Janice Macdonald - The Man On The Cliff

“You couldn’t have stopped by at a better moment,” Annie said. “First off, if you wouldn’t mind making sure Rory gets the sandwiches I made for him, I’d be grateful. He’s mad for cold chicken and I had some left from last Sunday’s lunch.”

“Sure, no problem,” Kate said. “Do you want me to take them down to the station?”

“If he doesn’t drop by first.” Annie held up a poster for her to see. “And now I’d like your opinion on this. Tell me what you think.”

“The Cragg’s Head Fleadh,” Kate read aloud, mentally shoving aside thoughts of her encounter with the man on the cliff. “A festival of fiddles, flutes and concertinas. It looks great.”

“Flah,” Annie corrected. “Rhymes with hah,” she said with a smile. “That’s all right, though, you’re not the first to say it wrong. I’ve so much to do I can hardly see straight and now, with this worry over Elizabeth, it’s all I can do to keep my mind on anything.”

“You still haven’t heard from her?” Kate asked.

“I haven’t directly, but that was a friend of hers on the phone just now. Swears she saw Elizabeth at a coffee bar this morning. Would have spoken to her, she says, but she ran off. Still, it’s good to have even a wee bit of news.”

“I’m sure it must be.” Kate glanced again at the poster. “So you’re in charge of putting this whole thing together?”

“I am. Well, we’ve a committee, of course, but in the time it takes for them to decide on anything, I can already have it done.” She retrieved a slim blue book from under a pile of papers on her desk and handed it to Kate. “Sometimes I wonder why I bother, though. Last year, Cragg’s Head wasn’t even in here. This year they put a little note that said it wasn’t worth a detour.”

Kate riffled through the pages and smiled up at her.

“Well, we’re never going to have the crowds flocking here,” Annie said, returning the smile. “But it’s home. I’d never leave. My sister left for America, a few years back. Boston. Pat and I went over there for a holiday and they took us to an Irish bar of all places.” She shook her head. “All of them singing ‘Danny Boy’ and shedding tears for dear old Ireland as though they’d go back in a minute, if they could. And few of them ever would.”

“You’ve lived in Cragg’s Head for a long time?”

“My whole life.” Annie gestured to the stack of wooden desks in the corner. “Until this year, this room used to be a classroom. Caitlin sat at one of those desks in this room and so did I…” She smiled. “Too many years back to remember. My father and grandfather tilled those fields out there. We’ve been here for as long as anyone can remember. Pat’s family too.”

“It must be nice to have that sense of continuity,” Kate said, recalling her own childhood. “My dad was always getting transferred. By the time I was nine, I’d been enrolled in a dozen different schools.”

“Ah God.” Annie gave Kate a horrified look. “What kind of a start in life is that? Your mother didn’t mind it then?”

“Well, they finally got divorced, so she probably did. But she tended to go along with whatever my father wanted and he was always looking for something he never seemed to find.” With her finger, she pushed scattered paper clips into a pile, lost for a moment in her thoughts. “We did okay, I guess. My brother and I. We both got decent grades. We made friends.” She grinned at Annie. “Of course they never lasted long, but then we made new friends.”

Annie clicked her tongue. “Sure, it would be like pulling up the daffodil bulbs every morning to see if they’re growing,” she said. “If you dug me up and put me somewhere else, I’d not be the same person.”

“In California, where I live,” Kate said, “almost everyone is from somewhere else. People talk about putting down roots and that sort of thing, but it’s more like we’re seeds blown on the wind. You could land anywhere and, just as easily, pull up and go somewhere else.”

Annie shook her head as though the thought were too outlandish to comprehend.

“That’s why you’re not married,” she finally said. “You’ve no idea who you are or where you belong. Come to think of it, that’s probably Hughie Fitzpatrick’s problem. Him growing up on the Maguire estate as he did. Like planting a potato in among the roses and expecting it to grow petals. Sure, who wouldn’t be confused?”

SHE WASN’T JUST CONFUSED, Kate thought later that morning as she sat at a small desk in Annie’s front parlor, she was besotted. For the last hour she’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to focus on the notes from an interview she’d just completed with an old school friend of Moruadh’s, but her brain was refusing to cooperate. All it wanted to do was think about the gray-eyed man. The man on the cliff.

Why had she turned down his offer of a ride home? Maybe he would have asked her out. Dinner perhaps. A little pub with mullioned windows and a fireplace. The stories of their lives exchanged over a couple of Guinnesses.

She shook her head to clear the images. You’re in Ireland to work. Not for a fling. She drank some coffee from a cup patterned with pink cabbage roses, picked a raisin out of a piece of soda bread, wrote three headings on her yellow pad: Accidental death. Suicide. Murder.

The school friend had said that Moruadh had occasionally suffered with bouts of depression. Spells, she’d called them. Kate recalled her mother’s incapacitating depression after the divorce. Days when she never left the bed.

But there were degrees of depression. From the friend’s description, Moruadh’s appeared to have been of the mild blues variety. Kate got up and wandered over to the window. Beyond Annie’s neatly planted front garden, she saw the dark turrets of Buncarroch Castle looming in the gray air. Something almost sinister about it. If Moruadh spent much time there, no wonder she’d had fits of depression.

Kate made more notes, drank some more coffee. Found her thoughts drifting back to the gray-eyed man. An Irish accent, but overlaid with something else. An expensive education maybe, or years abroad. She tried to re-create it. What had he said? ‘Just remember, the right side is on the left.’ Even now, she could feel this little tug in her stomach as she pictured him.

Restless, she got up from the table and wandered upstairs to her room. Maybe a little fling might have been fun. Since they didn’t exactly live within commuting distance, she wouldn’t be screening him as a husband candidate. Obviously nothing could come of it. Why not enjoy herself while she was here?

At the dresser, she stared at her reflection. Long red hair she’d worn the same way since she was about fourteen. Hanging loose down her back or tied up in a ponytail. Freckles she didn’t try to cover because she hated the feel of makeup on her skin. She picked up a brush and ran it through her hair. Not that there was much point in thinking about flings, she’d probably never see him again. Although, as Annie said, Cragg’s Head was a small place. She’d seen him twice already. Maybe she should take another walk.

Outside, a car door slammed, and she ran to the window. With a pang of disappointment, she saw that the car at the curb was a light green Gardai car, not a dark green Land Rover.

Get over it, she told herself as she watched Rory McBride get out. The guy doesn’t even know where you’re staying. She heard the front door open and close, then Rory’s voice calling her name.

Thinking of the strange exchange with him the night before, she hesitated. She was alone in the house. Annie and Patrick wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours, and Caitlin was at school. Paranoia, she decided. It was broad daylight and his car was parked outside in clear view. And this was Ireland, not Santa Monica.