Celtic Christmas Page 6

  “I don’t know,” Zak admitted. “Perhaps the man doing the interviews has more of the story.”

  “Alyssa was sitting at my table during the tournament, and she did mention that Bobby seemed to have become angry after speaking with Daniel,” Nona informed us. “We’ve all heard that Daniel was angry with Tyson over his relationship with Hillary, so maybe Daniel said something to Bobby that he knew would get him riled up.”

  “I suppose if the local law enforcement has taken both men in, they will figure it out,” Zak said. “Dinner isn’t for several hours. What should we do with the rest of the afternoon?”

  “Since we’re going to the Christmas Market tomorrow, perhaps we should explore the rest of the castle today,” Nona suggested.

  “I’m not sure Lord Dunphy wants his guests rattling around in the uninhabited part of the castle,” I said. “It hasn’t been lived in for more than a century, and I have to admit that it’s in serious disrepair.”

  “I’d really love to see the dungeons,” Nona insisted.

  “Me too,” Alex seconded.

  “There is access to the dungeons from the beach,” I informed Nona. “It’s a long walk to the entrance from the castle, but if you feel up to it, I think I remember how to access the dungeons.”

  “I’m up to it,” she confirmed.

  “Me too,” Alex said.

  I glanced at Zak.

  “I’ll stay here so Catherine can have a nap,” he offered. “She’s been rubbing her eyes since you returned from visiting the stable.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “We’ll take the beach path and just take a quick look.”

  The path from the castle led to a staircase, which took us to a boathouse, which opened out onto the beach. I remembered that the path along the sand wound back in the direction of the castle, which from the beach, sat high up on the moor. I told Nona and Alex the story of how Zak and I had found the hidden entrance to the dungeon the first time we’d been in Ireland. The beach ended beneath the spot where the castle was located up on the bluff. I remembered that the entrance to the dungeons was located behind a wall of shrubbery. As there had been before, there was an iron gate across the entrance, although it was open. Once we entered the gate, I remembered there would be a dark hallway that led to the dungeons. The dungeons were also accessible from a stairway that could be accessed from the old and uninhabited part of the castle.

  “Wow, this is really cool,” Alex said as we made our way down the cold and narrow hallway lined with cells.

  “It is pretty awesome,” I agreed. “I’m not sure the prisoners who were kept here in the past would agree with the term awesome, but I remember my fascination with the whole thing the first time we were here.”

  “It looks like this passage goes quite a way back,” Nona said.

  “It does. The dungeons occupy the space under a good part of the oldest section of the castle. I don’t think we should venture beyond here, however. The integrity of the walls seemed to be questionable at best when I was here the last time.”

  “It looks like someone has been here recently,” Alex said, pointing to a pair of footprints on the sandy floor of the walkway.

  “One large print and one small,” Nona said.

  “You did tell me that Ronan mentioned seeing a man and woman walking around last night,” Alex reminded me.

  “I suppose that whoever dumped Tyson’s body in the old section of the castle could have come out this way,” I agreed. “Maybe we should inform Lord Dunphy about what we’ve found.”

  Everyone agreed that was a good idea, so after Nona took some photos of the cells with her phone, we turned to head back the way we’d come. We were halfway back to the entrance when I heard a noise.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Alex said.

  “Me neither,” Nona added.

  “It sounds like singing way off in the distance. Or maybe humming. I’m picking up a distinct melody.”

  Everyone stood perfectly still.

  “I still don’t hear anything,” Nona said.

  I glanced at Alex, and she shook her head.

  I turned back toward the dungeons and began to walk further into the interior. I was sure I heard the distant echo of someone singing. I wasn’t sure why Nona and Alex couldn’t hear it.

  “It’s pretty freaky back here,” Alex said, wrapping her arms around her body. “And dark, even with the flashlight.”

  It was true that the cells at the entrance to the dungeon were a lot less intimidating than the cells located in the bowels of the castle’s lowest level.

  “The footprints come all the way back here,” Alex said, shining her flashlight on the ground.

  “I guess we should go back, so we don’t disturb them,” I said, realizing too late that we’d already disturbed a lot of the prints that had been left in the sand that had blown in from the beach.

  I could see that Alex was happy to exit the dark tunnel. I supposed it was pretty intimidating. We slowly walked back along the beach, enjoying the sunshine that managed to penetrate the clouds that threatened from a distance.

  “It would have been awful to be locked up down there,” Alex said as she wrapped her arms around her torso. “Barbaric even.”

  “Things were different in the past than they are now,” I pointed out. “Prisoners taken in battle were seen as little more than animals.”

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t lock an animal up down there, let alone a person,” Alex countered.

  I couldn’t agree more.

  The trip up the steep stairway was a lot harder on Nona than the trip down, so I took it slow and helped her every step of the way. It took a while, but we eventually made it to the top. Once we reached the top, we turned and looked out toward the sea. It really was lovely, but even the sea in all its vastness seemed primitive and brooding today.

  I was anxious to tell Lord Dunphy about the prints, so I suggested we continue back toward the castle. If Tyson had been killed by a pair of killers, rather than a single person, that would introduce a new element to the current suspect list. Perhaps once we returned to the room, we should go over what we knew with Zak to figure out which pair of last night’s dinner guests might have teamed up to eliminate the man who seemed to have angered most everyone present in one way or another.

  Chapter 6

  Friday, December 20

  Dinner the previous evening was delicious as expected. Adam, Alyssa, Jeffery, Sean, Connor, Evette, Tessa, and Hillary all went into the village for the rehearsal dinner, while the rest of us stayed behind and enjoyed Bonnie’s meal. I noticed that Gwen didn’t come down to dinner, which I supposed was understandable. Her son had just died, after all. Harry tried to put on a brave face, but he’d seemed distracted. Walter drank too much and diverted a lot of the attention from everyone else by acting like a complete and total moron. Carolina got into an argument with Victoria, which resulted in hair pulling on both sides. All in all, it was a very entertaining evening.

  The morning dawned clear of the overcast that had blanketed the area since we’d been there. I had to admit it was hard to leave Zak cuddled up in the nice warm bed even though I was anxious to spend this time with the young woman who’d first come into my life six Christmases ago. Alex showed up early for our trip to the stables, and it seemed obvious to me that she was more than just a little excited. We were both bundled up in multiple layers.

  As we rode along the beach, we discussed the suspect list the four of us had come up with yesterday. Like me, Alex had an active mind that worked a problem from all the various angles until she was able to make sense of things.

  “Based on what we know, I still feel like Bobby and Daniel make the best suspects,” Alex voiced her opinion. “However, if Tyson was spending time with both Tessa and Victoria, that seems to give Roderick a motive as well.”

  “I agree. I can see how he might be upset that this man, who is obviously a player, would be hitting
on his daughter and his date.”

  “I know Zak didn’t think it was him, and maybe it wasn’t, but in my mind, he should still be on the list,” she insisted.

  “I agree. What do you think about Walter as a suspect? He doesn’t seem to have a specific motive, but he has been drunk the entire time he’s been here, and people under the influence of alcohol, can be impulsive and do things they might not otherwise do.”

  Alex paused. I imagine she was thinking it over. “I haven’t been around Walter much at all, and I haven’t heard a lot of gossip about any motives he might have, but I agree about the influence of alcohol. Personally, I would add him to the list.”

  “I’m not sure if Zak added him when we were coming up with our list yesterday, but if not, I do think I’ll add him when we get back. Buford too.”

  Alex turned and looked at me. “Buford is the bartender?”

  “Yes. He tended bar and helped to serve dinner,” I answered.

  “Why do you think he is a suspect?”

  “No particular reason except it seemed to me that Tyson spent more time with him than anyone else. Perhaps there was a reason for that. When I was first introduced to Tyson, he’d been discussing a text with Buford. Maybe there was something significant about the text that we don’t know about.”

  “Makes sense to me. Anyone else?”

  “Not that I can think of offhand.” I adjusted my position in the saddle.

  “What about the female suspects?” Alex asked. “I know you said that it would have been hard for someone to have stabbed Tyson in the back from the angle at which he was stabbed unless they were at least as tall as he was, but let’s consider the motives for the female guests anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  “According to what you told us yesterday, Heidi came to the castle with Tyson, but it sounds as if once they arrived, he gave her the brush off.”

  “That is correct.” I pulled in my horse just a bit since he had started to trot, and this conversation demanded a nice gentle walk.

  “The rumor you shared with Nona, Zak, and me is that Heidi and Tyson were just friends, but were they? Could Heidi have actually hoped for more? And even if they were just friends, and Heidi didn’t have a romantic interest in Tyson, she couldn’t have been happy about coming to the castle thinking she had a room to stay in, and then being told by her roomie that he had a better offer and she needed to make other plans.”

  “I agree,” I smiled at Alex, who had obviously given some thought to the discussion we’d had as a group the previous day. “You do make a good argument for Heidi being upset by the series of events. I’m not sure she would be upset enough to kill the man, but I can see that she would have had reason to be angry.”

  “And then there’s Hillary,” Alex continued. “The rumor you heard was that she had an on-again/off-again thing going with Tyson, but I have to wonder if that was on both parts, or just on his. Could she have been secretly harboring deeper feelings for Tyson and been upset that he was chatting up the other women in the room the night of the dinner?”

  “So, you think that when Maeve saw Tyson and Hillary in the arboretum, she might have been complaining to him about the amount of attention he was paying to other female guests?”

  “I think it’s a possibility. If the rumor about Heidi being just a friend is correct, I wonder why Tyson brought her in the first place. It seems that Tyson was a popular sort, who could easily come up with a plus one who would have something other than friendship on her mind.”

  Alex made a good point. If Tyson was the sort to flutter from flower to flower as Maeve indicated, why would he have brought someone who was just a friend to the wedding?

  “Does anyone else come up as a suspect in your mind?” I asked.

  “You said that Tyson was seen chatting with both Tessa and Victoria. That was the reason used for Roderick being a suspect. But you also said that most of the family members, as well as the wedding party, had previously met at the engagement party.”

  “Yes. Carolina mentioned that she’d met Tyson at the engagement party, and it sounded like other family members and close friends were there as well.”

  “So, what if Tyson met Tessa and/or Victoria at the engagement party and they entered into a flirtation of sorts? What if one or both of these women came to the castle expecting to take up where they left off, but Tyson had moved on to other women?”

  I brushed a wisp of hair from my face. “Wow. You’ve really thought about this.”

  “I have. Nona fell asleep early, and I was bored, so I decided to make my own suspect list after the four of us had spoken.”

  “Did you come to any conclusions?” I wondered.

  “Not really. As we discussed, Bobby and Daniel do make the best suspects, but Bobby came back to the castle yesterday and helped serve the dinner, so the local police must have released him. I assume they wouldn’t have released him if they didn’t believe he was innocent. I didn’t notice if Daniel returned.”

  “I didn’t see him, but since Hillary went to dinner with the others, she wasn’t at the castle last night. If he really was there just to keep an eye on her and since he lives in the village, he may have figured there was no reason to come back to the castle after his interview.”

  “I guess that’s true. There are a lot of interesting ways to look at the situation, and I know that it isn’t really up to us to figure this out, but I am interested.”

  I smiled. “Me too. I’ve gone over things again and again in my mind. The idea that there may have been a pair of killers complicates things. I can see Daniel being angry enough to kill Tyson, but who would he pair up with? Certainly not Hillary if she was still seeing Tyson on the side as the rumors indicate.”

  “Unless Tyson was caught with someone else, which made Hillary mad,” Alex pointed out. “Let’s not forget that Tyson was seen chatting up both Tessa and Victoria. We discussed the fact that his flirting might have angered her.”

  “That’s true.” I pulled on the reins and brought my horse to a stop. The sun was just about to peek over the horizon. It was a beautiful morning. The heavy clouds had cleared, leaving behind wispy remnants, which were sure to brighten the sky with tendrils of red. The air was still, and the waves lazily lapped onto the beach, which contrasted sharply with the pounding waves we’d experienced when we’d first arrived.

  “This is really breathtaking,” Alex gasped as the sky turned red.

  “It really is. I’m glad there was a break in the weather so we could experience this.”

  Alex pointed to a location down the beach. “Someone is coming.”

  I looked in the direction she pointed. “It looks like Titan, so I am going to guess the rider is Lord Dunphy.”

  We waited for him to arrive.

  “I see that you’ve found my favorite spot to watch the sunrise,” he said.

  “We have. It’s beautiful,” I answered.

  “You were lucky to be here on such a perfect morning. We have a lot of overcast days on this part of the coast, so we don’t always get to enjoy the sunrise, but today was exceptional.”

  We sat in silence for a while and watched the sun climb into the sky.

  “So, what do you have planned today?” he asked after a while.

  “We’re going to the Christmas Market in the village. I guess Nona arranged for a van.”

  “She did request transportation. I’ve scheduled the van to be out front at eleven to take anyone who wants to go into the village today.”

  “And then the ball is tonight,” Alex added. “I’m really looking forward to that.”

  “It should be a wonderful event,” Lord Dunphy agreed. “Although, Mother has been going on and on about the lack of poinsettias in the ballroom. It seems to me that with all the decorations we already have, live plants aren’t necessary, but I guess I’ll have to have some brought in, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I glanced at Alex and winked. Lord Dunphy’s mother had been dead fo
r ten years.

  “It seems to me that the entire castle is decorated perfectly,” I said. “I think I have to agree with you that the additional plants really aren’t necessary.”

  “Thank you,” Lord Dunphy said. “Maybe if you see Mother, you can tell her that.”

  “The whole place really feels like a fairy castle,” Alex agreed.

  “That’s what I thought,” Lord Dunphy huffed out a breath. “But, as I’ve indicated, Mother has very particular tastes.” He glanced at the sky, which was filled with sunshine now. “I suppose I should get back. I have an appointment to meet with the inspector about the footprints you found yesterday. We are hoping that we can match shoe sizes to staff or guests who were at the castle at the time of the murder.”

  “Even if you can figure out who made the prints, will you be able to prove that the people belonging to the prints were the ones who killed Tyson?” Alex asked.

  “No. In fact, matching sizes won’t necessarily prove who made the prints, but it will give us a path of investigation. Enjoy the rest of your ride.”

  Alex and I watched Lord Dunphy ride away and then started back ourselves.

  “The footprints we found seemed significant when we found them, but the truth is that the pathway we explored isn’t one that’s used often, and the tunnels are protected from the rain and the wind,” Alex pointed out. “It may be that the prints were left months ago by some other guest who found the hidden entrance and was curious.”

  “I guess that’s true,” I admitted. “But, as I’ve said in the past, it isn’t really our job to figure that out. Let’s head back and have some breakfast. I’m starving.”

  Chapter 7

  “I’m Cain. I’ll be your driver today.” A man standing in front of the van introduced himself later that morning.

  “I’m Zoe.” I looked at the baby in my arms. “This is my daughter, Catherine.” I glanced to my left. “And my husband, Zak; daughter, Alex; and grandmother, Nona.” I chose not to explain the relationship tags assigned to Alex and Nona. The man was a stranger, and I’d pretty much decided it was easier just to skip the explanation about honorary titles.