Page 61 of Road Trip
“Curious to know what they talked about. Does your sister follow cricket? Or is she perhaps a pool shark?”
“That’s part of my shaggy dog story,” Maeve said.
She launched into her tale and told Liam about her mother’s dying wish, that her daughters should take a road trip to Ireland to trace their family heritage.
“It’s the last thing either of us wanted to do,” she admitted. “Therese and I haven’t been close in years.”
“And yet, here you are.”
“There were… extenuating circumstances. We learned, shortly after her death, that our mother had been bilked out of her life’s savings by a sleazy television preacher. She’d even taken out a new mortgage on our family home—the one Therese and I were set to inherit. The news couldn’t have come at a worse time. Therese is an actress and is perpetually broke. And I found out, the day after the funeral, that I’d lost my teaching job, due to ‘budget cuts.’ Wehad nothing left. Except for Lady Geraldine, and a rusty coffee can full of twenty-dollar bills Mom had set aside over the years from her paycheck to fund the trip she intended for us to take.”
Maeve’s eyes filled with unwelcome tears. She blinked them away and sat back, waiting for him to say something else, ask another question, but he kept his eyes on the road. She returned her gaze to the sky, sprinkled with more stars than she’d ever noticed back at home. Mary Helen would love this, she reflected. All of it. Not just the scenery, but the drama of what they’d already discovered.
“And now, we find out that there’sanotherpainting of Lady Geraldine, that was stolen from Tarrymore, by the IRA, fifty years after our great-grandmother supposedly brought ours to America on that ship she boarded in Cobh, or Queenstown, or whatever you want to call it.”
“You heard about the IRA raid, huh?” He shot her a look of sympathy.
“Through my research. Also the guide mentioned it when I was touring the estate, and then yesterday, Esme Rossington told Therese all about how the robbery was what prompted her father to donate the property, and most of the art collection, to the National Trust, or whatever they call it.”
“Not the answers you were hoping to find about your portrait.”
She let out a long sigh. “Look. I’m not a gullible person. I quit believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy when I was in first grade after I noticed the guy at the mall’s beard was attached by an elastic strap. I don’twantto allow myself to hope ours is real, but the thing is, there’s a chance, just a tiny chance, that it’s legit.”
“Okay, not gullible, non-Santa fan, what makes you think that?”
“Therese showed our painting to an expert in Savannah. She was dubious, until she saw the painting. She couldn’t verify it, but she did say it looked like the real thing. And then, yesterday, we went to visit the daughter of Kathleen’s little brother Tommy. Her name is Isabel. Quite elderly and living in a nursing home. She told us that Kathleen was sent to live at Tarrymore as a little girl, at theinsistence of Lady Delia Rossington, who became Kathleen’s protector. She was raised there, not back at that tenant farm with the rest of the Connors.”
“Why was that, I wonder? The Rossingtons haven’t exactly been known for their generosity to the local peasants,” Liam observed.
Maeve shook her head. “Lord Rossington apparently liked at least one of the locals. Kathleen’s mother, Bridget, caught his eye. He was married, of course, with two sons, and she was just a teenager. Would have been quite a scandal, but arrangements were made, and the parish priest saved the day. Bridget was quickly and quietly married off to an agreeable lad from the village…”
“Named Connor.”
“Isabel heard the church got a new roof and Bridget’s father got a new horse out of the deal. And Lady Delia, the lord’s spinster older sister, brought the little girl, named Kathleen, to the manor house to be raised as her protégé.”
“Quite a tale,” Liam murmured. “But how does Kathleen end up with a priceless family portrait?”
“Another freakin’ mystery,” Maeve said. She recounted what Isabel had told them about the last time her father had seen his older sister.
“Out of the blue one afternoon, someone from the estate drove up and Kathleen hopped out and said she was leaving for America, right then. She promised to write, and then she gave him a little pin, like a stickpin, I guess you’d call it, which she said Lady Delia wanted him to have. She made him promise not to show it to anyone.”
Maeve dug her phone from her pocket and scrolled through her camera roll. She pulled up the photo of Isabel’s pin, enlarged the image, and held it up for Liam to see.
“Tommy gave her the pin. She still has it. Was wearing it on her sweater when we went to see her.”
He slowed the Jeep and swung into the inn’s parking lot. After he stopped the car he reached for the phone, studying the image intently.
“That’s the Rossington coat of arms. They plaster it on everything. The labels on my whiskey bottles, the signs at the estate…”
“The cocktail napkins at the inn,” Maeve added.
She put her phone away. It was past midnight and there was a light above the inn’s front door, but most of the other windows in the building were dark. Except for one window in one room, on the third floor. She spotted a profile in the window, briefly, before the light blinked off.
“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” she murmured.
“Come again?”
“Just something my mother used to say, whenever we’d pull up to our house after being away. I haven’t thought of that in years. No idea where that came from.”
