Page 69 of Road Trip
“Your sister?”
“She’s messing with me, as sisters do. Mine happens to be an out-of-work actress, so she’s playing the big sister role, on steroids.”
Maeve turned to him. “You have a brother, right?”
“Two brothers, and I’m the youngest, so I got all the shite they could dish out. Which was a lot.”
“I always wished I’d had a big brother,” she said.
“Speaking of wishes, any thoughts about where you’d like to get a drink? I know a place, a little closer to the estate…”
“How about the Willow Tree?”
“Hoping to run into Esme Rossington? To interrogate her about the missing portrait?”
“It’s part of the reason I agreed to take this trip,” she said.
“But didn’t you tell me Esme wasn’t cooperative? If she is there tonight, what would you say to her?”
“Dunno,” she admitted. “But I feel like I need to do something. We’ve been reading Kathleen’s letters to her brother Tommy. She went through so much, arriving in New York, her only friend a woman she shared a berth with on the ship to Ellis Island. Living in a cramped tenement on the Lower East Side of the city, working in a shirt factory for pennies, then moving upstate to Geneva, where she met and married her first husband. He had a good job, a railroad conductor, but he was much older and died within a year, of a burst appendix. Not too much later, she got remarried to a man named Patrick John Murphy, and eventually had three children, the oldest of which, Julia Mary, was my grandmother. They opened a tavern together and lived above it.”
Maeve’s voice trailed off as they pulled into the parking lot at the Willow Tree.
“You’re in luck,” Liam said under his breath as they entered the pub.
She shot him a questioning look and he gave an almost imperceptible nod in the direction of a table against the far wall.
An older woman dressed in a moth-eaten brown sweater sat absent-mindedly feeding chips to a cocker spaniel in her lap while she watched a soccer match on the television over the bar. Esme Rossington. Had to be. Slumped opposite her was a man, with a scraggly gray ponytail, face forward on the tabletop.
“You there,” the woman called out loudly.
Liam looked around to see who she was addressing, but there were only a handful of others in the pub, and none of them were paying any attention to her.
“Ma’am?” Liam said, as Maeve followed him over to the table.
“You’re one of those Grogan boys, are you not?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Liam Grogan.”
“The whiskey maker,” she said, pleased with herself. “Your brother fixed my truck. Good lad.”
“I’ll let him know you were pleased,” Liam said, turning to go.
“And who’s this?” She pointed a bony finger at Maeve.
“This is my friend, Maeve Dunagin. Visiting here from Savannah, Georgia.”
Maeve gave her winningest smile, but Esme Rossington was unimpressed.
“Is that your sister who’s been pestering me, asking nosy questions? Trying to claim she’s family to my family?”
Maeve’s smile evaporated in the face of the old woman’s hostility. “Therese is my sister, yes. And yes, our grandmother was from this village. It’s our understanding she was raised in the manor house at Tarrymore.”
She kept her voice low, not wanting to attract attention from the others in the half-empty bar, but now, the man sitting opposite Esme slowly raised his head and stared at her, glassy-eyed. His eyes were a pale gray and he had the kind of pulpy, bulbous red nose that bespoke years of hard drinking.
“What’s this?”
“An American,” Esme said dismissively. “Pushing in where she’s not wanted.”
