The Deanes were fighters. Always were, always will be.”
“He’s not going to shoot me, is he?” Kate laughed.
“No, that was long ago.” Bernie winked. “You’ll be safe enough.”
When Kate arrived at the house, she was almost relieved there wasn’t a car in the drive, no answer when she knocked on the door. She’d sensed a setup in Bernie’s proposal. The last thing she needed was a romantic entanglement. She peered in the front window, saw a fiddle, an upright piano, an unlit fireplace. In a detached outbuilding, she glimpsed lines of pots, dripping with glaze the colors of the surrounding landscape—blues and lavenders, grays and pearls, greens and umbers—he must have made the bowl she liked at Bernie’s cottage. And in the corner, a sculpture: the curve of a woman’s torso and breast. Kate had never seen anything so beautiful.
“You’re not a burglar, are you?” Niall Maloney cycled up behind her.
She hadn’t heard him coming. His chain was well oiled, and he’d ridden straight over the turf, the wheel leaving a thin trail in the grass. She pressed a hand to her chest. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”
“My daughter lives up the road—though it seems I’m not the only one doing the sneaking,” he teased. The straw basket mounted on the handlebars held a bag of meat pies, the grease seeping into the paper, the smell of warm, fresh-baked pastry and beef making her hungry again. Sometimes her mother had made pasties when Kate was growing up, using her Butte Irish grandmother’s recipe.
“Here,” Niall said, insisting when she shook her head. “Have one.” He handed her a small turnover, more of an appetizer, really.
She took a bite, somewhat disappointed. Lu’s pies had been bigger, made the way her grandmother made them, crammed with potatoes—potatoes being all her ancestors could afford; the meat came later, when they were done with the mines and secured jobs aboveground at the power company, her grandfather working his way up from the mailroom, her mother the first to go to college, the mines still and silent now.
A wind came up off the sea, bent the grass and lupines to earth, let them go—on and on it went, the pressure, the release.
“What are you doing here?” Niall asked. “After some pottery for a souvenir?”
“I’m looking for Sullivan Deane.”
“The girls are always looking for Sullivan.” His eyes sparkled. “Lucky man.”
“It’s not like that—”
“It isn’t? And here I was hoping for a bit of gossip.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but Bernie asked me to find him,” she explained with a good-natured smile. “She said he has a computer.”
“What’s she need that for?”
“A project for the lace society.”
“Entering the modern age, is she?”
“Something like that.”
“My grandson knows computers. Works for a software company in Dublin. I don’t understand a thing he says when he starts going on and on about cyberspace. Might as well be speaking Greek. But he’s made a go of it. Took me for a ride in his fancy car last time he visited. Christmas it was. The young ones don’t come home often enough—which makes your being here even more of a novelty,” he said, adding, “How do you like our little village?”
“It’s a lovely place.”
“It is, isn’t it? I’ve lived here my whole life. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It’s important to have a place to call home. A place where people know you.” He scratched his chin. A scruff of silvery beard had started to grow. “You’re from Seattle, aren’t you? Were your people Irish?”
“Some of them.”
“No wonder you seem so at home here.”
“It’s hard not to be. Everyone has been so welcoming.” Well, almost everyone; she thought of Aileen and Father Byrne. “Do you know where Sullivan is?”
“I think he went to the market in Kinnabegs. It’s his day to sell the pottery.”
“Is it far?”
“It’s a thirty-minute cycle from here. One of the towns scattered along the coast, bigger than ours, gets more tourists, though not much,” he said. “Some of the best scenery in the area.”
She thanked him and set off again. Even if she didn’t find Sullivan Deane, she’d see more of the countryside. She supposed the place looked much as it had for centuries, an occasional standing stone breaking the low rolling hills, monuments to forgotten gods, a horse among the buttercupped fields, whinnying for a handout as she went by. She hummed to herself, her voice blending with the wind, the spinning of the wheels, and headed for the sea.
Kate skirted the bay with its