The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (44 page)

A gust of wind lashed the hillside while he fumbled with the gate latch, and once inside, Conor paused again, leaning against it. His stamina was improving, but even today’s undemanding walk emphasized its limits. After a moment, he straightened and continued into the cemetery. The McBride family plot was marked by a decoratively carved high cross, and when it came within view, he felt a comforting twinge of familiarity. Dismissing fatigue, he walked forward to stand before it.

The monument’s original lettering had been smoothed by more than twenty years of weather, making the more recent name in the stone appear harsh by comparison. As he reached out to trace the fresh cut, his fingers trembled. He took a step backward and dropped his hands.

“I wanted to go with you.” The new, splintered quality of his voice still sounded strange to him. “I couldn’t get there. I don’t know what that means. Too strong to die or too weak?”

He pictured his mother’s face again as he had seen it last, fading away from him, while his heartbeat stumbled back to its regular rhythm. Her face had been full of love and forgiveness, but he wondered if she could have known what she was forgiving. How much could spirit understand once the body was left behind? Could it look into the mind of a loved one and see the crimes accumulated there? He sank down next to the cross, resting his head and hands against the cool stone. “God forgive me,” he groaned. “I couldn’t bring him home,
 
Ma. I couldn’t even bury him properly. All I could do was leave him there and run.”

Huddled against the cross, he wondered if she could know it was not only his brother he was remembering and that it was not his brother who haunted his dreams.

“C
ONOR
? G
OD
IN
heaven, is that yourself there?”

Looking in the direction of the urgent whisper, Conor smiled faintly. “No other. How are you, Phillip?”

“Jaysus, I can’t believe it.” Phillip Ryan approached through the darkness, his broad face illuminated by a penlight attached to a key ring. “How did you get here?”

Conor squinted as the circle of light landed on his face. “I got a cab from the airport as far as Graham’s store and walked from there.”

“I just came from Eileen Graham,” Phillip said. “She saw you heading this way and swore she was seeing your ghost, and I see why. You look half-destroyed. Are you sick?”

“Not really. I mean, not anymore.”
 

“How long have you been sitting here?”
 

“What’s the time?” Conor asked.

“It’s about half-nine.”

“So, an hour and a half, then.”

“I can’t believe it,” Phillip repeated. “You look—”

“Half-destroyed. So you said.” He put up a hand and Phillip pulled him to his feet with little effort.

“It needs saying again,” Phillip said, shaking his head. “You’ve dropped two stone at least, and what’s wrong with your voice?”

“Dose of pneumonia,” Conor said lightly, hoping to modulate the drama. “They had to open up a hole in my neck to get some air in, and I guess they hit a few things they shouldn’t have.”

“Holy mother of God,” Phillip breathed. He aimed the penlight at Conor’s throat, examining the scar. “Must hurt like hell, then?”

“It doesn’t actually,” Conor assured him. “Just sounds like it does. Would you mind running me home, Pip? Now I come to think of it, I’m fairly knackered.”

During the ride to the house, he kept the conversation steered away from himself, posing a steady stream of questions and focusing on the last months of his mother’s life. She had remained characteristically serene and brave right up to and through her last days, Phillip confirmed. When she knew she was failing, she’d called her sister-in-law to come down from Galway. Honora had moved in and organized the hospice care, and was there at the end with her two daughters, Fiona and Grace.

“I ought to warn you,” Phillip said. “You’re as popular as a month of rain with those three women just now. Come to that, you’re not a great hero around town either.” He brought the car to a jolting stop in front of the house and turned from the wheel in sudden anger. “Conor, where in the hell have you been all this time, for fuck’s sake? You leave for London on a Thursday to meet with some dodgy Brit about your long-lost brother, and then you don’t come home for months? Did you not realize—”

“Of course I did,” Conor said sharply. “And so did she.”

He looked at the agitated face next to him and felt his resolve weaken. He owed his friend a great deal and couldn’t stand the thought of lying to him. Although there was little of his story that was safe for sharing, the urge to confess was unbearable. It would only get harder to resist the longer he stayed. With a resigned sigh, Conor threw open the door of the car. “Come on into the house. I need to talk to you about something.”

It wasn’t the story he knew Phillip wanted, but he did have news, and realized he needed to tell it now, before nostalgia took a firmer grip, tempting him to say more than was prudent.

An hour later, they sat in the living room with a bottle of whiskey on the table between them. Conor fidgeted uneasily in his chair, staring at the fire. The hissing blaze was too understated to provide much light, but its strawberry hue bounced from the rippled glass of the casement windows, giving their faces an artificial flush. When he could no longer endure the silence, he pushed the bottle forward, and cocked a questioning eyebrow.

“Say something, Pip.”

Phillip poured the width of two fingers of whiskey into his glass, stared at it, and then picked it up and took a slow sip before speaking. “Okay. I’m surprised all right. This place is your family’s legacy, and if you say the hunt for your brother was a wild goose chase, then I suppose he’s not likely to show up again to claim his share of it. It’s yours, free and clear. I never expected you’d make the choice to sell it.”

“Choice?” The word no longer triggered the withering bitterness in Conor it once had. It just made him feel tired. “When was the last time I did anything because I chose it?”

“How should I know? Why don’t you tell me?”

Conor cringed at the tension in his friend’s voice and met the hurt reproach in his eyes with difficulty. “Phillip—”

“You’re dragging around an awful heavy load, Conor. Why do you want to be carrying it all by yourself?”

“Because it’s mine to carry,” Conor said, softly.

“Rubbish.” Phillip pushed aside the whiskey bottle and sat forward. “You say you hunted all over India for Thomas because the British fellow said he was there. You say you never found him. Well, what did you find, for God’s sake? You were gone long enough. What happened over there that’s made you want to sell your farm and run off to America?”

When Conor made no reply, Phillip fell back against his chair and stared at him, angry and confused. “Have you got a buyer?”

“I do.”

“Who is it?” Phillip waited, and as Conor’s eyes fell to the floor, he slammed his glass down onto the table. “Are you joking me? I don’t even deserve to know that much for the love of God?”

The chair toppled onto its side as he erupted from it. Conor flinched, half-expecting a fist to come flying across the table at him, but after he jumped up, Phillip’s rage appeared to dissolve. He froze, looking uncertain, and stepped over to the fireplace. He squatted down and began jabbing a poker into the heart of the guttering flames.

“When did you decide you couldn’t trust me?” Phillip asked quietly, thrusting the poker forward with rhythmic repetition.

“It’s nothing to do with trust, Phillip.” Conor could read his friend’s sense of betrayal in the stiffened muscles of his back and hated himself for it. “Believe me when I tell you, you don’t want to get mixed up with any of this. I’ve already said more than what’s good for either of us. I shouldn’t have come here at all, but I had to.”

“When will you leave?” Phillip asked, after a short pause.
 

“In a few days.”

“Where will you . . . oh no, never mind.” Phillip’s ordinarily gentle voice held a jarring note of mockery he had never heard before. “I suppose that’s a great secret as well. Not for me to question or to know.”

“Actually,” Conor said, carefully, “There’s something I was hoping to have your help with, if you’re willing. You’ve been to America, but I haven’t. I don’t know a soul and haven’t a clue where to go. You told me once about that cousin you visited over there, the one that died. Doesn’t his widow do B&B now? With a farm attached that she can barely keep going?”

“It’s not B&B. It’s an inn with a working farm. In Vermont.” Without turning, Phillip put the poker down on the floor next to him. He wrapped his arms around his knee and continued staring into the fire.

“Yeah, all right, an inn,” Conor agreed, stupidly nodding at his friend’s back. “I just thought, you know—me needing a place to go, her needing some farming help. Is it dairy?”

“Dairy, yeah,” Phillip said at last, breaking another interminable pause.

“Right.”

Conor bit down hard on the inside of his cheek and forced himself to stop talking. After several minutes of absolute, unbroken silence, Phillip twisted on his heel and turned to him. With his back to the fire, his face remained shadowed, but a glimmer of the firelight reflected back on him from the windows, and for an instant Conor saw a glint of something in his eyes he almost would have sworn was laughter. It sent an apprehensive tingle over his scalp, but when Phillip spoke, his voice sounded only stoic and sad.

“At least I’d know where you are. You wouldn’t disappear on me again entirely. I’ll e-mail Kate and ask her. She’d be happy for a bit of help, I’m sure. She’ll be lucky to have you.”

He rose stiffly, put the poker back in its stand, and went to lean against the doorway to the kitchen. “It’s late, and you need to get some sleep. I’ll see myself out through the back.”

Conor rose as well but held himself in check, knowing instinctively that he couldn’t go to his friend. The evening had introduced something new between them—an awkward reserve had chilled the easy relationship they had long known. “I’ll help with the morning milking,” he offered, desperate to begin rebuilding what he’d lost. “Regular time?”

“Yeah, sure, regular time.” Phillip shot him a look of cool disdain. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

When he was gone, Conor left the lights off and walked aimlessly through each room of the house, his hands resting on tabletops, doorframes, bedposts, and windowsills. A studiously preserved lacuna occupied most of the space in his head, protecting him from memories that tried to assault him with every surface his fingers touched. He ended up back in the tiny kitchen and unlocked the top portion of the half door that led out to the flagstone patio. It swung open, and dampness floated in like the vaporous trail of a night-walking spirit, caressing his face and passing through him with a faint hint of the ocean’s echo against his ear.

He stood looking out, considering the idea of a walk to the barn. There were few opportunities left to indulge in the satisfaction of treading through it in the darkness, listening to the peaceful, snuffling sleep of his herd. He lifted the latch on the bottom half of the door, but then he heard a sound like a sharp slap coming from the front of the house. Returning to the living room and switching on a light, he saw a CD case lying on the floor. He recognized it immediately: a recording of Bach’s violin concerti.

I can remember when it was the fiddle you had to have with you everywhere.

The memory of his brother’s words whispered in his mind, obliterating in an instant its carefully maintained zone of blankness. A tremor ran down his arms to the tingling tips of his fingers. He’d relied for too long on the molded grip of a handgun as his only tactile means of reassurance, and the weight of it—physical and spiritual—incorporated all the compacted mass of a black hole. Now he had an overwhelming desire to feel something else in his hands: the familiar, almost weightless heft of a violin. All at once, he felt like a wayward, thoughtless lover, too long away and with love’s object too long from his thoughts. He actually looked at his watch, calculating how many hours he would need to be camped on the Bank of Ireland’s steps until it opened, and he could retrieve his Pressenda.

He finally set the feverish preoccupation aside and walked to the stereo system on the bookshelf. He watched with unusual attention as the disc slid silently into the player, and after a pause, Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major erupted from the speakers. A small tickle fluttered in Conor’s gut as the three introductory chords sang out to him like a jovial, personal salute.

He let the disc play through to the end. Twice. As the concerti moved through their varied tempos and moods— Allegro, Adagio, Presto, Largo—he lay stretched on the sofa, his left hand roaming over a phantom fingerboard. When the music fell silent for the second time, he stayed motionless, listening to the comfortable groans and creaks of the house and to the satisfying sound of his breath—deep, clear, and almost noiseless.

He woke slowly about six hours later from a heavy, dreamless sleep, the most restful he’d had in months. A tuneful assembly of birds had gathered in the hawthorn bush outside the front door, and the monochromatic light of an overcast dawn was brightening the windows.

Conor sat up, wondering if there was anything in the house to eat. He stepped over to the stereo to shut it off, but as the CD tray glided out beneath his waiting hand, he froze. A smile of understanding crept over his face. He removed the disc and pivoted to look again at the spot where he’d found it—slapped down in the middle of the floor.

He left the disc on the bookshelf and headed for the kitchen with a lighter step. He was soon to be homeless, but he wasn’t alone after all, and he realized now that he never would be. For however long and however far he went, he would carry them with him—his familial basso continuo—and the whisper of their mysterious music would soothe and sustain him until the final, closing cadence brought him home.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my family and friends—too numerous to name—who have supported me in so many ways as this project inched its way forward. To write and publish a book is an adventure. To do it with the warm encouragement and companionship that I have experienced is a treasure.