What? What had she realized? That she was in love? That was absurd. You didn't fall in love with someone you'd only known for. a week. Someone out of his own milieu. It was like a shipboard romance, spiced with the erotic charge of danger. If she saw him in England, ensconced in his job as soccer coach and math teacher, surrounded by adolescent boys, she would probably regard him in a much less romantic light. That warm, loving matriarch of his was probably a tartar, his sisters spoiled bitches, his brothers lechers. He'd never mentioned what happened to his father. Probably dead on the hunting field, or of apoplexy or too much port.
In retrospect, his life sounded like an English novel. James Herriot crossed with P. G. Wodehouse and a little bit of Jane Austen thrown in. She hadn't known people really lived like that.
She certainly wouldn't fit in. If she were even asked to. As it was, she hadn't been given the choice. Michael had been whisked off to some hospital with that officious little man, and Daniel had taken her on a long, leisurely cruise northward, on a vacation that had felt more like prison.
She couldn't rid herself of the notion that there'd been some message passed, some word given, that she was now allowed to return home. Daniel had stoutly denied all of her direct accusations and skirted more oblique questions, and finally she'd given up asking. Daniel was a man who knew how to keep secrets. She could only take his word for it that Michael was in a hospital in London, on the mend. That the attempts on her life had been the work of a deranged segment of Patrick and Caitlin Dugan's splinter group of the IRA, and that every single member of that group, the Cadre, had been arrested and imprisoned. And that everyone was going to live happily ever after.
She didn't believe him. Oh, she believed she was safe enough. Daniel wouldn't let her return to New York if her life was still in danger. But his facile explanations were just a bit too unlikely coming from someone who'd learned about life the hard way.
The taxi behind her squealed off into the blazing hot day, but still Francey didn't move. She was home, but it didn't feel like home anymore. She remembered an old gospel song, one she'd heard when her mother had been married to the man who consorted with bootleggers in the hills of Tennessee. "I ain't got no home in this world anymore." She would have to scour the old record bins and see if she could find a recording of it. It felt as though it had been written with her in mind.
Her apartment smelled of stale air and dead plants. She opened the windows to let what little breeze there was blow through, opened her refrigerator, then slammed it shut in disgust. Daniel hadn't given her time to close up her apartment; he'd simply swooped down and carted her off, and she'd been too apathetic to do anything more than go along. He'd even paid her bills while she was gone, keeping things as they were. The result was two rooms full of dead plants and a refrigerator with a whole new definition of the word penicillin.
She dumped the moldy food and dead plants, ignoring the noisy scuttling of displaced bugs as their peaceful haven was disturbed. She made herself some iced tea, deciding to risk her ancient ice, and sank onto her overstuffed sofa, the best piece of furniture in the apartment.
She flicked on the television, discovering it was still set on CNN. She'd been obsessive before she'd left, living and breathing the news. The healthiest thing she could do would be to turn to a game show.
She was reaching for the remote control when her hand stopped. Despite the newscaster's words, it didn't look like Northern Ireland on the television, it looked like Beirut. Bombed-out buildings, smoke rising, sirens wailing. None of the rolling green beauty she'd always associated with Ireland. But then, she used to believe in leprechauns, too.
Daniel hadn't been lying after all, even if he'd been a bit premature. The British secret service had managed to ferret out the headquarters of one of Ireland's most fanatical groups. The Cadre was destroyed, its leaders jailed, with only a few members escaping. The authorities expected to catch up with them in a matter of days.
The picture switched to a sunny, tropical island, and the voice-over continued with a rundown of the recent upsurge of terrorism around the world, including three men found dead on a deserted island near the resort island of St. Anne, and the deaths of a couple on an island off Malta.
Francey didn't move, but her mind switched away from the still-stuffy room and the endless drone of the television as the announcer moved on to gloomy financial news. Three men dead on Baby Jerome. Michael? Cecil?
Or whoever had been trying to kill her?
None of it made sense. No one had told her the truth, not since she'd first been unlucky enough to meet Patrick Dugan and his phony sister Caitlin. They had lied, the government had lied, Daniel had lied. Only Michael had told her the truth. Hadn't he?