Twisted Agendas Read Free Page B

from me.” She shrugged him off, her cupped hands plummeting from her face to regard him venomously. “You’ve never wanted this. Take me home this
minute.” She strode toward the car park.
    The journey home was silent.
    “Let me out here ,” she said when they reached her parent’s driveway.
    “I’ll drop you at the door.”
    “Stop the fucking car.” After climbing out, she held the door and leaned inside. “You’ve humiliated me and my family. You’re not a man. I never want to see you
again.”
    She slammed the door shut.

At the famine house
    Since relocating to study in London, Philomena Patricia Harris insisted everyone call her Piper. She’d loved the name ever since she’d first heard it in the eighth
grade when a family from Santa Barbara moved to Long Island and their daughter joined her class. It sounded so much better than Phila, the abbreviation her mother used whenever they chatted, which
wasn’t often now. Her father still called her Philomena when he called. He kept forgetting.
    Acceptance of the name change hadn’t been automatic in England, either. Three lecturers and her dissertation supervisor regarded her very strangely at the beginning when she’d
insisted they call her Piper. They already knew her legal name from the class register, but ultimately had shrugged it off, attributing her insistence to American vanity and its penchant for
reinvention, foibles they were used to because of the large number of Americans pursuing a Masters degree at the London School of Economics.
    The sound of the car horn blaring pulled Piper out of her reverie. Her driver, a young man called Declan, honked the horn again at a black cow ambling lazily down the middle of the narrow road.
The beast stopped and looked back at him, then lifted its tail and urinated before moving to the verge.
    “The Glenties sure is pretty,” she said in a renewed effort to make conversation as she stared out at the barren, heather-clad hills. “It’s how I’ve always imagined
Ireland.”
    “Americans would like Ireland to stay rugged and poor like this,” said the driver. “Nice place for a visit, but not to live.”
    “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, I know the Irish economy’s doing real good. The Celtic Tiger, right?”
    “That tiger isn’t calling with every Irish family,” he said. “Some people are still dirt poor.”
    She could see another famine house tucked in a shallow hollow. Like the previous one, it was also roofless and constructed of the same fieldstone that formed the crumbling walls enclosing the
tiny fields. The abandoned dwellings were smaller than storage sheds in the backyards of Long Island homes.
    “Wouldn’t care to live out here, though,” said Piper. “Life must have been very lonely.”
    “You’re right there.”
    Wiry, with a pockmarked face, Declan was about ten years older then she, thirty-four tops, and taciturn. This was the most he’d chatted throughout the two-hour ride. Piper regarded herself
a people person, good at making folks feel comfortable, but all he’d uttered were monosyllabic answers to her questions. She wondered if he regarded her as a distraction. Or perhaps he was a
chauvinist and resented having to take her to the meeting place.
    In any event she wasn’t going to say anything political and risk antagonising him. She’d networked too hard to commit that act of stupidity, working the telephones for nearly two
months as well as enduring a scary interview, before which she’d first been blindfolded, taken to a secret location and then made to sit on an uncomfortable wooden chair looking at a wall
with a cheap painting of the Blessed Virgin while two men grilled her. Eventually satisfied she was telling the truth about her objectives, they’d allowed her to turn around.
    “Sorry we had to make you face the wall,” the older, ruddy-cheeked man with a pure white scar above his right eye had said when they’d finished. “We can’t take