Chapter 8
8
Peering into the darkness to where the red digits of her alarm clock glowed, Jess saw that it was gone 3 a.m. and she was still wide awake. Talking to her mum always gave her a good dose of insomnia and left her wound tighter than a pair of knickers two sizes too small. She gave a long, drawn-out sigh because she knew she was wasting her time tossing and turning in bed when she could be doing some work. She’d managed to finish the piece she’d been working on earlier, despite the interruption, and she was pleased with the way it had turned out. It would definitely get her into Niall’s good books, she thought, stretching with satisfaction.
Whenever she wrote something, though, she liked to leave it at least twenty-four hours before going back over it. It was amazing the mistakes that glared out when she cast a fresh eye over her work. So there was no point working on her brief brush with celebrity life anymore tonight. She could get ahead of her game, though, by making a start on tracking little Amy Aherne down.
She tossed the duvet aside and got up, then dragged it into the lounge behind her, dumped it on the couch and switched her laptop on before padding into the kitchen to make a cuppa.
The problem was, she mused, setting the steaming mug of tea down on the coffee table next to her computer, Little Amy – as she’d begun thinking of her – wouldn’t be so little now. In fact, she’d be a middle-aged woman of forty-six and had probably been married for years.
She plonked down on the couch, flexed her fingers then let them hover over the keys as she pondered what she should begin to search under. Unless she’d decided to become a nun, keep her own surname or hyphenated it, it would be a waste of time searching under Amy Aherne. Still, she had to start somewhere.
As she’d expected, she got no useful hits, just a whole lot of stuff to do with the Troubles – as the sectarian fighting spanning the late 1960s to the mid-1990s in Northern Ireland was referred to. She didn’t want a gloomy history lesson, so maybe she’d be better off doing a Google search for the brother, Owen, and see where that got her. A moment later, something about W.B. Yeats cropped up, as did a genealogy website with Ahern listed minus the E on the end, and… Oh dear, she thought, as her eyes scanned the list and settled on a death notice. She double-clicked, and closer inspection revealed that this poor soul had lived in Tipperary. Just like the song, Ballymcguinness was a long way from Tipperary – the opposite end of the country, in fact – so the odds of this being her Owen Aherne were slim.
She picked up the mug, blew on it and thought for a moment before taking a sip. She’d try good ole Facebook and see what that threw back at her.
She settled back to wait for the onslaught she’d have to trawl through and could hardly believe her eyes when the search told her there were no Owen or Amy Ahernes that fitted the bill.
Right, well, Ballymcguinness sounded like a mere dot of a place; surely searching there would yield the result she was after?
A website welcoming her to Ballymcguinness filled her screen with a grainy black-and-white photo of a small town. It kind of looked like the start of Coronation Street with all the roofs – not very inspirational and not very helpful either. She didn’t want to know how many grocery stores or hairdressers the town had. She wanted to know where she could find Amy blinkin’ Aherne, she thought in frustration.
Flopping back onto the couch, Jess closed her eyes for a second and wracked her brains. Sometimes having all this technology at your fingertips was a waste of time. Then it came to her. Duh-uh! Still, it was the middle of the night; she was entitled to be a little bit thick. This time, she searched the white pages, and lo and behold, after narrowing her search, up popped two listings for Aherne. The first was for an M.J. Aherne, who was registered at a retirement home in the village of Dundrum, and the second was for an O.M. Aherne, Glenariff Farm, Pyke Road, followed by a phone number. She had her man and unbelievably he still lived at his childhood address.
Jess’s eyes strayed over to the telephone but then she shook her head. She might be up and about, but she was fairly sure Mr Aherne wouldn’t appreciate being on the receiving end of her dulcet tones at this hour of the morning; nor would his wife appreciate a strange woman telephoning her husband in the middle of the night. Besides, she was beginning to feel sleepy.
Yawning, she saved her search, switched the laptop off, then took herself and her duvet back to bed.