‘Well, the poor woman has been on the phone half the night bawling her eyes out and talking to your mother so she might be too tired to hack you up just at the minute.’
Molly closed her eyes and concentrated on feeling terrible. Her mother. Her aunt. Her ex-fiancé. Her former best friend. God, she had made a hash of things.
‘Oh, Pohraig,’ she said, her eyes flying open and filling with tears. ‘I’ve got this terrible hex and it’s making me do the most awful things.’
He moved up the bed closer to her and brought out his stunning bloody fingers again, wiping away her tears.
‘There’s no such thing as a hex, Molly,’ he said in that melty voice that made her feel gooey inside. ‘Things just aren’t necessarily what they seem.’
‘Don’t go all priestly on me, Pohraig — it’s true,’ she said, angrily.
Pohraig used his smooth brown fingers to hold one hand over Molly’s mouth and snuff out her complaining.
‘Before you start giving out to me and I open the door to the queues of people piling up to throttle you, Molly Brown, there are a couple of things you need to know.’
Molly sank back into her pillows and rolled her eyes.
‘Righty-ho, then, Father. Give me all you’ve got,’ she said, although it didn’t sound like that coming through his fingers.
‘First,’ he said, ‘I’m not a priest.’
Pohraig, she suddenly realised, had swapped his dog collar for a black polo neck.
‘And second, I’m not your cousin.’
It was a most fetching polo neck too, she thought, as his words swirled around her and seeped into her, warming her up. A lot.
‘Gerry O’Reilly is my uncle and he’s been running this agency of his since the Virgin Mary stopped appearing here about 10 years ago. It was my mother she first appeared to, actually.’ Pohraig slowly took his hand away from Molly’s mouth, his eyes never leaving hers. He waited to see if she was going to say anything, interrupt him, but she didn’t, so he kept going.
‘The whole place would have gone down the gurgler, or so he thought, but they had this book where all the visiting foreigners had written down the relatives they were looking for so Gerry decided to find them.’
Molly leaned back, her mouth hanging open.
‘Turns out, however, the actual relatives are a bit hard to come by so Gerry talked the good folk of the village into stepping into the shoes of these long-lost loved ones for the purposes of an emotional reunion and sending a few extra pounds Ballymahoe’s way.’
Pohraig searched Molly’s eyes for any signs of reaction but there were none.
‘We’re usually on a rotate and every now and then according to some crazy system Gerry has going you have to show up as a priest or a nun. I hate doing it, with a passion. I normally run a mile. I don’t even live here, Molly. I’m in Dublin. But this time it was supposed to be Thomas Aquinas Ginty’s turn only he arrived back pissed as a lord’s bastard from the city with a four-letter word tattooed on his cheek. So then Gerry calls my mother, she calls me, there’s a lot of shouting and carrying-on and here I am. Molly, are you even listening to me?’
Molly’s eyes had glazed over. He’s not a priest and he’s not your cousin, she was telling herself at a small impromptu party she was throwing behind closed doors. Who needs the details? He’s not a priest and he’s not your cousin.
‘You’re not a priest and you’re not my cousin? Definitely?’ She looked into the green pools of his eyes and resisted the urge to dive.
‘No, Molly, I’m not. Definitely.’
She smiled drippily, but something was scratching at the door of her mind. Someone at her party was causing a fuss.
‘The wedding!’ she said. ‘Why were you at the wedding? Why did everyone treat you so strangely? Priestly, even?’
Pohraig’s eyes clouded over.
‘I was engaged to be married to Andrew’s sister, Niamh,’ he said quietly, ‘but she disappeared two years ago, just a week before our own wedding.’
‘She disappeared?’ Molly asked, incredulous. ‘As in was kidnapped?’
‘She disappeared,’ said Pohraig looking uncomfortable, ‘as in with the financial controller of the computer firm we worked for. They were killed in a car accident in Wales, that day, driving to London. That’s how I found out she’d gone. When the police rang me because I was still listed as her next of kin. You were sitting on her grave outside the church,’ he said sadly.
He fell silent and Molly, too, was speechless. She hadn’t been sitting on the poor bugger’s mother at the graveyard after all. It was his fiancée. His cheating fiancée! His dead cheating fiancée!
‘But why did you …?’ she eventually couldn’t help asking. ‘That night? When you said you couldn’t? You don’t?’
‘I hadn’t seen anyone since her, Molly. Hadn’t really been with anyone. Properly. I’ve had trouble with, oh, you know, women, since then.’
Molly felt her heart plummet.
‘There’s a pill for that now, though,’ she remembered, encouraged.
‘Not that sort of trouble,’ Pohraig said slowly. ‘Trouble in general. Trouble with trusting them. Trouble with liking them. Trouble with wanting to see them again.’
‘Well, there’s probably a pill for that too,’ Molly said, getting the picture. ‘Or an operation, anyway.’
‘And then there you were,’ Pohraig looked into her eyes again. ‘Sitting in the back of that church crying your heart out, which was probably what I would have been doing if Andrew hadn’t asked me to be his best man, and I just looked at you and sort of fell …’ he fizzled out.
‘Don’t mention falling,’ Molly joked nervously. Fell over, fell out, fell in? she asked herself.
‘But then I freaked out and couldn’t handle it and left you there and then didn’t think of anything else until I walked into Brendan’s pub last night and it was you. God, I couldn’t believe it. And the face on you!’ He shook his head.
‘Well it’s not every day one realises one has the hots for a man of the cloth to whom one is also closely related,’ Molly pointed out. ‘I think one deserves to have a face on her in those conditions.’
‘I’ve been telling Gerry for years that he’s pushing it on the priest thing but the old bastard truly gets such a kick out of watching people find out there’s a religious person in the family. I think he’s addicted to it.’
‘Well, I can see how a more religious family than ours would certainly appreciate it,’ agreed Molly, wondering if Pohraig was ever going to kiss her.
‘Your aunt reads differently on paper, is what he told me. A single woman, 50-ish, from New York? They mostly don’t look like that. It’s time he pulled the plug on O’Rellys anyway. The world is just too small these days.’
Well, if he’s not going to kiss me, thought Molly: ‘Who is Mary Rose?’
‘Oh, she’s Nell’s daughter, actually. She has two little boys, Connie and Joe, both at school now, I think, and some shite of a husband living the high life in London. She did a grand job keeping Viv company through the night. Speaking of which,’ he said, ‘I should really let her know you have woken up so she can put you to sleep again, permanently.’
Pulling one flannel-clad arm out from under the bedclothes, Molly clutched at Pohraig’s arm.
‘Right now?’ she asked, unintentionally husky. ‘Do you have to?’
If he turns those bloody pools of his towards me one more time without a kiss, she thought, I’m going to poke them out with a stick.
Epilogue
Molly and Pohraig were laughing over one of the computers when Bobs came in with a tray of steaming coffees.
‘That Brendan next door’s been hiding a bloody great cappuccino machine all this time,’ she said, unloading the coffees. ‘I had to wrestle it out from the back room but it makes the most delicious drinks. Gerry will do his ’nana, apparently, but I’m up for it.’
She sank onto one of the office chairs and peered at the screen
the two were working on.
‘Any sign of him?’
‘Not a bloody clue!’ chirruped Molly. ‘A person has never been so missing.’ She elbowed her husband. ‘Put to good use Pohraig’s computer skills, my telephone manner and Gerry’s “networking” can find just about any ancient old auntie or uncle but when it comes to Tom Connor … of course, the mysterious disappearance of the “O” doesn’t help but actually Pohraig has a theory, don’t you, Pohraig?’
Still shy in the presence of his new mother-in-law, Pohraig avoided her gaze.
‘Spit it out, boyo, I won’t bite you,’ she laughed.
‘No, but you might nibble at him a bit,’ said Molly, collapsing with giggles.
‘It’s just that from analysing the letters,’ Pohraig said nervously, ‘and interviewing people from the area that knew of Kathleen and Michael and your grandparents — on both sides — there’s not a single soul can remember your brother Tom.’
‘But?’ Bobs wanted to know.
‘But,’ Pohraig said, frowning at Molly to stop her cackling, ‘your mother was apparently very fond of goats.’
Bobs choked on her coffee and slapped her cup down on the desk as she stood up and staggered about, bashing her own chest.
‘You’re not telling me?’ she gagged, still coughing. ‘Please don’t!’
‘There is talk of a favourite,’ Pohraig continued slowly, ‘whose name may or may not have been Tom.’
Molly became alarmed at her mother’s choking and rushed to her side, whereupon she realised the woman was actually roaring with laughter.
‘We came all this way to find Tom Connor, the goat?’ she finally spluttered.
Molly smiled and wrapped her arms around her wonderful mother, still shuddering with coughing and laughter.
‘Oh, we found much more than that,’ she said, smiling at Pohraig and nodding at the Polaroid of Viv and Mary Rose and the kids skiing in Aspen that was pinned to the noticeboard.
‘In fact, I think we’re doing just fine without him.’
About the Author
Sarah-Kate Lynch has been a journalist for nearly 20 years although, frankly, she looks far too young and gorgeous to have been toiling for quite so long. Her writing career started when she accidentally applied for a job on a newspaper as a teenager and finished when — oh, that’s right, it’s still going.
Sarah-Kate tries to live with her husband on the coast west of Auckland but as he insists on moving about the place to work, she goes too, the details of which can be read about in her column in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. Her first book, Stuff It! published in 1997, examined the sense in being on a diet for 25 years yet never getting thin. (There wasn’t any.)
Copyright
A BLACK SWAN BOOK
published by
Random House New Zealand
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand
www.randomhouse.co.nz
First published 2000
© 2000 Sarah-Kate Lynch
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 77553 362 7
Cover and text design: Sharon Grace, Grace Design
Cover photograph: Fleur Wickes
Printed in Australia
Sarah-Kate Lynch, Finding Tom Connor
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