Free Irish Chain by Earlene Fowler Page A

replied.
    “A cop?”
    “A minister?”
    “You two know each other?” I said.

4
    GABE’S FACE SWITCHED from surprise back to his blank, impenetrable cop look. “Nice to see you again. Please step out of the room.” His voice was pleasant but inflexible. “I hope you didn’t touch anything.”
    “Good seeing you too,” Mac said evenly, looking Gabe straight in the eye.
    “How do you two know each other?” I asked. They both ignored me.
    “Wait in the hall,” Gabe said. “I’ll need to speak with you both in a minute.” He slipped on his round, wire-rimmed glasses, clasped his hands behind his back and stepped closer to Mr. O’Hara.
    After Gabe’s phone call to the station, it didn’t take long before the hallway was full of police officers, uniformed and plainclothes, each jostling for room to perform their various crime-scene tasks.
    Once Edwin had been informed of the incident, he pushed himself into the thick of things, strutting around importantly, telling the crime-scene personnel how to do their jobs and trying to get in and see the room and the bodies. When a detective threatened to slip one of the extra-large plastic evidence bags over Edwin’s head and secure it with a rubber band, Gabe pulled Edwin aside. I watched with amusement as he sternly told him to take care of his own responsibilities and arrange for the elderly residents to return to their rooms with as little fuss as possible. Everyone at the dance who didn’t live at Oak Terrace was briefly interviewed by one of San Celina’s five detectives, had their photos taken and were asked to leave their names and addresses before departing.
    Over the next few hours, Mac and I helped the staff accompany the frightened residents back to their rooms, saw to it that all the kids made it to their cars and helped Oralee get settled in her new room in another building. Knowing his grandmother wouldn’t stand for anything less, Mac didn’t mince words when he told her what happened to Mr. O’Hara and Miss Violet.
    “Mac?” She gave him a sharp, inquiring look.
    “Everything’s fine, Grandma.” He took her rawboned hand in his. “Don’t worry.”
    “You’re a good boy,” she said, lying back on her bed and closing her eyes. The skin on her face looked as fragile as an egg shell and she lay so motionless, her thin-veined eyelids so still, it seemed for a moment that she’d died too. A lump lodged deep in my throat. We’d been so busy in the last few hours, I’d almost managed to push the reality of the two deaths to a dark, back corner of my mind. Miss Violet’s round, animated face as she read Charlotte’s Web aloud to my fourth-grade class flooded back to me in a painful Technicolor memory.
    “I’m going to see Gabe,” I said, suddenly wanting to look into his calm face, feel the security I associated with being in his presence.
    “I’ll come with you,” Mac said. He turned to Oralee. “I’ll be back before I go home. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.” She nodded mutely and turned her head. A tear trickled down into a seam of her tanned cheek. She swiped it away impatiently. I squeezed her hand before leaving, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from bursting into tears. It frightened me to see Oralee so vulnerable, and it frightened me even more that Mac had essentially lied to Gabe.
    We found Gabe in a small room off the nurses’ station where they were interrogating the comic-reading attendant. He had finally returned from an unauthorized break at a neighborhood bar and looked scared to death. Lieutenant Cleary, San Celina’s chief of detectives, towered over the nervous man, questioning him in a rapid flow of Spanish. The dark-eyed attendant gave staccato replies, appearing somewhat confused that a black man wearing a corduroy jacket and looking like a college professor was speaking to him in fluent street Spanish. Jim Cleary’s mild-looking exterior hid a cop who was a ten-year veteran of some of