Malarkey

A Lark Dodge Mystery

By

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
events described herein are products of the author's imagination or
are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-182-0

Malarkey
Copyright © 2014 by Sheila
Simonson

Cover design
Copyright © 2014 by Judith B.
Glad
Poulabrone photo by JoeHoughton

Previously published in 1997 by St. Martin's Press,
and in1998 by Worldwide Library

All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the
reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any
form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or
hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of
the publisher.

Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this
copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including
infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is
punishable by up to five (5) years in federal prison and a fine of
$250,000.

Published by Uncial Press,
an imprint of GCT,
Inc.

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Permission to reprint from the following is gratefully
acknowledged:

"The Hosting of the Sidhe" from
The Poems of W.B. Yeats:
A New Edition,
edited by Richard Finneran (NY: Macmillan,
1983)

"Long-Legged Fly" and "Under Ben Bulben" reprinted with
permission of Simon and Schuster from
The Poems of WB Yeats: A
New Edition,
edited by Richard Finneran. Copyright 1940 by
Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael
Butler Yeats and Anne Yeats.

"Meditation in Time of Civil War" reprinted with the
permission of Simon & Schuster from
The Poems of W.B.
Yeats: A New Edition
, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright
1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1956 by Georgie
Yeats.

Special thanks are due to Anne McCaffrey, for her generous
hospitality and good advice, and to Richard Woods, for his cottage.
Needless to say, nothing unpleasant happened there and much that
was pleasant did. Anne McCaffrey R.I.P.

This book is for my husband Mickey,
who
shared an Irish adventure with me,
though it wasn't Lark's
adventure.

I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler,
I'm a long
ways from home...

Irish song.

Keep left.
I entered the roundabout under the
indignant nose of a lorry approaching from the right.

"Did you say something, Lark?" My father leaned forward
against the seatbelt the better to read road signs. "Should be the
second exit. Ah."

I eased the car around the tight curve. Was that sedan going
to ram me from the left? No, I had the right-of-way. I shifted to
second left-handed.

The roundabout decanted my red Toyota hatchback onto a
major street, two lanes each direction, moderate traffic, lights, and,
oh God, a sign warning of another roundabout. I kept the car in
second gear.

"The Southeast!" Dad announced, triumphant. He was the
navigator. "Left lane."

With a premature sigh of relief, I flipped on the windshield
wipers and entered the correct lane to head south on the N11. It took
me a second or two to turn the wipers off.

It was not raining. The problem lay with the car. The turn
signal lever was in the windshield wiper slot and vice versa. The
effect unnerved me. No doubt it unnerved the drivers following me,
too. I shifted into third.

It was five years since I had driven on the left, and that had
been in England. Driving in Ireland was different in ways I was only
beginning to comprehend. I had just come south from Dublin airport
and, jet-lagged though I was, I hadn't bumbled into the heart of the
city. With Dad's help, I had negotiated the Eastlink—a route along
major streets that led to a toll-bridge across the Liffey and,
ultimately, to the Irish Ferries terminal. Since we didn't need a ferry,
we were now trying to make sense of the roadmap the man at the
car-hire desk had given us. It was not easy. For one thing, some of
the signs gave place names in both Irish and English. Does Ath Cliath
look anything like Dublin? A rhetorical question.

Dad squinted at a street sign posted high on a shop.
"Stillorgan Road—I think this is right."

"It should turn into a freeway, I mean a motorway, fairly
soon." I braked as the traffic halted for a stop light. So far the N11
was just another four-lane street. At half-past two of an April
afternoon, the traffic was still moderate. The light changed. I shifted
appropriately and kept to the slow lane. Cars went on passing me on
the right. They were supposed to pass on the right, I reminded
myself. I was gripping the wheel too hard. I flexed my fingers one by
one.

We putted through the southern suburbs of Dublin for a
good quarter of an hour before the street evolved into a motorway. A
van and two cars zoomed past on my right. At last I worked up the
courage to overtake the Morris Mini I had been tailing at 35 mph—
and flipped on the windshield wipers. "Damnation."

"Are you all right?"

I turned the wipers off again and shifted rapidly into fourth,
pulling back into the slow lane ahead of the Mini. A red L in the
window announced that the driver was a Learner. "I can manage the
left-handed gear shift, and paranoia is keeping me on the left-hand
side of the road, but I can't seem to get the hang of the turn signal.
How far do we go on the N11?"

"About a hundred kilometers."

The speed limit—seventy—was posted in miles per hour, but
distances on the signposts were given in kilometers. I kept having to
make arithmetic conversions, no easy task for an English major.

"Uh, sixty-five miles?"

"About that."

I decided I could relax and drive for a while without
watching for the turnoff. "Bray," a blue and white road sign
announced, and, in parenthesis, "
Bré
." I had the vague
notion that Bray was a resort town.

I whizzed past the exit. "Nice weather."

"Yes. It's been raining." Dad had spent the previous ten days
doing historical research in Dublin. He and his luggage had taken a
taxi out to meet me at the airport. "Are you groggy?"

"A little. But my body's at seven in the morning, so I'll be
okay for a while." I live in the Pacific Northwest and that meant an
eight hour time difference on top of a twelve hour flight. I had slept a
little on the plane.

"It was good of you to come, Lark."

"Now, Dad, you promised you wouldn't cover me with
gratitude. I needed the break." I was driving my father because he
had suffered a mild stroke the previous summer.

Dad was only sixty-eight, and he had made an excellent
recovery. Still, he didn't trust himself behind the wheel, and neither
did the State of New York. It had suspended his license until his
physicians and the folks at the DMV were ready to give him their
blessing. So far he hadn't asked for it. My mother fretted over that.
She thought he should try, but I figured it was his body. Besides, I
wanted to get away. From what wasn't entirely clear to me.

My father is an emeritus professor of history at a small
liberal arts college in upstate New York. His field of expertise is the
American Civil War, specifically Confederate finance. However, he
comes from an old Quaker family and had done considerable
personal research into the Society of Friends over the years.

When Dad decided to get back to his roots and research the
Irish Friends, everyone thought his interest was a sign of returning
vigor. He could study the records of the Dublin Meeting easily
enough without a car—and had done so before I arrived—but he
wanted to visit the Quaker settlements in the southeast, villages
where the Dailey family had lived and flourished before they
migrated to Pennsylvania at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
For that, he needed a car and a driver. I was the driver-elect.

"Watch out," Dad said. "I think the freeway's going to
end."

Sure enough, the road narrowed—to two slim lanes with lots
of curves and no perceptible shoulder. We passed through hamlets
set in glens of an intense green rendered more intense by contrast
with dark rock outcroppings and brilliant flowering gorse. Traffic
piled up behind me, but there was no way I was going to push the
Toyota beyond fifty on those curves.

At last the road widened again to four lanes. A sign
announced that we were approaching Newtownmountkennedy. Now
there was a place name that would have been simpler in Irish. About
five miles farther south, the N11 gave up any pretense of being a
motorway. The sky clouded over. A patter of rain encouraged me to
turn on the wipers. I managed to do it without hitting the turn signal
first.

The road wound upward and down again through at least
forty shades of green. Sheep dotted the high hills, and sleek black
and white milk cows browsed the lower reaches. One field had been
mown in stripes as neatly as a lawn. I was used to huge unbroken
expanses with an occasional barbed wire fence. Here I saw, for the
first time, the magic of Gerard Manley Hopkins's landscape—"plotted
and pieced, fold, fallow, and plough." Hopkins was an Englishman,
but his years as a priest had mostly been spent in Ireland.

Had I come to Ireland for poetic insight? I didn't think so. It
stopped raining. I flipped the turn signal. "Tell me about our
landlord," I murmured, correcting my error. A car passed.

"Alex was a student of mine for a couple of years. He thought
he might go into history, but he was impatient about details."

"Tut tut." I didn't actually say that, but I made a sympathetic
sound. For Dad history was details.

"He and his wife, Barbara, and a friend started a little
company, Stonehall Enterprises, in their garage. It's the classic
success story. They wanted to make CD ROM disks for university
libraries. All of ancient Greek literature can be put on one
disk..."

"Or the Dead Sea Scrolls?" The road was winding through
steep hills and there was no shoulder. I gripped the wheel.

"Yes, now that they're in the public domain. A team of
computer experts has recorded the texts of Tibetan Buddhism,
too."

"Using an electronic scanner? How did they know the
scanner hadn't scrambled the texts?" I had used scanners and was
familiar with their eccentricities.

"They hired monks."

Copy-editing monks. Why not? I wondered if anyone had
scanned the Book of Kells. Speaking of monks.

"Watch out."

I hugged the shoulder as a lorry heaped with squashed car
bodies wobbled past, going north. A portent? Keep left, I told myself,
keep your eyes on the road. "So did the Steins' scholarly disks pay
off?"

"Of course not." Dad gave a mild snort at my innocence—or
at the innocence of his former students. "There's no money in
history. Alex and Barbara were going bankrupt, so they took on a
partner, an idea man. They started making entertainment disks—
albums of unusual images, multimedia things..." His voice trailed.
Dad's interest in multimedia could be gauged by his vagueness. He
was an old-fashioned man, in many ways, though not a fuddy-
duddy.

The road wound on. I drove through the village of Ashford
without incident, but at Rathnew, a few kilometers along, I had to
negotiate a right turn of 110 degrees at a three-way intersection.
And all I was doing was following the N11.

"So what happened to Stonehall Enterprises?"

"They made lots of money and decided to move the plant to
Ireland for tax reasons."

"And they bought a castle."

"It's a Victorian Gothic manor house. An investment, Alex
tells me. They're renovating it."

"Busy little bees."

Dad chuckled. I drove.

The highway rose into rolling hills with a 'climbing lane' that
permitted the half-dozen cars stacked up behind me to pass. The
Toyota chugged along in fourth. It was a tight little car with plenty of
power. I could have gone eighty, but not on that road. The climbing
lane disappeared.

My father is six foot three inches tall and I am six feet, so our
knees came perilously near the dashboard, but I hadn't gone a
kilometer before I understood the wisdom of Dad's choice. A larger
car would have been useless on streets and roads designed for
donkey carts. Even the highway, in those stretches without a
shoulder, was too narrow for, say, my husband's Honda Accord—not
a huge car but not small, either. The Toyota was just right. Too bad it
didn't come with automatic transmission.