Death of an Irish Mummy Read online

  Praise for the Dublin Driver Mysteries by Catie Murphy

  DEATH ON THE GREEN

  “There is so much to like about the cozy perfection that is Catie Murphy’s Death on the Green from the lush Irish travelogue to the precise balance between comic relief and crime. Megan’s friendships and romantic life—dating a woman but also crushing on a male detective—give the story a lived-in feel. And while murder is nasty business, there are cuddle sessions with the Jack Russell pups that Megan keeps telling herself she’s fostering, not adopting. All this plus seeing justice done? Megan (which is to say, Murphy) makes it look easy.”

  —Bookpage, STARRED REVIEW

  “A Texas transplant can’t stop tripping over bodies in Ireland. Cleverly blends rivalries on and off the golf course with colorful characters as a plucky limo driver takes the wheel again.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  DEAD IN DUBLIN

  “Murphy’s Dublin feels immersive and authentic, and even minor characters add depth and detail . . . This is an auspicious series debut, and hopefully the luck of the Irish will hold for many more stories to come.”

  —Bookpage STARRED REVIEW

  “[Murphy’s] irrepressible debut provides a lively entry in the Dublin Driver Mysteries. A bad review can kill a restaurant—but what if a restaurant kills a reviewer?”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Dead in Dublin serves up an interesting whodunit story as it helps push the cozy mystery genre forward into the new decade. One cannot help but be curious to see how this new series unfolds.”

  —Criminal Element

  The Dublin Driver Mysteries by Catie Murphy

  Dead in Dublin

  Death on the Green

  Death of an Irish Mummy

  Death of an Irish Mummy

  CATIE MURPHY

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by C.E. Murphy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

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

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2422-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2423-6 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2423-2 (ebook)

  In memory of Robert Lynch,

  who lent his name and a great deal of love

  to this series.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Dublin Driver books are great fun to write, and about 85 percent of the time I’m confident of my use of Hibernian English in them. The other 15 percent of the time I spend texting “would you say this or that” to my Irish-born friends and getting a consensus on my phrasing. In that light, thanks are due to Brian Nisbet, Fionnuala Murphy, Kate Sheehy, my Lady Writers Ruth, Sarah, and Susan, and probably about eleventy other people I’m forgetting.

  Thanks are also due to my editor, Elizabeth May, and to artist Anne Wertheim, along with the Kensington art department for guiding the cover art for these books along such charming lines.

  And I couldn’t write these books (or any others!) without a family who makes sure I can hide away to write, so as always, all my love to Ted, Henry, and my dad.

  CHAPTER 1

  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.”