The Selkie Sorceress (Seal Island Trilogy, Book 3) Page 5

  “Mr. Holt.” Eileen McKenna said, her smile warm and friendly as she opened the door. “You’re right on time.” She dusted her hands on a pink flower-printed apron tied around her ample waist. “I just pulled a batch of lemon cookies out of the oven.”

  “How did you know lemon cookies were my favorite?” Sam asked. The laugh lines around Eileen’s eyes deepened as he shook her hand. Her skin felt smooth and papery, like a grandmother’s should. “Please, call me Sam.”

  “Alright, Sam.” She waved him inside. “I’m sorry it took us so long to get back to you. We never expected to be gone so long.”

  Sam scrubbed the soles of his boots over the welcome mat and ducked under the doorway, eyeing the brochures, souvenirs and chocolates spread out on the coffee table. “Belgium?”

  She nodded. “Tom’s been wanting to go for years.” She looked over her shoulder, her green eyes twinkling. “My husband has a weakness for Belgian beers.”

  “Let me guess…” Sam held up a basket of truffles. “You have a weakness for their chocolate?”

  “Guilty as charged.” She grinned, nodding toward the spiral staircase and the faint sound of a radio announcing a local sports game. “But don’t tell Tom that half of those aren’t actually gifts for anyone.”

  Sam chuckled as he followed her through a cozy sitting room with a plaid sofa and a worn armchair. A small TV was propped up in the corner. The front windows were open and he could hear the cars passing by on the street.

  “How do you take your tea?” Eileen asked.

  Sam leaned against the doorway of a kitchen that smelled of melted butter and sugar. “Black. And I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me.”

  She poured tea into two mugs and added a dollop of cream to hers. She handed him the darker mug and snagged a spatula from the drawer beside the oven. “To be honest, Sam,” she said, transferring cookies from the baking sheet to a platter. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Really?” Sam paused in the act of blowing on the steam floating out of the mug. “Why is that?”

  She gestured for him to open the back door and led him out to a rickety metal table painted a cheerful apple green in the back garden. She set the cookies down and settled into the chair opposite him. “I’ve thought about Brigid a lot over the years. I’m surprised you’re the first detective to ask me about her.”

  Sam nodded for her to go on.

  “Brigid was part of the cleaning crew at the college,” Eileen began. “She used to come into the library after hours to dust the books. I know it sounds silly—dusting the books. But the library at Trinity College is one of Ireland’s finest museums. It’s a celebration of our literary culture and heritage. Some of the books go back thousands of years.”

  “It’s an impressive place,” Sam admitted.

  “Aye,” Eileen smiled, straightening her shoulders with pride. “I took care to keep it that way for the twenty years I managed it.” Sliding the platter toward him, she waited until Sam took a cookie. “Part of my job was to oversee the cleaning crew. Most of the girls were quiet, hard-working. There wasn’t much to manage, really.”

  Eileen leaned back in her chair, cradling her tea in both hands. “But there was something about Brigid that worried me. I suspected things were not good at home. Every now and then, she’d show up with a fresh bruise on her face. And, despite protests from the other girls, sometimes she would bring her children with her to work.”

  “Was that allowed?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Eileen admitted. “But in her case, I let the rules slide a bit. Her two boys were very well behaved. They played quietly in the corner while she cleaned. And I spied bruises on them a time or two. I figured they were safer in the library than they were at home.”

  Sam thought about the neighborhood where Liam and Dominic had grown up, and imagined their drunk father stumbling home from the bars late at night. No wonder Brigid had brought them into work with her. “How long was she an employee?”

  “Less than a year.” Eileen broke off half of a cookie and nibbled on the edge. “But it was long enough for me to get to know her. One night, she didn’t show up for her shift and didn’t bother to call. When she didn’t come in the next night, or the night after that, I tried to track her down, but no one seemed to know who she was or where she lived.”

  “Didn’t she have to give an address on her employment form?”

  “Yes. But it was a fake one. When I went to check, it was an address of a music shop in Bray. I asked the shop owner and the neighbors who lived around the shop. But they didn’t know her. No one had ever seen a woman by the description I gave.”

  “What else did you do to track her down?”

  “I went to the local hospitals.” She looked up, her expression sober. “I thought…with the bruises and all, maybe there’d been an incident.” She swallowed a sip of tea, and looked away. “But no one had checked in under that name.”

  Sam nodded. He’d done some searching too, hacking into the hospital records of every emergency room in this area. But no one named Brigid O’Sullivan had checked into a Dublin hospital in the winter of 1988.

  “After a while, I went to the garda and filed a missing person’s report. I was really worried. But they didn’t take it seriously. They said her family would have come in, if something was really wrong. I tried to explain that maybe her husband wasn’t such a nice man, but things were…different in Ireland back then. Domestic disputes were usually treated as a matter between a husband and wife and the garda didn’t want to get in the middle of it.”

  Sam tapped his fingers over his mug. He was familiar with the situation. It wasn’t that different in America still, to this day. It sure hadn’t been any different for Tara. He studied Eileen across the table. She had done some digging. He was impressed with how hard she’d tried to find Brigid. It was her missing person’s report that first caught his attention when he hacked into the Dublin police files. But a person without proper resources and without the help of the garda could only get so far. “What did the other women in the cleaning crew say?” Sam asked. “Didn’t they know where she lived?”

  Eileen shook her head. “They were glad she was gone.”

  “Why?”

  Eileen wiped her sugar-dusted fingers on her apron. “Well, besides the fact that they thought she got special treatment, they blamed her for the disappearing books.”

  “The disappearing…books?”

  “Yes.” The corner of Eileen’s mouth tilted up. “Soon after Brigid started working there, the librarians would come into work in the morning and find that some of the books from the lower shelves were missing.” She sent Sam a look over her mug. “You have to understand that every book in the library is shelved with incredible attention to detail according to the topic and time period. This process can take weeks, sometimes months, of extensive research.”

  Sam nodded. “Of course.”

  “You can imagine how the librarians felt when their system was…compromised. First, they accused the cleaning crew of stealing, but then they started to find the books shelved in other places. To the librarians, that was almost as bad as stealing and they wanted to fire the entire cleaning staff. But the other girls came to me together and told me it was Brigid. They’d seen her moving books at night without telling anyone. Naturally, being the manager, I confronted her about it.”

  “And…?”

  Eileen paused to take a sip of her tea. “She said she was moving them to their proper place.”

  Sam’s brows shot up.

  “I know,” Eileen said. “You can imagine how I felt when she said that. It was my job to oversee the proper cataloging and organizing of the books. But Brigid was adamant that the books she moved were shelved in the wrong place and she had corrected the mistake.”

  “Was she right?”

  “Well, you see. That’s what’s so strange about all this. When I looked into it, I realized she was right. In every case, some small detail had been ov
erlooked and the book belonged exactly where she put it.”

  “Did she explain why she’d moved each book?”

  “No. She never had an explanation. And she couldn’t possibly have known without access to the information we had in our archives. She wasn’t even a very good reader. But she had some sort of strange sixth sense about it.”

  Eileen paused as a siren screamed to life a few streets away. She waited for it to die down. “In every case except for one. There was one book—a story about selkies.” She glanced up. “You’re familiar with them?”

  Sam snagged another cookie off the plate as the skin on the back of his neck started to prickle. “Yes.”

  “Well, there was an old fairy tale—a legend about a white selkie. She insisted it belonged in the section with the mermaids.”

  Sam paused, the cookie halfway to his mouth. Mermaids?

  “You see,” Eileen went on, “the selkie stories are in one section—under Irish mythology. The mermaid stories are in a different section—under general mythology. You’d think those sections would be close to each other, but they’re not. The Irish have a lot of pride for their own culture and legends. And while we respect the legends and myths of the world, we’d rather put our own on special display in our country’s premier literary museum.”

  “Of course,” Sam murmured, thinking back to the theory Tara had voiced in the pub yesterday—that maybe Brigid hid the book in a specific spot in the library to give them a clue. “Did she move any of the other selkie stories to the mermaid section?”

  “No.” Eileen shook her head. “Only the one. Which is why we had such a heated debate about it.”

  Sam’s gaze lifted to the back of the row house edging up to Eileen’s back garden, at the long electrical wires hanging out the windows. “But why would she re-shelve only that one? And not the rest of the selkie books?”

  “Believe me, I asked the same thing. But she wouldn’t tell me. She never had an explanation. But she warned that if I tried to put it back, she’d move it again. After a few days, I gave up. A week later, she was gone and we never heard from her again.”

  Sam stared at a curved groove in the surface of the rusted table. “Did you put the story back?”

  Eileen shook her head. “No.”

  Sam glanced up. “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure,” Eileen admitted. “But something about Brigid’s sudden disappearance has always haunted me. I’ve always felt that something bad must have happened to her. And I guess I hoped that maybe one day she would show up again.” She looked down, into her tea. “I think I left it there in case she ever came back. So she would know that I…believed her.”

  “Do you?” Sam said slowly. “Believe her?”

  Eileen looked up, her green eyes filled with concern. “I think there’s a reason Brigid put that book there. I only wish I knew what it was.”

  “BRIGID,” SISTER EVELYN called softly through the door as she knocked. “We’re having a last minute visit from Father McAllister. I wondered if you could put together a flower basket for the dining room?”

  Sister Evelyn heard a faint scuffing noise and she put her ear to the door, tapping again. When she didn’t get an answer, she sighed and let herself in. A small shaft of light illuminated Brigid’s sparse furnishings. Her small single bed was already made—the corners tucked in, not a wrinkle in the material. The pens on her desk were lined up neatly in a row. Her stationery was stacked in a single corner, the edges aligned with the desk.

  But the woman on the floor was only half-dressed, her long hair a tangled mess of black waves and knotted river grasses. “Oh, Brigid,” Sister Evelyn closed the door and sank to the floor beside her friend. “Not again.”

  “I thought I heard him,” Brigid whispered, her eyes focused on the book beneath her palm. Slowly, she shifted it into a different position. “I thought I heard his voice in the river.”

  Sister Evelyn brushed Brigid’s heavy hair back from her face. The grasses broke off, crackling to the floor. Her friend had gone down to the river last night…again. “But he wasn’t there?”

  Brigid shook her head, reaching for another book and sliding it behind the last one in the second row. Twelve books on gardening. All hardbacks on loan from the local library. Sister Evelyn had left them in the common room for everyone to look at. She’d been surprised when she walked through the room this morning and noticed they were gone. “What are you doing with the books, Brigid?”

  “I need to put them in order.”

  “How about alphabetically?” Sister Evelyn suggested gently.

  Brigid shook her head. “No.”

  “How about by variety? Or blooming times? Earliest to latest?”

  “No.”

  “Tallest to smallest?”

  “No.” Brigid shifted another book around. The back cover scraped against the floorboards. A warm wind ruffled the curtains and Brigid paused, lifting her eyes to the rolling green hills outside. “Something’s wrong.”

  “There’s nothing wrong.” Sister Evelyn picked the river grasses out of her friend’s hair. The rest of the nuns might think Brigid was crazy. But they hadn’t known her when she was in that hospital. They hadn’t seen what those people had done to her. They didn’t understand that Brigid’s obsession with organization was the only shred of sanity she could claim in a life that had spun wildly out of control.

  “The gardens are starting to bloom,” Sister Evelyn said cheerfully, shaking more grasses out of her hair while Brigid continued to stare out the window.

  Brigid nodded, her gaze following the path of a robin into the forest.

  “We might see daffodils for the first time in January.”

  Brigid shook her head, the grasses rustling around her bare shoulders like tiny bones in the wind. “It’s not time.”

  “It’s only a heat wave,” Sister Evelyn said gently.

  Brigid’s pale eyes—the color of storm clouds gathering over the sea—shifted to Sister Evelyn. “It’s not time.” Her cold fingers wrapped around Sister Evelyn’s wrist. “It’s not right.”

  Owen glanced over his shoulder, as he did every night when he wandered down to the beach at sunset. Hardly anyone came here. It was mostly rocks and they could get slippery at high tide. But the coastline was bone dry. Even the lichens crackled under his feet as he picked his way over them.

  He paused when he spotted a starfish washed up on the shore. He knelt, scooping it up and carrying it back to the water. Strips of dried seaweed broke off and crumbled under his shoes. His eyes widened when he saw the dozens of pale sea stars stranded on the thin sliver of white sand. He dropped the book he was carrying and scrambled over to them, picking them up and tossing them back into the water.

  A lone seal swam into the shallow waters and circled the starfish, swishing her tail fins to help them back into the deeper waters. When Owen and the seal had returned all the starfish back to the sea, Owen glanced up at the horizon. The sun, a copper coin in the distance, was almost touching the hazy edge of the sea.

  “I have to get back,” he whispered. But the seal swam closer. She lifted her sleek head out of the water and crooned out a sad song. Owen bit his lip. His parents expected him home before dark. He looked at the road leading back to the village. Maybe he could stay a little longer if he ran home.

  Picking up the book, he climbed onto the long flat rock that hung over the water and sat with his feet dangling over the edge. He opened to the page where he’d left off last night and started to read.

  “‘Don’t you love me best of all?’ the little mermaid’s eyes seemed to question him, when he took her in his arms and kissed her lovely forehead.

  ‘Yes, you are most dear to me,’ said the Prince, ‘for you have the kindest heart. You love me more than anyone else does, and you look so much like a young girl I once saw but never shall find again. I was on a ship that was wrecked, and the waves cast me ashore near a holy temple…’”

  He trailed off as Nuala dipped
and spun in frantic circles under the surface of the water. She flipped, somersaulting, and then hopped up onto the ledge of the rock, her pale eyes pleading at him to go on. Owen read a few more paragraphs, stumbling over some of the bigger words. He paused when Nuala nudged his fingers with her wet nose.

  “What is it?” he whispered. She let out a low whimper and he ran his hand tentatively over her head. He knew she couldn’t answer. But she scooted closer, rubbing her nose on the pages of the book. He flipped back a few pages until she stopped nudging the book and he squinted to make out the words through the fading light.

  “She saw dry land rise before her in the high blue mountains, topped with snow as glistening white as if a flock of swans were resting there. Down by the shore were splendid green woods, and in the foreground stood a church, or perhaps a convent…”

  Nuala splashed back into the water, swimming in frantic half-circles around the rock. Owen paused, his finger on the word as he sounded out the syllables again. “Con-vent?”

  She nodded, splashing warm water onto the rock.

  “Con-vent,” he said again, not entirely sure if he was pronouncing it right. He didn’t know what a convent was. But it must be important. He slipped the gold ribbon back between the pages as the sun dipped into the ocean. He stood, waving goodbye to Nuala. “I have to go,” he called over his shoulder as he scampered over the rocks to the road. A trail of seawater dripped from the hem of his pants, steam rising up in his wake.

  GLENNA LAID A stick of sage across a small driftwood fire. The dried herbs crackled as she stepped out of her cloak. The ocean lapped at her feet, warm as a tide pool on Lunasagh. A swallow darted out of the caves, its black wings beating against the inky blue sky. She lifted her arms, the swell of power building inside her as ripples danced over the surface of the water.

  Sky above me, sea below me, fire within me

  Give me strength to see more clearly

  The sea churned, bubbling around her ankles. Steam floated up from the surface and gathered in Glenna’s upturned palms. The air crackled as the mists crystallized, sparkling in her hands.