Kilmoon: A County Clare Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

favorite gravestone among Celtic crosses that marked the resting spots of people long dead. He wore a tweed newspaper boy’s cap and matching sport jacket. The cap wobbled on his head, and the jacket sleeves hung past his wrists.
    “You’re sure about it then?” Kevin said.
    “Quit harping. You’re worse than the magpies. You think I don’t drive myself into the village when you’re at one of your construction sites?”
    Kevin squinted against a hangover. Tonight he’d be after it again, the only difference being that he’d be buried alive by birthday revelers. He enjoyed his pints well enough, but he didn’t look forward to the party. He never did, in fact, and this year would be worse than ever. One year ago today, he thought. Is that when things started to change?
    “I made a decision here a long time ago,” Liam said in a voice soft enough Kevin barely caught the words.
    Liam’s here was Our Lady of the Kilmoon, an early Christian church stained with mossy grime that had aged her past her years. The relic was hardly bigger than Kevin’s cottage but with a moody presence nonetheless as she watched over her graves. Her thatched roof had disintegrated long ago because only rock tolerated the Irish rainscape. Yet, even her hardy walls had started to succumb to the elements. Loose rocks littered the ground around her, half hidden by grassy tussocks. A drystone wall marked her territory, within which grave markers and Celtic crosses slowly sank into the ground. More walls bordered fields spreading green and lush in all directions. A few houses stood off in the distance. Out here in the middle of nowhere cows and sheep outnumbered humans.
    In the neighboring sheep pasture, a pre-Celtic standing stone glowed orange in the growing light. The obelisk appeared more permanent than Our Lady, which was built a millennium later. It shared space with livestock and rock walls and blackthorn, while the church, though picturesque, usurped space as if she knew she didn’t belong and must protect her parcel of land all the more for it. Kevin imagined the early Christians glancing at the standing stone as they entered the church and then secretly praying to the pagan gods the stone represented.
    Despite the clash of old cultures, or more likely because of it, this was a sacred spot, which might be why Liam had started dragging Kevin along for what amounted to brooding sessions. No coincidence these sessions began the day after Liam had received a letter that he still refused to share with Kevin. When was that? Early July? Sometime after the rains finally abated for a short while, in any case.
    “I decided to let myself fall in love,” Liam said. “I felt entitled, you see. It was my turn, but I turned it into nothing but a harpy’s burial.”
    Liam turned up his collar against the wind only to have a gust blow off his cap, which flipped three times and landed on one of Our Lady’s windowsills. Kevin didn’t understand how Liam’s hats grew too big because surely his skull couldn’t shrink. He retrieved the cap, fearing what Liam would say next. He preferred the Liam of old, who never spoke of his past.
    Kevin handed the cap to Liam and stepped away to pluck at a bouquet of withered violets. To his way of thinking, the flowers were useless. The leftover bits of skeleton, if any, cared nothing about such niceties. They were already mutated into another life, another death, on and on through time like endless tiled corridors.
    Off to Kevin’s left, Liam pulled the irksome letter from his pocket to finger it for the thousandth time. With an annoyed grunt as prelude, Kevin began whistling against the sound of the letter sliding out of its envelope. A Beatles song, the one about Jude, who shouldn’t carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.
    “Why not let me match you this year, sonny boy?” Liam said. “Time’s running out, you know.”
    Kevin squeezed the violet stems but caught himself before crushing