Legacy of Secrets (76 page)

“I didn’t know,” I said, astonished, and I heard Shannon gasp. “I must introduce you to Shannon Keeffe,” I added with a matching twinkle in my eye. “She’s by way of being a relative of yours.”

I explained that she was Finn and Lily’s great-granddaughter. He flung back his head and laughed. “Is there no end to the old man’s surprises? I’m sorry,” he apologized quickly to Shannon. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but old Finn was known to have a roving eye and he was as full of charm and blarney as most Irishmen, right to the end.” He paused and added with a frown, “But wait, aren’t you Bob Keeffe’s daughter?”

“I am,” she said, lifting her chin proudly.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, taking her hand and patting it kindly. “He was a fine man and none of us here at James and Company can believe what’s happened. Bob Keeffe was no more a crook than the Queen of England. It’s scandalous, the way the media are after him like vultures.”

“Thank you,” Shannon said with a wavering smile, because sympathy is the one thing that triggers her tears. “My father is really the reason we are here.” She glanced
appealingly at me, and I took over, briskly telling Michael James that we believed Bob had been murdered, and we wouldn’t rest until we found out who had done it.

“I won’t go into why, because it’s too long a story,” I said, “but we believe the murderer is connected with the past in some way, and with Lily Molyneux.”

“Ah, the famous Lily,” he said thoughtfully.

“Notorious, more likely,” I added briskly.

Michael nodded. “I guess maybe you’re right. My father told me the whole story when I was eighteen. I had just graduated from high school and was heading for Yale. He had retired and was living in the house on Louisburg Square where he had once worked as a stableboy. He called me into his study and he said to me, ‘Michael, there’s a lot about me you don’t know, and maybe there’s some things about me I’m never going to tell you, but I want you to know where I came from. I want to tell you about our roots in Ireland. And about the woman I loved more than any other, and how a man’s stupid pride can do more damage than a bullet. In fact, there were times, after I had lost her, when I might have preferred the bullet.’

“That was in 1951, I guess, and he was a man in his eighties, still upright and handsome, with silver hair and those fine gray eyes I always wished I had inherited. But I’m like my mother, Madeline Whittier James. Mom was tall and fair-haired and nice-looking, and she was always laughing and easy to be with, and after I heard about Lily, I guessed that’s why Dad liked her. He said she was as straight as a die and he always knew exactly where he was with her.

“Mom was much younger than he was; he met her at a Fourth of July picnic at a friend’s house out at Southampton. He was sixty-five then, though he told me proudly he looked nearer fifty. He was handsome and he was rich, and he could have had his pick of a dozen women, but he said he knew right away she was the one.

“Mom died when I was fourteen, and my father was like a lost dog. He didn’t know what to do without her. He took
to going back into the office again, but his mind wasn’t on it. I was away at prep school and he was lonely and he would show up at odd times, and drag me out for lunch, or to a football game. I suppose gradually he got over the shock and the loss, but he said he would miss her to the end of his days. ‘She was my favorite companion,’ he told me soberly. ‘I never wanted any other woman when your mother was alive.’

“Anyhow, the day he called me into the study, he told me for the first time about where he was born, in that little earth-floored hovel in Connemara. ‘I know I haven’t revealed any of this before,’ he said, ‘but it’s not because I’m ashamed of it. It’s just that it all became so complicated. But now that I’m an old man, I guess you had better hear about it from me, and then there’ll never be any surprises sprung on you in the future. And just so nobody can ever accuse your old dad of keeping things from you.’

“And then he told me the story, about him and Lily and Liam. The whole thing. And about his brother Daniel whom I never knew existed until then.

“‘We O’Keeffe lads did well for ourselves in the new country,’ he told me proudly. ‘Only along the way, we somehow lost each other.’ He looked me piercingly in the eye and said, ‘So now you know all about your long-lost relatives, and the half-brother who disappeared. Odds are they’ll never show up to haunt you, but if they do, you now know the truth.’

“I asked him if he had ever tried to find Liam, and he admitted guiltily that he had, but that it was too late. Liam had disappeared and he never saw him again.”

Michael looked at me and said thoughtfully, “Lily must have been some woman.”

“She was,” I admitted. “But now you know that Bob Keeffe was Liam’s son, and that makes Shannon your cousin. So you see,” I said triumphantly to Shannon, “you are not alone in the world anymore.”

Michael James laughed. “You can count on me for any help you need,” he told her kindly. “And I’d like you to
come and meet my family, any weekend you are free. It’s all pretty casual and easygoing out at Sag Harbor, and there’s always room for one or two more.”

Shannon blushed with pleasure and thanked him prettily, and I told him that since she was Lily’s heir and had come into a considerable amount of money, she might be in need of his business advice as well.

“And now we have eliminated you from our list of murder suspects, we must get on to the next one,” I said, and he stared at me with astonishment.

“Murder suspect?” he repeated. “You thought maybe I had killed Bob Keeffe?”

“It was just a thought,” I replied airily. “But now we’ve met you, we know you didn’t do it.”

“How
do you know?” he asked curiously.

“Gut reaction,” I said firmly, “or else woman’s intuition. Either way, I’m sure.”

We said good-bye and promised to be in touch soon, and went off in search of our next suspect, Senator Jim O’Keeffe.

N
OW,
I
’VE ALWAYS LOVED TRAINS;
there’s something about them that offers more glamour and excitement than a mere plane ever can. I remember chugging and steaming through London to Dover, and the choppy gray ferry crossing, and then being back on the train where suddenly all of Europe is stretched before you. You could have dinner and then curl up like a pampered pet in your elegant little berth and wake up in any one of half a dozen countries, steaming through snow-capped mountain passes and green valleys, bustling cities and verdant forests. I would be wild with anticipation, as the passport officials would stride the swaying corridors, checking papers and looking like something out of a Sidney Greenstreet movie. And we would end up in Baden-Baden or Transylvania, Vienna or Venice, Istanbul or Moscow. Oh, it was an experience all right, and one I’m glad not to have missed.

And that’s why I was pleased when Shannon suggested we take the train to Washington to meet Senator Jim O’Keeffe. Brigid was with us, thrilled at the thought of the tour of the White House she was going to take while we visited the senator.

Jim O’Keeffe was a popular man, massive like his grandfather; a bachelor with a reputation for enjoying the company of women. He had thick dark hair growing back from a wide forehead, and it was streaked with silver at the temples. His eyes were as silver-gray as the streaks in his
hair, and his smile could, as they say, charm the birds from the trees.

He looked us appreciatively up and down as we were ushered into his office in the Senate building. “Two beautiful redheads,” he said, striding toward us and holding out his hand. “My lucky day.” Need I tell you I was immediately won over?

It was obvious within the first few minutes that his tongue was as silver as the other parts I have already mentioned, but the man was sincere when he told Shannon how sorry he was about her father. He sat next to her on a large green sofa, patting her hand, and telling her just as Michael James had that he had never believed for a minute Bob Keeffe was a crook. “And I’ve seen enough of those in my business to know,” he added, a touch grimly.

I glanced at Shannon, staring at him, misty-eyed, and I sighed. I knew from that old gut reaction that Senator Jim O’Keeffe was no murderer either, but then I thought hopefully, maybe what he had to say might lead us to the man, or woman, we wanted.

I explained briskly what we had discovered so far, and that Shannon had come to me searching for the story of the past, so we could make sense of the present.

“You mean the story of Lily Molyneux,” he said, just as Michael James had. It seems that both O’Keeffe brothers had carried their memories of her in their hearts as well as their heads, right to the end, passing her legend down from generation to generation, the way I had done with Shannon.

He said, “I can’t help you much with the present, except to offer my assistance if you need it, but let me tell you what I remember about my grandfather.”

Now, there’s something about those tall, bearlike bearded men that has always appealed to me. They look somehow more solid and dependable than the rest of us, and I could understand his appeal to the voters, and his popularity with the media. Senator Jim O’Keeffe, like most Irishmen, was a born raconteur with a voice as smooth and
hypnotic as the sound of waves on the shore, and we listened eagerly to his memories.

“G
RANDFATHER
D
ANNY
O’K
EEFFE WAS QUITE A CHARACTER,”
he said, looking at us and smiling. “He was already an old man when I was born, but you know, he never lost that booming voice, and that vitality. And even though he was a cripple, he never developed the frailty that old men do. I’d bet that when he died, he didn’t look that much different from when Lily Molyneux married him, except for the extra weight and the white hair, of course. And the wheelchair.

“He maneuvered that chair like it was a tank, charging around the house like a battle commander, flinging orders right and left as he went, to the servants, the dogs, the secretaries, because he never relinquished his control of Danstores. He kept on working right to the end, and I was with him on the day he died.

“We were at his villa in Portofino; he had married an Italian woman he met there in 1919. He had fallen in love with the country and with her and she was everything Lily wasn’t: sweet, gentle, and from a family who worked for a living. Her mother and father ran a little trattoria patronized by the locals and the occasional tourists or the people from the grand yachts that cruised the Mediterranean waters in the summer, though Portofino was still tiny and unspoiled then.

“When Dan had the fight with his brother, he wanted nothing more to do with him. After he quit politics, like many newly rich men of that era, he bought himself a beautiful gleaming white yacht and sailed the seas for months on end with a bunch of friends, exploring the world and enjoying himself. He ruled his empire from it, just as he had from his office in D.C.

“He had been one of the most popular senators in Washington, just the way I am myself.” Jim smiled at us with an engaging lack of modesty. “But Dan’s business was taking more and more of his time, and as he became even
more dependent on the wheelchair, he decided to give up politics. They said it was a sad day in Washington when Senator Danny O’Keeffe stepped down from office. He had pushed many a law through, helping the immigrants and the poor and he was truly ‘a man of the people.’ He must have had a million friends and well-wishers and they said the party he threw at ‘the mini White House’—his home in Maryland—was one of the best ever seen in this city.

“Anyway, he met and married Maria Annunciata, whom he always called Nancy, within the space of two months. The ceremony was at the local church in Positano, and a year later their son, my father Patrick, was born. And soon after that, two sisters. He bought a spectacular spur of land on a bluff overlooking the water, and built a splendid pink villa on it.

“It may have been the most beautiful house I ever saw.” Jim smiled at me and added, “but then I have never been to Ardnavarna, and Grandfather Dan told me it couldn’t hold a candle to that. He said there was no place in the world as beautiful as Connemara. I remember asking him why he never went back there if it was so special, and that was when he told me the story.

“I was nine years old and I was spending my summer at the Villa Favorita with my grandparents, as I always did. They divided their time between the Maryland house in the winter months and the yacht and the villa in spring and summer. I loved those long hot summer days. God, even now I can feel the sun on my back as I scampered down to the rocks to fish, and I can smell the wild rosemary and thyme crushing beneath my sandaled feet. I can tell you, I was a lucky little boy to have known those golden Italian summers, all those long hot blue days and sparkling warm nights, when I was allowed to stay up late like the rest of the Italian kids, and wander the streets of the village with them, hanging out at my other grandpa’s trattoria. It was a taste of freedom I never had back at home. In Washington, my dad helped run Danstores, though he was always the
crown prince and never the king, because Grandpa Dan never abdicated in his favor, and Dad only got to take over control after he had died.