Death of an Irish Mummy

Book 3: Dublin Driver Mysteries

by Catie Murphy

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Squiring a self-proclaimed heiress around Dublin has got limo driver Megan Malone's Irish up—until she finds the woman dead . . .



American-born Cherise Williams believes herself to be heir to an old Irish earldom, and she's come to Dublin to claim her heritage. Under the circumstances, Megan's boss Olga at Leprechaun Limos has no qualms about overcharging the brash Texas transplant for their services. Megan chauffeurs Cherise to the ancient St. Michan's Church, where the woman intends to get a wee little DNA sample from the mummified earls—much to the horror of the priest.



But before she can desecrate the dead, Cherise Williams is murdered—just as her three daughters arrive to also claim their birthright. With rumors of famine-era treasure on the lands owned by the old Williams family and the promise of riches for the heirs, greed seems a likely motive. But when Olga surprisingly becomes the Garda's prime suspect, Megan attempts to steer the investigation away from her boss and solve the murder with the help of the dashing Detective Bourke. With a killer who's not wrapped too tight, she'll need to proceed with caution—or she could go from driving a limo to riding in a hearse . . .

Release date: June 29, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

The body lay in a coffin eighteen inches too small, its legs broken and folded under so it would fit.

Megan stood on her tiptoes, peering down at it in fascinated horror. Dust-gray and naturally mummified, the body in the box, nicknamed “the Crusader,” must have been a giant—especially for his era—while he lived, some eight hundred years ago. How he’d come to rest in the crypt at St. Michan’s Church in Dublin was beyond Megan’s ken.

Next to him, in a better-fitted coffin, lay someone missing both feet and his right hand. Megan didn’t quite dare ask if he’d gone into the grave that way or if his parts had been . . . misplaced . . . over the centuries. Given that there was a tiny woman called “the Nun” lying beside them both, Megan assumed nobody in ancient, Catholic Ireland would have had the nerve to liberate the fellow of his limbs under her supervision. The fact that he was buried here, in the church, suggested he’d been a decent sort of fellow in life, although he was known, according to both the tour guide and the plaques in the crypt, as “the Thief.” The final body, a woman, was referred to only as “the Unknown,” which, Megan felt, just figured.

“Are any of these the earl?” A brash American voice bounced off the crypt’s limestone walls and echoed unpleasantly in the small bones of Megan’s ears. She, being Texas-born and not quite three years in Ireland, knew from brash Americans. Cherise Williams fell squarely into that bracket. Megan had been driving Mrs. Williams around Dublin for two days, and recognized the brief, teeth-baring grimace the young tour guide exhibited after only knowing the woman for ten minutes.

Like Megan had done dozens of times herself, the guide turned his grimace into a smile as he shook his head. “No, ma’am, the earls are interred, but not among the mummies on display. As you can imagine, the church can hardly condone breaking open coffins to admire the mummies, so those we see here are . . .”

He hesitated just briefly, and Megan, unable to help herself, suggested, “Free-range?”

The poor kid, who was probably twenty years Megan’s junior, gave her a startled glance backed by horror. As he struggled to control his expression, Megan realized the horror was at the fear he might burst out laughing, although he managed to keep his voice mostly under control as he said, “Em . . . well, yes. Free-range would . . . yes, you could say that. I wouldn’t,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself, “but you could. Their coffins have slipped, decayed, or been damaged over the centuries, and in those cases we’ve chosen not to . . .” He shot Megan another moderately appalled look, but went along with her analogy. “Not to re-cage them, as it were.”

“But I need the earl’s DNA,” Mrs. Williams said in stentorian tones.

“Yes, ma’am, but you understand I can’t just open a coffin at the behest of every visitor to the vault—”

“Well, what about one of these?” Mrs. Williams made an impatient gesture at the wall, where nooks and vaults held crumbling coffins of various sizes, and the floor, where a variety of wooden coffins had succumbed enough to age that mummified legs and arms poked out here or there.

“Yes, ma’am, some of these are the earls of Leitrim, but—”

“Well, let me have one, then! I only need a sample. It’s not as if I’m going to carry an entire skeleton out of here in my handbag, young man; don’t be absurd.”

The kid cast Megan a despairing glance. She responded with a sigh, taking one step closer to Cherise Williams. “We’d better be leaving soon to get to your two p.m. appointment, Mrs. Williams. The one you’re meant to be speaking with officials about this, instead of a tour guide. You know how difficult it is for young men to say no to the ladies. We wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.” She wanted to say it was difficult for young men to say no to women who reminded them of their mothers, but Cherise Adelaide Williams wore her sixty-three years like a well-bandaged wound and seemed like the sort who could imagine no one thought her old enough to be a twenty-year-old’s mom.

Just like that, the guide’s gaze softened into a sparkle and he bestowed an absolutely winsome smile on Mrs. Williams. His voice dropped into a confiding murmur as he offered her his arm, which she took without hesitation. “Sure and she’s right, though, ma’am. It’s breaking me own heart to see the distress in yer lovely blue eyes, but if I lose this job it’s me whole future gone, yis know how it is. It’s true university’s not as dear in Ireland as I hear it is back in the States, but when you’re a lad all alone, making his own way in the world, it’s dear enough so. I’d be desperate altogether without the good faith of the brothers at St. Michan’s and I know a darling woman like yourself would never want to see a lad lost at sea like.” He escorted her toward and up the stairway, both of them ducking under the stone arch that led to the graveyard. He laid the Irish on so thick as they mounted the rough stone stairs that Megan lifted her feet unnecessarily high as she followed them, like she might otherwise get some of the flattery stuck on her feet.

By the time she’d exited the steel cellar doors that led underground, the guide had jollied Mrs. Williams into smiles and fluttering eyelashes. “We have a minute, don’t we?” she cooed at Megan. “Peter here wants to show me the church’s interior. Maybe I can convince the pastor”—The tour guide bit his tongue to stop himself correcting Mrs. Williams on the topic of priests versus pastors, an act of restraint Megan commended him for—“to let me have a finger bone or something, instead of going through all this bothersome legal nonsense.”

“Of course, Mrs. Williams.” Megan could imagine no scenario in which that would happen, but she followed the flutterer and the flatterer into the church.

Parts of St. Michan’s Church looked magnificently old from the exterior. Its foundation dated from Dublin’s Viking era, and a tower and partial nave had survived since the seventeenth century. They looked like it, too, all irregular grey stones and thick mortar. The rest of the nave had been repaired with concrete blocks that, to Megan’s eye, could have been as recent as the 1970s, although apparently they were actually from the early 1800s. She expected the interior to be equally old-fashioned, but its clean, cream walls and dark pews looked as modern as any church she’d ever seen. Arched stained glass windows let light spill in, and a pipe organ—one that Handel, composer of the Messiah, had evidently played on—dominated one end of the nave. Megan shook her head, astonished at the contrast with the narrow halls and sunken nooks of the crypts below.

But Dublin was like that, as she’d slowly discovered over the years she’d lived there. Modern constructions sat on top of ancient sites, and builders were forever digging up the remains of Viking settlements when they started new projects. Even this church, well over three hundred years old, was predated by the original chapel, built a thousand years ago. According to the literature, the ground had been consecrated five hundred years before that.

Any temples or building sites that old in the States had been razed to the ground, and all the people who’d used them, murdered, around about the same time St. Michan’s had been built.

“Cheerful,” Megan told herself, under her breath. Peter the tour guide had introduced Mrs. Williams to the priest, who currently had the look of a man weathering a storm. He actually leaned toward Mrs. Williams a little, as if bracing himself against the onslaught of her determination, and if he’d had more hair, Megan would have imagined she could see it waving in Mrs. Williams’s breeze. He had to be in his seventies, with a slim build that had long ago gone wiry, and a short beard on a strong jaw that looked like it had held a line in many arguments more important than this one.

“—grandfather, the Earl of Leitrim—” Cherise Williams persisted in saying Lye-trum, though the Irish county was pronounced Leetrim. Megan—a fellow Texan—couldn’t tell if Williams didn’t know how it was said, or if her accent simply did things to the word that weren’t meant to be done. Everyone who had encountered the Lye-trum pronunciation had repeated Leetrim back with increasing firmness and volume, while also somehow being slightly too polite to directly correct the error. So far the attempted corrections hadn’t taken, leaving Megan to suspect the other Texan didn’t hear a difference in what she said and what everyone else did.

The priest had interrupted with a genuinely startled, “Your great-grandfather?” and Mrs. Williams simpered, putting her hand out like she expected it to be kissed.

“That’s right. I’m the heir to the Earldom of Lyetrum.”

The tour guide and the priest both shot Megan glances of desperate incredulity while Mrs. Williams batted her eyelashes. Megan widened her eyes and shrugged in response. A week earlier she hadn’t known Leitrim (or anywhere else in Ireland, for that matter) had ever had any earls. Then Mrs. Williams, styling herself Countess Williams, had called to book a car with Leprechaun Limos, the driving service Megan worked for. Megan’s boss, who was perhaps the least gullible person Megan had ever met, had taken the self-styled countess at her word and charged her three times the usual going rate for a driver. Megan had looked up the earls of Leitrim, and been subjected to Mrs. Williams’s explanation more than once since she’d collected her up at the airport. In fact, Mrs. Williams had launched into it again, spinning a fairy tale that drew the priest and Peter’s attention back to her.

“—never knew my great-grandfather, of course, and my granddaddy died in the war, but his wife, my granny Elsie, she used to tell a few stories about Great-Granddaddy, because she knew him before he died. She said he always did sound Irish as the day was long, and how he used to tell tall tales about being a nobleman’s son. We’d play at being princesses and knights, when we were little, because we believed we had the blood of kings.” Mrs. Williams dipped a hand into a purse large enough to contain the Alamo and extracted a small book, its yellowed pages thick with age and a faded blue-floral print fabric cover held shut with a tarnished gold lock. The key dangled from a thin, pale red ribbon tucked between the pages, and Mrs. Williams deftly slid it around to open the book with. She opened it to well-worn pages and displayed it to a priest and a tour guide who clearly had no idea of, and less genuine interest in, what they were looking at.

“Granny Elsie never seemed to take it at all seriously, but after she died we found this in her belongings. It’s all the stories Great-Granddaddy Patrick used to tell her, right down to the place he was the earl of, Lyetrum. She said he never wanted to go back because of all the troubles there, but that was then and this is now, isn’t it! So all I need is a bit of one of the old earls’ bones, so I can prove I’m the heir, you see?”

As if against his will, the priest said, “What about your father?”

Creases fell into Cherise Williams’s face, deep lines that cut through her makeup and drew the corners of her mouth down. “Daddy died a long time ago, and the Edgeworth name went with him. If I’d only known it meant something, of course, I’d have kept it, but when I got married I changed my name. Everyone did in those days. But my girls and I, we’re the last of the Edgeworth blood. My middle daughter, Raquel, is coming in this afternoon to be with me for all of this. We meant to fly together, but there was an emergency at work.” She turned a tragic, blue-eyed gaze on Megan, who was surprised to be remembered. “Ms. Malone is going to get her at the airport while I speak with the people at vital statistics about getting a DNA sample from the mummies here, aren’t you, Ms. Malone?”

“I am, ma’am.” Megan was reasonably certain the Irish version of vital statistics was called something else, but neither she nor the two Irish-born men in the church seemed inclined to correct Cherise on the matter. “And I don’t mean to pressure you, Mrs. Williams, but we really should be going. I’d hate to be late collecting Ms. Williams.”

Cherise Williams gave the priest one last fluttering glance of shy hope, but he, sensing rescue, remained resolute. “I do dearly hope you find what you need at the Central Statistics Office, Mrs. Williams.”

“I’m sure I shall.” Mrs. Williams sniffed and tossed her artistically graying hair. “I’m told the Irish love to be accommodating, and no one can resist the Williams charm.” She swept out of the church, leaving Megan to exchange a weak, wry glance with two Irish people who had proven neither accommodating nor susceptible to the Williams charm. Then she hastened out in Mrs. Williams’s wake, scurrying to reach the car quickly enough to open the door for her client. “I can’t imagine why they couldn’t just—” Mrs. Williams waved a hand as she settled into the vehicle. “Surely a little finger bone wouldn’t be missed.”

“Well,” Megan said as gently as she could, as she got into the Lincoln’s front seat, “I suppose we’d have to think about how we would feel if someone wanted to just take a finger bone from our grandfather’s hand.”

“That’s just it!” Mrs. Williams proclaimed. “He is my grandfather! Or one of them is. The last earl was my great-granduncle, so it’s his father who was my direct ancestor.”

“But your immediate grandpa. The one who was married to Grandma Elsie.” Megan pulled out into traffic, albeit not much of it. The River Liffey lay off to their right, beyond the light-rail Luas tracks, and she forbore to mention that Mrs. Williams would probably get to Rathmines, where her appointment with the vital statistics office was, faster on the tram than in Megan’s car.

“No one would want Granddaddy’s finger!” Mrs. Williams replied, shocked. “What a horrible idea, Ms. Malone. What on earth could you be thinking, suggesting somebody go and steal Granddaddy’s finger!”

“My apologies, Mrs. Williams,” Megan said, straight-faced. “I can’t imagine what got into me.” She drove them across the tracks and pulled onto the quays (a word she still had trouble saying keys), offering bits of information about the scenery when Cherise Williams had to pause for breath while scolding her for the imaginary sin of violating the sanctity of her poor sainted grandfather’s body. “Here’s Ha’penny Bridge. It was the first bridge across the Liffey, and cost a ha’penny to cross—up there is Trinity College, I suppose it’s possible the earls of Leitrim were educated there—entering the old Georgian center of Dublin, made popular when the Duke of Leinster moved to the unfashionable southern side of the city—”

“To be a duchess,” Mrs. Williams sighed. “Now wouldn’t that be something?”

“Countess is more than most of us can hope to aspire to.” Megan smiled at the woman in the rearview mirror, and Mrs. Williams, evidently assuaged, listened to the rest of Megan’s tour-guide spiel in comparative silence. Half a block from the clunky-looking statistics office building, Megan broke off to say, “Now, I just want to verify, Mrs. Williams, that I’ll be bringing Ms. Williams back to your hotel, and you’ll be meeting us there? You’re certain you don’t need me to collect you here at the office?”

“I’m sure, honey. You go get Raquel and I’ll see you tomorrow morning when we drive up to Lyetrum.”

Megan, wincing, said, “Leitrim,” under her breath and pulled in under the ugly statistics building to let Mrs. Williams out. “You have the company’s number if you decide you need a lift. Don’t be afraid to use it.”

“Thanks, honey. Oh! And you take my extra room key, so Ray-ray can go right in.” Mrs. Williams handed the key over, despite Megan’s protestations, and disappeared inside the building. Megan, letting out a breath of relief, drove out to the airport in blissful silence, not even turning the radio on. Raquel Williams’s flight was almost an hour late, so Megan got a passingly decent coffee and a truly terrible croissant from one of the airport cafés, and sat beside arrivals to wait for her client.

She would have known Raquel as Cherise’s daughter even if Raquel hadn’t waved when she saw Megan’s placard. She was taller than her mother, with rich auburn hair that didn’t match her eyebrows, but with the same strong facial shape that Cherise had. Her hair was worn in a much looser, more modern style than Cherise’s hair-sprayed football helmet, but otherwise she was her mother’s younger doppelgänger, down to the pronunciation of Leitrim. She swept up to Megan, said, “Hi, I’m Raquel Williams, the heir apparent to Lyetrum, and I just can’t wait to see this whole darn gorgeous Emerald Isle.”

“Megan Malone. It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Williams. I’ve dropped your mother off at—”

“Oh my gosh, you’re American too! Are you from Texas?” Raquel leaned across the barrier to hug Megan, who stiffened in surprise and found an awkward smile for the other woman.

“I am, yes. From Austin. And here’s your room key, from your mother.”

“Oh, wasn’t that nice of her? And woo-hoo! Keep Austin weird, honey! I live there now myself, but Mama’s from El Paso. Who’d have ever thought an earl would settle in Texas, huh?” Raquel Williams tucked the key in a pocket and came around the barrier rolling a suitcase large enough to pack three-quarters of a household into and wrangling a huge purse along with a carry-on. “Not that he did right away, of course. It was New York first, but when his son died in the war, he took sick and Gigi Elsie—that’s his daughter-in-law, our great-great-grandma Elsie—took him down to El Paso, where she’d always wanted to live, and heck fire, here we are. How’s Mama?”

Megan smiled. “She’s just fine. Visiting the statistics office now in hopes of getting permission to get a DNA test done on one of the mummies. I’ll take this, if you like, ma’am.” She nodded toward the enormous suitcase.

“Oh heck fire, sure thing, but you’d better call me Raquel or you’ll have me feeling old as sin.” Raquel swung the suitcase Megan’s way and smiled. “I’ve never been out of Texas before, this is all a big old adventure for me. How did you end up here?”

“I had citizenship through my grandfather, so they couldn’t keep me out.” Megan smiled again and gestured for Raquel to walk along with her as they headed for the hired cars parking lot. “Not quite as fancy as a connection to the earls of Leitrim, but it’s worked for me.”

“Leetrim? Oh my gosh, is that how they say it here? We’ve had it all wrong all this time! Won’t Mama have a laugh!” Raquel chattered merrily, her Texan accent washing over Megan in a more familiar, friendly way than her mother’s did, as they reached the car and drove back to Dublin. Raquel peppered her with questions about the scenery, Leitrim’s history—Megan wasn’t much help there—and whether the Irish were really as superstitious as she’d heard.

“It’s not that they’re superstitious,” Megan said with a smile. “It’s that you wouldn’t really want to build a road through a fairy ring, would you?”

Laughter pealed from the back seat. “Gotcha, right. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but are we almost there? I forgot to use the ladies’ before I left the airport.”

“Just a few more minutes, and you can run right in to use the toilets in the lobby while I get your luggage,” Megan promised.

Raquel breathed, “Thank goodness,” and, a few minutes later when they arrived, did just that. She met Megan at the hotel’s front doors, an apologetic smile in place, afterward. “Thank goodness for public restrooms. Would you mind helping me bring the luggage up? I hate to bother—” She nodded at the bustling lobby, full of people already doing jobs.

“I don’t mind at all. It’s room four-oh-three.” They took the lifts up, Raquel in the lead as they entered a narrow hall with dark blue carpeting.

“Oh, isn’t this terrific, it’s so atmospheric, isn’t it?”

“A lot of Dublin is. Old buildings, lots of history. It’s one of the reasons I love it.”

“I can see why.” Raquel slipped the key in the door, and, pushing it open, smashed the corner into her dead mother’s hip.

Raquel screamed, the sound bouncing off concrete wall to come back at her full-force. She dropped to her knees, grabbing Cherise Williams’s body, and Megan swayed as the screams’ echoes bounced around the small bones of her ears. There were a few words in Raquel’s cries—Mama? Mama? Mama, wake up! Mama, no!—bu. . .