The Celtic Riddle

The two men looked perplexed. After a few seconds, Breeta sidled through a door to the right of the fireplace. She was the kind of young woman, I thought, that people always made a point of saying had a pretty face, by way of ignoring her excess weight. She did have many good features, beautiful dark hair set against flawless pale skin and blue eyes, but at this very moment, she looked dreadful. I wanted to take her home to my friend Moira's beauty salon and get her straightened out. Her dark hair was unkempt, and she kept twisting a lank tendril round and round her finger. Dressed in black jeans and a baggy and rather unflatteringly-colored brown sweatshirt, she looked lumpen. Her pale skin was blotchy. She was suffering, it suddenly occurred to me, despite her uninterested demeanor, but whether it was from sorrow at the death of her father, or disappointment at being cut out of his Will, I couldn't say. "How did you know?" she asked accusingly.

I pointed toward the floor. "The tortoise. I saw its little brown head poking out from under the sofa," I added.

"He," she said getting down on her knees and reaching under the sofa. "It's a he, not an it. His name is Vigs." That appeared to be all she was prepared to say.

"Vigs," I agreed, as I walked to the kitchen counter. A half-empty bottle of whiskey sat on the counter. I opened it and sniffed. It smelled just fine to me. I grabbed four tumblers, and turned to the others. "How about a get-acquainted drink?" I asked. "We might as well, it's starting to rain," I added, as the room grew suddenly darker.

"Should these young people be drinking this?" Alex asked severely, eyeing the bottle of Bushmills.

"This is Ireland, Mr. Stewart," Michael laughed. "We'll be getting this in our mother's milk. Whiskey was invented here, you know. Irish monks. For medicinal purposes, of course. Took the recipe to Scotland, where they've made a bit of a botch of it."

Wisely I think, Alex and I chose not to get into a discussion of the relative merits of Scotch and Irish whiskey.

Seconds later, the wind was blowing sheets of rain almost horizontally against the window. Breeta slumped once again in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace, a large wing chair covered in a cabbage rose print, and stroked the tortoise's head. I poured. Breeta sulked.

I felt myself getting irritated. Words cannot express how much I dislike people who sulk all the time. Mercifully, Jennifer Luczka has grown out of such a phase. Actually it was not so much growing out of it as a miraculous transformation when her father's then live-in girlfriend Barbara vacated the premises. Barbara is a perky blonde I call Ms. Perfect on account of how she designs her own clothes, irons everything, even socks, runs marathons, and never serves a salad that doesn't have a flower of some kind in it, all the while holding down a job as a vice president of a bank. Come to think of it, I like perky even less than I like sulky. Perhaps Jennifer does too.

"How about a fire?" Michael exclaimed. He peered into the wood box, shrugged, and headed for the door. "I'll be right back," he said.

I stood by the window peering out into the mist. It was impossible to see more than a few feet from the window, and Michael had disappeared from view almost immediately. The rain drummed on the roof, and made splintering sounds against the windowpanes. In the distance I heard a squawk, a gull perhaps, or an animal scurrying from the wet, a sound that for a moment brought back the edginess I'd been feeling earlier.

In what seemed rather longer than I would have thought necessary, Michael returned, soaking wet and very dirty, a pile of dark lumps about the size and shape of bricks in his arms. "Turf," he said, noticing my expression. "You'll need to get more, Mr. Stewart. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to reach the last of it under the house. We'll have a fire." In a few minutes he had the fire smouldering away, and stood, his back to it, drying out. Turf, I decided, was the famous Irish peat.

"Oh, I forgot," Michael said suddenly, taking a rather sodden piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. "My clue. I didn't tell the others because they wouldn't tell after you told them yours. They may get over it," he added. "He gave them hard of his tongue, Mr. Byrne did, on that video. Maybe put them a bit out of sorts. Anyway, here it is: The furious wave."

"I am the sea-swell. The furious wave," I said, very much doubting that the family would get over it, as Michael hoped. They seemed way too set in their miserable ways for that. "How very obscure. And speaking of obscure, who, by the way, is Padraig Gilhooly?"

Dead silence in the room: Breeta's hand paused in midstroke over the head of the tortoise.

"Nobody," said Michael. "Now, my clue has a two beside it. Do you think that means something?" Deft change of topic, that was.

"I don't know," said Alex, taking his envelope out too. "Mine has a one."