The Death of a Joyce Scholar by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

call you that?”
    She flashed him a quick smile, and with some relief left the sitting room. She walked quickly into the hall, through the kitchen and beaded curtains, and out into the full sun of the back garden. McGarr’s eyes dropped down on the flat plane that extended from the band of her shorts to the base of her spine and was, he imagined, just the size of his palm. Her step was crisp but graceful, and his urge, following her like that, was to reach out, stop her, and in some way tack her down. He forced himself to look away.
    “I have a wee dog. Kinch.” She flicked a hand at a doghouse that had been fashioned with some forethought into a corner of the garden wall and looked custom-made. It had been raised off the ground; a little ramp led up to its entrance. The style was Swiss, like a chalet, with gingerbreadeaves, shutters on mock windows, and window boxes with multicolored plastic flowers. “Kinch is fixed. It makes it easier that way. And then I can let him out for an hour or two every morning without fear that he’ll run off. Between the time I get up and go to work,” she went on, opening the back gate and stepping out into the alley.
    “And what work is that?”
    “I’m in publishing, actually.”
    “You don’t say. In what capacity?”
    “Editor.” She mentioned a British publishing house, a name McGarr had seen on the spine of Kevin Coyle’s book. And she added, “Irish acquisitions and publicity. They fairly well leave things here up to me to make the most of.”
    Books again, McGarr thought, and he reconsidered Catty Doyle. She seemed rather young and insouciant and all too fey and winning to be an editor in a publishing house. But then McGarr knew little of publishing, and perhaps acquisitions was something to which a person like she might be well suited.
    “As I was saying, I had let Kinch out, and I was late and in a hurry. When I opened the gate here and called, he didn’t come as usual. And when I listened, I heard him barking down the alley.”
    Again McGarr followed her, trying to think of something, anything besides the plateau bounded by the crests of her backside. He had even forgotten cold lager beer, plaice Nicoise, and vinho verde. He wouldn’t know what to do with somebody like Catty Doyle if he had the chance—ultimately, that was.
    “It was rapid, worried, sustained barking, the way Kinch barks when somebody’s at the door.”
    McGarr couldn’t remember any such barking, but then he hadn’t rung the bell.
    “And I followed it around the cemetery wall to here. The barking.”
    As the lane at the rear of De Courcy Square approached Finglas Road, it branched off into another alley, which served Bengal Terrace and was bounded on the other side by the wall of the cemetery.
    “Still I couldn’t see Kinch, and I walked nearly to that gate”—she pointed to the lane—“before I caught sight of him standing by what I thought at first was some itinerant or tramp. But when he wouldn’t come away, and I saw that the man’s eyes were open and then recognized who it was, I said, ‘Get up now, get out of that, Kevin, and come in the house and have a cup of tea.’” she turned to McGarr, “never thinking—” Her eyes had filled with tears, and her shoulders cupped, then shook.
    McGarr’s first instinct was to put an arm around her shoulders, but he thought better of it.
    “Where?” he asked in a gentle tone.
    “There.”
    “But exactly. Take me to it.”
    He waited while she gathered herself, noting how much less appealing Catty Doyle seemed to him emotionally stricken and vulnerable than when she exuded the taunt of sexual command. And he decided to exploit the weakness, if only to understand the Catty Doyle who had not prepared herself for guests or the police.
    She stepped forward tentatively until they reached an area where the tall grass and weeds beside the granite blocks at the high cemetery wall had been matted down and stained generously with what McGarr