Whispers in the Mist (2 page)

September wasn’t a good month for either of them. Beth had died in September.

“I’ll drive you to school, sweetie.” His son’s wailing still echoed from the back of the house. “Why’s Petey crying?”

Mandy leaned against him. “He had a nightmare and went to bed with Mam. He won’t come out of her room.”

Jesus, the look in his daughter’s eyes. She was only nine years old, for Christ’s sake. Her gaze shouldn’t be dulled by worry and fear that she was doing everything wrong. He knew the feeling well, but she must not end up stuck on that sorry path.

“You did everything right,” he said. “Just perfect.”

Her chin wobbled. Danny knelt and hugged her to his chest, his heart breaking.

“Are you feeling bad?” he said.

She nodded against his shoulder. “My tummy hurts.”

“That’s no good,” he said. “In fact, that’s a fat bloody wad of cowshite.”

“Da,” she sighed, but she smiled as she raised her head. “That didn’t even make sense.”

Danny carried his daughter back to the kitchen, poured cereal, milk, and orange juice, and told her to brush her hair. He found Petey standing beside the windows in Ellen’s bedroom, hiccuping on snotty breath and peeking outside from between the edges of the closed curtains. Ellen sat on the bed with her head resting on raised knees. Danny picked up Petey and carried him out of the room. His initial sadness gave way to worry when he felt Petey’s feverish forehead.

“You get to stay home from school today, little man. How do you like that?”

Petey landed on his bed in a jumble of limbs, his hair stuck to the sweat on his forehead. Danny swiped at the reddish-brown hair that his children had inherited from Ellen and tucked Petey’s lanky limbs—Danny’s contribution to the gene pool—under the covers.

“I’ll be safe at home, won’t I?” Petey said.

“Of course you will. Mandy said you had a nightmare?”

Petey grabbed his stuffed flamingo. “Because yesterday I saw
him
. You know.”

Danny didn’t know but he nodded, keeping his expression neutral.

“He came out of the fog right in front of our house. He had a big cape like you see the baddies wear on the telly, and he was dragging someone behind him. Sucking her up. She tried to run away, I saw her, but then he held out his hand and his evil Grey Man powers made her come back to him. But when she came back she was all curled up like her stomach hurt.”

Danny sat on the edge of the bed, inhaling the sweet scent of child sweat and trying to come up with a comforting response. Petey, at five, was prone to nightmarish fancies on the best of days—and today wasn’t one of those.

Petey gazed up at him, imploring him to believe that he’d seen Grey Man.

“Did you see a swallow?” Danny said. “Swallows always follow Grey Man when he’s lurking about.”

Petey shook his head. “There was too much mist.”

“That’s true. Here’s what I think. I think that Grey Man passed our house without stopping for a reason, and that reason is that he knows I’m a detective sergeant, and I’ll capture him and I’ll throw him in jail.”

Petey rolled away. “But you don’t live here anymore.”

Danny rolled him back over and kissed his forehead. “Grey Man knows I’m around, just a few miles away. He knows I protect everyone in this house. Now, how about you think about the great day you’ll have doing a bunk from school?”

Petey semi-settled, Danny checked on Mandy in the kitchen, and then returned to Ellen. He exhaled hard in an attempt to dislodge the knot that always affixed itself to his rib cage when it came to his wife. The bedroom smelled fusty, like too many unbathed skin cells settled on every surface. Danny flung back the curtains so that the rings clanged against the curtain rod.

Ellen lifted her head. Dark circles dragged down the skin beneath her eyes. Her hair lay tangled around her shoulders rather than in its usual sleep-braid. “I know,” she said.

“Have you been taking your meds?”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Leave it. I had a bad night, that’s all. I’m awake now, and I’ll see to the kids. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure? I could—”

“I said”—she tossed a pillow in his direction—“I’m fine.”

This was the way of it between them now. Petty jolts of annoyance at every turn.

“I’ll take Mandy to school,” Danny said, “and I told Petey he could stay home—”

Ellen sighed.

“—and that’s not a problem, right?”

Ellen rose and closed the bathroom door behind her with a decided
click
. Not quite a slam, but enough to let Danny know she’d read something in his tone that he should have kept to himself.

“I’ll come the usual time tonight,” he said through the closed door. Normally, he visited each evening to tuck the children into bed. His favorite time of day, in fact. Reading stories returned them to their sunnier days as a family. He was determined to maintain as many of their old routines as possible.

For now, there was nothing for it but to kiss his son goodbye and bundle Mandy into his ailing Peugeot. The car ground to life with a sputter and a gurgle. Ellen had been better the last three or four months, but her improvement didn’t come without relapses.

The fog had thickened in the thirty minutes he’d been inside the house, bringing with it the scent of the ocean. Drystone walls along the side of the road lurked like a monster race of serpents, petrified but ready to return to life. Danny’s mother used to tell him all manner of old tales about serpents, changelings, sprites, and especially Grey Man, who festered offshore waiting for its chance to ooze inland, visible to anyone who could see beyond the fog of their limited vision.

Danny turned onto the lane toward Lisfenora and Mandy’s school.

“Da?” Mandy tapped his thigh. “I think maybe Petey did see Grey Man. On our lane.”

“Believe me, sweetie, Grey Man hasn’t come calling. Not to worry.”

Five minutes later, Danny’s mobile
briiing
ed and Mandy held it up to his ear while he drove. He’d spoken too soon.

TWO

F
ROM
D
ANNY’S HOUSE, DOZENS
of lanes wound between hedgerows, whose bare branches disappeared into the mists, and over hillsides dotted with limestone and grazing cows. A few of these lanes meandered into Lisfenora, a village that turned into a tourist attraction each September. Brightly painted shops and pubs with names such as the Plough and Trough Pub welcomed the throngs of visitors who arrived to participate in the annual Matchmaking Festival—or, if not to participate exactly, to join the party atmosphere for a randy weekend.

During the day, Liam the Matchmaker held court in the plaza, a small, cobblestoned square in the village center. Despite flowers well past their bloom and benches in need of new paint jobs, the plaza, and the village in general, held its own when it came to satisfying tourists on the hunt for all things Irish quaint and Irish picturesque.

The matchmaker himself didn’t disappoint either. He wore his signature purple topcoat with tails and a fluffy scarf to ward off the chill. He was slender, frail almost, but held himself erect. He wore his
advanced age like women wore shawls: casually draped around himself, as if he could shuck off decrepitude with a quick flick of the wrist.

At least, this is what Merrit Chase thought as she wriggled around to get the circulation in her feet going again. She perched next to Liam, the father she’d met for the first time a year ago, on their appointed divan, which the village supplied along with a caravan tent. Merrit supposed she could start thinking of Liam as “Dad” by now, but she didn’t. He was “Liam” and would be for a long while to come, maybe even for the next thirty-three years of her life. He was still a little scary to her, a little overwhelming, not to mention a lot worrisome. It had been a challenging year, to say the least.

Distracted by her tingling toes, she half spied a man beelining toward Liam through the crowd that had congregated in the plaza. She didn’t think much of him until he halted with a skid of his shoes in front of Liam. His voice practically curdled it sounded so sour.

“You have a death to answer for, Matchmaker,” the stranger said.

Merrit froze with one leg stretched out in front of her. Not five minutes previously, she’d felt something lurking besides the mist that had started to creep in from the fields. Foolishness, maybe, but Merrit couldn’t help her paranoia. Before leaving for the plaza, she’d discovered the word
slag
painted on her driver’s side car door in bold magenta slashes. The graffiti “artist” could be any of the locals who eyed her with skepticism, even suspicion, as she perched next to the celebrity matchmaker at the center of it all. The culprit could even be the man who stood before them now, swaying from one foot to the other with freckles dotting his receding hairline.

“Well?” the man said. “Nothing to say about killing my mother, Matchmaker?”

The man caught Merrit glancing at his shaking hands and shoved them into his pockets. Merrit sat forward, wanting to reach out to him despite his—hopefully—false accusation, but just then Seamus Nagel, who had been waiting for his turn with Liam, stepped up and pushed the freckly man out of the way.

“Bugger off,” Seamus said. “Liam chose me next. Been watching his antics for years, and I’ll not wait another second for my turn with him.”

“We’ll chat,” the stranger said to Liam. “This needs to end.”

“If by ‘this,’ you mean your rudeness, then yes, I agree,” Liam said.

Seamus guffawed and settled next to Liam with an enthusiastic slap of hands on thighs. “Cheeky bastard.”

“Indeed,” Liam said.

Merrit peered into the crowd where the man had disappeared. That was a little more than
cheeky
. Beneath the man’s accusatory tone she’d sensed something more. A kind of desperation.

Liam sat between her and Seamus, unflappable as usual. He nodded at her.
Ready?

Her lungs spasming with anxiety, Merrit leaned in to whisper in his ear. “What did that man mean?”

“Bugger all if I know.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him. She knew from firsthand experience that he wasn’t an angel beneath his charismatic façade. He had a complicated past and a tendency to sideline the truth when it suited his purposes.

“Promise?” she said. “You don’t know what he was talking about?”

“No, and don’t you fret. He can find me again, and I’ll settle him out. And, before you ask—I doubt that man had anything to do with the message on your car.”

She gave up for now. Liam with his unerring instincts had zeroed in on her next question, and shut her down too. His gimpy hand, a result of a long-ago run-in with a rock wall, landed on her arm. “Now focus.”

Right. Focus. Merrit inhaled the comforting scent of vindaloo chicken coming off the nearest food kiosk and reached into her coat pocket to touch her inhaler. Its cool and smooth surface grounded her, allowed her lungs to relax. She adjusted Liam’s matchmaking ledger on her lap. The book had to weigh twenty pounds with its leather-bound cover and thick stock. It was a monstrosity, but it went with Liam’s image. She relaxed her clawed grip on the pen and wrote Seamus’s name on a fresh line.

“I’m that ready to meet my second wife,” Seamus was saying. “The first one broke Brendan’s heart, doing a runner back to Dublin. Years ago now, but I’d eat a dirty nappy before I’d forgive her.”

Liam wrapped an arm around the back of the divan. Merrit watched, fascinated, as Seamus reacted to Liam’s silent invitation to reveal his innermost thoughts. He shifted his hips toward Liam and reclined so that he almost touched Liam’s outstretched arm.

“You already know Merrit,” Liam said, “my right-hand woman, learning the ways of the matchmaker because this old gent can’t live forever.”

“Ay, we all know Merrit by now, don’t we?” Seamus said, his tone so neutral he might as well have shouted out his disdain.

Last September news of her kinship with Liam had spread through the village faster than a windswept fire back in her native California. Twelve months hadn’t lessened her outsider’s status. If anything, the locals had gotten used to disliking her and enjoyed their communal dismissiveness. She knew what her detractors thought. She was a baby to the land, a mewling Yankee pretender to the matchmaking throne who dared to act like a proper Lisfenoran.

If only the locals knew that she walked around the village, with its cobblestones and eighteenth-century storefronts, longing to feel part of the community. No way could she follow in Liam’s giant footsteps, but here she sat, in training for a time-honored position. She’d let Liam convince her that she had the talent for matchmaking—he said she was “charmed for it”—but she felt like a fraud. Evidently, the villagers agreed.

Only fourteen more days until the end of September, the festival, and the daily public flaying under the village’s critical eye.

Swallowing down her nerves, Merrit readied her pen and prepared herself to learn from Liam’s example. She already knew something about Seamus. He was well-known around the village, a man who drifted from job to government dole to job with cheerful ease. He spent most of his free time in the Plough and Trough. He’d moved to the village from Dublin years ago and made himself more local than some born to County Clare.