Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

But she had turned it in. Perhaps that was why Niall seemed to trust her.

He felt a presence behind him and turned to find Shawn Kearney herself standing in the doorway. He closed the book and slipped it back on the shelf.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Is what true?”

“About Niall Dawson being arrested?”

Word traveled fast here. He didn’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of telling the truth. “I’m afraid so.”

“He didn’t harm anyone. He couldn’t.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Cormac said. “Niall’s one of my oldest friends.”

“Then you want to help him, too.”

“Is there something you know, Shawn? Something that could help Niall?”

She came closer and lowered her voice. “He told me this morning why he was here in April, investigating a ring of treasure hunters—”

“Shawn, have you ever heard of the Book of Killowen?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Nora found John O’Donovan’s notes online last night, with the reference to the shrine and to the book being burned. We thought that might have been a ruse.”

She glanced behind her, checking to see that they were alone. “I need to know exactly what’s on that wax tablet you found on the bog man.”

“How did you—”

“Martin told me. He showed me the photographs you left with him. Do you still have the originals?”

Cormac took the camera’s memory card from his pocket. “On here.”

“Let me have a look. Please.”

He handed over the card, and she plugged it into the laptop on the corner table. Her reaction was similar to Gwynne’s. What did they all know that he and Niall were missing? “Shawn, do you know what it says?”

She turned to him. “I should let Martin explain, he’s much better at translation than I am. How much do you know about the Book of Killowen?”

“Only that it’s mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters , and there are stories about people coming to blows over it, and that neither the book nor the shrine has surfaced since the eighteenth century—a hundred years before O’Donovan wrote about it in his Ordnance Survey letters. He was basically reporting on rumors on something that might not even exist anymore. One of the Beglans was supposed to have burned the book because he was fed up with the controversy.”

Shawn Kearney threw him a skeptical glance.

Cormac took a step back. “Hang on, is the Book of Killowen still here? What about the shrine?”

“I can’t say any more.”

“Wait a minute. Does the book have anything to do with the death of Benedict Kavanagh or Vincent Claffey?”

“I don’t know. Please don’t ask me any more. Look, you’ve got to be careful. There are certain people here who would—” A sudden noise in the hall pulled her up short. “I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” She opened the door and looked both ways, then slipped away.

Cormac’s memory snaked back to Anthony Beglan following the cattle, the foreign-sounding words flowing from him, and Martin Gwynne’s reaction to the Latin script on the tablet, the ancient writer’s thoughts about evil and malice.

Nora studied Joseph Maguire’s sleeping face, searching for traces of the family resemblance. She found hints in the cut of his jaw, the shape of the earlobes, the curve of his lower lip. Joseph had been subdued all day, after the bath incident last night. He shifted in his lounger, opening one eye only briefly to see that she was there. “Nero,” he said, one of his many names for her.

She checked her watch: nearly four. Eliana should be back soon. From where she sat, she could see the gap between the car park at the front of the main house and the path that headed off toward the cottages in the wood. Graham Healy pulled a black BMW into the car park’s end space and hefted a couple of large carrier bags—one filled with clinking bottles of wine—and what looked like a petrol container from the back of the car. He disappeared down the path. Strange that no one had seemed too concerned about Healy paying off Vincent Claffey. Why was that? Come to think of it, had anyone found a fat packet of cash when they searched Claffey’s farm? The Garda Síochána weren’t exactly immune to opportunity; there had been ample proof to the contrary. But somehow Stella Cusack didn’t strike her as the light-fingered type. So why was Graham Healy still walking around while Niall Dawson was sitting in jail? If stopping blackmail was the motive for Claffey’s murder, surely both men had at least an equal stake in that. Everything came back again to Benedict Kavanagh and what he was doing in the boot of that car.

Nora looked to the woodland path again, surprised to see Eliana emerging from the oak grove. The girl walked quickly, and Nora detected a disturbance.

“Is something bothering you?” she asked when Eliana joined them.

“No!” The girl’s eyes darted back to the edge of the wood.

“Eliana, please tell me. That man who just went down the path, did he say something?”

“No, he said nothing.” She paused. “He only stared at me.”

Nora looked through the woods where Healy had gone. “Perhaps it’s better to stay away from that path. There are plenty of other places to walk.”

Nora glanced back at Joseph. His eyes were open, and he’d apparently been listening in on their conversation. “Who’s stack-stack-staring?”

“It’s nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing for you to be concerned about.”

“Is it all right if I leave you two here for a bit?” Nora asked. A notion was taking shape, her curiosity catching on Graham Healy’s odd manner just now.

She’d have to double back around the orchard so that Joseph and Eliana wouldn’t see her go down the path. Easy enough, just head for the bog and turn right behind the goat barn and the cheese storehouse. Lucien and Sylvie must have rooms dug into the hill for aging their cheese; they sold their produce at the local markets, and there was no way all that could fit into the tiny storehouse. There must be caverns full of cheese in there.

She made sure no one was watching, then followed along the barn and ducked behind it. To her left was the road leading to Anthony Beglan’s farm and the bog, and straight ahead a narrow path led back up into the wood above the storehouse.

The light was different on this visit to the oak grove. The cloud cover was heavier, and the sky cast a yellow light that made the moss underfoot glow a most unnatural fluorescent green. A crack sounded ahead, and Nora slowed her pace. She was off the path entirely now, stepping over hummocks and boulders, the snake-like and moss-eaten roots of giant trees. She detected movement about a hundred yards ahead. Healy, it had to be. But what was he doing? She crept closer, moving only when his back was turned, until she was close enough to observe him. He’d heaped a large pile of dead branches in the center of a circle of fallen logs and was breaking branches over his knee and pitching more wood onto the pile. He bent over, and Nora spotted the petrol can at his feet.

Healy left the container at the edge of the woodpile, evidently not ready to start the fire just yet. Maybe they were waiting for cover of darkness, so that smoke from the fire wouldn’t be visible. This far from the house, you wouldn’t smell it or see the light through the trees. It wasn’t Midsummer, or Samhain or Imbolc, or any cusp of a changing season, so what was this fire for—a celebration, some sort of ceremony? Or perhaps the simplest reason of all: to burn something.

Stella Cusack had reached an impasse with her prisoner. Niall Dawson sat across the table with his head in his hands.