Free The Last Storyteller by Frank Delaney

for a low-rent outfit. Not good enough for your mother. Or my children.

25
    On fire, blinking my eyes in confusion, I said goodbye.
    “I’ll be back to visit you soon.”
    “Don’t come if you can’t bring her with you,” Mr. Barry said.
    As soon as I quit the hospital, he left my mind. Greater forces moved in. My confused brain ran film of a sniper, a bullet, a gun, drawing a bead, with the music of death on the soundtrack.
    In the old days, when the insides of my lips turned dry, that meant sadistic violence, vile and worthless. I had long banished it, and for a moment I had composure enough to track its pathway: from Randall’s sarcasm about my avoidance, through his urging that I find Venetia, and on to the kicking of mad Jody Sloane.
    Mr. Barry had capped it. He’d shown me my own truth, and my own failure to regain it. “Trueness.” What else is there?
    Randall had said Templemore—a long narrow town, easy to survey. Easy, too, to figure where the show would play every night; and easy to confirm from the posters.
    Theatrical companies liked Ireland: good audiences, and not much by way of rival entertainment. Most towns had one or two bed-and-breakfast landladies who would take traveling entertainers. Not everyone did, because some troupes flitted by moonlight and never paid the bill.
    The women who took the risk liked the shows and the performers. Often they had a little theater in their own heads—like Lily Egan in Templemore. I had known her for years: tall, rouged, and whispering, a ship in full sail when out in the street.
    Sometimes I stayed at her place—Morning Glory: Select Bed & Breakfast—for the fun rather than the food; she had the best gossip in the county. She’d also hinted that she’d been a high-kicking chorus girl in London. That fact reached me late one night on half a bottle of Madeira.
    “And you needn’t ask me,” she whispered, rolling those big velvet eyes, “if I had to take off my clothes. Because I won’t tell you.” At which she hoisted her bosom again.
    I drove into Templemore that morning in a blaze of desperate confusion. Lily Egan greeted me with caution.
    “Yes, they’re staying here.”
    “When did they arrive?”
    “Are you here to make trouble, Mr. MacCarthy?”
    “What makes you say that, Miss Egan?”
    “Well, everybody knows who she is.”
    “How is she?”
    Lily Egan didn’t invite me in at first. She looked up and down the street, in case anyone could hear.
    “That isn’t a happy lady.” She saw—she must have seen—the anguish cross my face. “But are you going to make her any happier, I ask myself.”
    “What do you mean?” I said.
    “They’re not in, anyway.”
    “I can wait.”
    She pursed those fat crimson lips.
    “On the grounds that a few hours won’t make a difference?” When I began to speak she stopped me and said, “Don’t you remember telling me the whole story one night?”
    I didn’t. But it was likely.
    I said, “I miss her.”
    “The children are lovely,” said Lily Egan. “They’re like children you’d write away for. Great natural teeth,” she added, tapping her own tall dentures. She narrowed her velvet eyes and measured me. “Yes, you are here to make trouble, aren’t you?” She had a witch’s chin. “Mr. MacCarthy, don’t. Not in front of the children.”
    Some air left me. “May I come in for a moment?”
    She opened the door, and I walked past her and leaned against a wall in the hallway.
    “They went out very early,” she said. “They’re climbing the Devil’s Bit Mountain; the children were intrigued by it.”
    “What’s he like?” I said, meaning—as I now know—
Would he be easy to kill?
    Lily Egan looked me up and down as though about to make a purchase. “Well, he’s not you.”
    And then I again asked the panicky question: “How is she?” The marks in my palms from my fingernails lasted two days.
    “She’s silent,” said Lily Egan. “She hasn’t said a word since she got