Chapter 9
Margaret O’Hara’s granite marker stood beside Patrick’s, elegant in its simplicity, the dates telling a love story in numbers—fifty-six years together before she passed.
“The clue should be here somewhere,” Aidan said, examining the area with the focus he usually reserved for stubborn engine problems. “But Grandda was in his seventies. He couldn’t have done anything too physical.”
Dylan’s eye caught on an ornate iron cross standing between the headstones—Victorian elaborate, the kind of memorial wealthy families commissioned when death was dressed in poetry rather than avoided in silence. But something about its base seemed wrong. Newer.
“There,” she said, kneeling to examine it closer.
They found what Patrick intended—a bronze plaque that appeared decorative but opened on hidden hinges, revealing another clue wrapped in waterproof cloth.
Where love was witnessed by the stars, / And sacred vows were made, / Not in the chapel or the church, / But where the moonlight played. / The garden holds its secrets still, / Though roses bloom no more, / Find the sundial’s shadow when / The clock strikes exactly four.