Free The Celtic Riddle by Lyn Hamilton

rather longer than I had thought
necessary to get a little fuel for the fire. "What about the other
stuff? Footprints? Signs of a struggle?"
    "Downpour pretty well took care of that. Also, all of you tramping
around and looking over the side of the cliff when you found him." He
looked mildly annoyed as if we should have known better. "Not much sign
of anything, I'm told." He paused for a moment. "Do you take the
opposite side of every discussion with me for sport, or have you
changed your mind?"
    I shrugged. How could I tell him that for a moment or two the world
had stood still, soundless, and that I'd had a premonition of something
awful about to happen? How could I say that just as it was beginning to
rain I'd heard an unnatural animal sound that at the time I'd thought
was a bird, or an animal fleeing the wet, but now thought, despite
every effort to persuade myself otherwise, might have been the scream
of a dying man going over a cliff? "Just wondering," I said.
    "Well, wonder no more," he said reaching for the Irish Times. "Do
you think my arteries will survive two weeks in this country?" he
asked, eyeing the empty plate in front of him that just a few minutes
ago had contained the innocuously named heart attack on a plate, the
Irish cooked breakfast: two eggs, a few rashers of bacon, two breakfast
sausages, two kinds of blood sausage, and toast with Irish butter. I
gathered he was changing the subject.
    I couldn't let it go like that. The sound I'd heard, the edginess
I'd felt, wouldn't go away. If indeed that awful sound had been
Herlihy, then he hadn't slipped on the mud. It had barely begun to rain
when I'd heard it. And why, exactly, had it gone so quiet? The wind had
dropped, yes, just before the rain, the lull before the storm. But what
about the birds that only seconds before had been wheeling and
shrieking above us. Why did they suddenly stop too? Was it the
approaching storm, or had something else, a struggle on the cliff,
perhaps, made them go silent?
    Before the boating incident of the day before, I might have been
prepared, indeed have welcomed the chance, to accept the official
explanation. But I couldn't believe that what had happened to us had
been an accident, not after seeing Conail O'Connor's face. That in
itself made me look at other so-called accidents with suspicion. But I
couldn't tell Rob that, either. Jennifer had related the story with
great dramatic flair when we got back, and Rob had looked perturbed,
but she was at the age where she exaggerated everything, and Alex and I
had downplayed it. I would have liked to talk to him about it, about my
panic when I lost hold of her, those horrible seconds before she
surfaced, but I knew I'd be doing it to make myself feel better, not
him. Parenthood is frightening enough, I decided, without having to be
terrified by what might have been.
    When breakfast was finished, Rob and Jennifer announced that they
were off sightseeing to Killarney, if anyone wanted to come. Alex said
he'd met someone who'd offered to take him fishing. I said I was just
going exploring around town.
    "Promise me you're not going anywhere near Second Chance," Rob said
severely.
    "I promise," I said. It was an easy promise to make because I had
something else in mind. Not something he'd be any happier about, mind
you. There was a specific bit of exploring I proposed to do, and when
the others had left, I headed down, once again, to the pier. It took me
about an hour, wending my way up and down the docks, but eventually I
found what I wanted. It was down by a sandwich sign advertising
somethingcalled St. Brandon Charters offering fishing expeditions,
scenic tours of Dingle Bay, trips to the Blasketts, the islands off the
Dingle coast, and both fly-fishing and sailing lessons. The proprietor
of St. Brandon Charters, whoever he or she might be, was obviously a
versatile sort. Multi-skilling, I think they call it in the corporate
world, another of those vile made-up terms like downsizing