The Irish Manor House Murder Read Online Free PDF

hold back her fair hair and with the smell of marijuana on her breath, overcome with love she married Tom Keegan, guitar-playing rock star. “A darling man, besides,” they said of Tom Keegan, who was then thirty-one, with recordings that were at the top of the charts. And when he was thirty-six and died in the van accident at Galley Head, “It took a piece out of Ireland, a main missing piece,” they said of him. Caroline thought at first she would die of the loss. But at least by then she had the children, Rowena and Scott.
    “Ma’am? I’ve finished up here. Should I bring Ms. Rowena’s bag downstairs for you?”
    “Hmmm?” She swam up from the past. “Oh, yes, Jennie. And didn’t I say? You’re to take it to Castle Moore, just leave it with Rose. You can use Ms. Rowena’s bike, it has a big enough basket.”
    *   *   *
    Alone, Caroline raised her head and looked up at the frieze of plaster horses, mares and stallions, manes flying, hooves upraised. She shivered. Something terrible had happened in the meadow, why lie to herself? And something terrible between her father and her daughter had caused it. Something beyond dreadful. But what? The what loomed like a giant wave. What? Who could tell her? Scott? She would sound out Scott.
    She drew a breath of relief. Scott would know. He and Rowena were unusually close. He was two years younger than Rowena. But Rowena had always loved and protected her little brother. And Scott, maybe because of his deformed leg, seemed to have compensated by developing an intuitive sense.
    Yes, Scott. He would know.

8
    Jennie heard Dr. Ashenden come into the front hall behind her. She recognized his definite step, the crack of his heel on the marble floor. She was putting on her three-quarter-length coat. She’d meantime put the black nylon bag on the settle beside the front door. It was already eleven o’clock.
    “That bag,” Dr. Ashenden said, his voice sharp, “belongs to my granddaughter. Why’s it here? What’re you doing with it? What’s she up to?”
    Buttoning her coat, Jennie looked at Dr. Ashenden, one long, shocked, fascinated glance, then down at her buttoning fingers. His face! Scratches, purple bruises around his bloodshot eyes. One cheek was swollen from chin to cheekbone, a dark red. It was so painful to see that it made Jennie flinch. One of his shoulders was heavily bandaged. The left. His arm rested in a dark blue sling.
    “Well?” Authoritative. It made her jump.
    “The bag?” She was taking it to the stables at Castle Moore … Clothes, yes, some clothes … No, she didn’t know … Mrs. Keegan — that is, Mrs. Temple — had packed them … A telephone call, she thought, from Ms. Rowena.
    “I see.”
    Out the door with the bag, shivery somehow. Closing it behind her, she heard a sound, at first she thought a hoarse and strangled cry, but the door, a massive door, squeaked like a human in pain. It got that way in the wet of October, the wood expanding; it was oak.
    *   *   *
    A half hour before lunch, the smell of pea soup with curry wafted into the hall where Caroline at last found Scott. He was standing by the hall table, flicking through the morning’s mail, resting his weight on his good leg. Caroline stood watching her son, smiling, but with that inevitable ache in her heart. Scott was twenty-two years old. Like her, he was too thin, and not tall. He had a thatch of fair hair and blue eyes with a tinge of gray that made them look so light as to be almost transparent. “See-through eyes,” Caroline had heard a youngster in Ballynagh call them. In any case, Scott was undeniably a handsome young man.
    Right now, he was in a navy shirt and yellow sweater. He wore dove-gray trousers that as usual he’d bought from a catalog to spare himself the mortification of buying trousers in a shop, exposing his pathetically narrow leg in the steel brace. Caroline thought: My bones, my son’s bones. Not like Rowena’s. Did Scott envy