Page 32 of Irish Oath
She came in and sat in the chair across the desk. The visitor's chair, not the one I was in. A distinction she made without appearing to think about it. Elbows on the desk, chin in her hands, looking at the closed folders.
"The boot prints," she said. "At the estate."
"I saw them."
"Size fourteen. Nobody in any family I could identify runs that large. I checked." A pause. "I checked a lot of things that seemed excessive at the time."
"They don't seem excessive," I said.
Her face changed. Not gratitude exactly. She didn't take that kind of thing easily. More the specific relief of a person who'd done a thing alone a long time and had just been told they'd done it right.
"I went back twice," she said. "To the estate."
"I know. The photographs are dated."
"Nineteen and twenty-two." She turned toward the window. "The second time I found things I'd missed the first time. I got better." A beat. "At a lot of things."
I looked at her.
A nineteen-year-old and a twenty-two-year-old walking through the ruins of everything she came from, alone, looking for the thing that would make sense of it. Building the skills she needed as she went, because there was no one to build them with her.
I thought about the file on the desk and all the years in it.
"There's a section you didn't finish," I said.
She went still.
"The financial records. Our side. You got further than you should have, and then you stopped, about eighteen months ago." I waited her out. "What stopped you?"
A long pause.
"I started to doubt," she said. Flat. No decoration. "The evidence was too clean. The frame was too complete. I kept finding exactly what should be there if you'd done it and nothing that shouldn't be there if you hadn't." She looked at the folders. "In my experience things are messier than that. People make mistakes. Leave what they didn't mean to. The fact that I didn't find any of that felt like information."
"It was," I said.
"I know that now." She looked back at me. "I kept going anyway for another eighteen months. Because if you didn't do it, then someone else did, and I didn't know who. And a certainty that old is hard to put down even when it feels wrong."
I nodded.
That was the most honest thing anyone had said in this house in a long time.
"We'll find who did it," I said. "Put your half beside ours, and the answer's in there."
She held my gaze a moment. Assessing. Deciding something.
"I know," she said. And then, after a pause, "That's why I'm still here."
She stood, gathered the folders, and took them with her when she left. I watched her go, then turned back to the window and the gray October morning, and I thought about incomplete information and planted evidence and someone careful enough to frame the Kerrigan family all this time without leaving one genuine mistake behind.
That kind of careful has a shape to it.
I recognized the shape.
I went to find Ronan.
13
SIENNA
