It was very much like the one they’d just left, but the barns and out-buildings were still very much in use, and the yard was muddy with the hoof marks of cattle.

They tapped at the front door, and it opened to a small, compact woman with dark red hair and a grievance.

“There you are!” she said at once to Constable Satterthwaite, ignoring the man from London. Clutching the startled constable’s arm, she dragged him toward her kitchen, all the while complaining over the earsplitting screams of something in great pain somewhere in the house. “You’ve got to rid me of that thing, do you hear? She told me it was thirty years old, and I can’t even cook it, it’ll be stringy as an old shoe. I tried to shove him out the door, but he won’t leave. I can’t sleep for this racket. All day, all night. There’s no peace!”

Rutledge had followed them to the kitchen and saw nothing as he crossed the threshold. But he nearly backed into the passage again to save his ears from whatever was shrieking with such high-pitched horror.

Hamish, silent in the face of what could only be called a cacophony, was as speechless as Rutledge himself.

He’d heard the Irish speak of banshees, but until now he’d never given these harbingers of death much thought. He found himself remembering what old Michael Flaherty, once a jockey, had talked about in his cups. “A sound beyond any other. It tears at the soul, it wails like a lost spirit, and it can’t be seen except by someone in the family.”

And then something moved, and for the first time Rutledge could see the source of the incredible noise. It was a small dove gray parrot with a flash of red on its tail, and it was clinging to a plate on the top of the dresser against the far wall, almost invisible in the last rays of sunset outlining the open kitchen door. Its bright eyes were fixed on the newcomers as if expecting them to attack.

“There, you see,” Mrs. Blaine said, pointing excitedly. “All day, I tell you, and all night. I don’t see how she stood it. I’d shoot it if it weren’t for my best Staffordshire ware. He was always sending her gifts, Lieutenant Teller was, but what possessed him to send her that thing I don’t know. They can live a hundred years, she said.”

Rutledge remembered the little pet graveyard, and the animals resting there. A hundred years—she would never have to weep over a lost love again. A lonely woman given something to talk to.

The parrot shrieked again. Hardly talking, as Hamish was pointing out.