After all the drama during her last trip, Imogene Durant is looking forward to spending some time in the Irish countryside, visiting with an old school friend and working on the edits for her new book. With good food, friends and lots of comfy sweaters, her idyllic surroundings are rudely interrupted when a young woman with a bright future is found dead and worse, Imogene's friend's daughter is accused of the crime. Sweater Weather
There was no number on the house, or, come to think of it, no name on the road. How did anyone find anybody here in County Wexford, where there were apparently more roads per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world?
It was as if every little goat track had been paved but not necessarily widened in the process. Imogene had been in Ireland five days now, five days of being driven places by her graduate school friend Sighle, and she could almost recognize the last three turns before the house she was renting. Lord help her if she had to find her way back from town on her own. Sighle had mentioned there was a bus and that she could probably get the driver to stop just by her lane, but the trick would be to recognize the lane before you got to it, Imogene thought.
Coming to Ireland to get her book written might not have been the very best idea.
She poured herself another cup of tea and made her way back to the kitchen table situated by the large patio doors. Once she had added the extra seat cushion, the chair was more comfortable and she was on a better ergonomic level with the laptop. And the view was sublime, a lovely country garden beyond a wide patio deck, rolling down over a little bridge toward a tidal estuary that was also a bird sanctuary, offering very little in the way of boisterous activity except by a delightful variety of birds unfamiliar to Imogene.
Or perhaps it was the time of year that was keeping boisterous activity at bay. Supposedly, a music festival occurred across the estuary later in the summer months and drove the locals a bit mad with the music and the noise the campers made. Even though everything was green and lush (of course it was green, it was Ireland, for god's sake), it was presently just early spring.
Imogene's landlady, Sighle's aunt Carmel, whose name was pronounced exactly as spelled, unlike Sighle's (whose name sounded out to "Sheila") and those of most of the rest of her family, hadn't actually left her the address along with her page-long list of instructions and admonishments, so when she ordered a sweater for delivery, Imogene had copied the address from a piece of mail she'd brought in from the mailbox on the stone pillar near the road. She hadn't meant to purchase anything big while here; the plan was to work on the Paris book and pop up to Dublin to wander about for a few days. Big purchases couldn't really be justified.
Sighle had sent her pictures of the flowers in her garden, and Imogene had foolishly equated the blooming of tulips and roses with actual spring warmth. She had packed accordingly: a thin cardigan that fit under her spring trench coat, a few tees and a good Oxford cotton blouse, one skirt, one pair of leggings, one pair of black denim jeans.
While it was indeed lush and springlike in the garden, the small house itself was chilly, and she had spent the first five days huddled next to the electric radiator in the little television room, wearing almost everything she'd brought with her. She decided an Aran sweater would be a useful purchase as well as a decent souvenir of her time in Ireland, and had gone online to see if ordering one from the Galway main outlet would be as easy as waiting till she next made it into Dublin to the physical store. According to their website, the sweater of her dreams would be in her hands the following day. Which was today. To a lovely house over the Kiltra Bridge, near Barrystown, which wasn't a town at all, in Imogene's opinion, given she could see no
