Chapter 36
CHAPTER 36
CLOVER
May you be in heaven half an hour
Before the Devil knows you’re dead.
“ T hat was my grandfather’s favorite saying.” I walked up beside Damien and squeezed his arm as he stared at a faded, dust-covered plaque on the kitchen wall.
He was wearing Kellen’s clothes—black jeans, black shirt, black boots—and I had traded my damp sundress for Darby’s Trinity College jumper and a pair of black leggings. It was so strange to think that we might have been standing in this exact same spot over twenty years ago, wearing the exact same clothes on a different pair of bodies.
Damien’s energy was off. He didn’t respond when I touched him. Didn’t reply when I spoke. After the way he’d made love to me the night before—the emotional catharsis he’d had in my arms—I was so sure that I’d finally gotten through to him. That he was finally beginning to remember.
But when I’d woken up, he’d been gone. And evidently, so was his breakthrough.
“Actually, it was Darby’s grandfather, but you know what I meant. This was his house before he left it to her. It’s so weird; I don’t remember any of that happening. I just … know it.”
No response.
“Do you remember this plaque? You’ve been staring at it for a while.”
A single shake of his head.
“Did you sleep at all? When I woke up in the middle of the night, you were gone.”
Another shake.
“Damien.” I spun to face him. “That’s two nights in a row. Other than passing out on the train yesterday, you haven’t slept in over forty-eight hours.”
Finally returning my gaze with two bloodshot, hooded eyes, Damien simply replied, “And I’ll sleep on the train again, on our way to Shannon. You ready?”
“Ready?” My voice was shrill. “I already told you. I’m not leaving. Not until I find out what happened to them. To us . That’s why we’re here, Damien. Don’t you see that? The universe brought us here for a reason.”
“ You brought us here,” Damien snapped, the force of his words causing him to sway on his unsteady feet. “And we’ve stayed long enough. I won’t lose you again, Clover.”
“Again?”
Hope stirred in my chest as those exhausted gray eyes struggled to focus on mine. Gray eyes that Father Sullivan had said looked just like Kellen’s. He was remembering. I knew he was.
“When you were captured,” Damien clarified, tilting his head back and sucking in a labored breath. “I thought I’d lost you when you were captured … in Howth.”
Rage simmered beneath my skin. He was hiding something. I could feel it.
“Please, Clo,” Damien begged, closing his eyes. “We have to leave.”
“Not until I find out what happened. Saoirse didn’t show me. None of Darby’s journals give any clues. Something terrible happened here, Damien, and I think it’s our destiny to right those wrongs. I’m sorry if you can’t see that, but—”
“All I see”—Damien’s eyelids lifted, revealing a colorless well of worry as he clasped my hands with weak fingers—“is a girl that I can’t live without. I’m sorry if keeping you safe interferes with your little murder mystery, but it’s my top priority, now and always.”
“Interferes with my what?” I stepped out of his grasp with a jerk, feeling my face heat and my pulse begin to climb.
“You know what I mean.” Damien rubbed his temples as his heavy eyelids lost their battle against gravity again.
“No, I don’t.”
Damien sighed with his whole body. “All of this stuff with Kellen and Darby is just a fantasy, angel. A … distraction from everything that’s happened, everything you lost.”
His body slumped against the wall while I just stood there, vibrating with anger.
After everything I’d shown him the night before—the bench, the rope swing, the way I knew my way around the house—he was going to ignore all my proof and jump straight to the conclusion that I was some hysterical woman, suffering from some grief-induced mental breakdown.
That I was Crazy Clover, living in her imaginary world again.
“I’m not crazy,” I hissed, feeling my hands ball into fists at my sides.
Damien sighed. “I didn’t say ya were, love. You’re just—”
“And I’m not leaving.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“This mystery you’re trying to solve, it won’t change anything, ya know. It won’t bring them back.”
“Us!” I shouted. “Stop saying them. It’s us, and you know it!”
“No. Them. Your family.”
Damien’s words extinguished my rage like a bucket of ice water as I considered what he was saying. Was I just trying to distract myself from my grief? Was I putting us in danger by staying?
Before I got the chance to answer those questions, Damien’s knees buckled, and I had to dive under his arm to keep him from falling. His body was shutting down. The man hadn’t slept more than two hours in the last two days, and he was still recovering from two gunshot wounds. He needed to lie down more than he needed me to challenge which one of us was in denial.
“Come on, handsome,” I said, steering him out of the kitchen and toward the bedroom. “Time for bed.”
Bobbing his head and slurring his speech, Damien protested, but he was too weak and shaky to push me away.
The only words I could make out as I laid him down and unlaced his boots were, “Please, Clo … stop. He’s gonna kill you … he’s gonna kill you too.”
Dear Damien,
I’ll probably be back before you wake up, but if not, I went to the church to see if Father Sullivan knows anything. Be home soon.
Love,
Clover
After leaving a note on the kitchen table, I slipped out through the broken back door and into the breezy cloud-covered morning. The sun had risen, but was nowhere to be seen as I gazed across the overgrown meadow at the forest and the purple mountain beyond. The top of it punctured the clouds, mirroring the wound I felt in my chest after my argument with Damien.
I kept telling myself that his refusal to believe what was happening was about him, not me, but when I’d spent most of my life being told that I was crazy, that I should doubt what my heart knew to be true, that my delusions were nothing more than coping mechanisms created by a traumatized child with an overactive imagination … that was easier said than done.
I needed more proof. I needed answers. And I needed them before Damien woke up and carried me, kicking and screaming, back to Glenshire Station.
I couldn’t have found my way back to the church before my encounter with Saoirse, but now, I knew exactly how to get there. I just knew.
With one last glance at the mountain, an aching in my heart, and a certainty in my soul, I turned to head toward the driveway …
And found myself face-to-face with a woman staring at me from the other side of the fence.
Clutching my chest with a yelp, I took a deep breath and released it on an embarrassed laugh.
“Sorry,” I said, walking toward her through the knee-high weeds with a polite smile plastered on my face. “You scared me. For a second there, I thought you were a ghost.”
The woman’s laser-focused eyes narrowed with every step I took toward her.
“I could say the same about you, love.” A touch of shakiness in her voice betrayed her defensive posture. She appeared to be in her sixties but had the sharpness of someone much younger. A mostly gray braid hung over her shoulder, and her freckled skin was weather-beaten, probably from years spent tending to the sheep grazing in her pasture.
“Ya seem lost.” She tilted her head, analyzing me in a way that made me feel like I must have sprouted horns in my sleep. “Do ya need help … findin’ yer way?”
Her tone was cryptic, her face guarded, but there was a familiarity about her, a warmth, that I chose to trust.
“No, miss. I know where I am. I’m here to investigate the murders of Darby and Kellen Donovan.”
She scoffed. “Bit late for that, don’t ya think?”
I smiled weakly and nodded, stopping a few meters away from the fence. “Better late than never.
“I’m Clover,” I added, lifting a hand in an awkward, unnecessary wave. “Darby Donovan was … is my favorite author. I just … want to find out what happened to her.”
“What else is she to ya?” she asked, boldly lifting her chin.
My palms began to sweat. “I … I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Ya look just like her, child. So much that I thought you were her ghost. She your kin or somethin’?”
I released a breath and responded with a relieved smile. “Or something.”
Nodding slowly, she gratefully didn’t press me for more information. “I see. We all have our secrets, don’t we?”
“And your name is?”
“Nora. Been living here since the place belonged to Darby’s granda. She gave me his flock when he died. Sweet girl, that one. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss seein’ her.”
“Do you know what happened to her? All it says online is that she and her husband were killed during a home invasion.”
“That’s what they say, isn’t it?” Nora sighed.
“Is that not what happened?”
Glancing over my shoulder, Nora flicked her chin in the direction of the barn. “Not unless you consider a woodshop a home.”
I turned and looked at the renovated structure. It was definitely in disrepair, but appeared to be far newer than the farmhouse. “That’s a woodshop?”
“Aye. Kellen was a gifted woodworker. There was evil in him though. You could see it in his eyes. And rumor had it that he killed the village priest when he was just a lad, but he wouldn’t have hurt a hair on Miss Darby’s head. He loved that girl somethin’ fierce.”
“Do you have any idea who did it?”
“None. Nobody does, except for maybe … Darby’s uncle. Eamonn O’Toole. He was some big-shot detective up in Dublin. He came by and spoke to the local guards as soon as it happened, and it was as if the whole thing got swept under the rug. No investigation. No crime scene tape. He just … locked the doors and put a For Sale sign in the yard.”
“And nobody ever bought the place?”
“Folks out here have a healthy respect for the spirit world.”
“So, people think the house is haunted.”
“Aye. And the forest.”
“This detective, Darby’s uncle, do you know where I could reach him?”
“He’s a very old man now. Went looney a few years back and has been hospitalized ever since. Probably on death’s doorstep by now. Doubt you’ll get much out of him at this point.”
“I have to try. Do you think I could borrow your phone? Perhaps if I call the hospital—”
“Haven’t ya heard, love? Mobile network’s down in Dublin. No calls in or out.”
“But the trains are still running?”
“For now. Volunteers from the union are keepin’ it runnin’ so folks can evacuate, but it’s just a matter of time until the Russians shut that down too.”
“And you wouldn’t happen to know the name of this hospital, would ya?”
“Oh, darlin’. If you’re thinkin’ about going anywhere near Dublin, you’d better think again. The whole city’s a war zone now. Look, I don’t know what kind of … attachment ya had to Miss Darby, but findin’ out who killed her isn’t worth riskin’ yer life.”
“Respectfully, Ms. Nora”—I swallowed—“I think that it is.”