The Quiet Woman, page 1
THE QUIET WOMAN
TERENCE FAHERTY
Contents
Also by Terence Faherty
Acknowledgments
Prologue: On the Screeb Road
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue: Letterfenny
Also by Terence Faherty
The True Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
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The Quiet Woman
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The Owen Keane Mysteries
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Deadstick
Live to Regret
The Lost Keats
Die Dreaming
Prove the Nameless
The Ordained
Orion Rising
Eastward in Eden
The Confessions of Owen Keane
The Chronicles of Owen Keane
* * *
The Scott Elliott Mysteries
* * *
Kill Me Again
Come Back Dead
Raise the Devil
In a Teapot
Dance in the Dark
Play a Cold Hand
The Hollywood Op
* * *
The Star Republic Mysteries
* * *
Tales of the Star Republic
Files of the Star Republic
Copyright © 2014 by Terence Faherty
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means without written permission, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Publishing History:
The Five Star edition: June 2014
The Gisbourne Press edition: February 2022
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This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
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Cover Design: Cover Story Design
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Interior Design: Sue Trowbridge, interbridge.com
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Author Photo: Paul Chaffee
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ISBN: 978-1-7324184-7-9
For Kathryn and Dick Kennison
Acknowledgments
The Camelot Guide to Romance Writing, which is quoted forty-five times on the following pages, does not exist. Some of the tips I attribute to it are things I’ve figured out during my twenty-year career as a mystery writer and some are bits of advice I’ve picked up while listening to other writers talk about their craft. To add more romance-writing flavor, I consulted and can recommend three books that are more reliable than The Camelot Guide and have the further advantage of being real: On Writing Romance, by Leigh Michaels, Writing Romances, edited by Rita Gallagher and Rita Clay Estrada, and Writing Exotic Romance, by Alison Kent.
I would also like to thank Richard J. Sveum, MD (and BSI), for his suggestions on medical issues.
Prologue: On the Screeb Road
Just after closing time they set out from Ryan’s in the old Morris. Set out slowly because a fog had rolled in off Galway Bay sometime during the evening’s drinking and bantering and darts, a fog like steam from a kettle, steam that came and went in white billows.
Two rode in the little car: Michael Murray, an automobile mechanic, and Agnes, his wife and the mother of his three children, all of whom had died within days of their birth.
So they were alone, these two, but not alone, as the three dead children were always with them, never far from Agnes’s mind and therefore never far from Michael’s. This was especially true tonight. Agnes had spent a long evening seated in the parlor bar, listening to other women talk of their children, a secret knife to her heart. The passage of years and years had eased the pain to this extent: Her friends’ children had grown up and so their resemblance to the dead babies had dwindled away. But now an unlooked-for blow had struck. The oldest of these grown children had begun to have children of their own. And so the baby snaps had appeared again and with them the old regret.
“Don’t drive into the ditch, Michael,” Agnes said with a warning tap of her wedding band on the metal dashboard.
“Thank God you spoke,” her husband replied. “For I was that close to doing it. I thought the fog might be less down there, due to the added air pressure.”
“You’re adding to the air pressure in here,” she said, “blathering away like that. Roll your window down if you feel it come on you again and you’ll clear the road for half a mile before us.”
Michael smiled in the darkness at this victory. He knew from long experience what she’d been thinking of and he also knew how to distract her, which was to draw her attention to some foible of his own. Even their oldest friends thought of them as a bickering couple, not recognizing their back-and-forth for what it was, the grasp of a loving hand and an answering squeeze.
“It’s a well-known fact,” Michael continued, “that the density of the air increases the lower down you go, just as the weight of the water increases the lower you go in the sea. I’ve often observed it in the shop when the stove isn’t drawing right. The smoke will hang in the air just above my head like a blanket, supported invisibly from below.”
His wife sniffed only, and he saw he had made a misstep by mentioning his shop, which was in the nave of an abandoned church. Agnes sometimes superstitiously attributed their sad losses to his having desecrated that sacred place with his grease and oil.
He hurried on. “Sure I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in St. Timothy’s with the incense.”
“With the incense in St. Tim’s,” she repeated sarcastically. “I’d say instead it was the pipe smoke in Ryan’s, if I thought you were up to observing anything in there except the new girl behind the sticks, that Sybil of the half-buttoned blouses. I could tell you what’s holding her up, and it’s not the density of the air.”
Now they were set for the entire ride, having hit on a subject that would easily last them its remaining miles. That is, they would have been set but for a particularly dense patch of fog blowing across the road just then. Michael missed a turn he never missed, and a gray stone wall shot up before them like a cold hand thrust up from the turf.
“Michael!” Agnes screamed, but he was already standing on the brakes, pushing himself away from the wheel with one arm while throwing the other across her as they slid on the grassy verge. Their front bumper actually tapped the wall, but only that, and they were stopped, so close to the stones that they trapped the light from the old headlamps.
“Mary Mother of God,” Agnes said and made the Sign of the Cross.
“I’ve scratched the chrome, I think,” Michael said.
“Chrome,” Agnes repeated as he backed them onto the road. “There’s less chrome left on this car than hairs on your head, Michael Murray. Go slowly now. Haven’t you learned your lesson?”
“I am going slowly,” her husband replied, but in truth he was going faster and faster, her remark about his thinning hair having hit near the bone and dampened his earlier solicitude. Then too, he was embarrassed at having missed the turn and anxious to prove himself the master of the road.
“Slow down, Michael, won’t you? You’ll be off the road again.”
“I’ll not be. Not again.”
“Then you’ll hit something in the road.”
“That’s the beauty of a night like this. No thinking thing will be—”
Before he could finish, they saw the shape out in the very tips of their headlight beams. A little eddy in the fog? Yes. No! A figure, a woman, her back to them.
Michael stamped on the tiny brake pedal again, his left arm across his wife and her two wrapped around it. They were on pavement this time and not grass, and they stopped quickly but with a great noise of tires.
Quickly, but not before Agnes had taken in a mind’s picture of the figure that would last her, unfading, all her life. It was of a woman of middling height and slender, wearing a brown cloth coat with a bit of ornamental belt in the back, held in place by two bone buttons. Her head was covered by a bright blue scarf that shimmered like silk and completely hid her hair.
“What in God’s name?” Michael asked, panting, for it was clear the woman wasn’t walking in the road, only standing there. What was more, she had yet to acknowledge the Morris, hadn’t so much as drawn herself in as it slid to a stop a fe
Michael raised his palm above the horn, and at that moment the woman turned her head to them. They saw that it was barely a woman, a girl really, with a sweet, wan face and eyes that were lost and imploring.
“What in God’s name?” Michael said again and reached for his window crank. He’d no sooner grasped it than he turned to his wife. “Lower your window; she’s coming to your side of the car.”
“Are you blind then?” his wife said. “She’s coming to your side of the car.”
Their eyes met for a second in awe and fear. When they looked again to the fog, the girl was gone.
“Bridey,” Agnes whispered.
“God save us. Do you think?”
Her nod was so slow and so deep it was almost a bow. “Bridey Finnerman.” And she blessed herself again.
Chapter One
“Start on the darkest night of your heroine’s life. Then shoot out the lights.” Camelot Guide to Romance Writing
What time was it in Ireland? Danny Furey looked at her watch, or tried to. The cabin of the 747 was too dark for her to see its hands but not dark enough to activate their cheap luminous paint. Was Ireland time five hours ahead of Jersey time? Four? Six? That was something she’d know if she’d had time to plan the trip like a rational human being. And she’d know the average temperature in Ireland in September and the average inches of rainfall. For that matter, she’d know the name of the hotel where she’d be sleeping that night.
Sleep. How many hours until they turned on the cabin lights and served breakfast? No more than two, and she was wasting them. On your mark, get set, sleep, Danny told herself, and almost smiled.
She looked to her right, to her brother Kerry. The Furey nose was just visible above the outline of the little airliner pillow, and Danny could tell from the sounds that nose was making that Kerry was deeply under. Kerry, who had violated every guidebook rule for avoiding the sleeplessness that led to jet lag, starting with not touching any alcohol. Kerry, who had a disease with a name so long he couldn’t spell it, was sleeping away like he hadn’t a care in the world.
As Danny turned from her brother, she felt the slight moistening of her palms she knew to be an early sign of airsickness. But she was rarely airsick, and only in very little planes in very bumpy skies. This plane was a great sky liner and the night air was very smooth, with just the occasional thump to make the overhead compartments rattle. It was like the motion of a train, she thought, right down to the slight swaying of the tail section where the Furey luck had landed them. Danny wasn’t going to be sick—she was sure of that—but now that she’d let the possibility enter her mind, she couldn’t put it out again.
She searched for some distracting thought and blundered, seizing on her most vivid recent memory: Kerry’s phone call of the night before.
Just hearing from her brother on a day that wasn’t her birthday or Jesus’s had surprised Danny. The call had come in at twelve thirty-five by her bedside clock. Awakened from the first deep hour of sleep and slow-witted, Danny had decided that Kerry was drunk. Drunkenness was an even more likely explanation for a call than a birthday or Christmas, but it had turned out to be no more true.
“Pack your bags, little sister,” Kerry said in place of hello. “We’re going to find Letterfenny at long last.”
Letterfenny. Asleep or awake, Danny spotted that warning word, that code for the unspecified future time when all would be right between herself and her brother and perhaps with North and South Korea as well.
“Someday,” she said, but even that sounded too much like a contract. “Maybe.”
“Not someday. Tomorrow. September 14, 2008. I’ve booked the seats. And not maybe. My last maybe is behind me. I’m all yeses and noes now. Noes mostly. I want Letterfenny to be a yes, and I need your help.”
“Call me this weekend—”
“I’m sick, Danny. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia. That’s the good kind, by the way. Kills you so slowly you might outlive it. Die of something else, I mean. At least, you might if you wait until you’re sixty something to get it, like most people do. I got it at thirty-nine, which was spotting it way too much of a head start.
“I’ll worry about that when we get back from Ireland, with Letterfenny struck off my to-do list. By the way, what you’re feeling right now is the sensation of being backed into a corner.”
Danny had felt the bile rise in her throat then and she felt it now. She thought of the little paper sack in the pocket of the seatback in front of her. But that seatback was now fully reclined, the balding head of its occupant almost in Danny’s face, the pocket somewhere in the blackness beneath the head. Not that it mattered. She knew she’d strangle before she’d vomit into a bag in the dark, surrounded by strangers, asleep or pretending to be.
She wiggled out of her seat and into an aisle that was lit like a tiny runway, lights in the floor at intervals to outline the narrow path. She made her way to the back of the plane at a wedding-march pace, her sense of dignity choke-holding her panic. The central section of seats ended in a flat blank bulkhead. Behind it was a bank of lavatories, every one available. She picked the center door because it was the farthest from any sleeper, shut the accordion door, and shot home its tiny bolt. An overhead light came on, followed by an exhaust fan with a bad bearing. Danny found its rattle comforting. No one would hear her retching.
She bent over the stainless-steel bowl, one sweaty hand on either plastic wall of the little compartment, and waited. And waited. And nothing came out of her but—after a full minute’s trying—a sigh. She gave it up, turned to the toy sink, and ran some tepid water into her cupped hand. Above the sink was a tiny mirror and in the mirror her mother’s face.
Not exactly her mother’s face, which currently resided in Fort Lauderdale and was consequently very tanned, but one more and more like it every day. Dark and narrow—except at the forehead, which was wide enough, held apart by smooth black brows, the eyes beneath them almost as dark and almost as overlarge. Beneath those a nose that was nondescript by Furey standards and a small mouth whose lips were drawn now like a double bowstring.
Danny thought of an old saying: By forty every man has the face he deserves. Or was it thirty? Fifty? Damn. She was only certain that it was equally true of a woman. She had her mother’s face and—no credit to her—it was the very one she deserved. A face to reprove her, to remind her of her sins, the few of commission and the sad many of omission.
Kerry the brother had the Furey face, which was largely the Furey nose, accompanied by small bright eyes, a dimpled chin, and wild hair; all gifts from their long dead father, along, it seemed, with his lifeline. An unpredictable and cheerful man, he’d been short-lived, so much so that Danny always fell back on memories of photographs when she tried to picture him.
Danny rubbed the waiting water into her face and patted it dry with a paper towel. The waste bin was crammed to bursting, so she folded the towel and held the damp square in her palm. She opened the lavatory door and jumped. A woman was standing there. An older woman with tannic skin, her head arched back so she could look up into Danny’s face, her eyes darting blurs behind square glasses. Her whole look was questioning, almost entreating. What have you to say to me? Do you have some word for me? A message? An answer?
