The Celtic Riddle

"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 and rightsizing that are euphemisms for unpleasant results, in this case, presumably, fewer employed people doing a lot more work.

"Nice boat," I said.

The man barely looked up from his work. "Yen. Thanks," he replied.

"Who owns it, do you know?"

The man ignored me, continuing to painstakingly clean the gunwales, inch by inch.

"Anybody know who owns this boat?" I said, turning to three old men sitting on a bench on the pier.

"Paddy Gilhooly," said one of them. This was not the name I was expecting, but an interesting one nonetheless.

"Do you know where I might find him?"

"He's not far," the old man said. The second man cupped his hand around his ear to hear better and laughed.

"Yer lookin' at him," the second man shouted, pointing to the man working on the boat.