Chapter 19
Griffin had never seen Dublin from the windows of a bus before. From up high, he marveled at the number of people walking down O’Connor Street as well as the flocks of birds perched on the statues and monuments. They’d left his car in the car park garage because Claredidn’t want to fight the traffic through central Dublin.
She sat at his side, setting up the mobile phone he picked up, not to replace the one she knocked out the window, but a new account not under his grandfather’s name.
Despite his love for his grandfather, Griffin wasn’t sure the old man was coherent. He and Clare had made several timelines of the family saga of Brigid, Richard“Strongbow” de Clare, what he remembered of his father and the mystery of his mother. There were serious discrepancies. They’d pieced together what they could from the annals he’d packed as well as notes Pierce had made for him.
“I’ve set up GPS tracking for you,” Clare said, shoving the phone under his nose. “From now on, wherever you go, the phone will keep track of your location by date.You’ll need to register your face for the account login.”
She tapped an icon and held the phone in front of his face. “I’ve also downloaded an online journal with reminders to take notes every three hours. You can either text the notes or do a voice recording. It’ll also take a selfie, which is a picture of yourself when you hold the phone like this.”
“I know what a selfie is,” Griffinargued. “I’m not that out of touch.”
“But you never took any, did you?” She stretched her arm out and tapped a circle. “There, me and you on the bus.”
“If I took any, I don’t know where they are,” he admitted. “The last phone I had had no pictures. Grandfather claims I took a picture of the Heart of Brigid before I got on the airplane.”
“Then there has to be an account somewherethat has your pictures,” Clare said. “Problem is you don’t have your user name and password.”
“Pierce says there’s a notebook I used to carry around. I’ve lost it, of course.”
A funny expression crossed Clare’s face, but she shook her head as if a sudden chill descended on her shoulders. She continued tapping on the phone. “Anyway, I’ve set up another account for you, and it hascloud storage. That means every picture you take is uploaded to the cloud. Each image or video is date-stamped and geo-tagged, showing the location.”
“I suppose all of this will help me when I wake from the dead,” he said in a purposely gloomy undertaker tone.
“It will, I promise,” she said. “The key is you have to remember your user name and password if you lose your phone. We’llalso set up social network accounts for you so that you can find your friends again, like me, Maeve, and Sorcha.”
“Ah, so I’ve made my very first friends on my own. Should I be proud of myself?”
She swung the phone in front of his face, flashing a picture of the three festively dressed fairy impersonators. “What will your grandfather think when you come home with three girlfriends?”
“From thousand-year virgin to playboy. I think I died and went to heaven.” He took the phone and browsed to her social network account. “Hey, I recognize this guy, Seamus O’Fool.”
“He was a real joker, life of the party,” she said. Her voice sounded half-strangled, but she cleared her throat and continued, “Funny thing, I believed him when he said he had a pot of gold at the end ofevery rainbow.”
“You knew him?” Griffin zoomed in on a photo of Seamus wearing a lampshade over his dark, wavy hair.
“He had the crowdfunding accounts for my movie project.” Clare grabbed the phone and x’ed out of the photo gallery. “A week before I was on that flight to Dublin, I found myself locked out of my accounts. When I called the bank, they said the money was gone.”
“Why would Seamus filch from a pretty lass like you?” Griffin asked. “Wait a minute. Were you and he an item?”
A grinding burn roiled his gut, and waves of tension gripped his body. What if Seamus had already tapped this beautiful fairy creature who hallucinated in broad daylight? What if, in not knowing where she was, she’d given herself to him?
What if instead of hiding the Heartof Brigid in a fairy mound, like she wanted him to believe, she’d actually given it to Seamus?
“We weren’t close,” Clare said, biting her words. “After he took the money, I had no choice but to return home.”
“On a first-class flight?” He raised a doubting eyebrow.
“The ticket was gifted to me by my cousin, Jenna Hart,” Clare said.
“I thought you were an orphan.” Hewasn’t done poking holes in her story. She was so much a storyteller, she had a hard time keeping things consistent.
“I took a DNA test, looking for relatives,” Clare said. “Jenna’s family came up as positive match for being my cousins. I wrote her, but she didn’t know of any aunts or uncles in Ireland, although it was possible one of her uncles could have passed through and left someonepregnant.”
Fair enough. Griffin himself had many holes in his family history. But he wasn’t done with the interrogation. Even though she wasn’t his Brigid, she’d promised to prove her basic goodness by helping him get his Heart of Brigid back.
“Why would she gift you a first-class ticket? Where did you get the money to rent the convertible?”
