Whiskey Island (3 page)

“I thought I saw someone….” Niccolo fell silent.

“Who?” the cop asked.

“I don’t know. I might have imagined it. I thought it was the carjacker trying to escape.”

“Well,
somebody
hit him. We know that for sure,” the cop said. “Could you give a description?”

“There wasn’t anybody there.” Casey forced life into her voice. “I would have seen somebody running away.”

“Then how do you explain the fact that the carjacker was passed out at the wheel?” Niccolo asked.

“Maybe he and his pal had a fight before they decided to steal my car. Maybe he’d been knocked on the head earlier and it just caught up with him, a delayed reaction, like he said.” She tilted her head toward the cop. “I don’t know.”

“Think about what you saw. All of you. Just let us know if you remember anything new.” The cop departed.

“I didn’t see anybody, either.” Peggy looked down at the child in her lap, who had begun to whimper. She looked surprised to find her sitting there.

Casey got to her feet. “That’s because there wasn’t anybody.”

“Just where do you think you’re going?” Megan demanded.

“For the Jameson’s. I’m assuming you still keep a bottle or two around?” Casey’s words trailed after her.

Megan faced Niccolo again. “You’re going to let me take care of your arm, aren’t you? If I find you’ve disappeared while I’m off looking for the first aid kit, I’ll hunt you down.”

“Life on the run holds no appeal.”

She was surprised at the punch to her gut that followed his grin. The grin wasn’t high voltage. She doubted his blood pressure had risen enough for that. But it was flashy, and unexpected enough to stop her in her tracks.

Peggy rose. “The apartment upstairs is still unoccupied?”

Megan’s mind was whirling. “The renters moved out a couple of weeks ago. They did a number on it. I haven’t had time to have it painted and carpeted. You and Casey can stay there if you’d like. There’s more room to spread out than at my place.”

“Then if you don’t mind, I’ll forget the drink. I’m going upstairs to get settled. Tell Casey I took Ashley with me. I think we both need some quiet time.”

The little girl was wide-eyed, but there were no tears slipping down her cheeks. Megan was no connoisseur of children, but she thought Ashley, with her fine brown hair and heart-shaped face, was a pretty child. Megan wondered how on earth she’d ended up in Casey’s care.

The extension of that was even more interesting. She wondered how on earth Casey had ended up back at the Whiskey Island Saloon after insisting for years that she would never step through the door again. Megan had seen her sister occasionally during that time, but always in other places, including Casey’s apartment in Chicago. She had never expected to see her here again.

“Let us know if you need anything?” Megan reached out to stroke Ashley’s hair. “We can talk later.”

“There’s nothing that won’t keep. Tomorrow’s soon enough.” Peggy left with Ashley still clinging to her.

“She’s been through quite an experience. They both have,” Niccolo said.

Megan didn’t know what to add to that. She wanted the night’s events to be a bad dream. She couldn’t yet think about them rationally.

She changed the subject. “I’ve never seen you here. Are you from the neighborhood?”

He shook his head, then he grimaced. “I guess I am at that. I live over by St. Brigid’s.”

Casey returned with a bottle in one hand and glasses gripped between the fingers of the other. “Where’s Ashley?”

“Peggy took her upstairs. There’s room for all of you in the old apartment.”

Casey nodded. “A round on the house. Let them settle down a minute before I check on them.”

Megan suspected she had little chance of having her million questions answered immediately. She shrugged. “When life hands you a lemon, skip the lemonade. Go straight for the Irish.” She took the bottle from her sister and neatly poured an inch for each of them.
“Sláinte.”

She was a saloon keeper, the daughter of a saloon keeper, the granddaughter and great-granddaughter, too. She seldom drank, and never when her world was spinning backward. Tonight she thought of none of those things as she drained her glass.

The whiskey warmed her heart, her soul and the deepest regions of her belly. She understood the gut-wrenching yearning for it, the desire for oblivion that sometimes motivated her patrons. She understood the color whiskey brought to ordinary lives, the stories it lifted to the surface, the melting of hearts that had been frozen in fear.

She also understood how the very power of it, the matchless wonder of it, could destroy.

It had nearly destroyed her family.

She slapped her glass on the table. “I’ll be back in a minute with the kit. And I’ll expect to find both of you sitting right here waiting for me.”

Niccolo wasn’t sure why he was still sitting at the corner table. The dizzy spell that had nearly sent him crashing to the ground was over. He had fainted once before, while giving blood, and he supposed his reaction tonight had been akin to that one. His arm burned, and when the sleeve of his work shirt was peeled away, the wound would certainly bleed again. But he doubted he would actually need stitches, although a tetanus shot might be in order.

He supposed he was still sitting here because there was no place better to go. His house was empty and uninviting, a work in progress more than a home. Ignatius Brady, the pastor of St. Brigid’s and his only friend in the city, was away on retreat. His neighbors on one side were young professionals with fulfilling lives of their own. The voluptuous neighbor on the other side had a suspicious number of male visitors who always left a short time later, happier than when they’d arrived.

Niccolo passed the moments by examining his surroundings. By saloon standards, Whiskey Island was a gem. On the outside, the old frame building was lackluster. The wood was painted tan, with no contrasting trim. The sign was discreet, but handsomely lettered in Gaelic script. The only additional clue to the bar’s Irish roots were three shamrocks carved in a segmental pediment over the door.

The interior was a different story entirely. Much of Whiskey Island was paneled in dark wood—walnut, he guessed—which, judging by the patina, had been in place for at least half a century. On two walls the area above the wainscoting was painted a deep forest green and hung with posters of windswept coastlines and pastoral stone cottages.

There were portraits, too, of unsmiling men and women of another century, family groupings, children on ponies and priests in black. A hand-printed sign over the mahogany bar read:

Trí bhuna an ólacháin:

maidi n bhrónach

cóta salach.

pócat folamha.

And then below it, in smaller letters:

The three faults of drink are:

a sorrowful morning,

a dirty coat

and an empty pocket.

The padded stools looked comfortable enough to lounge in for a hard night of drinking; the television high in one corner was flat screen and state of the art. The room was larger than he’d guessed it would be. He imagined they packed in several hundred on St. Patrick’s Day.

“You haven’t been here before?”

His gaze fell to Casey Donaghue. He shook his head.

“You picked a fine night for your first visit.”

His smile was wry. “I was just out for a stroll.”

“On a night like this? The temperature’s dropping by the minute. There’ll be half a foot of snow by morning.”

“I know. I was on my way home.”

“Thank you, Niccolo. I don’t know many people who would have done what you did.”

He shrugged. It seemed to him that he had only done what was called for. “You were a heroine. I saw the way you threw yourself over Ashley and your sister at the end.”

She shrugged, too, and looked as uncomfortable as he felt. He studied her for a moment. Casey had a thin, angular face surrounded by cascades of lovely waving hair. If she, Megan and Peggy were sisters, then someone upstairs had been doling out family genes with an eye to diversity.

And that brought him squarely back to Megan Donaghue. She was shorter than Casey, who was tall and willowy. Megan was more compact, more womanly, and her face bordered on rectangular. Her features belonged to a more feminine Huck Finn. The red hair that had so captured his imagination on his journey to sweet oblivion was a helter-skelter gathering of boyish curls with a life of its own.

“You own the saloon?” he asked. “You and your sisters?”

“Oh, it’s ours, all right,” Casey said with a grimace. “The drunks and the poets, the good old boys and the whiskey tenors. Our heritage. I haven’t been back in years.”

That surprised him. “It’s a comfortable place.”

“Yeah, and everybody knows your name.”

“That’s not such a bad thing, is it?”

She smiled, but it did nothing to soften her sharp features. “This place can consume your life and make you forget there’s a real world outside that front door. Ask Megan.”

He heard Megan arriving again before he saw her. She walked the way she did everything else: she bustled, and the air crackled accordingly.

She slapped a beat-up tackle box on the table in front of him. “We’ll clean you up a little, you’ll have another drink, then Barry will drive you over to Metro, where they’ll clean you up again. Barry’s the bartender. I’ll have him wait so he can take you home.” Megan nodded toward a bald man in a green polo shirt behind the counter.

Niccolo had no particular reason to go along with any of this, and no reason not to. “You’re sure you don’t want to come yourself, to be certain they do a good enough job?” he asked Megan.

She was not offended. She favored him with one stern look from long-lashed amber eyes. “We can do this two ways, Nick. Gently or with gusto. Your choice.”

He didn’t have to roll up the sleeve of his work shirt. It lay in tatters against the flesh of his upper arm. He merely propped his elbow on the table and let her get to work.

“Once upon a time I wanted to be a nurse.” She gently peeled back the shreds of fabric.

“Nurse Ratchet, I presume.”

Her lips teetered in a quasi smile. “I have no idea why I thought it would be fun. I’ve taken care of enough fools in my life. You have no idea how many men I’ve patched up at this table. They come in here aching for a fight. We don’t encourage it, of course, and we stop serving them the minute we see what they’re after. But it happens sometimes anyway.”

“From the time she was seventeen, she patched them up and gave them a good talking to,” Casey said. “Part Mother Superior, part Mother Macree.”

“I don’t care what happens to any of them.” Megan cradled his arm as gently as a baby bird. “Not a one.”

Casey caught Niccolo’s eye. She lifted one brow.

“This might sting.” Megan held something cold and wet against Niccolo’s arm, and he decided she was right. Oddly enough, he was enjoying the experience anyway. Maybe it had something to do with the pleasure of survival. He had only just begun to consider the other possibilities of the night.

His eyelids drifted shut before he knew it. Something mournful and undeniably Celtic floated from a tape player perched on the bar. Cigarette smoke blended incongruously with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Megan’s hands were gentle, and the throbbing in his arm reminded him that he was still alive.

He opened his eyes and found that Casey had gone. There was another shot of whiskey in his glass, and Megan was standing in front of him now, arms folded. She wasn’t smiling, and her brown eyes glistened.

She spoke in the throaty, bluesy alto that was already beginning to sound so familiar. “This is your table forever, Niccolo Andreani. Any time you want it. And this is your bottle. When it’s finished, there’ll be another just like it. You’ll never be a stranger here, and you’ll never pay as much as one dime for anything you want.”

Niccolo wanted many things. He wondered if he could find any of them in a saloon.

If so, it would be the ultimate irony.

3

C
asey was still shaken enough by the night’s events that her hands trembled. She had never lacked courage, but she knew that when she woke up tomorrow morning, she might be shaking still.

When the carjacker had held his gun to her throat, the past year had suddenly flashed before her eyes. She saw the mistakes, the haunting questions. Most of all, she’d understood the awesome responsibility she had for the little girl in her care. Her child only fleetingly, but her child to protect, even if her own future had to be sacrificed.

“Mommy?”

Casey splashed water on her face in the apartment bathroom and wiped it with a towel. She forced reassurance into her voice. “Not Mommy, sweetheart. It’s Casey, remember? I’m just washing my face.”

“Mommy…”

Casey’s heart constricted. She threw open the bathroom door and strode into the tiny living room, where Ashley was huddled in a corner of the sofa, just waking up after dozing off for a few minutes. Peggy scooped up the little girl before Casey could and hugged her close.

Casey crouched beside them. “Ashley, sweetheart. No one’s going to hurt you. The police took the bad men away.”

Ashley sniffed and popped her thumb in her mouth. Casey could see she was stiff and resistant in Peggy’s arms.

The dingy living room wasn’t much larger than the rectangular area rug. A tan suede-cloth sofa and two plaid chairs lined the walls. A coffee table took up the center of the room. The three females took up the rest of the space.

“She’ll be okay,” Peggy assured her sister. “Ashley needs a good night’s sleep. I think she’ll feel better in the morning.”

“I’m so sorry about this. I guess we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I don’t think anything like that’s ever happened here, do you? We’ve had fistfights in the parking lot, but never anything like this. I’m going to ask Megan about having a security camera installed out there, maybe another light.”