An Early Wake Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING COUNTY CORK MYSTERIES

  Scandal in Skibbereen

  “Ireland itself becomes a character as Connolly adds description of the countryside and bits of history throughout the book . . . County Cork is surely a place you’d love to visit, and Sullivan’s a great spot for a pint of Guinness and a bit of gossip.”

  —Kings River Life Magazine

  “[A] well-set and nicely paced cozy.”

  —Library Journal

  “Connolly has created some wonderful characters . . . You can tell the author loves her setting and has researched it thoroughly. Her love for the Irish countryside just glows throughout the story.”

  —Escape with Dollycas into a Good Book

  “Once you fall for Connolly’s characters and the Irish beauty of the village of Leap, you might return for other reasons . . . Connolly’s descriptions are enough to make anyone plan a trip to County Cork.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  “The Irish countryside continues to enchant . . . Maura is a strong lead character, near perfect.”

  —MyShelf.com

  Buried in a Bog

  “Connolly’s latest is a captivating tale—sweet, nostalgic, and full of Irish charm, but also tightly plotted and full of twists, turns, and shocking reveals.”

  —The Maine Suspect

  “’Tis a grand thing . . .The prolific Sheila Connolly . . . pays tribute to her Irish heritage . . . Connolly invests this leisurely series opener with a wealth of Irish color and background.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “An exceptional read! Sheila Connolly has done it again with this outstanding book . . . A must read for those who have ever wanted to visit Ireland.”

  —Shelley’s Book Case

  “Full of charm and mystery . . . The locals are warm and welcoming and the central hub of the village, Sullivan’s Pub, is a slice of comfort. Throw in a dead body and a mugging in a nearby village and you have all the makings of a great whodunit.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Anyone with a trace of Irish in them, and all of us who wish we could claim an Irish connection, will welcome the first book in the County Cork series . . . And, with a country with Ireland’s history, there’s certain to be fascinating murders and mysteries to come.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  PRAISE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING ORCHARD MYSTERIES

  “Sheila Connolly’s Orchard Mysteries are some of the most satisfying cozy mysteries I’ve read . . . Warm and entertaining from the first paragraph to the last.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  “An enjoyable and well-written book with some excellent apple recipes at the end.”

  —Cozy Library

  “The mystery is intelligent and has an interesting twist . . . [A] fun, quick read with an enjoyable heroine.”

  —The Mystery Reader (four stars)

  “The premise and plot are solid, and Meg seems a perfect fit for her role.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fresh and appealing sleuth with a bushel full of entertaining problems. One Bad Apple is one crisp, delicious read.”

  —Claudia Bishop, author of the Hemlock Falls Mysteries

  “A delightful look at small-town New England, with an intriguing puzzle thrown in.”

  —JoAnna Carl, author of the Chocoholic Mysteries

  “A promising new mystery series. Thoroughly enjoyable.”

  —Sammi Carter, author of the Candy Shop Mysteries

  PRAISE FOR THE MUSEUM MYSTERIES

  “Sheila Connolly’s wonderful new series is a witty, engaging blend of history and mystery with a smart sleuth who already feels like a good friend.”

  —Julie Hyzy, New York Times bestselling author of the White House Chef Mysteries

  “[The] archival milieu and the foibles of the characters are intriguing, and it’s refreshing to encounter an FBI man who is human, competent, and essential to the plot.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “She’s smart, she’s savvy, and she’s sharp enough to spot what really goes on behind the scenes in museum politics. The practical and confident Nell Pratt is exactly the kind of sleuth you want in your corner when the going gets tough. Sheila Connolly serves up a snappy and sophisticated mystery.”

  —Mary Jane Maffini, author of the Charlotte Adams Mysteries

  “National Treasure meets The Philadelphia Story in this clever, charming, and sophisticated caper. When murder and mayhem become the main attractions at a prestigious museum, its feisty fundraiser goes undercover to prove it’s not just the museum’s pricey collection that’s concealing a hidden history. Secrets, lies, and a delightful revenge conspiracy make this a real page-turner!”

  —Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha Award–winning author of The Other Woman

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sheila Connolly

  Orchard Mysteries

  ONE BAD APPLE

  ROTTEN TO THE CORE

  RED DELICIOUS DEATH

  A KILLER CROP

  BITTER HARVEST

  SOUR APPLES

  GOLDEN MALICIOUS

  PICKED TO DIE

  Museum Mysteries

  FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

  LET’S PLAY DEAD

  FIRE ENGINE DEAD

  MONUMENT TO THE DEAD

  RAZING THE DEAD

  County Cork Mysteries

  BURIED IN A BOG

  SCANDAL IN SKIBBEREEN

  AN EARLY WAKE

  Specials

  DEAD LETTERS

  AN OPEN BOOK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  AN EARLY WAKE

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright © 2015 by Sheila Connolly.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-69818179-3

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / February 2015

  Cover illustration by Daniel Craig.

  Cover art: Celtic knots © Shutterstock; Vines © Leone_V/Shutterstock.

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Acknowledgments

  I first visited the pub Connolly’s of Leap over fifteen years ago, when it was run by Paddy McNicholl and his wife Eileen Connolly. It was only the second pub I’d visited in Ireland, but it’s been part of my life ever since, and it became the model for Sullivan’s in this series. Back when I first visited, it was renowned
for its music. Paddy was a musician, one of the founding members of a band called The Mighty Shamrocks, and he brought an extraordinary array of musicians to the place, where they played together in the narrow back room against the hillside. I was lucky enough to attend one of those events in that era. But when Paddy passed on a few years ago, the music stopped and the pub closed.

  Two years ago I was talking to Sam McNicholl, the son of Paddy and Eileen, and a musician himself. He told me then that he wanted to bring back the music. He certainly had the energy and enthusiasm to do so. Last year I stopped in and found the pub newly polished without losing any of its character, and now Sam’s only waiting on a few details (like licenses) for it to come back to life.

  And that’s where this story fell into my lap: this book is about bringing the music back. Memories are long in Ireland—and people remember the Connolly’s that was. They’ll come back. Like Sam said to me—and like Mick says to Maura in the book—it’s magic. That’s what I tried to capture here.

  Some elements that I’ve included here serve as a reminder that Ireland is a part of the modern world. But when the music comes back to Sullivan’s (or Connolly’s), it’s proof that the old ways survive as well.

  Of course, there are others who have contributed along the way. Eileen Connolly McNicholl has been generous with stories of the pub back in the day, and some of her details have crept into this book and others. Skibbereen Garda Sergeant Tony McCarthy continues to provide helpful details about how the gardaí actually work in Ireland (and it’s not quite like in the U.S.). As ever, if I’ve made procedural mistakes in this book, they are mine, not his.

  Thanks as always to my amazing agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, and my tireless editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez; to the wonderful writers’ community that provides so much support and encouragement, particularly Sisters in Crime and the Guppies; and to my blog sisters and brothers on Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen and Killer Characters. And to my husband and daughter, who love West Cork almost as much as I do.

  Contents

  Praise for Titles by Sheila Connolly

  Berkley Prime Crime Titles by Sheila Connolly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Is fada an bóthar nach mbíonn casadh ann.

  It’s a long road that has no turning.

  —IRISH PROVERB

  Chapter 1

  Maura Donovan looked at the piles of paper spread out on her well-worn kitchen table and despaired. For six months now she’d been running Sullivan’s, a small pub in a small town in County Cork, Ireland, and she had no idea if she’d made any money at all. She knew how to handle the day-to-day stuff like tending bar—she’d been doing that since she was legally old enough (and maybe a bit before), back in Boston where she’d grown up—but running a business was a different matter. At least it had been a good summer with nice weather, and the place had been well filled some nights. Not so well filled on others. She’d heard it was the poor economy everywhere that was keeping the tourists from other countries home watching their own pennies, but it was hard to get by with only the locals as customers. And even here in Leap there was plenty of competition, particularly from the inn across the street, plus the new bistro that just opened down the road—and even more competition in nearby Skibbereen, a thriving market town seven miles down the road and with ten times the population of Leap.

  All of which was why Maura had been putting off doing the numbers for Sullivan’s. She didn’t have a computer or spreadsheets—just invoices and bank statements and lots of scraps of paper with scrawls that she couldn’t even read. She had taken a couple of accounting classes back in Boston, but she’d never liked them and hadn’t paid a lot of attention then. She’d paid the salaries of her employees—Mick, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s daughter, Rose—but they were all part-time and worked erratic schedules, adjusting their hours from day to day or week to week. How her employees managed to live on what she paid them, she did not know, but closing down wasn’t an option: she was pretty sure Mick could find himself another job, but she had her doubts about Jimmy. Jimmy was good at bantering with customers but when it came time to swap out the kegs of Guinness or wash up on a busy night, he always seemed to disappear. Then there was his daughter, Rose, who’d only recently turned seventeen, a sweet, bright girl who had little future in the small village but no plans to leave her father to fend for himself. Good for Jimmy, bad for Rose. Worse, there were hardly any young people Rose’s age around: they’d all gone off looking for work in other places, not that Maura could blame them. The young men in particular seemed to have gone the farthest, not only to England or Spain but even to Australia.

  Maura wanted the girl to have a life of her own, but she couldn’t offer much guidance, certainly not based on her own patchy history. Besides, she was still learning the ins and outs of Irish culture, and maybe she was reading the situation all wrong. But she was pretty sure there had to be something better for Rose than pulling pints part-time in a shabby small-town pub and going home to fix supper for dear old dad. Rose was quite a good cook, based on what she’d brought in to share now and then. Maybe she could find work in a restaurant locally. There was some money in the region, Maura knew—a conference center had opened over in Rosscarbery and a newer one in Glandore just up the harbor a bit. People were coming to the area, and they had to eat, didn’t they? There were a few nice restaurants in Skibbereen. Rose should look to her future, rather than doing what Maura had done, which was drift along with no plan and no goals until her grandmother’s death had blasted her out of her rut and somehow landed her in Ireland.

  Well, now she was here, trying to scratch out a living, and responsible for employees. Maura herself took as little money out as she could, but even she had expenses, if only minimal ones.

  Her house, for example, she’d inherited outright six months earlier, along with the pub from Old Mick Sullivan, but no matter how much she scrimped, she still had to pay for electricity, and gas for cooking and heating. She hadn’t needed much heat yet, but that could change—she hadn’t even been in the country through a winter yet. She’d been told that it never got really cold in this part of Ireland—something about the ocean currents. She’d even seen palm trees here and there, which always startled her. Still, these old stone and stucco cottages were hard to keep warm. Was she supposed to be laying in peat—or turf, as they called it here—or wood? She could just see herself in the middle of a damp winter, huddling over a small pile of smoky burning moss, trying to keep warm. Not the life you imagined back in Boston, Maura.

  And then there was the car. She was driving an ancient Peugeot on an extended loan, somewhere short of a gift, from Bridget Nolan down the lane. But Maura couldn’t expect Bridget to pay upkeep on the car that had belonged to her late husband, and she didn’t like to take charity from anyone. She was happy to pay her own way and willing to work hard. But there was so much she didn’t know.

  Old Mick had kindly left her some money to tide her over when she took over the pub, but that wasn’t going to last much longer. Which left the whole mess in her lap. For a moment Maura looked
back on her days as a bar waitress with something like nostalgia: it sure was easier when all she’d had to do was show up and serve people, then collect a paycheck and some tips if she was lucky.

  Of course, she could walk away from Sullivan’s, if she couldn’t make the numbers work. What would be the point of staying open just to lose money? The real estate market in Ireland was still down, but the pub license had to be worth something, didn’t it? And it was hers to sell. She hadn’t yet run through all the money Old Mick had left to her; she could take that and go . . . anywhere. Except she didn’t know where to go. She didn’t feel any strong need to go back to Boston—now that Gran was gone, there was nothing for her there. And she had Jimmy and Rose and Mick depending on her, and she didn’t want to turn them out when there weren’t enough jobs to go around. And maybe the new owners wouldn’t be so kind to Old Billy Sheahan, a longtime friend of Old Mick’s and a fixture in the well-worn armchair by the pub fireplace, or maybe they’d tear down the place altogether and put in a shiny modern place of some sort and change the town. Maura sighed. Not easy being an owner. Maybe it got better with practice.

  She stretched, then checked her watch. Nearly ten a.m., and she should be opening the pub by ten thirty. Too late to start anything now, eh, Maura? she told herself. She stood up, pulled on a sweater hanging by the door, and went out the front door of her house.

  She had no near neighbors. At one end of the lane, where it petered out, there was a house that hadn’t been lived in for years, although the owners still kept sheep and cows on the pasture. The house on the other side of hers had been abandoned even longer, and she guessed it had been in ruins since before she was born. There were other, newer houses up the hill in front of her, and a few farther down the hill, not that she often saw the people who lived there. And then there was Bridget’s cottage, on the lane that led from the top to the bottom of the hill. Maura decided to stop in and say good morning before she left for the village.