Eithne’s flat, a creaky second-floor walk-up above a butcher’s on Lower Rathmines Road, smelled of damp plaster and coffee. She’d come from Galway, burned out from deadlines, hoping the suburb’s calm would spark something. Rathmines, with its charity shops and old Georgian bones, felt like a place where stories hid. One rainy afternoon, poking through bins at the Swan Centre’s Oxfam shop, she found a scratched vinyl record in a sleeve marked “Seamus O’Rourke, ’63.” No title, just a faded photo of a young man with a guitar, his eyes fixed on someone off-camera. Back home, she spun it on her thrift-store turntable. The needle hissed, then a voice—raw, tender—sang: “Clara, my star, where’d you wander? The strings still call you home.” The song cut off mid-verse, leaving Eithne with a shiver she couldn’t shake.

She asked around. The butcher downstairs, a man with hands like hams, remembered Seamus. “Mad fella, always strummin’ at the Inn. Loved a girl, Clara, but she left him. Then he was gone too—poof, after a gig.” The Rathmines Inn, now a gastropub with polished floors, still had an old stage in the back. Eithne visited, sipping a flat stout, imagining Seamus under the dim lights. That night, walking home past Belgrave Square, she heard it—a faint guitar, weaving through the fog. Not a busker, not a radio. It was Seamus’s melody, the same chords from the vinyl, echoing from nowhere.

Eithne’s writer brain kicked in. She dug through the Rathmines Library, finding yellowed articles about Seamus’s disappearance. The Evening Herald, June 1963: “Local Musician Vanishes After Inn Performance.” No trace, no body. Clara, a waitress at the Inn, had left Dublin weeks earlier, some said for London. Others whispered she’d drowned in the Grand Canal, her ghost luring Seamus to join her. Eithne’s nights filled with the melody, louder now, pulling her to the canal’s edge near Portobello Bridge. She’d stand there, notebook in hand, scribbling fragments of Seamus’s song, trying to finish it. “Clara, my star, the water’s cold…” The words felt like they weren’t hers.

Rathmines revealed itself slowly. Eithne walked its streets—Castlewood Avenue, with its tidy hedges; the Swan River’s sluggish flow; the old clock tower looming over the town hall. Each corner seemed to hum with Seamus’s grief. At the Stella Cinema, now a hip venue, she found a poster from ’63 advertising Seamus’s gig, his name in bold. The librarian, an old woman with a sharp eye, told her about Rathmines’ ancient wells, buried under the streets, said to hold spirits. “Maybe your song’s one of ‘em,” she said, half-smiling. Eithne laughed it off, but the melody grew insistent, waking her at 3 a.m., urging her to write.

One night, by the canal, she saw her—a woman in a faded dress, hair like wet reeds, standing on the water’s surface. Clara? The figure vanished when Eithne blinked, but the melody swelled, guiding her to an abandoned well behind a boarded-up house on Charleville Road. There, under moonlight, she found a rusted tin box buried in the dirt. Inside: sheet music, Seamus’s handwriting, the full Rhapsody—a love song and a farewell. Eithne sang it aloud, her voice shaky, and the air stilled. The melody stopped. Days later, at the Rathmines Inn, she played the song on a borrowed guitar. The crowd clapped, unaware they’d freed a ghost. Eithne’s novel, now alive with Seamus’s story, was finished that spring. Rathmines, quiet again, kept its secrets.