“I thought I had.”
Gandolph smiled, waggishly. “I managed not to trip any of them. I haven’t lost all my marbles during my … exile. You look terrible, Max. Is this a bad moment for a reunion? What took you so long? Where have you been?”
“Back in Ireland.” Max opened the huge Zero-king stainless steel refrigerator and pulled out a beer. A Harp beer. “Want one?”
“Beer is not my druthers, dear boy. Why do you think I bought Orson Welles’s former house? Like him, I am a gourmand. Wine, brandy, perhaps the not-too-trendy liqueur when I’m in a mellow mood. No beer, ale, or stout of any sort.”
Max twisted off the cap, drank deep. “All that is still here. Help yourself.”
The older man disappeared into the adjacent wine cellar and came out reverently bearing a bottle.
Max took and uncorked it for him.
“My arthritis thanks you.” Gandolph lifted the ruddy wineglass to the light to savor it visually before he tasted it.
Max reflected on arthritis, the unspoken reason why Gandolph had given up the practice of magic to concentrate on unmasking false mediums. When had it hit Gandolph, the stiffening of fingers once so nimble? Somewhere in his early fifties. Max might be heading in the same direction. Who knew? He’d been out of contact with his family for so long, for their own protection, he didn’t even know what maladies ran in their genes, what he might expect. He was as good as an orphan.
“Max, lad,” came Gandolph’s cajoling voice, warmed by his first savored sip of the Chardonnay. “You’re brooding. That’s a genetic predisposition of the Irish more ingrained than a love of liquor and even more dangerous. Don’t think. Talk. What’s happened?”
“There’s bad news and worse news. Which do you want first?”
“Bad before worse.”
“Actually, I think my bad is your worse, and my worse is your bad. Did you know Gloria Fuentes was dead?”
“Gloria! No.” Gandolph sat on a kitchen stool. “I haven’t seen her in years, of course. Odd how you can work together so closely with someone, and once the act is retired, lose touch. And I was dashing about the country looking for mediums. When was it?”
“A few months ago.”
“Only a few months?” Gandolph shook his head. “And me back in town just in time to miss seeing her alive. Poor Gloria. She wasn’t that old. I hope it wasn’t cancer.”
“It was faster. Gandolph, somebody strangled her in a church parking lot. Do you know what she’d be doing there?”
“Oh my God, what a tragedy! Why was she there? Going to church, I assume. Just because she worked onstage in fishnet tights didn’t make her a showgirl. She loved her work, but when it was over, she was out of the spotlight. Had a gaggle of nieces and nephews she doted on. She’d been retired for years. They did catch the killer?”
“No. Do you think her death could be related to the attempt on your life?”
“I don’t see why. Once I retired, we lost touch. I was like you, pursuing the trail of ghosts that were hard to find, and I was darn hard to find myself. If this is the bad news, what is worse?”
“Worse for me than for you, I think.” Max sat on a kitchen stool and told him about Kathleen O’Connor’s terrible accident and probable death, as if he were at the village pub chatting up the friendly barman.
“The emergency crew was working on her, of course,” Max finished up. “But it looked like frantic revival efforts in the face of inevitability. I’m convinced she’s gone.”
Gandolph’s round face grew long and he shook his balding head several times.
Baldness. That was another thing Max didn’t know would come to him soon or later or never. He was beginning to feel age hovering behind him like Elvis’s ghost, closing down his future.
“Terrible,” Gandolph was muttering. “A terrible … accident? I can’t quite call it that. She was still pursuing you, after all these years?”
“Me. And others in my place. Innocents, as usual. She liked to torment innocents.”
“I remember her. Prettiest lass in Londonderry. It couldn’t last as I remember it, of course, that beauty.”
“It did,” Max said shortly. It had been too dark in the desert to see Kathleen’s face as other than a light-andshadow-kissed mystery, and now he would never see it again. “Others saw her more recently. A sketch had been done from memory. Her beauty had matured, that’s all. Grown, not faded.”
“Hearsay, though.”
“I believe the source, an impeccably honest source.” Max smiled to recall just how hopelessly honest Matt Devine still was. Momentarily, he envied him. “I’m glad I never saw her again, Garry. I can’t think of that lovely young girl without seeing a death’s head superimposed on those treacherous features. Sean’s skull, sans crossbones.”
“You didn’t see her at the accident scene.”
“Too dark.”
“But you’re sure it was her, sure she’s dead.”
“What other woman would pursue me on a motorcycle? Someone else had seen her riding one earlier.”
“She rode a bicycle in Londonderry, like a country lass.”
“She was a country lass then. She had moved up in the world. You don’t know… . You remember Sean and me trying to trip each other up while we both played court to Kathleen. You know what happened.”
“A sad, sad thing, Max. You can’t blame yourself for winning the lass over your cousin, or for him being alone that night in a Protestant pub that was bombed by the IRA.”
“No, but I can blame Kathleen O’Connor. I’ve since met someone she was plaguing, stalking really, here. And when he heard of how I knew her, and where, and what happened, he had an interesting diagnosis for it all. He thinks she knew the pub would be hit and that Sean would be there. He thinks she enjoyed dallying with me while my cousin was being murdered, that she relished the guilt I would bear for the rest of my life.”
“That would be unthinkably evil, to plan that sort of thing, and she was just a young girl. Who is this ‘someone’ who thinks such terrible things?”
“My impeccably honest man, an ex-priest that she targeted as a victim when she couldn’t find me.”
“An ex-priest? No wonder. I couldn’t believe you’d tell just anyone your sad history, especially the undercover implications.”
Max laughed, not happily. He drank some more beer. “Oh, Gandolph. Oh, Garry. You and I exited Ireland together all those years ago, and mostly worked together until you retired a few years ago. You were a stepfather to me, in magic and in espionage, but you can’t know what’s happened in Las Vegas in just the past year. This man, this ex-priest, is my new Sean, my cousin and my rival, and my fellow victim of a fatal woman. If he weren’t so honest I’d feel free to hate him, but I can’t.”
“He rivaled you for Kathleen?”
“In terms of competing for her deepest hatred, yes. It was shocking to see her find another to bedevil, to be almost unfaithful in her hatred. But … there’s another woman too. I had to leave Las Vegas for almost a year to keep some hounds on my trail away from her. She met him in the meantime.”
“Ah. So they are now a pair.”
“No. She took me back, but it’s different, isn’t it? If I hadn’t been able to come back—”
“They would have been a new couple?”
“Maybe. I can’t be certain. I don’t think they can be either.”
“Just as none of us can be certain why Kathleen played the game she did, right up to the end. It went way beyond aiding the cause of Irish freedom. That was only a pretext for her.”
“Agreed. But since her reappearance—and she left me alone for all those years—I’ve had to wonder what triggered her return. And return she had.”
“She Who Must Be Reckoned With,” Garry mused. “Ghosts are like that. Supposed ghosts, I should say. They have unfinished business and cannot rest, so say the mediums. There’s a certain psychological attraction to the notion that the dead wait around for justice to be served.”