“Like three years ago? Jack was only a baby, so . . .”
That ripple of pain darted across Fiona’s face again. Before she could start thinking, I asked, “When was the last time you saw Conor?”
There was a sudden wary flicker in her eyes. The safe shell of concentration was starting to thin; she knew something was up, even if she couldn’t tell what. She sat back in her chair and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while. A couple of years, I guess.”
“He wasn’t at Emma’s birthday party, this April?”
The tension in her shoulders went up a notch. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I guess he couldn’t make it.”
I said, “You’ve just told us Conor was willing to go to a lot of trouble for his goddaughter. Why wouldn’t he bother with her birthday party?”
Fiona shrugged. “Ask him. I don’t know.”
She was picking at the sleeve of her jumper again and not looking at either of us. I leaned back, got comfortable and waited.
It took a few minutes. Fiona glanced at her watch and ripped at fragments of fluff, until she realized that we could wait longer than she could. Finally she said, “I think they could have maybe had some kind of argument.”
I nodded. “An argument about what?”
An uncomfortable shrug. “When Jenny and Pat bought the house, Conor thought they were nuts. I did too, but they didn’t want to hear that, so I tried a couple of times and then I kept my mouth shut. I mean, even if I wasn’t sure it would work out, they were happy, so I wanted to be happy for them.”
“But Conor didn’t. Why not?”
“He’s not great at keeping his mouth shut and just nodding and smiling, even when that’s the best thing he could do. He thinks it’s hypocritical. If he thinks something’s a crap idea, he’ll say it’s a crap idea.”
“And that annoyed Pat, or Jenny? Or both of them?”
“Both. They were like, ‘How else are we supposed to get on the property ladder? How else are we supposed to buy a decent-sized house with a garden for the kids? It’s a brilliant investment, in a few years it’ll be worth enough that we can sell it and buy somewhere in Dublin, but for now . . . If we were millionaires, yeah, we’d get a great big place in Monkstown straight off, but we’re not, so unless Conor wants to lend us a few hundred grand, this is what we’re getting.’ They were really pissed off that he wasn’t supportive. Jenny kept saying, ‘I don’t want to listen to all that negativity, if everyone thought that way then the country would be in ruins, we want to be around positivity . . .’ She was genuinely upset. Jenny’s a big believer in positive mental attitude; she felt like Conor would wreck everything if they kept listening to him. I don’t know the details, but I think in the end there was some kind of big blowup. After that Conor wasn’t around, and they didn’t mention him. Why? Does it matter?”
I asked, “Did Conor still have feelings for Jenny?”
It was the million-dollar question, but Fiona just gave me a look like I hadn’t heard a word she had said. “That was forever ago. It was kid stuff, for God’s sake.”
“Kid stuff can be pretty powerful. There are plenty of people out there who never forget their first loves. Do you think Conor was one of them?”
“I don’t have a clue. You’d have to ask him.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Do you still have feelings for him?”
I had expected her to snap at me on that one, but she thought about it, her head bent over his face in the album, her fingers tangling in her hair again. “It depends what you mean by feelings,” she said. “I miss him, yeah. Sometimes I think about him. We’d been friends since I was, like, eleven. That’s important. But it’s not like I get all wistful and pine for the one who got away. I don’t want to get back together with him. If that’s what you wanted to know.”
“It didn’t occur to you to stay in touch after he had the blowup with Pat and Jenny? It sounds like you had more in common with him than they did, after all.”
“I thought about it, yeah. I left it a while, in case Conor needed to simmer down—I didn’t want to get in the middle of anything—but then I rang him a couple of times. He didn’t get back to me, so I didn’t push it. Like I said, he wasn’t the center of my world or anything. I figured, same as with Mac and Ian, we’d find each other again, somewhere down the line.”
This wasn’t where or how she had pictured the reunion. “Thanks,” I said. “That could be helpful.”
I reached to take the album, but Fiona’s hand came out to stop me. “Can I just—for a second . . . ?”
I moved back and left her to it. She pulled the album closer, circled it with her forearms. The room was still; I could hear the faint hiss of the central heating moving through the walls.
“That summer,” Fiona said, barely to us. Her head was bent over the photo, hair tumbling. “We laughed so much. The ice cream . . . There was this little ice-cream kiosk, down near the beach—our parents used to go there when they were kids. That summer the landlord said he was raising the rent to something astronomical, there was no way the guy could pay it—the landlord wanted to force him out, so he could sell the land for, I don’t know, offices or apartments or something. Everyone around was outraged—the place was like an institution, you know? Kids got their first ice cream there, you went on first dates there . . . Pat and Conor, they said, ‘There’s only one way to keep him in business: we’ll see how much ice cream we can get into us.’ We ate ice cream every single day, that summer. It was like a mission. We’d only be finished one lot, and Pat and Conor would disappear and they’d come back with another big handful of cones, and we’d all be screaming at them to get those away from us; they’d be cracking up laughing, telling us, ‘Go on, you have to do it, it’s for the cause, rage against the machine . . .’ Jenny kept saying she was going to turn into a great big lump of lard and then Pat would be sorry, but she ate them anyway. We all did.”
Her fingertip brushed across the photo, lingering on Pat’s shoulder, Jenny’s hair, coming to rest on Conor’s T-shirt. She said, on a sad whisper of a laugh, “‘I go to JoJo’s.’”
For a second Richie and I didn’t breathe. Then Richie said, easily, “JoJo’s was the ice-cream shop, yeah?”
“Yeah. He gave out these little badges, that summer, so you could show you supported him. ‘I go to JoJo’s,’ and a picture of an ice cream cone. Half of Monkstown was wearing them—old women and everything. We saw a priest with one once.” Her finger shifted, moving off a pale spot on Conor’s T-shirt. It was small and blurry enough that we hadn’t looked at it twice. Each bright T-shirt and top had one somewhere, the chest, the collar, the sleeve.
I bent to fish in the cardboard box, pulled out the little evidence bag that held the rusted pin we had found hidden in Jenny’s drawer. I passed it across the table. “Is this one of the badges?”
Fiona said softly, “Oh my God. God, look at that . . .” She tilted the badge to the light, searching for the image through the wear and the print dust that had turned up nothing. “Yeah, it is. Is this Pat’s or Jenny’s?”
“We don’t know. Which of them would have been more likely to keep it?”
“I’m not sure. I would’ve said neither of them, actually. Jenny doesn’t like clutter, and Pat doesn’t really get sentimental like that. He’s more practical. He’ll do stuff, like the ice creams, but he wouldn’t keep the badge just for the sake of it. Maybe he could’ve forgotten it in with a bunch of other things . . . Where was it?”
“In the house,” I said. I reached out a hand for the bag, but Fiona held on to it, fingers pressed on the badge through the thick plastic.
“What . . . why do you need it? Does it have something to do with . . . ?”
I said, “In the early stages, we have to go on the assumption that anything could be relevant.”
Richie asked, before she could press harder, “Did the campaign work? Yous got the landlord off JoJo’s back?”