"Dermot Michael," Nuala screamed on Sunday afternoon as she dug her fingers into my arm, "Turn off here! There's terrible things happening! Men dying everywhere!" I had been listening to the 5:00 radio news. Another art gallery robbery in the River North Area -- this time at the Thalberg Gallery at Erie and Orleans. Third robbery this month. Police were speculating that the robbery might be linked to the opening of the Monet exhibit at the Art Institute. What nonsense! I turned off the radio and left Lake Shore Drive at 31st Street as I had been instructed.

Nuala Anne McGrail (a.k.a. Marie Phinoulah Annagh McGriel) is fey. Or psychic. Depending on your perspective. She would rather say simply that she "sees things." She is a holdover, albeit a gorgeous one, from the mists and myths of Celtic antiquity, a woman who in olden times would have been honored as a seer, a prophetess, even a minor goddess. Or perhaps burned as a witch.

Now she's an accountant.

Incidentally, her name should be pronounced as though it were spelled "Noola." The double O must be drawn out and said with a certain touch of the bog and the mists and the rain and the sea about it, which is very hard to do, though my brother George the Priest got it right the first time.

She is not fey often, as least as far as I know. When she is in one of those, what should I call them, "conditions," I take her seriously. Usually it means that we are going to be involved in solving a mystery from the past and maybe one in the present too. I use the term "we" loosely. Nuala is not only fey, she is also a detective.

She buried her head against my chest.

"Make them stop it, Dermot Michael. Make them stop it."

I put an arm around her, always a pleasant experience.

"It will be all right, Nuala, just hang on to me."

We turned into the Lake Meadows housing development, one of the first integrated middle and upper middle class rental developments along the South Shore of Lake Michigan -- high rise glass and steel buildings ala Mies, elegantly landscaped and protected by high fences to keep the natives out. The people -- men, women and children -- who were outside on the lawns enjoying the mild Memorial Day weather seemed a subtle mixture of white, black, and brown. Racial integration, as someone once said, against the poor.

"What is this place?" She demanded.

Nuala was wearing white tennis shorts and a dark red tee shirt which proclaimed "Galway Hooker."

"It's the Lake Meadows development," I said, "a well maintained proof that you can have racial integration so long as you limit it to one social class and build big fences."

"Oh," she said meekly.

"Nothing more," I continued.

"You'll be thinking that I'm nothing but a frigging eejit, Dermot Michael."

She actually said "frigging," the word represented her effort to clean her vocabulary from the Dublin street language which was the lingua franca of Trinity College of the University of Dublin.

"I'd never think that, Nuala," I said, cuddling close her close and stroking her long black hair.

"You would too," she said, beginning to sniffle. "Won't you be wanting to send me back to the bogs?"

"Woman, I will not!"

She continued to sniff.

I should also say a word about how she pronounces the English language, lest I drive you out of your frigging minds with attempts to reproduce the actual sounds. The Irish language generally lacks a "th" sound, no equivalent of the Greek "theta" of the Anglo-Saxon "thorn" (often spelled as "Y" as in "ye" olde taverne, but still pronounced "th"). So in all words involving a "th" you are likely to hear from someone Irish the sound "t" or a "d" or more likely a subtle mix of the two. Nuala might say, for example, "I'm not going to take off dis binkini ding just because you want a midnight swim. What would your moder dink if she found out."

Actually, she never said anything like that to me, worse luck for me, perhaps. But if she had and I was reporting it, I would have substituted the "th" sound. Nuala resolutely refuses to try to put the "h" sound in the "th" words.

"I know that English has a frigging "th" sound," she says, but it ought not to have."

Paradoxically and perhaps perversely she pronounces the letter "h" as "haitch" -- as do all the other Irish.

How can I describe this astonishing young woman to you?

Should I say that she is the most beautiful woman I have ever met and surely the most beautiful that I have ever held in her arms?

"What was this place," she said as snuggled closer to me, "before it was your frigging Lake Meadows?"

"Slums," I guess.

"Did anything terrible happen here?"

"Maybe the Fort Dearborn massacre, though I think that was a little further north."

"What was that?"

"The first settlement in this city was at the mouth of the River, downtown as we call it now. The army built a fort there to protect the settlers from the natives and from the Brits. The called it Fort Dearborn after a town near Detroit. During the war of 1812, after the Brits had captured Detroit, the commander of the garrison, most unwisely decided to abandon the fort and retreat to Vincennes down on the Wabash River in Indiana, not the last tragic mistake the American military made. The Indians killed them all shortly after they left the fort. It's represented by one of the four stars in the Chicago city flag."

"How many people died?"

"About forty, I think."

"A lot more than that here."

"Oh."

Yesterday evening at Grand Beach, she whispered into my ear, "Isn't it nice that your sister-in-law Tessa is expecting another child and himself a boy, with them already having three girls!"

"Who told you that?"

"No one," she put a finger to her lips. "Tis a secret."

Right!

I once described her as looking like a pre-Christian Irish goddess -- Bride or Bionna or Sionna or Erihu or Maeve or one of those gorgeous and terrifying women. I'd never met one of them, however, so that was my hyper-active fantasy. It's always hyper-active when Nuala Anne is present. The child -- she isn't quite twenty-one yet -- is strikingly beautiful. Her cream-white face and breast-length black hair stop your first and make you want to see a lot more of this young woman. Her face, slender and fine-boned was the sort that stares at you from the covers of women's magazines -- except that the cover women don't usually have a haunting hint in their deep blue eyes of bogs and druids and old Irish poetry. The bottom half of her face was a sweeping, elegant curve which almost demanded that male finger's caress it with reassurance and affection. However, the center of the curve was a solid chin which warned trespassing, or potentially trespassing, male fingers that they had better not offend this young woman or they would be in deep trouble

Her body was that of a beauty contest entry. In a fairly modest bikini of the sort she had worn most of this weekend at Grand Beach, Nuala stopped traffic. Women as well as men gaped. But the bodies of bathing beauties usually lack Nuala's grace and intense athletic energy. Her body and her face are almost always in movement, so it is hard to say what she's like in those rare moments when she is at rest.

Except some adjective that she would probably furiously reject -- like delicious.

As I was calming her down after her fey attack, I thought about reaching under the tee shirt and caressing the smooth, soft skin of her belly, a liberty I was on occasion permitted. On almost any occasion I wanted, as a matter of fact.

Lake Michigan is quite cold at the end of May. Although she'd been warned that the water temperature was in the high fifties, she had charged down the stairs, tossed off her robe, and dove into the water. We locals would have screamed and ran out. She, however, had swum out maybe a hundred yards with a powerful crawl, turned around and swum back in. She emerged from the water triumphant, a tall, willowy hoyden.

"Dermot! Me robe!" She had ordered. "Sure, isn't it refreshing now! A lot warmer than the Atlantic Ocean or the Irish sea!"

She didn't add, since my family were standing around awe-struck, that when she and her mother went swimming in the Atlantic, they often wore nothing at all, at all. "If the men can do it, why can't we?"

Nuala was the youngest of six children born in an Irish speaking family in Cararoe way out on the end of the Connemara peninsula. Her mother was in her very early sixties and still a quite attractive woman, promising that Nuala's beauty would change but not fade.

"Sure," I had said once, in a mood to make trouble, "if I came upon the two of you in that condition, wouldn't I want to look at your mother first. Anyone can be beautiful at nineteen."

"And wouldn't that show you had good taste?" she had said dismissing my dirty fantasy with a brisk sweep of her hand.

"Feeling better?" I asked her as we waited at thirty first and Cottage Grove.

"It's fading now . . . Don't I feel like such an amadon and me with these crazy spells?"

"I don't think you're an amadon, Nuala Anne," I said, stroking he right arm tenderly.

"I don't care what you think," she said. "I think I'm a nine-fingered gobshite."

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