O’Rooney remembered me from Mullin’s, though we hadn’t exchanged a word there. “Mr. Keane from America,” he said when he was back in his Windsor chair behind his workbench counter. “Your name in the Gaelic would be O’Cathain, roughly, ‘son of battle.’ It was anglicized first as O’Cahan, later as Kane and Keane.”
“How do you happen to know that?”
“It’s one of my hobbies, genealogy.” As near as I could tell, he was dressed in the very tweeds he’d worn the night before, though his flat cap was missing, revealing him to be as bald as the sobbing pub owner. “And heraldry, too, you know. It’s good for business. Americans especially are always wonderfully impressed when I rattle off a little of their family history. If you don’t mind my saying so, you Yanks are a woefully uninformed group.”
He had a pipe filled by then, a well-browned meerschaum. While he was lighting it, I started in.
“I came by to ask you about another of your interests. I’m told you’re an expert on local folklore.”
“So I am. But it’s a broad topic. Is there something particular you’re interested in? I can see there is by the light in your eyes. If you were as keen on antiques, I’d have a banner day.”
“I’m interested in any ghost stories connected with the old friary.”
“Are you now? Why would that be?”
“I’m a ghost chaser.” I tried to remember the exact words Breda had used to describe her husband. “It’s my great dream to see one.”
I was curious to know whether Breda had told me the truth, whether O’Rooney would pick up on the echo of McKinney’s reputation. He did.
“A dangerous thing to want, Mr. Keane, if you’ll pardon the impertinence. The dead past is a dangerous thing to poke at generally.”
I knew that from bitter experience, but I didn’t say so. I wondered instead about O’Rooney’s free advice. Thanks to Mullin, he knew that I was staying with Breda. So he might have understood my real interest in the friary. He might even have guessed the secret intent of my question. If he had, he kept his guess to himself.
“Two stories come to mind,” he said. “One involves a headless abbot, the other a poor murdered girl.”
“I’ll take the murdered girl.”
O’Rooney puffed on his pipe for a time. I had an idea by then how the ceiling beams had gotten black. Judging by his expression, the smoke signals meant “I thought you might.”
“She’s a legend only, not an historical fact. According to this tale, a beautiful local girl named Catriona caught the eye of one of the friars in the abbey. This was way back in the fourteenth century, when many of the religious weren’t as chaste as we expect them to be today.
“The friar was so besotted with Catriona that he lured the girl into the friary after Mass one day and had his way with her. Then, fearing exposure, for Catriona was no girl to be threatened into silence, he killed her and buried her under the friary’s stone floor.
“But his secret came out in the end, as murder always will. Catriona’s ghost saw to that. It walked the halls of the friary until the bloody friar went mad and confessed.”
“And the ghost still walks?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard. So it would be a real feather in your cap, were you to be the one to see her. The making of your reputation as a ghost chaser.”
8
On my way back to the haunted friary, I looked in at the tiny Guarda station and was told that Constable Garvey was off taking a report on a missing horse. I decided I wouldn’t wait for him to get back, that I couldn’t wait for him, in fact. I was too excited to even take my time as I made my way up the hill to the friary’s entrance gate. Before I’d reached it, my double-time pace had reopened half-healed blisters from my African campaign.
I’d seen how the thing had been worked, and I was in a lather to verify my guess. Garvey had said that there was no way an accomplice could have lured McKinney to the murder spot without exposing herself to danger when the stone fell. But there was a way. The killer had used Tim McKinney’s well-known passion for ghosts as bait, if I was right, if something about the passageway in which McKinney had died was true.
A half-dozen laughing German tourists were coming down the grassy hill as I went up. I was alone on the summit, but down the far slope a farmer was letting a herd of black cows through a second gate in the perimeter wall. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Then I hurried to the spot where Breda’s husband had died. I stood there, as Garvey had done an hour earlier, and took in the view. There was nothing very interesting down the passage and no view at all to my right, thanks to the intact wall. The wall on my left had a break I’d noted on my first visit, when the cleft had suggested the handiwork of a giant ax. That cleft afforded a very narrow view of the interior of the friary, specifically of a fairly intact wall supported in part by the remains of a chimney. This wall also had a gap, a square one near the top. Through it I could see a second interior wall. Set high in that second wall was a narrow doorway. At one time, it must have connected two second-story rooms, but the rooms were gone, leaving only this headstone-shaped hole as their memorial. The doorway was perfectly aligned with the square gap in the chimney wall, the cleft in the passage wall, and the spot where I stood. If I moved a foot in any direction, I lost sight of it.
I left the passageway at a run and scrambled all over the ruins, looking for a spot where I could get a better view of the floating doorway. It couldn’t be seen at all from outside the friary, the exterior walls being too well preserved in that part of the structure. I was able to reach the narrow ground-floor rooms on either side of the wall that held the doorway. In either room I could crane my neck and see the opening, but it was badly foreshortened. Certainly neither room offered as complete a view as the one I’d had in McKinney’s passage.
Which was exactly the result I wanted, the result I needed to verify my theory. The end of the passage offered the only clear view of a precise spot in the ruin. McKinney had been drawn to the end of the passage because of that view, because someone had told him that at a certain hour — midnight, probably — the view would include a ghost. And not just any ghost. The spirit of Catriona the fair, not seen in five hundred years.
Examining the floating doorway presented something of a challenge. I tried a little rock scaling, as I’d done on the passage wall under Garvey’s supervision, but the interior walls had been built with more care and offered fewer handholds.
After two unsuccessful assaults, I was ready for another approach, and I remembered the farmer who’d been letting his cows in to eat the friary grass. He was still at the gate, urging along some stragglers.
I ran down the hill to him, getting his full attention and then some. Still, I was polite enough to introduce myself and ask his name — Tutty — before I popped my question: “Do you have a ladder I might borrow?”
Tutty did, a fine aluminum one parked next to a stone barn just beyond the gate. He didn’t ask why I wanted it; the fact that I was an American seemed to be a carte blanche explanation for eccentricity. Nevertheless, I babbled something about wanting to check some stone carving. In exchange for that lie, Tutty — a man whose skin had been reddened extremely by the same weather that was eroding the friary — offered to help me carry the ladder up the hill. Together we placed it beneath the vestigial doorway. With the farmer securing the ladder’s footing, I started up.