Sienna
I asked Ronan if I could take the car.
He said yes without asking where I was going, which I hadn't expected, and which cost him something I caught in the set of his jaw. The effort of a man who wanted to ask and chose not to. He handed me the keys, said be back by four, and that was all.
I drove into Dunraven alone.
I'd been at the estate nine days. Nine days of evidence files and recordings and the four of us around the kitchen table, the slow strange work of building something in a place I'd never expected to build anything.
Days of the sea outside the window, Tiernan filling the quiet the way he did, Cormac's silences, and Ronan watching me when he thought I wasn't watching back.
I needed an hour that wasn't any of that. I needed to see the town.
I parked at the edge of the harbor where I'd always parked as a child.
Where my father used to park on Saturday mornings when he took me to the market, in the brief window of my childhood simple enough for casual Saturday mornings, before security arrangements made them impossible.
The harbor was the same. The fishing boats were the same.
The smell of salt and diesel and something frying was the same, the way smells stay the same when they're specific enough to live in your memory.
The frying was chips, and the chips put Uncle Eamon on the harbor wall in my head for half a second, his arm around me, before I folded him up and put him away. Some grief you carry around all day. His I could only take in seconds.
I got out and walked.
The town was quiet on a Thursday morning in October.
A few people crossed the market square with the purposeful unhurry of people who lived somewhere and had nowhere to be that they weren't already going.
A woman with a pram. Two men outside the pub who'd stood there since anyone remembered, talking with the body language of a conversation thirty years old.
A teenager on a bicycle who gave the car I'd arrived in more attention than he gave me.
I walked down the main street with my hands in my pockets and my collar up against the wind, taking it all in.
The butcher was still there. Different sign, same building, same spot.
I'd been sent to that butcher on Saturdays with a list in my mother's handwriting I took extremely seriously, because I was that kind of child.
The pharmacy next door was new. The old pharmacist had retired.
I knew that from the background work I'd done over the years, the kind you do when you run a surveillance operation dressed up as a whiskey business.
The hardware shop had expanded. The bookshop had not, which pleased me in a way I couldn't account for.
I stopped outside the bookshop.
It was small and cramped and had the smell good bookshops have, paper and dust and something that might have been ambition. Too many books and not enough shelf space, a shop that had long since made peace with the fact. A handwritten sign in the window advertised a local history section. I went in.
The woman behind the counter was old enough to have been here my whole life.
Small, sharp-eyed, with the specific attention people who spend their lives around books develop.
The ability to sort a person quickly and accurately without making a thing of it.
She clocked me when I came in. I nodded and moved into the stacks.
The local history section was in the back, where they always are in shops like this.
Respected but not prominent, for the people who know to check rather than the ones passing through.
I ran a finger along the spines. Dunraven: A Coastal History.
The Families of West Clare. Irish Crime and the Modern Era.
A thin self-published volume called simply The Cliff Road.
I pulled out The Families of West Clare and turned to the index.
Madigan. Pages 47, 89, 134.
I stood in the back of the bookshop and read what a local historian had written about my family in the past tense.
The Madigan family, prominent in the region for three generations, known for their distillery and their place in the complicated social fabric of organized crime in the west of Ireland.
I got as far as the sentence that began with Tragedy struck, and I closed the book before I read the rest.
I put it back on the shelf. I stood there with my hand on the spine and breathed through it. Then I took my hand away and went back to the other titles.
"You're not from here," the woman said when I came back through.
"Sorry?"
"You're not from here." Not unkindly. Just noting it. "But you know the town. The way you walk it. You know where things are."
I held her gaze. "I visited once or twice. When I was young."
She studied me with those sharp eyes. "Where are you staying?"
"The Kerrigan estate," I said.
Her face changed. Recognition, and something else. A small adjustment of whatever category she'd sorted me into.
"Ronan's a good man," she said. "His father was a good man. The whole family." A pause. "It's been quiet up there a long time."
"Yes," I said. "I imagine it has."
"Funny." She said it like it had only just surfaced.
"You're the second this month to come asking after that house and the family tied to it.
Had a gentleman in a fortnight back. Older.
Lovely manners. Wanted the local histories, anything on the old families out on the point, the alliances between them.
" She lifted a shoulder. "A writer, I took him for. We get them."
Something cold walked up the back of my neck. I kept it off my face.
"Did he leave a name?"
"He did not. Paid cash." She frowned, as if the oddness of it was only now reaching her. "Tipped like a man who'd rather not be remembered, now that I think of it."
She held my gaze a beat longer, and I gave her nothing. Eventually she nodded and went back to whatever she'd been doing.
I bought a book I didn't need about the geology of the Clare coastline, because it seemed rude to leave without buying anything, and went back out into the wind.
The street was empty in both directions, the ordinary empty of a small town on a weekday. I stood on the step anyway and let the trained part of me work, the part my father built and Chicago kept sharp. No one in a doorway. No car that didn't belong. Nothing.
Which should have settled it and didn't. The back of my neck had its own opinion, and it had kept me breathing a long time, so I'd quit arguing with it years ago.
I walked to the end of the main street and turned down the coast road, and kept going until the town was behind me and the cliff path was ahead and the water was below me, gray and enormous and uninterested.
I stopped where the path curved down toward the shingle beach and thought about a fifteen-year-old girl who ran from this town in the dark and didn't come back for a long time.
I thought about what she'd been running toward.
I thought about what I'd built in Chicago.
The bar, the whiskey, the surveillance, the case.
How it felt like purpose for so long, and how it had started to feel like something else in the last year.
Not purposeless. Just insufficient. Like I'd built a very elaborate machine for a task the machine couldn't actually finish, and some part of me had known it a while and hadn't been willing to say so.
I'd called Kira my second night at the estate.
Kira ran my bar in Chicago, closed it four nights a week, and was the nearest thing to a friend I'd let myself keep in four years, which is to say she knew a woman named Claire Byrne and nothing underneath her.
So I gave her the story I'd kept ready for exactly this.
A sick aunt in Ireland, no telling how long.
I put her in charge with a raise she didn't argue about and the number of a lawyer for anything she couldn't handle.
Madigan's would keep pouring without me.
It cost me less than it should have, handing off the place that had been my whole life for four years. Maybe because it had only ever been a very good place to hide, and I was standing now in the thing I'd been hiding from.
The wind came off the water cold and sharp. I turned and looked back at the town.
Dunraven from this angle looked the way it did in my childhood memories of it.
Small and certain, settled into its piece of coastline like it had always been there and meant to stay.
The church spire. The harbor. The roof of the pub my father went to the odd Friday and came home from smelling of porter and in an excellent mood.
I'd thought about this town every day since I ran.
I'd thought about it with grief and anger and the bitter fuel of a girl taken from everything she loved, certain she knew exactly who'd done the taking. I'd thought about it as the place where everything ended. The place I could never come back to.
I was standing in it. It hadn't ended.
I pulled my collar up and looked at the town I grew up in and thought about my mother, and what she'd wanted for me, and how it hadn't been a cage after all.
I thought about Ronan saying I shouldn't be alone anymore.
Tiernan wanting something real. Cormac, who'd read the whole of my work and found nothing in it he'd have done differently.
I thought about the name Sienna. I thought about what it would mean to pick it back up.
Not yet. Not today. But I thought about it.
Then I turned, walked back into town, and got in the car.
And I didn't point it up the coast road to the Kerrigans.
Not yet. There was one more place, and I'd known I was going to it since the second the bookshop woman said the word gentleman, the way a tongue finds the sore tooth and won't leave it be.
I drove out the far side of Dunraven, past the harbor and the last of the houses, up the boreen that climbed the other headland. The one that used to be ours.