The Angel by Carla Neggers

Author:Carla Neggers [Neggers, Carla]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Mira
Published: 2012-12-02T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland

8:00 p.m., IST

June 23

Eddie O’Shea hunched his shoulders against the fierce wind and lashing rain. A proper gale had kicked up since the guards and the Americans had left. How poetic, he thought, holding his cap on his head as he pushed on up the dirt track. He’d left his pub in his brother Patrick’s hands, but there wouldn’t be a crowd—surely he wouldn’t manage to burn the place down before Eddie could get back.

Rain pelted his face with such force it might have been hundreds of tiny needles. The landscape was all gray and green. It seemed fine and normal to him, but he expected that Keira Sullivan would have found a way to capture it in a painting and make it feel special. Eddie had lived on this land his entire life. His ancestors went back a thousand years or more on the Beara, or so his mother had insisted—and who was he to argue?

A Yank with Irish blood coming to the village because of an old story about fairies and other such nonsense wasn’t all that unusual. Eddie didn’t pay attention to such things, typically.

But this story, and this Yank, were different.

He came to a dip in the upward sweep of the hills and crossed a wooden bridge over a winding stream, just as he had ever since he’d first sneaked off from his mother the first time at three years old.

He paused at the fence and caught his breath, shifting to keep the wind at his back. The grass and the rocks would be slick. The ground would be muddy. There’d be manure piles to navigate. Eddie had no illusions that he’d have ever made a good farmer.

I don’t want to go into the pasture.

But he knew he had to, if any measure of peace of mind was to be his.

The guards, Keira and the big man—Simon Cahill—had crawled around in the old ruin without finding a thing except the bloody remains of a dead sheep. Eddie had pried at least some of the details from Seamus Harrigan, a regional detective with the Garda who’d stopped by the pub for a bowl of soup. Harrigan didn’t know what to make of the American folklorist and her tale, but they hadn’t found her backpack in the rubble—or, he’d said, any Irish artifacts. Nothing. Harrigan had said “artifacts” with a scowl. But he didn’t disbelieve her. He’d told Eddie that Keira had been sincere—and quite beautiful. He just didn’t know what was fact and what was imagination.

Harrigan had liked Cahill, too. Everyone did.

Eddie frowned at the fence. He’d stalled long enough. He’d have been over it by now as a boy. He stood on a rock to give him more height, and felt a pull in his thigh as he climbed over the fence, catching his trousers on a sharp barb. He could just hear his brother snorting with laughter—not Patrick, the brother minding the pub. He was an aimless, jobless ne’er-do-well if there’d ever been one, but always cheerful, not a bad word to say about anyone.

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