always said. Since Nora wrote suspense novels and Luke owned three funeral homes in Summit, New Jersey, Regan’s formative years were spent listening to numerous conversations about crimes and cause of death.

Regan poured a second cup of coffee from the thermos on her desk. Lately she’d decided that making a pot of coffee when she woke up and bringing the remains with her to work made sense. The sole drawback was that it didn’t fill the room with the wonderful scent that only a coffeepot gives off, but the old-building smell that permeated her office, nothing antiseptic about it, made Regan happy.

Outside, the California sun was shining mercilessly, it being unseasonably hot for the month of June. On days like this, Regan loved to hole up in her office and become absorbed by her work. But today was Friday, and Regan was really there just to tie up loose ends. In the evening she was flying out on the “red eye” to Newark. A car would pick her up and take her to her parents’ house, then in the afternoon they’d all drive to the vacation home in the Hamptons that Luke and Nora had bought just last year.

The Hamptons, a collection of beachside villages on the South Fork of Long Island, were about a two-hour drive from New York City, depending, of course, on the traffic. Sometimes called “Hollywood East,” the South Fork was considered a high-profile stage because of all the celebrities it attracted during the summer months. With its tip jutting out as far as eighty miles into the Atlantic Ocean, the Hamptons were renowned for an almost-magical light that illuminated the flat picturesque landscape. People flocked there to see and be seen and to enjoy not only all that nature had to offer but also the parties and socializing that went full steam ahead between Memorial and Labor Days.

Regan’s Fourth of July week would be spent going back and forth between her parents’ home in Bridgehampton and the group house that her best friend, Kit, an insurance agent from Hartford, Connecticut, had unexpectedly joined out there. Group houses in the Hamptons consisted mostly of singles from the New York City area who rented houses together in pursuit of sun, fun, and that elusive someone who might be found at any of the parties that took place in the more than fifty-mile stretch of towns from Westhampton to Montauk. It was like a big game of hide-and-seek for adults.

Regan and Kit had just gotten back from vacationing in Ireland a few weeks earlier. And here I am leaving again, Regan thought. But she and Kit always planned an adventure together every year, and this time it had been Ireland in June. Now that her parents had the house in Bridgehampton, the week of the Fourth of July seemed to be a good time to take her other vacation of the summer.

Regan sipped her coffee and stared at the framed prints depicting the coats of arms of both the Regan and Reilly families, which had recently been added to her eclectic collection of wall hangings. Regan had bought them on the bus tour she and Kit had taken of the Ring of Kerry, a tour that made frequent stops at the souvenir shops that had sprung up around just about every bend of what was otherwise a most rural Irish route. The prints were hung next to the window; Regan felt it an appropriate spot, since the Regan family motto was “The hills forever,” and under the Reilly crest, black lettering urged “With fortitude and prudence.”

The phone next to her began to ring, jarring her back into the present. Quickly she grabbed it.

“Regan Reilly,” she practically chirped, leaning back slightly in her orthopedically correct chair, a chair that tilted and swayed and was guaranteed to maneuver in almost any direction as it conformed to her body. Regan thought that, considering what she’d paid for it, it should also take her to lunch.

“Ah, Regan, it’s Austin. How’re ye keepin’?”

Regan smiled. It was her young Irish neighbor. He’d moved into her apartment complex six months before, coming to Los Angeles from Ireland to pursue a career in comedy. When he found out that Regan was going to vacation in Ireland, he’d insisted she visit the West and attend the birthday party his family was having for his American cousin “Brigid the singer” at the local pub in their little village. “I’m still adjusting to being back from Ireland, Austin. Your family was so great. They sure know how to throw a party. Thanks again.”

“Ah, they enjoyed having you there, Regan. That’s actually why I’m calling.”

“Really?”

Austin cleared his throat. “You haven’t heard anything about what’s been going on with Brigid this week?”

“No, I haven’t,” Regan said quickly, picturing the beautiful green-eyed, redheaded dynamo whose singing and fiddle-playing at her party got everyone dancing, including some on the bar. Regan knew that after her birthday bash Brigid had been going directly back to Nashville to get ready for the tour to launch her debut album. Austin had said her record company was pulling out the stops; after her hit single, they were expecting the album to take off.