The Rising of the Moon Read online

  Sean grins at me. “Sure. It’s only Davy, and he’s a quiet one.”

  That seems to satisfy the cops, and Sean pours them each a glass.

  The bottle’s empty, so Sean says, “Bring us another, will you, Davy?”

  “Sure. No problem.” I manage to stand up and make my way over to the bar without stumbling over my own feet. Once there I can hold on to the bar while I retrieve another bottle of whiskey. The unimpaired part of my brain wonders who’s going to pay for the bottles, but the rest of it says, who cares? I carry the bottle back to the table, where it’s snatched away from me and passed around to refill the already empty glasses.

  This time I drink more slowly.

  Cop Number One, whose name badge reads “Joseph Ryan,” says, “Sean—those boys have been a thorn in our side since they first showed their ugly faces around here.”

  “Glad to be of help. We look after our own, don’t we?” Sean says. “Let them take their dirty business somewhere else. This is our neighborhood.”

  We all raise our glasses and drink to that.

  * * *

  “The Rising of the Moon” is a much-loved Irish ballad whose lyrics were written by John Keegan Casey (1846–70), and set to a much earlier tune. It first appeared in 1865, long after the events it commemorates: the outbreak of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, when a poorly armed group of Irish rebels stood up to the British Army—and lost. The song remains popular and the tune widely recognized in Ireland today, as it is often taught in schools, played regularly at official and sporting events, and has been covered by a wide variety of musicians.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  the first book in the new

  County Cork Mystery Series

  by Sheila Connolly,

  Buried in a Bog,

  coming in February 2013!

  1

  Maura Donovan checked her watch again. If she had it right, she had been traveling for over fourteen hours; she wasn’t going to reset it for the right time zone until she got where she was going, which she hoped would be any minute now. First the red-eye flight from Boston to Dublin, the cheapest she could find; then a bus from Dublin to Cork, then another, slower bus from Cork to Leap, a flyspeck on the map on the south coast of Ireland. But she was finding that in Ireland nobody ever hurried, especially on the local bus. The creaking vehicle would pull over at a location with no obvious markings, and people miraculously appeared. They greeted the driver by name; they greeted each other as well. Her they nodded at, wary of a stranger in their midst.

  She tried to smile politely in return, but she was exhausted. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She was on this rattletrap bus only because Gran had asked her to make the trip—just before she died, worn down from half a century of scrabbling to make a living and keep a roof over her granddaughter’s head in South Boston. Now that she thought about it, Gran had probably been planning this trip for her for quite a while. She had insisted that Maura get a passport, and not just any passport, but an Irish one, which was possible only because Gran had filed for an Irish Certificate of Foreign Birth for her when she was a child. What else had Gran not told her?

  And what else had she been too young and too selfish to ask about? Gran had never talked much about her life in Ireland, before she had been widowed and brought her young son to Boston, and Maura had been too busy trying to be American to care. She didn’t remember her father, no more than a large laughing figure. Or her mother, who after her father’s death had decided that raising a child alone, with an Irish-born mother-in-law, was not for her and split. It had always been just her and Gran, in a small apartment in a shabby triple-decker in a not-so-good neighborhood in South Boston.

  Which was where Irish immigrants had been settling for generations, so Maura was no stranger to the Boston Irish community. Maybe her grandmother Nora Donovan had never shoved the Ould Country down her throat, but there had been many a time that Maura had come home from school or from work and found Gran deep in conversation with some new immigrant, an empty plate in front of him. She’d taken it on herself to look out for the new ones, who’d left Ireland much as Gran had, hoping for a better life, or more money. The flow had slowed for a while when the Celtic Tiger—the unexpected prosperity that had swept the country and disappeared again within less than a decade—was raging, but then it had picked up again in the past few years.

  Maura suspected that Gran had been slipping the lads some extra cash, which would go a long way toward explaining why they’d never had the money to move out of the one-bedroom apartment they’d lived in as long as Maura could remember. Why Gran had worked more than one job, and why Maura had started working as early as the law would let her. Why Gran had died, riddled with cancer after waiting too long to see a doctor, and had left a bank account with barely enough to cover the last bills. Then the landlord had announced he was converting the building to condominiums, now that Southie was becoming gentrified, and Maura was left with no home and no one.

  It was only when she was packing up Gran’s pitifully few things that she’d found the envelope with the money. In one of their last conversations in the hospital, Gran had made her promise to go to Ireland, to tell her friend Bridget Nolan that she’d passed, and to say a Mass in the old church in Leap, where she’d been married. “Say my farewells for me, darlin’,” she’d said, and Maura had agreed to her face, although she had thought it was no more than the ramblings of a sick old woman. How was she supposed to fly to Ireland, when she wasn’t sure she could make the next rent payment?

  The envelope, tucked in the back of Gran’s battered dresser alongside Maura’s passport, held the answer. It had contained just enough cash to buy a plane ticket from Boston to Dublin, and to pay for a short stay, if Maura was frugal. Since Gran had taught her well, she didn’t think she’d have any trouble doing that. How Gran had managed to set aside that much, Maura would never know.

  She’d buried Gran, with only a few of her Irish immigrant friends in attendance, and two weeks later she’d found herself on a plane. And here she was. Maura was surprised to feel the sting of tears. She was cold, damp, jet-lagged, and—if she was honest with herself—depressed. It had been a long few weeks, but at least staying busy had allowed her to keep her sadness at bay. She’d held on to her couple of part-time jobs until the last minute, but she had made no plans to return to them; that kind of work was easy enough to find, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to stay in Boston. Gran had been her only relative, her only tie to any place, and with Gran gone Maura was no longer sure where she belonged. She was free, if broke. She could go anywhere she wanted, and with her work experience tending bar and waitressing, she could pick up a short-term job almost anywhere. The problem was, she didn’t know where she wanted to go. There was nothing to hold her in Boston, but there was no point in leaving either.

  Maura looked out through the rain streaming down the windows. She’d always heard that Ireland was green, but at the moment all she could see was grey. What had Gran wanted her to find in Ireland?

  Since Gran had never really mentioned any people “back home” to Maura, she’d been surprised to find a bundle of letters and photographs stashed next to the envelope with the money, where Gran must have been sure that Maura would find them. Sorting through them after Gran’s death, she had found that the few photographs were ones she had seen no more than once or twice in her life, but luckily Gran had written names on the back; most of the letters had come from a Bridget Nolan, with only the skimpiest of return addresses—not even a street listing. Taking a chance—and wanting to believe that someone in Ireland would still care—Maura had written to the woman about her old friend’s death and her wish that Maura make the trip to Ireland to pay her respects there. Mrs. Nolan had written back immediately and urged her to come over. Her spidery handwriting hinted at her advanced age and suggested that Maura shouldn’t delay, and it was barely two weeks later that Maura had found herself on the plane. And then
on a bus, which passed through small towns, cheerfully painted in bright colors, as if to fight the gloom of the rain. Most often it took no more than a couple of minutes to go from one end of the town to the other, and between there was a lot of open land, dotted with cattle and sheep and the occasional ruined castle to remind Maura that she was definitely somewhere that wasn’t Boston. The towns listed on the road signs meant nothing to her. She was afraid of dozing off and missing her stop. Mrs. Nolan had given Maura sketchy instructions to get off the bus in front of Sullivan’s Pub in a village called Leap, and they would “see to her,” whatever that meant. The bus lurched and belched fumes as it rumbled along the main highway on the south coast, though “highway” was a rather grand description: it was two lanes wide. More than once the bus had found itself behind a truck lumbering along at a brisk twenty miles per hour, but nobody had seemed anxious about it; no one was hurrying.

  Finally, through the gloom of the late afternoon in March, Maura could make out a large painted sign by the road: Sullivan’s of Leap, with a dashing highwayman riding a horse straight out of the sign. It was no more than a minute later that the bus driver called out “Leap” (which he pronounced “Lep,” as in “leper”), and Maura gathered her belongings, which consisted of a battered duffel bag with her clothes plus an old school backpack with everything else, and waited while a few other women climbed down. The women appeared to be regular riders; they exchanged farewells and vanished quickly in different directions, leaving Maura standing in the rain looking at the dilapidated façade of Sullivan’s.

  About the Author

  After collecting too many degrees and exploring careers ranging from art historian to investment banker to professional genealogist, Sheila Connolly began writing mysteries in 2001, and is now a full-time writer.

  She wrote her first mystery series for Berkley Prime Crime under the name Sarah Atwell, and the first book, Through a Glass, Deadly (2008), was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel; Pane of Death followed in 2008, and Snake in the Glass in 2009.

  Under her own name, her Orchard Mystery Series (Berkley Prime Crime) debuted in 2008 with One Bad Apple, followed by Rotten to the Core in 2009, Red Delicious Death in 2010, A Killer Crop later in 2010, Bitter Harvest in 2011, and Sour Apples in 2012.

  Her new series, the Museum Mysteries (Berkley Prime Crime), set in the Philadelphia museum community, opened with Fundraising the Dead in 2010, followed by Let’s Play Dead in 2011, and Fire Engine Dead in 2012.

  She is currently writing a new series set in Ireland, the County Cork Mysteries, which will debut in 2013.

  Her first short story, “Size Matters,” was published by Level Best Books in 2011, and was nominated for an Agatha Award.

  Sheila is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and Romance Writers of America. She is a former President of Sisters in Crime New England, and was cochair for the 2011 New England Crime Bake conference.

  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Sheila Connolly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  The Rising of the Moon

  Excerpt from Buried in a Bog

  About the Author