The Angel
The Angel
Carla Neggers
Inside an ancient ruin, Keira discovers the mythic stone angel she seeks—but also senses a malevolent presence…just before the ruins collapse around her.Search-and-rescue veteran Simon Cahill finds Keira in the rubble just as she's about to free herself. Simon holds no stock in myths or magic, so he isn't surprised that there's no trace of her stone angel.But there is evidence of startling violence and—whatever the source—the danger to Keira is quite real. The long-forgotten legend that captivated her has also aroused a killer…a calculating predator who will follow them back to Boston, determined to kill again.
Praise for the novels of
CARLA NEGGERS
“No one does romantic suspense better!”
—Janet Evanovich
“A believable, gripping story that will keep armchair sleuths guessing… Here is intelligent writing that remains highly entertaining.”
—Publishers Weekly on Betrayals
“Neggers has created yet another well-matched pair of characters and given them a crackerjack mystery to solve—complete with a seriously creepy villain.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Abandon
“[Neggers’s] skill at creating colorful characters and deliciously twisted story lines makes this an addictive read.”
—Publishers Weekly on Stonebrook Cottage
“When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”
—Jayne Ann Krentz
“A keen ear for dialogue and a sure hand with multidimensional characterizations are Neggers’s greatest gifts as a storyteller…. By turns creepy and amusing, the story engages on several levels.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Breakwater
“Neggers keeps the reader guessing ‘whodunit’ to the end of her intriguing novel.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Widow
“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more could a reader ask? The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”
—Tess Gerritsen
The Angel
Carla Neggers
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To Kate and Conor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Brendan Gunning for all the wonderful Irish and Irish-American stories, and to Myles Heffernan, Paul Hudson, Jamie Carr and Christine Wenger for sharing your knowledge and expertise.
To Sarah Gallick for the help with Irish saints and for sending me early excerpts from The Big Book of Women Saints.
To my daughter, Kate Jewell, and my son-in-law, Conor Hansen, for getting us all to southwest Ireland. Conor, I’ll never forget standing in the stone house where your great-grandfather was born, or meeting your cousins on the Beara Peninsula.
To Don Lucey for the insight into Irish music and all the great recommendations.
To my agent, Margaret Ruley, and to my editor, Margaret Marbury, for the unwavering patience and support, and to the rest of the fabulous team in New York and Toronto—Donna Hayes, Craig Swinwood, Loriana Sacilotto, Dianne Moggy, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Heather Foy, Michelle Renaud, Stacy Widdrington, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson and everyone who makes MIRA Books such an incredible pleasure to work with.
And to Joe Jewell, my husband, for all the great times in Boston, “our” city, and to Zack Jewell, my son…yes, another trip to Ireland is in the works. Can’t wait!
Carla Neggers
P.O. Box 826
Quechee, VT 05059
www.carlaneggers.com
Contents
Prologue (#ud5449597-b012-5ef6-bd06-3bec8c162c56)
Chapter 1 (#ua391c8ba-1ba2-5c3a-9555-6ebbb3f20e2b)
Chapter 2 (#u5d89be55-9f76-5d0a-bdb7-400396966297)
Chapter 3 (#u3976cb89-96a3-5632-83ad-f629b14c611f)
Chapter 4 (#u65454ecc-1e3a-5801-a5fe-89de2c485bdb)
Chapter 5 (#u70b016ef-34af-54ca-8e83-99cd4a0e74c9)
Chapter 6 (#uc0712b68-4a87-564b-a9db-22bebdb06f71)
Chapter 7 (#u618a6c76-de94-5740-be03-305f188b98db)
Chapter 8 (#u20be9987-d4e9-575a-aff1-7ce283120ca3)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
South Boston, Massachusetts
2:00 p.m., EDT
July 12, Thirty Years Ago
A scrap of yellow crime scene tape bobbed in the rising tide of Boston Harbor where the brutalized body of nineteen-year-old Deirdre McCarthy had washed ashore. Bob O’Reilly couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Neither could Patsy McCarthy, Deirdre’s mother, who stood next to him in the hot summer sun. Coming out here was her idea. Bob didn’t want to, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t let her go alone.
“Deirdre was an angel.”
“She was, Mrs. McCarthy. Deirdre was the best.”
Ninety degrees outside, and Patsy shivered in her pastel blue polyester sweater. She’d lost weight in the three weeks since Deirdre hadn’t come home after her shift as a nurse’s aide. At first the police had believed she was just another South Boston girl who’d gone wrong. Patsy kept at them. Not Deirdre.
She disappeared on the night of the summer solstice. The longest day of the year.
Appropriate, somehow, Bob thought.
Patsy’s eyes, as clear and as blue as the afternoon sky, lifted to the horizon, as if she were trying to see the island of her birth, as if Ireland could bring her the comfort and strength she needed to get through her ordeal. She’d left the southwest Irish coast forty years ago at the age of nine and hadn’t been back since. She loved to tell stories about her Irish childhood, how she was born in a one-room cottage with no plumbing, no central heat—not even an outhouse—and how she’d learned to bake her famous brown bread on an open fire.
Bob wondered how she’d tell this story. The story of her daughter’s kidnapping, rape, torture and murder.
The police hadn’t released details, but Bob, the son of a Boston cop, had heard rumors of unspeakable acts of violence and depravity. He was twenty and planned on becoming a detective, and one day he would have to wade through such details himself. He hoped the victim would never be someone he knew. He and Deirdre had learned to roller-skate together, had given each other their first kiss, just to see what it was like.
“I heard the cry of a banshee all last night,” Patsy said quietly. “I can’t say I do or don’t believe in fairies, but I heard what I heard. I knew we’d find Deirdre this morning.”
The fine hairs stood on the back of Bob’s neck. A retired firefighter walking his golden retriever at sunrise had come upon Deirdre’s body. The police had come and gone, working with a grim efficiency, given Boston’s skyrocketing homicide rate. Now they had another killer to hunt.
With the city behind them and the boats out on the water and planes taking off from Logan Airport, Bob still could hear the lapping of the tide on the sand. He’d never felt so damn helpless and alone.
“Deirdre Ita McCarthy.” Patsy crossed her arms on her chest as if she were cold. “It’s the name of an Irish saint, you know. Saint Ita was born Deirdre and took the name Ita when she made her vows. Ita means ‘thirsting for divine love.’”
Patsy was deeply religious, but Bob had stopped attending mass regularly when he was sixteen and his mother said it was up to him to go or not go. He knew he’d go back to church for Deirdre’s funeral.
“I’ve never been good at keeping track of the saints.” He tried to smile. “Even the Irish ones.”
“Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and Saint Ita are early Celtic saints. Saint Ita had the gift of prophecy. Angels visited her throughout her life. Do you believe in angels, Bob?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“I do,” she whispered. “I believe in angels.”
It wouldn’t strike Patsy as particularly contradictory to say in one breath she’d heard a banshee—a solitary fairy—and in another that she believed in angels. If her beliefs brought her comfort, Bob didn’t care. He didn’t know what to tell her about banshees or angels or anything else. Her husband had died of a heart attack four years ago. Now this. “The police will find who took Deirdre from us.”
“No. They won’t. They can’t.” Patsy shifted her gaze back to the crime scene tape floating in the water. “The police are only human after all.”
“They won’t rest until they catch whoever did this.”
“It was the devil who took Deirdre. It wasn’t a man.”
“Doesn’t matter. If the police have to go to hell to find and arrest the devil, that’s what they’ll do. If I have to do it myself, I will.”
“No—no, Bob. Deirdre wouldn’t have you sacrifice your soul. She’s with her sister angels now. She’s at peace.”
Bob suddenly realized Patsy meant the devil literally. He pictured Deirdre with her blond hair and blue eyes, her translucent skin and innocent smile. She was as good as good ever was. She wouldn’t have stood a chance with someone who meant her harm. Devil or no devil.
He’d miss her. He’d miss her for as long as he lived.
He pushed back his emotions. It was something he’d need to learn to do if he was going to be a detective and catch people the likes of whoever had killed Deirdre.
“We don’t want this cretin to hurt someone else.”
“No, we don’t.” Patsy turned from the water. “But there are other ways to fight the devil.”
Two hours later, Bob found his sister, Eileen, reciting the rosary on a bench in the shade of a sprawling oak on the Boston College campus, where she had a summer work-study job at the library.
“I didn’t know you still had rosary beads,” he said.
“I didn’t, either. I found them in my jewelry box this morning.” She spoke in a near whisper as she held a single ivory-colored bead between her thumb and forefinger. “I haven’t said the rosary in ages. I thought I might not remember, but it came right back to me.”
Bob sat next to her. His sister was the smart one in the family. She’d returned two days ago from a summer study program in Dublin. No one had called to tell her Deirdre had gone missing. What could Eileen do from Ireland? Why spoil her time there, when they all hoped Deirdre would turn up, safe and sound?
When news of the discovery of Deirdre’s body reached the O’Reilly household that morning, Eileen pretended nothing had happened and left for work.
“I’ve just come from the waterfront with Mrs. McCarthy,” Bob said.
Eileen tensed, as if his words were a blow, and he didn’t go on. Her hair was more dirty blond than red like his, and she had more freckles. She’d never thought she was all that attractive, but she’d always been hard on herself—his sister had no limit to her personal list of faults big and small.
“There’s nothing the police can do now.” Eileen lifted her eyes from her rosary beads and shifted her gaze to her older brother. “Is there?”
“They can find Deirdre’s killer. They can stop him from killing again.”
“They can’t undo what happened.”
His sister’s left hand trembled, but her right hand, which held her rosary beads, was steady. Bob noticed how pale she was, as if she’d been sick. His smart, driven sister had so many plans for her life, but coming back home from Ireland to Deirdre’s disappearance had thrown Eileen right back into the world she was trying to exit.
And now Deirdre was dead.
Eileen’s fingers automatically moved to the next bead, and he saw her lips move as she silently recited the Hail, Mary.
He waited for her to finish the entire rosary and return her beads to their navy velvet pouch. She clutched it in her hand and leaned back against the bench.
They both watched a squirrel run up a maple tree.
Without looking at her brother, Eileen said, “I’m pregnant.”
Of all the things Bob had anticipated she might say when she’d finished praying, he hadn’t imagined that one. Their parents would be shocked. He was shocked. She didn’t have a boyfriend that he knew about.
He fought an urge to run away. Get out of Boston, away from the aftermath of Deirdre’s death, from what was to come with his sister. It all flashed in his mind—Patsy grieving next door, the police hunting for Deirdre’s killer, Eileen getting bigger, trying to figure out what to do with the baby.
The baby’s father. Who the hell was he?
Bob curled his hands into tight fists. He was young. He didn’t have to stay in Boston and deal with all these problems. He could go anywhere. He could be a detective in New York or Miami or Seattle.
Hawaii, he thought. He could move to Honolulu.
“How far along are you?” he asked.
“Not far. I haven’t had the test yet, but I know.”
“Eileen…” Bob looked at his younger sister, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “What happened in Ireland?”
But she jumped to her feet and walked quickly toward the ivy-covered building where she worked, and he didn’t follow her.
A week later, a series of calls into the Boston Police Department alerted them to a man who had just leaped from a boat into Boston Harbor.
He was in flames when he hit the water.
By the time a passing pleasure boat reached him, he was dead.
Within hours, the dead man was identified as Stuart Fuller, a twenty-four-year-old road worker who rented an attic apartment three blocks from the house where Deirdre McCarthy lived with her mother. Police discovered overwhelming evidence that tied him to Deirdre’s murder.
They had their devil.
The autopsy on Fuller determined that he’d drowned, but his burns would have killed him if he hadn’t gone into the water.
That evening, Bob found Patsy on her back porch with about twenty small angel figurines lined up on the top of the wide wooden railing. Despite the summer heat, she wore a pink polyester sweater, as if she expected never to be warm again.
“Deirdre collected angels,” Patsy said.
“I know. It made it easy to buy her presents.” Bob pointed at a colorful glass angel he’d found for her on a high school trip to Cape Cod. “I got her that one for her sixteenth birthday.”
“It’s beautiful, Bob.”
His throat tightened. “Mrs. McCarthy—”
“The police were here this morning. They told me about Stuart Fuller. They asked me if I knew him.”
“Did you?”
“Not that I recall. I suppose I could have seen him in the neighborhood.” She narrowed her eyes slightly. “At church, perhaps. The devil is always drawn to good.”
Bob watched her use a damp cloth to clean a delicate white porcelain angel holding a small Irish harp. It was one of the more valuable figurines in Deirdre’s collection and one of her favorites. She’d loved all kinds of angels—it didn’t matter if they were cheap, cheesy, expensive, ethnic. She used to tell Bob she wanted to buy a glass curio cabinet in which to display them.
“Patsy…do you know anything about Fuller’s death?”
She seemed not to hear him. “I have a story I want to tell you.”
Bob didn’t have the patience for one of her stories right now. “Which one?”
“One you’ve never heard before.” She held up the cleaned figurine to the light. “My grandfather first told it to me as a child in Ireland. Oh, he was a wonderful storyteller.”
“I’m sure he was, but—”
“It’s a story about three brothers who get into a battle with fairies over an ancient stone angel.” Patsy’s eyes sparked, and for a moment, she seemed almost happy. “It was one of Deirdre’s favorites.”
“Then it can’t be depressing. Deirdre didn’t like depressing stories.”
“She didn’t, did she? Come, Bob. I’ll make tea and heat up some brown bread for you. It’s my mother’s recipe. I made it fresh this morning. My father used to say my mother made the best brown bread in all of West Cork.”
Bob had no choice but to follow Patsy into her small kitchen and help her set out the tea and the warm, dense bread. How many times had he and Eileen and Deirdre sat here, listening to Patsy tell old Irish stories?
She joined him at the table, her cheeks flushed as she buttered a small piece of bread. “Once upon a time,” she said, laying on her Irish accent, “there were three brothers who lived on the southwest coast of Ireland—a farmer, a hermit monk and a ne’er-do-well, who was, of course, everyone’s favorite…”
Bob drank the tea, ate the bread and pushed back tears for the friend he’d lost as he listened to Patsy’s story.
Chapter 1
Near Mount Monadnock
Southern New Hampshire
4:00 p.m., EDT
June 17, Present Day
Keira Sullivan swiped at a mosquito and wondered if its Irish cousins would be as persistent. She’d find out soon enough, she thought as she walked along the trail to her mother’s cabin in the southern New Hampshire woods. She’d be on a plane to Ireland tomorrow night, off to the southwest Irish coast to research an old story of mischief, magic and an ancient stone angel.
In the meantime, she had to get this visit behind her and attend a reception tonight in Boston. But she couldn’t wait to be tucked in her rented Irish cottage, alone with her art supplies, her laptop, her camera and her walking shoes.
For the next six weeks, she’d be free to think, dream, draw, paint, explore and, perhaps, make peace with her past.
More accurately, with her mother’s past.
The cabin came into view, nestled on an evergreen-blanketed hill above a stream. Keira could hear the water tumbling over rocks and feel it cooling the humid late spring air. Birds twittered and fluttered nearby—chickadees, probably. Her mother would have given all the birds on her hillside names.
The mosquito followed Keira the last few yards up the path. It had found her at the dead-end dirt road where she’d left her car and stayed with her throughout the long trek through the woods. She was less than two hours from Boston, but she might as well have been on another planet as she sweated in the June heat, her blond hair coming out of its pins, her legs spattered with mud. She wished instead of shorts she’d worn long pants, in case her solo mosquito summoned reinforcements.
She stood on the flat, gray rock that served as a step to the cabin’s back entrance. Her mother had built the cabin herself, using local lumber, refusing help from family and friends. She’d hired out, reluctantly, only what she couldn’t manage on her own.
There was no central heat, no plumbing, no electricity. She had no telephone, no radio, no television—no mail delivery, even. And forget about a car.
On frigid New England winter nights, life had to get downright unbearable, if not dangerous, but Keira knew her mother would never complain. She had chosen the simple, rugged existence of a religious ascetic. No one had thrust it upon her.
Keira peered through the screen door, grateful that her mother’s stripped-down lifestyle didn’t prohibit the use of screens. The pesky mosquito could stay outside.
“Hello—it’s me, Mum. Keira.”
As if her mother had other children. As if she might have forgotten her only daughter’s name since chucking the outside world. Keira had last visited her mother several weeks ago but hadn’t stayed long. Then again, they hadn’t spent much time together in the past few years, never mind the past eighteen months when she’d first announced her intention to pursue this new commitment.
Her mother had always been religious, which Keira respected, but this, she thought as she swiped again at her mosquito—this isolated hermit’s life just wasn’t right.
“Keira!” her mother called, sounding cheerful. “Come in, come in. I’m here in the front room. Leave your shoes on the step, won’t you?”
Keira kicked off her hiking shoes and entered the kitchen—or what passed for one. It consisted of a few rustic cupboards and basic supplies that her mother had scavenged at yard sales for her austere life. Her priest had talked her into a gas-powered refrigerator. He was working on talking her into a gas-powered stove and basic plumbing—even just a single cold-water faucet—but she was resisting. Except for the coldest days, she said, she could manage to fetch her own water from the nearby spring.
Winning an argument with Eileen O’Reilly Sullivan had never been an easy task.
Keira crossed the rough pine-board floor into the cabin’s main living area. Her mother, dressed in a flowing top and elastic-waist pants, got up from a high stool at a big hunk of birch board set on trestles that served as her worktable. Her graying hair was blunt cut, reminding Keira of a nun, but although her mother had turned to a religious life, she’d taken no vows.
“It’s so good to see you, Keira.”
“You, too.” Keira meant it, but if she wanted to see her mother, she had to come out here—her mother wouldn’t come to her in Boston. “The place looks great. Nice and cozy.”
“It’s home.”
Her mother sat back on her work stool. Behind her, a picture window overlooked an evergreen-covered hillside that dropped down to a stream. Keira appreciated the view, but, as much as she needed solitude herself at times, she couldn’t imagine living out here.
A nearby hemlock swayed in a gust of wind, sending a warm breeze through the tiny cabin. Except for a wooden crucifix, the barn-board walls of the main room were unadorned. Besides the worktable and stool, the only other furnishings were an iron bed with a thin mattress, a rocking chair and a narrow chest of drawers. Not only was the small, efficient cast-iron woodstove the sole source of heat, it was also where her mother did any cooking. She chopped the wood for the stove herself.
The land on which the cabin was built was owned by a South Boston couple whose country home was through the woods, in the opposite direction of the path Keira had just used. She considered them complicit in her mother’s withdrawal from the world—from her own family. They’d let her choose the spot for her cabin and then stood back, neutral, until she’d finally moved in last summer.
A year out here, Keira thought. A year, and she looks as content as ever.
“It really is so good to see you, sweetheart,” her mother said quietly.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.”
A large sheet of inexpensive sketch paper was spread out on her worktable. Before retreating to the woods, she’d owned an art supply store in the southern New Hampshire town where she’d moved as a young widow with a small daughter. Over the years, she’d become adept at calligraphy and the tricky art of gilding, supplementing her income by restoring gilt picture frames and mirrors and creating elaborate wedding and birth announcements. Now she was applying her skills to the almost-forgotten art of producing an illuminated manuscript. The same couple who’d let her build on their land had found someone willing to pay her to illustrate an original manuscript of select Bible passages. Other than requesting an Irish Celtic sensibility and choosing the passages, the client left her alone.
It was painstaking work—deliberate, skilled, imaginative. She had her supplies at arm’s reach. Brushes, pens, inks, paints, calligraphy nibs, gilding tips, a gilding cushion, polishing cloths and burnishers.
“You’re working on your own Book of Kells,” Keira said with a smile.
Her mother shook her head. “The Book of Kells is a masterpiece. It’s been described as the work of angels. I’m a mere human.”
Another wind gust shook the trees outside on the hill. Storms were brewing, a cold front about to move in and blow out the humidity that had settled over New England during the past week. Keira wanted to get back to her car before the rain started.
“Did you see the Book of Kells when you were in Ireland in college?”
“I did.” Her mother’s tone was distant, controlled. She shifted her gaze to the blank, pure white paper on her desk, as if envisioning the intricate, thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript. “I’ll never forget it. What I’m doing is quite different. Much simpler.”
“It’ll be wonderful.”
“Thank you. The Book of Kells consists mainly of the four Gospels, but I was asked to start with the fall of Adam and Eve.” Her mother’s eyes, a striking shade of cornflower blue, shone with sudden humor. “I haven’t settled on the right serpent.”
Keira noticed a series of small pencil sketches taped to the birch board. “Those are some pretty wild serpents. It doesn’t get to you, being up here all alone drawing pictures of bad-assed snakes and bolts of lightning?”
Her mother laughed. “No bolts of lightning, I’m afraid. Although…” She thought a moment. “I don’t know, Keira, you could be onto something. A bright, organic bolt of lightning in the Garden of Eden could work, don’t you think?”
Keira could feel the tension easing out of her. She’d moved to Boston in January after a brief stint in San Diego and had trekked up here on snowshoes, hoping just to find her mother alive and reasonably sane. But her mother had been warm and toasty, a pot of chili bubbling on her woodstove, content with her rigid routines of prayer and work. Keira had thought living closer would mean they’d see more of each other. It hadn’t. She could have stayed in San Diego or moved to Miami or Tahiti or Mozambique—or Ireland, she thought. The land of her ancestors.
The land of her father.
Maybe.
Her mother’s sociability didn’t last, and the humor in her eyes died almost immediately. A studied blankness—a sense of peace, she would no doubt say—brought a neutrality to her expression. She seemed to take a conscious step back from her engagement with the world. In this case, the world as represented by her daughter.
Keira tried not to be offended. “I came to say goodbye for a few weeks. I leave for Ireland tomorrow night for six weeks.”
“Six weeks? Isn’t that a long time?”
“I’m doing something different this trip.” Keira hesitated, then said, “I’m renting a cottage on the southwest coast. The Beara Peninsula.”
Her mother gazed out at her wooded hillside. A second screen door opened onto another rock step and a small yard where she’d planted a vegetable garden, fencing it off to keep out deer and who knew what other animals.
Finally, she let out a breath. “Always so restless.”
True enough, Keira thought. As a child, she’d roamed the woods with a sketch pad and colored pencils. In college, she’d snapped up every opportunity to go places—backpacking with friends out West, jumping on a lobster boat with a short-lived boyfriend, spending a summer in Paris on a shoestring. After college, she’d tried several careers before falling back on what she loved most—drawing, painting, folklore. She’d managed to combine them into a successful career, becoming known for her illustrations of classic poems and folktales. That her work was portable, allowing her to indulge her sense of adventure, was another plus.
“When I was here last,” she said, “I told you about a project I’m involved with—I’m working with an Irish professor who’s putting together a conference on Irish folklore next spring. It’ll be in two parts, one in Boston and one in Cork.”
“I remember,” her mother said.
“One of the emphases will be on twentieth-century immigrants to America. I’ve been working that angle, and I ended up deciding to put together and illustrate a collection specifically of their stories. I have a wonderful one Gran told me before she died. She was from West Cork—”
“I know she was. Keira…” Her mother’s eyes were pained.
“What’s wrong? I’ve been to Ireland before. Not the Beara Peninsula, but—Mum, are you afraid I’m going to run into my father?”
“Your father was John Michael Sullivan.”
But Keira was referring to her biological father. Her mother had returned home from a summer study program in Ireland at nineteen, pregnant with Keira. When Keira was a year old, her mother had married John Sullivan, a South Boston electrician ten years her senior. He was killed in a car accident two years later, and his widow and adopted daughter had moved out of Boston and started a new life.
Keira had no clear memory of him, but when she looked at pictures of him, she felt an overwhelming sense of affection, gratitude and grief, as if some part of her did remember him. Her mother never discussed that one trip to Ireland thirty years ago. For all Keira knew, her biological father could have been a Swedish tourist or another American student.
She debated a moment, then said, “A woman on your old street in South Boston heard about the folklore project and got in touch with me. She told me this incredible story about three Irish brothers who fight with each other and fairies over an ancient stone angel—”
“Patsy McCarthy,” her mother said in a toneless voice.
“That’s right. She says she told you this story, too, before your trip to Ireland. The brothers believe the statue is of one of the angels said to visit Saint Ita during her lifetime. The fairies believe it’s not an angel at all but actually one of their own who’s been turned to stone. There’s more to it—it’s quite a tale.”
“Mrs. McCarthy told a lot of stories.”
“Her grandfather heard this one when he worked in the copper mines on the Beara Peninsula and told it to Patsy when she was a little girl in Ireland. The village where the brothers lived isn’t named, but there are enough details—”
“To pinpoint it. Yes, I know.”
“And the spot where the hermit monk brother lived. You could make a stab at finding it, at least, if you know the story.” Keira waited, but when her mother didn’t respond, continued. “Patsy told me you were determined to find the village and look for the hermit monk’s hut on your trip to Ireland before I was born.”
“She’s a gifted storyteller.”
“Yes, she is.”
Her mother lifted a small, filmy sheet of gold leaf to the light streaming in through the window. The use of gold—real gold—was what distinguished a true illuminated manuscript, but Keira knew it was far too soon for her mother to apply gold to her work-in-progress.
“Do you know the difference between sin and evil, Keira?”
Keira didn’t want to talk about sin and evil. She wanted to talk about Patsy’s old story and magic, mischief and fairies. “It’s not something I think much about.”
“Adam and Eve sinned.” Her mother turned the gold leaf so that it gleamed in the late-afternoon light. “They wanted to please God, but they succumbed to temptation. They regretted their disobedience. They took no delight in what they did.”
“In other words, they sinned.”
“Yes, but the serpent is a different case altogether. He delights in his wrongdoing. He exults in thwarting God. He sees himself as the antithesis of God. Unlike Adam and Eve, the serpent didn’t commit a sin in the Garden of Eden. The serpent chose evil.”
“Honestly, Mum, I don’t know how you can stand to think about this stuff out here by yourself.”
She set the thin gold leaf on the pure white paper. Keira knew from experience that the gold leaf was difficult to work with but resilient, able to withstand considerable manipulation without breaking into pieces. Applied properly, it looked like solid gold, not just a whisper of gold.
“We all sin, Keira,” her mother said without a hint of a smile, “but we’re not all evil. The devil understands that. Evil is a particular dispensation of the soul.”
“Does this have anything to do with Ireland? With what happened there when you—”
“No. It has nothing at all to do with Ireland.” She took a breath. “So, how’s your work?”
Keira stifled her irritation at the abrupt change of subject. It felt like a dismissal and probably was, but she reminded herself that she hadn’t come out to the woods to judge her mother, or even for information. She’d come simply to say goodbye before flying out of Boston tomorrow night.
“My work’s going great right now, thanks.” Why go into detail when that world no longer interested or concerned her mother?
“That’s good to hear. Thank you for stopping by.” She got to her feet and hugged Keira goodbye. “Live your life, sweetheart. Don’t get too caught up in all these crazy old stories. And please don’t worry about me out here. I’m fine.”
On her way back through the woods, Keira resisted the urge to look over her shoulder for the devil and serpents. Instead, she remembered herself as a child, and how her mother would sing her Irish songs and read her stories. Every kind of story—stories about fairies and wizards and giants, about hobbits and elves and dark lords, princes and princesses, witches, goblins, cobblers, explorers and adventurers.
How could such a fun-loving, sociable woman end up alone out here?
But Keira had to admit there had been hints of what was to come—that she’d seen glimpses in her mother of a mysterious sadness and private guilt, of a longing for a peace that she knew could never really be hers in this life.
Her mother insisted she hadn’t withdrawn from the world or rejected her family but rather had embraced her religious beliefs in a personal and profound way. She viewed herself as participating in a centuries-old monastic tradition.
That was no doubt true, but Keira didn’t believe her mother’s retreat to her isolated cabin was rooted entirely in her faith. As she’d listened to Patsy McCarthy tell her old story, Keira had begun to wonder if her mother’s trip to Ireland thirty years ago had somehow set into motion her eventual turn to the life of a religious hermit.
Another mosquito—or maybe the same one—found Keira, buzzing in her ear and jerking her back to the here and now, to her own life. She swiped at the mosquito as she plunged down the narrow trail through the woods to the dead-end dirt road where she’d parked.
The story of the three Irish brothers, the fairies and the stone angel wasn’t about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Ultimately, Keira thought, it was about the push-pull of family ties and the deep, human yearning for a connection with others, for happiness and good fortune.
Mostly, it was just a damn good yarn—a mesmerizing story that Keira could illustrate and tell on the pages of her new book.
“They say the stone angel lies buried to this day in the old ruin of the hermit monk’s hut.”
Maybe, maybe not. Patsy McCarthy, and her grandfather before her, easily could have exaggerated and embellished the story over the years. It didn’t matter. Keira was hooked, and she couldn’t wait to be on her way to Ireland.
In the meantime, she had to get back to Boston in time for a reception and a silent auction to benefit the Boston-Cork folklore project that had brought her to Patsy’s South Boston kitchen in the first place.
She glanced back into the woods, wishing her mother could be at the reception tonight. “Not just for my sake, Mum,” Keira whispered. “For your own.”
Chapter 2
Boston Public Garden
Boston, Massachusetts
7:00 p.m., EDT
June 17
Victor Sarakis didn’t let the heavy downpour stop him.
He couldn’t.
He had to warn Keira Sullivan.
Rain spattered on the asphalt walks of the Public Garden, a Victorian oasis in the heart of Boston. He picked up his pace, wishing he’d remembered to bring an umbrella or even a hooded jacket, but he didn’t have far to go. Once through the Public Garden, he had only to cross Charles Street and make his way up Beacon Street to an address just below the gold-domed Massachusetts State House.
He could do it. He had to do it.
The gray, muted light and startling amount of rain darkened his mood and further fueled his sense of urgency.
“Keira can’t go to Ireland.”
He was surprised he spoke out loud. He was aware that many people didn’t consider him entirely normal, but he’d never been one to talk to himself.
“She can’t look for the stone angel.”
Drenched to the bone as he was, he’d look like a madman when he arrived at the elegant house where the benefit auction that Keira was attending tonight was being held. He couldn’t let that deter him. He had to get her to hear him out.
He had to tell her what she was up against.
What was after her.
Evil.
Pure evil.
Not mental illness, not sin—evil.
Victor had to warn her in person. He couldn’t call the authorities and leave it to them. What proof did he have? What evidence? He’d sound like a lunatic.
Just stop Keira from going to Ireland. Then he could decide how to approach the police. What to tell them.
“Victor.”
His name seemed to be carried on the wind.
The warm, heavy rain streamed down his face and back, poured into his shoes. He slowed his pace.
“Victor.”
He realized now that he hadn’t imagined the voice.
His gaze fell on the Public Garden’s shallow pond, rain pelting into its gray water. The famous swan boats were tied up for the evening. With the fierce storms, the Public Garden was virtually empty of people.
No witnesses.
Victor broke into an outright run, even as he debated his options. He could continue on the walkways to Charles Street, or he could charge through the pond’s shallow water, try to escape that way.
But already he knew there’d be no escape.
“Victor.”
His gait faltered. He couldn’t run fast enough. He wasn’t athletic, but that didn’t matter.
He couldn’t outrun such evil.
He couldn’t outrun one of the devil’s own.
No one could.
Chapter 3
Beacon Hill
Boston, Massachusetts
8:30 p.m., EDT
June 17
Not for the first time in his life, Simon Cahill found himself in an argument with an unrelenting snob, this time in Boston, but he could as easily have been in New York, San Francisco, London or Paris. He’d been to all of them. He enjoyed a good argument—especially with someone as obnoxious and pretentious as Lloyd Adler.
Adler looked to be in his early forties and wore jeans and a rumpled black linen sport coat with a white T-shirt, his graying hair pulled back in a short ponytail. He gestured across the crowded, elegant Beacon Hill drawing room toward a watercolor painting of an Irish stone cottage. “Keira Sullivan is more Tasha Tudor and Beatrix Potter than Picasso, wouldn’t you agree, Simon?”
Probably, but Simon didn’t care. The artist in question was supposed to have made her appearance by now. Adler had griped about that, too, but her tardiness hadn’t seemed to stop people from bidding on the two paintings she’d donated to tonight’s auction. The second was of a fairy or elf or some damn thing in a magical glen. Proceeds would go to support a scholarly conference on Irish and Irish-American folklore to be held next spring in Boston and Cork, Ireland.
In addition to being a popular illustrator, Keira Sullivan was also a folklorist.
Simon hadn’t taken a close look at either of her donated paintings. A week ago, he’d been in Armenia searching for survivors of a moderate but damaging earthquake. Over a hundred people had died. Men, women, children.
Mostly children.
But now he was in a suit—an expensive one—and drinking champagne in the first-floor chandeliered drawing room of an elegant early nineteenth-century brick house overlooking Boston Common. He figured he deserved to be mistaken for an art snob.
“Beatrix Potter’s the artist who drew Peter Rabbit, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
Simon swallowed more of his champagne. It wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t a snob about champagne, either. He liked what he liked and didn’t worry about the rest. He didn’t mind if other people fussed over what they were drinking—he just minded if they were a pain in the ass about it. “When I was a kid, my mother decorated my room with cross-stitched scenes of Peter and his buddies.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Cross-stitch. You know—you count these threads and—” Simon stopped, deliberately, and shrugged. He knew he didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d had Beatrix Potter rabbits on his wall as a kid, but he was telling the truth. “Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder what happened to my little rabbits.”
Adler frowned, then chuckled. “That’s very funny,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe Simon was serious. “Keira Sullivan is good at what she does, obviously, but I hate to see her work overshadow several quite interesting pieces here tonight. A shame, really.”
Simon looked at Adler, who suddenly went red and bolted into the crowd, mumbling that he needed to say hello to someone.
A lot of his arguments ended that way, Simon thought as he finished off his champagne, got rid of his empty glass and grabbed a full one from another tray. The event was catered, and most of the guests were dressed up and having a good time. From what he’d heard, they included a wide range of people—academics, graduate students, artists, musicians, folklorists, benefactors, a couple of priests and a handful of politicians and rich art collectors.
And at least two cops, but Simon steered clear of them.
“Lloyd Adler’s not that easy to scare off,” Owen Garrison said, shaking his head as he joined Simon. Owen was lean and good-looking, but all the Garrisons were. Simon was built like a bull. No other way to say it.
“I’m on good behavior tonight.” He grinned, cheekily putting out his pinkie finger as he sipped his fresh champagne. Owen just rolled his eyes. Simon decided he’d probably had enough to drink and set the glass on a side table. Too much bubbly and he’d start a fight. “I didn’t say a word.”
“You didn’t have to,” Owen said. “One look, and he scurried.”
“No way. I’m charming. Everyone says so.”
“Not everyone.”
Probably true, but Simon did tend to get along with people. He was at the reception as a favor to Owen, whose family, not coincidentally, owned the house where it was taking place. The Garrisons were an old-money family who’d left Boston for Texas after the death of Owen’s sister, Dorothy, at fourteen. It was a hellish story. Just eleven himself at the time, Owen had watched her fall off a cliff and drown near the Garrison summer home in Maine. There was nothing he could have done to save her.
Simon suspected the trauma of that day was the central reason Owen had founded Fast Rescue, an international search-and-rescue organization. It was based in Austin and operated on mostly private funds to perform its central mission to put expert volunteer teams in place within twenty-four hours of a disaster—man-made or natural—anywhere in the world.
Simon had become a Fast Rescue volunteer eighteen months ago, a decision that was complicating his life more than it should have, and not, he thought, because the Armenian mission had fallen at a particularly awkward time for him.
Owen, a top search-and-rescue expert himself, was wearing an expensive suit, too, but he still looked somewhat out of place in the house his great-grandfather had bought a century ago. The decor was in shades of cream and sage green, apparently Dorothy Garrison’s favorite colors. The first floor was reserved for meetings and functions, but the second and third floors comprised the offices for the foundation named in Dorothy’s honor and dedicated to projects her family believed would have been of particular interest to her.
Owen glanced toward the door to the house’s main entry. “Still no sign of Keira Sullivan. Her uncle’s getting impatient.”
Her uncle was Bob O’Reilly, her mother’s older brother and one of the two cops there tonight Simon was avoiding. Owen’s fiancée, Abigail Browning, was the other one. She and O’Reilly were both detectives with the Boston Police Department. O’Reilly was a beefy, freckle-faced redhead with a couple decades on the job. Abigail was in her early thirties, slim and dark-haired, a rising star in the Homicide Unit.
She was also the daughter of John March, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the reason Simon’s association with Fast Rescue had become complicated. He used to work for March. Sort of still did.
He’d decided to avoid Abigail and O’Reilly because both of them would have a nose for liars.
“Any reason to worry about your missing artist?” he asked Owen.
“Not at this point. It’s pouring rain, and the Red Sox are in town—rained out by now, I’m sure. I imagine traffic’s a nightmare.”
“Can you call her?”
“She doesn’t own a cell phone. No phone upstairs in her apartment, either.”
“Why not?”
“Just the way she is.”
A flake, Simon thought. He’d learned, not that he was interested, that Keira was renting a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the Garrison house until she figured out whether she wanted to stay in Boston. He understood wanting to keep moving—he lived on a boat himself and not by accident.
“Abigail’s bidding on one of Keira’s pieces,” Owen said.
“The fairies or the Irish cottage?”
“The cottage, I think.”
They were imaginative, cheerful pieces. Keira had a flare for capturing and creating a mood—a part-real, part-imagined place where people wanted to be. Her work wasn’t sentimental, but it wasn’t edgy and self-involved, either. Simon didn’t have much use for a painting of fairies or an Irish cottage in his life. No house to hang it in, for one thing.
Irish music kicked up, and he noticed an ensemble of young musicians in the far corner, obviously enjoying themselves on their mix of traditional instruments. He picked out a tin whistle, Irish harp, bodhran, mandolin, fiddle and guitar.
Not bad, Simon thought. But then, he liked Irish music.
“The girl on the harp is Fiona O’Reilly,” Owen said. “Bob’s oldest daughter.”
Simon wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about Owen’s friends in Boston, especially ones in, or related to, people in law enforcement. It was all too tricky. Too damn dangerous. But here he was, playing with fire.
Owen’s gaze drifted back to his fiancée, who wore a simple black dress and was laughing and half dancing to the spirited music. Abigail caught his eye and waved, her smile broadening. They were working on setting a date for their wedding. Whenever it was, Simon planned to be out of the country.
“You can’t tell her about me, Owen.”
“I know.” He broke his eye contact with Abigail and sighed at Simon. “She’ll find out you’re not just another Fast Rescue volunteer on her own. One way or the other, she’ll figure out your relationship with her father—she’ll figure out that I knew and didn’t tell her. Then she’ll hang us both by our thumbs.”
“We’ll deserve it, but you still can’t tell her. My association with March is classified. We shouldn’t even be talking about it now.”
Owen gave a curt nod.
Simon felt a measure of sympathy for his friend. “I’m sorry I put you in this position.”
“You didn’t. It just happened.”
“I should have lied.”
“You did lie. You just didn’t get away with it.”
The song ended, and the band transitioned right into the “The Rising of the Moon,” a song Simon knew well enough from his days in Dublin pubs to hum. But he didn’t hum, because if he’d been mistaken for an art critic—or at least an art snob—already tonight, next he’d be mistaken for a music critic. Then he’d have to rethink his entire approach to his life, or at least start a brawl.
“In some ways,” he said, “my lie was more true than the truth.”
Owen grabbed a glass of champagne. “Only you could come up with a statement like that, Simon.”
“There are facts, and there’s truth. They’re not always the same thing.”
A whirl of movement by the entry drew Simon’s attention, and he gave up on trying to explain himself.
A woman stood in the doorway, soaking wet, water dripping off the ends of her long, blond hair.
“The missing artist, I presume.”
Even as he spoke, Simon saw that something was wrong. He heard Owen’s breath catch and knew he saw it, too. The woman—she had to be Keira Sullivan—was unnaturally pale and unsteady on her feet, her eyes wide as she seemed to search the crowd for someone.
Simon surged forward, Owen right with him, and they reached her just as she rallied, straightening her spine and pushing a sopping lock of hair out of her face. She was dressed for the woods, but even as obviously shaken as she was, she had a pretty, fairy-princess look about her with her black-lashed blue eyes and flaxen hair that was half pinned up, half hanging almost to her elbows.
She was slim and fine-boned, and whatever had just happened, Simon knew it hadn’t been good.
“There’s a body,” she said tightly. “A man. Dead.”
That Simon hadn’t expected.
Owen touched her wrist. “Where, Keira?”
“The Public Garden—he drowned, I think.”
Simon was familiar enough with Boston to know the Public Garden was just down Beacon Street. “Are the police there?” he asked.
She nodded. “I called 911. Two Boston University students found him—the body. We all got caught in the rain, but they were ahead of me and saw him before I did. He was in the pond. They pulled him out. They’re just kids. They were so upset. But there was nothing anyone could do at that point.” Despite her distress, she was composed, focused. Her eyes narrowed. “My uncle’s here, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Simon said, but he wasn’t sure she heard him.
He noticed Detectives Browning and O’Reilly working their way to Keira from different parts of the room, their intense expressions indicating they’d already found out about the body through other means. They’d have pagers, cell phones.
The well-dressed crowd and the lively Irish music—the laughter and the tinkle of champagne glasses—were a contrast to stoic, drenched Keira Sullivan and her stark report of a dead man.
Abigail got there first. “Keira,” she said crisply but not without sympathy. “I just heard about what happened. Let’s go into the foyer where it’s quiet, okay?”
Keira didn’t budge. “I didn’t see anything or the patrol officers on the scene wouldn’t have let me go.” She wasn’t combative, just firm, stubborn. “I’m not a witness, Abigail.”
Abigail didn’t argue, but she didn’t have to because Keira suddenly whipped around, water flying out of her hair, and shot back into the foyer, out of sight of onlookers in the drawing room. Simon knew better than to butt in, but he figured she wanted to avoid her uncle, who was about two seconds from getting through the last knot of people.
Simon wished he still had his champagne. “I wonder who the dead guy is.”
Owen stiffened. “Simon—”
“I’m just saying.”
But Owen didn’t have a chance to respond before Detective O’Reilly arrived, his hard-set jaw suggesting he wasn’t pleased with the turn the evening had taken. “Where’s Keira?”
“Talking to Abigail,” Owen said quickly, as if he didn’t want to give Simon a chance to open his mouth.
O’Reilly gave the unoccupied doorway a searing look. “She’s okay?”
“Remarkably so,” Owen said. “She’s not the one who actually found the body.”
“She called it in.” Obviously, that was plenty for O’Reilly not to like. He sucked in a breath. “How the hell does a grown man drown in the Public Garden pond? It’s about two feet deep. It’s not even a real pond.”
Good question, but Simon didn’t go near it. He wasn’t on O’Reilly’s radar, and he preferred to keep it that way.
The senior detective glanced back toward his daughter, Fiona, the harpist. She and her ensemble were taking a break. “I need to go with Abigail, see what this is all about,” O’Reilly said, addressing Owen. “You’ll make sure Fiona stays here until I know what’s going on?”
“Sure.”
“And Keira. Keep her here, too.”
Owen looked surprised at the request. “Bob, she’s old enough—”
“Yeah, whatever. Just don’t let her go traipsing back down to the Public Garden and getting into the middle of things. She’s like that. Always has been.”
“There’s no reason to think the drowning was anything but an accident, is there?”
“Not at this point,” O’Reilly said without elaboration and stalked into the foyer.
Simon didn’t mind being a fly on the wall for a change. “Does the uncle get along with his daughter and niece?”
“They get along fine,” Owen said, “but Bob sometimes forgets that Keira is ten years older than Fiona. For that matter, he forgets Fiona’s nineteen. They’re a complicated family.”
“All families are complicated, even the good ones.” Simon moved closer to the foyer doorway just as Keira started up the stairs barefoot, wet socks and shoes in one hand. She was prettier than he’d expected. Drop-you-in-your-tracks pretty, really. He noticed her uncle scowling at her from the bottom of the stairs and grinned, turning back to Owen. “Maybe especially the good ones.”
Ten seconds later, the two BPD detectives left.
The Irish ensemble started up again, playing a quieter tune.
Owen headed for Fiona O’Reilly, who cast a worried look in his direction. She had freckles, but otherwise didn’t resemble her father as far as Simon could see. Her long hair had reddish tints but really was almost as blond as her cousin’s, and she was a lot better looking than her father.
People in the crowd seemed unaware of the drama over by the door. Caterers brought out trays of hot hors d’oeuvres. Mini spinach quiches, some little flaky buttery things oozing cheese, stuffed mushrooms, skewered strips of marinated chicken. Simon wasn’t hungry. He noticed Lloyd Adler pontificating to an older couple who looked as if they thought he was a pretentious ass, too.
Simon went in the opposite direction of Adler and made his way to the back wall where Keira’s two donated watercolors were on display.
He decided to bid on the one with the cottage, just to give himself something to do.
It was a white stone cottage set against a background of wildflowers, green pastures and ocean that wasn’t in any part of Ireland that he had ever visited. He supposed that was part of the point—to create a place of imagination and dreams. A beautiful, bucolic place. A place not entirely of this world.
At least not the world in which he lived and worked.
Simon settled on a number and put in his bid, one that virtually assured him of ending up with the painting. He could give it to Abigail and Owen as a wedding present. Even if he didn’t plan to go to the wedding, he could give them a present.
He acknowledged an itch to head down to the Public Garden with the BPD detectives, but he let it go. He’d seen enough dead bodies, enough to last him for a long time. A lifetime, even. Except he knew there would be more. There always were.
Instead, he decided to find another glass of champagne, maybe grab a couple of the chicken skewers and wait for a dry, calmer Keira Sullivan to make her appearance.
Chapter 4
Beacon Hill
Boston, Massachusetts
8:45 p.m., EDT
June 17
Keira peeled off her hiking shorts and added them to the wet heap on the bathroom floor of her attic apartment. Her hands shook as she splashed herself with cold water and tried not to think about the dead man and the expressions of the two students as they’d frantically checked him for a pulse, uncertain of their actions, desperate to do the right thing even as they were repulsed by the idea of touching a corpse.
“The poor man,” she said to her reflection. “I wonder who he is.” She saw herself wince, and whispered, “Was.”
She towel-dried her hair as best she could, expecting a twig or a dead mosquito to fall out, a souvenir from her earlier hike to her mother’s. None did, and she combed out the tangles and pinned it up. She’d been looking forward to tonight’s auction and reception, but her visit with her mother and then the awful scene in the Public Garden had sucked all the excitement out of her. She just wanted to get the evening over with and be on her way to Ireland.
But for Ireland, she wouldn’t have even been in the Public Garden tonight. She’d dropped her car off with a friend in Back Bay to look after for the next six weeks and ran into the students dragging the man out of the pond on her way to the Garrison house. As she’d raced up Beacon Street after the police had arrived, she couldn’t shake the notion that her mother’s talk about sin and evil had put her in the Public Garden at exactly the wrong moment.
But that was unfair, Keira thought, and as she returned to her bedroom, she found herself wishing she could call her mother and tell her what had happened.
Everything changes.
She dug through her small closet, pulling out a long, summery skirt and top. The apartment was no more permanent than anywhere else she’d lived, but she liked the space—the efficient, downsize appliances, the light, the view of the Common. It wasn’t on the grand scale as the rest of the house, but it had charm and character and worked just fine for now. Compared to her mother’s cabin, Keira thought, her apartment was a palace.
In five minutes, she had wriggled into her outfit, put on a bit of makeup and was rushing back down the stairs again. Two deep breaths, and she entered the drawing room. Her cousin Fiona’s ensemble was playing a jaunty tune that didn’t fit Keira’s mood, but she tried to appreciate it nonetheless.
Owen immediately fell in alongside her, and she smiled at him. “I’m okay,” she said before he could ask.
“Good.”
He had a way about him that helped center people. Keira could imagine how reassuring his presence would be to a trapped earthquake victim. “Who was the man I saw you with earlier?” she asked. “Big guy. Another BPD type?”
She thought Owen checked a grin, but he wasn’t always easy to read. “You must mean Simon Cahill. He’s a volunteer with Fast Rescue.”
“From Boston?”
“From wherever he happens to be at the moment.” Owen smiled as he grabbed a glass of champagne from a caterer’s tray and handed it to her. “A little like you in that regard. I don’t know what happened to him. He was here two seconds ago.”
Just as well he’d taken off, Keira thought. She’d spotted him at the height of her distress, and if Owen was a steadying presence, Simon Cahill, she thought, was the opposite. Even in those few seconds of contact, she’d felt probed and exposed, as if he’d assumed she had something to hide and was trying to see right through her.
She thanked Owen for the champagne and eased into the crowd, realizing her hair was still damp from the downpour. For the most part, people she greeted seemed unaware of her earlier arrival, which spared her having to explain.
Colm Dermott, a wiry, energetic Irishman, approached her with his usual broad smile. She’d met him two years ago on a trip to Ireland, where he was a highly respected professor of anthropology at University College Cork. He’d arrived in Boston in April after cobbling together grants to put together the Boston-Cork conference and had immediately recruited Keira to help.
“The auction’s going well.” He seemed genuinely excited. “You must be eager to go off tomorrow.”
“I’m packed and ready to go,” she said.
“Ah, you’ll have a grand time.”
She’d given Colm a copy of the video recording she’d made of Patsy McCarthy telling her story, but hadn’t told him about her mother and her long-ago trip to Ireland.
They chatted a bit more, but Keira couldn’t relax. Finally, Colm sighed at her. “Is something wrong, Keira?”
She took a too-big gulp of champagne. “It’s been a strange day.”
Before she could explain further, her emotional younger cousin burst through the crowd, her blue eyes shining with both excitement and revulsion. “Keira, are you okay?” Fiona asked. “Owen just told me about the man you found drowned. I wondered why Dad and Abigail left so fast.”
Colm looked shocked. “I had no idea. Keira, what happened? No wonder you’re distracted.”
She quickly explained, both Colm and Fiona listening intently. “It wasn’t a pleasant scene. I wish I could have arrived sooner, but it might not have made any difference. He could have had a heart attack or a stroke, and that’s why he ended up in the water.”
“Do you know who he was?” Colm asked.
Keira shook her head. “No idea.”
“I hope he wasn’t murdered,” Fiona said abruptly. “I hope not, too,” Keira said, reminding herself that her cousin was the daughter of an experienced homicide detective. “The police are there in full force, at least.”
Owen returned and spoke to Fiona. “I just talked to your father. He’s going to be a while and asked me to give you a ride back to your apartment—”
“I can take the subway.”
“Not an option.”
Fiona rolled her eyes. “My dad worries too much.”
But she seemed to know better than to argue with Owen. She and some friends were subletting an apartment for the summer that her father considered a rathole, on a bad street, too far from the subway and too big a leap for a daughter just a year out of high school. Keira had stayed out of that particular discussion.
“I’ll water your plants while you’re in Ireland,” Fiona said, giving a quick grin. “Maybe I’ll talk Dad into buying me a ticket to Ireland for a week. You and I could visit pubs and listen to Irish music.”
“That’d be fun,” Keira said.
“It would be, wouldn’t it? Right now I guess I should go pack up.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear more of your band.”
“They were fantastic,” Colm interjected.
Fiona beamed and headed across the room with Owen.
Colm turned back to Keira with a smile. “Fiona’s more like her father than she thinks, isn’t she?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, his smile fading as he continued. “If there’s anything I can do, you know how to reach me.”
“I appreciate that. Thanks, Colm.”
He rushed off to speak to someone else, and Keira found herself another glass of champagne. As she took a sip, feeling calmer, she noticed small, white-haired Patsy McCarthy in the foyer.
Keira immediately moved toward her. “Patsy—please, come in. I’m so glad you could make it.”
“Thank you for inviting me.” Within seconds of meeting almost a month ago, Patsy had dispensed with any formalities and insisted Keira call her by her first name. She nodded back toward the door. “I thought it’d never stop raining.”
“I know what you mean. It was quite a downpour.”
With a sudden move, Patsy clutched Keira’s hand. “I wanted to see you before you left for Ireland. You’re going to look for the stone angel, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be in the village that undoubtedly inspired the story—”
“You’ll be there on the summer solstice. Look for the angel then.”
The summer solstice played a key role in the story. “I’ll do my best.”
“The Good People want to find the stone angel as much as you do. The fairies, I mean. The angel’s been missing for so long, but they won’t have forgotten it. If you’re clever, you can let them help you.” Patsy dropped Keira’s hand and straightened her spine. “I’m not saying I believe in fairies myself, of course.”
Keira didn’t tackle the older woman’s ambivalence. “If they believe the angel’s one of their own turned to stone and want it for themselves, why would they help me?”
“That’s why you must be clever. Don’t let them know they’re helping you.”
“I’ll try to be very clever, then.”
“The brothers will be looking for the angel, in their own way. They and the fairies all want the tug-of-war over it to resume. It’s meant to resume.” Patsy tightened her grip on Keira’s hand. “If you find the angel, you must leave it out in the open. In the summer sun. It’ll get to where it belongs. Don’t let it go to a museum.”
“I promise, Patsy,” Keira said, surprised by the older woman’s intensity. “I’ll look for the angel on the summer solstice, then, I’ll be clever and if I find the angel, I’ll leave it out in the sun—assuming that’s up to me. The Irish might have other ideas.”
Patsy seemed satisfied and, looking more relaxed, released Keira’s hand and eyed a near-empty tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries.
Keira smiled. “Help yourself. Would you like to take a look around?”
“I would, indeed,” Patsy said, lifting a fat strawberry onto a cocktail napkin. “I have every one of your books, you know. Do you think you’ll illustrate my story one day?”
“I’d love to.”
“That’d be something. It’s a good story, isn’t it?”
“It’s a wonderful story.”
Patsy smiled suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “Irish brothers, an angel and fairies. All the best stories have fairies, don’t you think?”
“I love stories with fairies.”
With Keira at her side, Patsy ate her strawberry and moved from artwork to artwork, as if she were in a museum, gasping when she came to Keira’s two paintings. “Oh, Keira. My dear Keira. Your paintings are even more incredible in real life.” She paused, clearly overcome by emotion. “This is the Ireland I remember.”
Whether it was an accurate statement or one colored by time and sentiment, Keira appreciated Patsy’s response. “It means a lot to me that you like my work.”
When Patsy finished her tour of the drawing room, she took another chocolate-covered strawberry and started for the foyer. “Can I see you back home?” Keira asked.
Patsy shook her head. “My parish priest drove me. Father Palermo. Like the city in Sicily. He couldn’t find a parking space, so he’s driving around until I finish up. Did you know that my church is named after Saint Ita?”
Keira smiled. “The Irish saint in your story.”
“It’s strange how life works sometimes, isn’t it?” They walked outside together. A simple black sedan waited at the curb. A handsome, dark-haired man in a priest’s black suit and white clerical collar got out and looked across the car’s shiny roof. “Are you ready, Mrs. McCarthy, or shall I drive around the Common one more time? I don’t want to rush you.”
“I’m all set. This is the artist I told you about, Father. Keira Sullivan.”
“Ah. Miss Sullivan. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Keira couldn’t read his tone, but Patsy added politely, “Keira, I’d like you to meet Father Michael Palermo.”
He tilted his head back slightly, as if appraising her. “Mrs. McCarthy tells me you’re collecting stories from twentieth-century Irish immigrants.”
“That’s right. She’s been very generous with her time.”
Patsy waved a hand in dismissal. “I’m just an old woman with an ear for a good story.”
Father Palermo kept his gaze on Keira. “Your mother grew up a couple doors down from Mrs. McCarthy.”
“Two,” Keira said without elaboration. “A pleasure to meet you, Father.”
“Likewise.”
He climbed back in behind the wheel, and Patsy got into the passenger seat and smiled at Keira. “Give my love to Ireland,” she said with a wink.
After they left, Keira lingered on the sidewalk. The wind had picked up, but after the heat and humidity of recent days, she appreciated the drier conditions that came with the gusts. The puddles that had formed in dips in the sidewalk would be dry by morning.
“So you’re off to Ireland in search of angels and fairies.” Simon Cahill grinned at her as he leaned against the black iron railing to the steps of the Garrison house. “Do you believe in fairies?”
“That’s not what’s important in my work.”
“Ah, I see. That’s a dodge, but whatever. Keira, right?”
“That’s right—and you’re Simon. Owen’s friend. I didn’t realize you were still here.”
“I have to pay for my painting.”
“Your painting?”
“Your watercolor of the Irish cottage. I couldn’t resist.”
“You bid on my painting? Why?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
Keira didn’t answer. He was obviously a man who could charm his way into or out of anything. And he made her uncomfortable—no, not uncomfortable…self-conscious. Aware. Maybe it was because he was the first person she’d spotted when she’d arrived from the Public Garden. Some kind of weird imprinting that was inevitable, unavoidable.
Finally, she said, “You don’t care about a painting of an Irish cottage.”
“I care. I just didn’t bid on it for myself. Abigail wanted it, but she was going to lose out. I decided it’d be a nice wedding present for her and Owen. He’ll like it because she likes it.” The corners of Simon’s mouth twitched with amusement. “Don’t frown. He thinks you’re good, too.”
Not only, Keira thought, was Simon dangerously charming, but he was also observant. And frank. “Thank you for bidding on the painting. The proceeds from the auction will be put to good use. You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Not really.”
“Then where do you live?”
“Direct, aren’t you? I have a boat. It’s at a pier in East Boston at the moment, but it’s only been there since yesterday. Before that, it was in Maine. I met Owen and some other Fast Rescue people at his place on Mount Desert Island after our mission to Armenia.”
Keira had read about the devastating earthquake. “That must have been tough.”
“It was.” He didn’t elaborate. “I was in London when it happened. I go back tomorrow.”
“What’s in London?”
“The queen. Castles. Good restaurants.”
The man had an appealing sense of humor, and, in spite of the tension of the past few hours, Keira felt herself relaxing. “Very funny. I meant what’s in London for you?”
“I’m visiting a friend. What about Ireland? What’s there for you, besides angels and fairies?”
Answers, she thought, but she shrugged. “I guess I’ll find out.”
His eyes narrowed on her, and she noticed they were a vivid, rich shade of green. “Up for a bit of adventure, are you?”
“I suppose I am.”
“Have a good trip, then.”
He ambled off down Beacon Street. When she returned to the drawing room, Keira checked with Colm. “How much did my cottage painting go for?”
“Ten thousand.”
She couldn’t hide her surprise. “Dollars?”
“Yes, dollars, Keira. It was four times the highest bid. Simon Cahill bought it. Do you know him?”
“No, I just met him tonight. What about you?”
“I talked with him for all of thirty seconds. Well, he must want to support the conference.”
“He must. I’m grateful for his generosity.”
“As am I,” Colm said.
Keira said good-night and headed for the stairs up to her apartment, amazed at how Simon had managed to get under her skin in such a short time.
It had to be because of the intensity of the past few hours. What on earth did they have in common?
She’d be back to normal by morning, finishing up her packing and heading to the airport by evening. At least she wasn’t going to Ireland by way of London; there was no risk they’d be sitting next to each other on the same flight.
It was a long way across the Atlantic.
Chapter 5
Boston Public Garden
Boston, Massachusetts
10:00 p.m., EDT
June 17
Abigail Browning paced on the sidewalk along the edge of the man-made pond where the two college students had discovered the body of Victor Sarakis, a fifty-year-old resident of Cambridge who apparently, even according to the initial take of the medical examiner, had drowned in about two feet of water.
Normally, Abigail found the Public Garden a soothing, pleasant place to be, with its graceful Victorian walks and statues, its formal flower beds and labeled trees, its mini suspension bridge over the curving pond. Technically, it was a botanical garden—a refuge in the heart of the city of Boston.
Tonight, it was the scene of a bizarre, as yet unexplained death. Police lights and the garden’s own Victorian-looking lamps illuminated the scene as detectives, patrol officers, crime scene technicians and reporters did their work. By tomorrow morning, there would be virtually no sign of what had gone on here tonight. The swan boats, a popular Public Garden attraction for over a century, could resume their graceful tour of the shallow water.
Abigail stopped pacing, grateful, at least, that she’d worn flats to tonight’s reception. Trees, flowers and grass were still dripping from the downpour. Most likely, it had been raining, and raining hard, when Victor Sarakis ended up in the water. The medical examiner had already removed the body for an autopsy. Anything was possible. Heart attack, stroke, an unfortunate slip in the heavy rain.
Pushed, tripped, hit on the back of the head.
Abigail wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions.
She glanced sideways at Bob O’Reilly, who’d decided, on his own, to interview the two students. Reinterview, Abigail thought, irritated. The responding officers had talked to the students. She’d talked to them. Now Bob was talking to them. For no good reason, either, except that he was a senior detective with decades of experience on her and presumably knew what he was doing. But she wished he’d go back up to Beacon Street and listen to his daughter play Irish music.
The students—summer engineering students from the Midwest—looked worn out. They could have gone back to their dorm a long time ago—they just didn’t.
They’d told Bob the same story, about cutting through the Public Garden from a bookstore on Newbury Street, hoping to beat the storm and get to a friend’s apartment on Cambridge Street. When the skies opened up on them, they debated going back to the bookstore or pushing on to their friend’s place.
Then they’d spotted a body in the pond.
“You could tell he was dead by looking at him?” Bob gave them one of his trademark skeptical snorts. “How?”
“I don’t know,” the thinner of the two students said. He had a scraggly beard and was shivering as his wet clothes dried in the breeze. “It was obvious.”
“He didn’t look like he’d been in the water that long,” his friend said. He was meatier, and he’d gotten just as wet, but he wasn’t shivering.
“Long enough,” Bob said.
The students didn’t respond.
“You didn’t see him before you noticed him in the pond?” Bob asked.
They shook their heads. They’d answered the same question before, maybe twice already. Abigail knew she’d asked it.
Bob gave them a thoughtful look. “How do you like BU?”
The skinny student didn’t hide his surprise—and maybe a touch of annoyance—at the personal question as well as his friend did. “What?”
“My daughter goes there. Music major.”
“We don’t know any music majors,” the meaty kid said quickly.
Abigail bit her tongue at the exchange, but Bob didn’t mention Fiona by name and finally told the students to go on back to their dorms. This time, they didn’t hesitate.
Bob turned to her. His red hair had frizzed up in the humidity and rain, and his freckles stood out on his pale skin. “You look like you want to smack me.”
“It’s a thought.”
He obviously didn’t care. She’d never met anyone with a thicker hide. She owned a triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, with him and a third detective, an arrangement that for the most part worked out well, but tonight, for the first time, she could see the potential for complications.
“Press is all over this one,” Bob said, nodding to a camera crew. “Some rich guy from Cambridge tripping on his shoelaces and drowning in the Public Garden swan pond.”
“We don’t know he’s rich, and, actually, it’s called the lagoon.”
“Lagoon? Lagoon reminds me of Gilligan’s Island. Why don’t they just call it a pond?”
“Maybe it’s a Victorian thing.” Abigail ran both her hands through her short, dark curls, noticing wet spots where water had dropped onto her head from leaves of the nearby shade trees. “And Mr. Sarakis was wearing loafers. No laces to trip over.”
“Figure of speech.”
Abigail said nothing.
“This is a straightforward death investigation, Abigail. Guy running in the rain slips or trips and goes flying, hits his head on the concrete, falls into the drink and drowns. A freak accident.”
“A good detective doesn’t let assumptions drive conclusions,” she said, adding with just a touch of sarcasm, “I wonder who gave me that advice when I decided to become a detective?”
“Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not in the mood.”
She didn’t blame him for wanting Victor Sarakis’s death to be an accident, considering his niece was the one who’d called 911.
Abigail kept her mouth shut. Normally she would appreciate Bob’s insight, his questions. He’d been in Boston law enforcement through some of its most difficult crime years. He wasn’t bitter and burnt-out so much as cynical. He’d seen it all, he liked to say, and not much of it had been good. But she didn’t want him around right now. It wasn’t just because of Keira’s involvement with the case, either.
“Never mind my bad mood,” he said. “You’ve been prickly for days.”
“So?”
He didn’t answer, and she felt him studying her in the same way he had when they’d first met eight years ago. He hadn’t believed she’d make a good police officer, much less a good homicide detective. She’d won him over slowly, despite what he considered a lot of baggage. Her father was the FBI director, a liability from Bob O’Reilly’s perspective because it brought attention to her. By itself, it was enough for him to rule her out as police officer material. But that wasn’t all. She’d quit law school after her husband was murdered four days into their Maine honeymoon, a case that had remained unresolved for seven years, until a break last summer.
Finally, she knew how Chris—her first love—had died, and who had killed him. For seven years, it was all she’d wanted in life. Answers. Justice. The lifting of the burden of not knowing what had happened that awful day.
But the break in the case had changed her life in a way she hadn’t anticipated. During her hunt for her husband’s killer last summer, she’d also opened herself up to falling in love again.
She could feel Bob’s eyes on her and brought herself back to the present. “There’s no evidence of foul play,” he said.
Abigail chose her words carefully. “So far, no, there isn’t.”
“He had his wallet in his back pocket.”
Indeed, the wallet had made identifying Victor Sarakis easy because it came complete with his driver’s license, ATM card, credit cards, insurance cards, bookstore frequent-buyer card and seventy-seven dollars in cash. No loose change, unless it had fallen out of his pants into the water or grass. If it had, the crime scene guys would find it.
But Abigail knew Bob had raised the point about the wallet because it played into his desire for Sarakis’s death to be an accident.
“What do you suppose he was doing out here in the rain?” she asked, knowing Bob wouldn’t like the question but refusing to let him bulldoze her.
“Movie, play, Starbucks. It’s Boston in June. He could have been doing a million different things.”
“He’s from Cambridge.”
“A lot of people from Cambridge cross the river for a night on the town.”
She knew that and wasn’t sure why she’d brought it up, except that Victor Sarakis didn’t strike her as a night-on-the-town sort. He wore expensive, if traditional, clothes—khakis, polo shirt and loafers. No socks. She hadn’t found a receipt from a nearby restaurant or shop or ticket stubs in his pockets. Patrol officers were at his house in Cambridge attempting to notify next of kin, but, so far, no one was home.
“Keira arrived at the party late. I wonder—”
“Don’t even go there.” Bob’s tone had sharpened. “You have no cause to push this thing.”
Abigail wasn’t intimidated. “A dead man. That’s cause enough.”
He tilted his head back slightly in that way she knew so well. It said that he knew she was deliberately pushing his buttons, that he wasn’t saying anything now because he was going to give her a chance to dig a deeper hole for herself.
So she did. “I wonder if Victor Sarakis was on his way to the auction. Maybe he was going to bid on one of Keira’s paintings.”
Bob rocked back on his heels. He and Abigail had worked together a long time, and she knew her comment would set him off. He could be volatile, or he could be patient. The choice depended on what he wanted, what tactic he thought would work to his best advantage. He wasn’t unemotional. He just had his emotions under tight wraps.
As far as Abigail could see, Bob had never known what to make of his niece. At almost thirty, Keira was a successful illustrator and folklorist, but with no roots, no sense of place. She’d been on the move since high school. Bob, on the other hand, had never lived anywhere but Boston.
“I doubt it was the only event on Beacon Hill tonight, but go ahead, Abigail,” he said. “Check the guest list. Knock on every door within ten blocks of here. It’s not like you have anything else to do, right?”
She had a full caseload. Every detective in the department did. But she shrugged. “I’m trying to remember how I heard about the auction. I don’t remember getting an actual invitation. I think it was just an announcement.” She sighed. She didn’t know why she was antagonizing Bob. “Forget it. I’m getting ahead of myself.”
He seemed to soften slightly, but that could be a tactic, too. “It’s the time of year. Summer solstice is getting close. It’s worse than a full moon. Too damn much sun, I swear. Brings out the weirdos.”
Abigail couldn’t resist a smile. “Bob, nobody says weirdos anymore.”
He grinned at her. “I do.”
“What’s with you and the summer solstice?”
“Nothing.” He yawned—deliberately, Abigail thought—and did a couple of shoulder rolls, as if he needed to loosen up. “I should get back. When you see Owen, thank him for giving Fiona a ride home for me.”
“Sure, Bob. I’m sorry Keira got here when she did. It’s not an easy thing, coming upon a body.”
“Fiona wants to spend a week in Ireland with Keira visiting pubs and playing music. Can you imagine the two of them?” He wrinkled up his face and blew out a breath. “Fiona keeps telling me I worry too much. Maybe I do. I don’t even like her taking the subway alone, never mind getting on a plane to Ireland by herself.”
“She takes the subway all the time. She’s a music student. She’s got lessons, ensemble practice.”
“Plays the freaking harp. You believe I have a daughter majoring in harp?” He rubbed the back of his neck as if he were in pain. “And I have a niece who paints pictures of fairies and wildflowers and collects loony stories people tell by the fire.”
“They’re both incredibly talented, and Keira’s successful in a highly competitive business. Plus, they both get along with you, which is saying something.”
Bob let his hand drop to his side. “Wait’ll you have kids.”
His words were like a gut punch, and Abigail looked away quickly, muttering a good-night and making a beeline for the crime scene guys, thinking of something she could ask them. Anything. Didn’t matter what. She didn’t want Bob to see her expression, to wonder what demons were haunting her now.
This was private, damn it. Personal. Up to her and her alone to figure out.
Kids.
She pictured herself with a big belly, Owen with a toddler on his shoulders—the three of them in the Public Garden on a beautiful June day. But it was a fantasy. Reality was so much more complicated. She and Owen weren’t even married yet, and babies would change her life, change his life.
Abigail turned her attention back to the pond. What had brought Victor Sarakis to Boston tonight? Never mind her mood or Bob’s mood, it was a question that needed an answer.
She spotted a crime scene guy she recognized. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. He was new. Really young. Grew up on a tough street in Roxbury.
“Malcolm,” she whispered, then raised her voice, calling to him. “Malcolm—hang on a second.”
“Yes, Detective?”
She glanced back at Bob, who pointed a finger at her and shook it—his way of telling her he knew what she was up to and would be watching.
Malcolm frowned at her. Abigail pointed to the sidewalk. “I just want to make sure we get photos of any cracks in the walks that could trip a guy running in the rain.”
“Of course. No problem.”
“Thanks.”
Bob continued across the picturesque mini suspension bridge over the pond. With a sigh of relief, Abigail studied the spot where Victor Sarakis had come to the end of his life. There was no fence on this section of the pond. If he’d tripped—or whatever—on the opposite bank, the knee-high cable fence could have broken his fall, perhaps kept him from drowning. But the water was so shallow—he must have been unconscious, otherwise why didn’t he just get up?
The autopsy would tell her more, but she had to agree with Bob and the medical examiner that Victor Sarakis’s untimely death was likely an accident.
In the meantime, she had work to do, and a long night ahead of her.
She touched her cell phone, but decided—no. Owen already knew she had a case and would be back to her place late. He had an early start in the morning for a Fast Rescue meeting in Austin. He was always on the go—Austin, Boston, his place in Maine, disaster sites and training facilities all over the world.
Let him get to bed, Abigail thought, and not worry about her. She wouldn’t want him to hear anything in her voice that would tell him she was gnawing on a worry, a problem. Because he’d ask her to explain, and she wasn’t sure she could. Whatever was going on with her wasn’t about him. It was about her.
And in those long years after Chris’s death, she’d grown accustomed to working out her issues on her own.
She wondered if Victor Sarakis had left behind any children, but pushed the thought out of her mind as she joined Malcolm in looking for cracks in the walks.
Chapter 6
Logan International Airport
Boston, Massachusetts
10:00 a.m., EDT
June 18
FBI Director John March greeted Simon with a curt handshake in an ultraprivate VIP lounge at Boston’s Logan Airport. March had flown up from Washington, D.C., that morning specifically for this meeting. He had an entourage of hulking FBI special agents and staffers with him, but they stayed out in the hall.
He was sixtiesh and trim, and although his hair was iron-gray, its curls reminded Simon of March’s daughter, Abigail. But March wouldn’t be seeing her today. He wouldn’t risk it. Simon knew it wasn’t just that March was protecting a classified mission. He didn’t want to have to explain his complicated history with the Cahills to a daughter—a cop daughter, no less—who knew nothing about it. It didn’t have to be a secret. It just was one.
“Some days, Simon,” the FBI director said, “I wish you’d decided to become a plumber.”
“If it’s any consolation, some days I wish I had, too.” Simon had been fourteen, crying over his father’s casket at a proper Irish wake in the heart of Georgetown when he’d first met March. “At least when you’re a plumber and you’re knee-deep in crap, no one tries to convince you it’s gravy.”
“I’ve put you in a difficult position.”
“I put myself there. You’re just capitalizing on it. That’s your job. I’m not holding it against you.”
“My daughter will.” March’s tone didn’t change from its unemotional, careful professionalism. “I’ve kept too many secrets from her as it is.”
Simon thought he detected a note of regret in the older man’s tone, but maybe not. Simon didn’t have the details, but apparently John March had known more about the circumstances surrounding the murder of his daughter’s first husband, an FBI special agent, than he’d let on. Nothing that would have led to his killer any sooner. But Abigail didn’t necessarily see it that way.
“Comes with the territory,” Simon said without much sympathy.
He hadn’t asked for March’s help all those years ago, when the then FBI special agent was wracked with grief and guilt after failing to stop the execution of Brendan Cahill, a DEA agent and friend, in Colombia. But there was nothing March could have done. The killers had videotaped themselves. The video showed them tying up Simon’s father. Blindfolding him. Firing two bullets into his forehead. Simon had seen the tape. For years, he thought he’d stumbled onto it—that he’d been clever, outwitting the brilliant, powerful John March. He was over that illusion now. March had arranged for Simon to find the tape and see his father’s murder.
Instead of feeling angry, bitter and betrayed, Simon had felt understood. March had known that once Brendan Cahill’s young son had realized the tape existed, he’d find a way to see it.
What Simon hadn’t realized, until recently, was that March had never mentioned him or his father to his daughter. Not once in twenty years.
He was a hard man to figure out.
March stayed on his feet. “I’ve told you as much as I know about what comes next.”
Simon doubted that, but he shrugged. “Great. I’ll be in London cooling my heels.”
“We’ve got him, Simon. We’ve got Estabrook, thanks to you.”
With a little luck, the “thanks to you” part would stay between Simon and March, but Simon had learned not to count on luck. “I’ll feel better when he’s in custody.”
“Understood.”
Simon could sense March’s awkwardness. Ordinarily he would keep his focus on the big picture and not concern himself with what a mission meant for Simon personally. But this mission was different. Eighteen months ago, Simon had left the FBI and started a new life—volunteering for Fast Rescue, making a living helping businesses and individuals plan for disasters. It wasn’t a bad life. He had a good reputation, a decent income and the kind of freedom he’d never had as a federal agent.
Enter Norman Estabrook.
To the public, Estabrook was a thrill-seeking billionaire hedge fund entrepreneur into extreme mountain climbing, high-risk ballooning, kayaking down remote, snake-infested rivers—whatever gave him an adrenaline rush. To a tight inner circle of trusted associates, he was also at the center of a network that dealt in illegal drugs and laundered cash for some very nasty people. Estabrook didn’t need the money, obviously, and he sure as hell didn’t care about advancing any particular cause. He liked the action. He liked thwarting authority.
In particular, Norman Estabrook liked thwarting John March.
Simon was in the perfect position to infiltrate Estabrook’s network, and that was what he’d done. He’d known from the beginning if Norman Estabrook was arrested as a major-league criminal—which he would be—and Simon’s role as an undercover federal agent remained a secret, his name would still be associated with Estabrook and his criminal network. Who’d hire him for anything, never mind trust him with their lives?
If he was exposed as an FBI agent, there went that career, too.
Either way, Estabrook would want him dead.
But Simon figured those were the breaks in his line of work. He stayed on his feet and noticed March did, too, the comforts of the lounge immaterial to either of them. They’d simply needed a private place to meet.
Simon grinned at the no-nonsense FBI director. “If this blows up in my face, I can always become a plumber.”
“You could do worse,” March said.
“Estabrook didn’t make a fortune by being stupid.”
“You’ve done your part, Simon. You provided what we needed to unravel this bastard’s network. He’s a bad actor, and so is the company he keeps.” March gave a thin smile. “Excluding you, of course.”
“Of course.”
“There’s nothing more you can do right now. Estabrook’s at his ranch in Montana, and he thinks you’re visiting a friend and recuperating from the Armenia mission.”
Simon shrugged. “I tend to get into brawls when I’m at a loose end.”
“You’re not at a loose end. You’re in wait mode.”
“Same thing.”
“If there’s another disaster—”
“I wouldn’t wish a disaster on anyone just to give me something to do. Owen’s trying to get me to get involved with Fast Rescue training. Makes my eyes roll back in my head, thinking about training people to do what I already know how to do.”
March looked down, and Simon could have sworn he saw him smile. “Just do what a disaster consultant and search-and-rescue specialist would do between jobs, and you’ll be fine.”
“Will Davenport’s putting me up in London.”
“Ah. Sir Davenport. Or is it Lord Davenport?”
“One or the other. Both. Hell, I don’t know.”
March’s eyes didn’t change. Nor did his mouth. Nothing, but Simon detected a change nonetheless. Will Davenport was a wealthy Brit who believed he owed Simon his life. Maybe he did, but Simon wasn’t keeping score. Apparently Will also had a history—a less favorable one—with the FBI director. Simon didn’t know what it was and wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“I take it Davenport is unaware of your reasons for going to London.”
It was a statement, but Simon responded. “If he is, he’s keeping it to himself.”
“That’d be a first,” March said, making a move for the door. “Simon, we’ve got Estabrook, and we’ll blow open his network and save lives. A lot of lives. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do, sir. I also know Abigail’s eventually going to find out my history with you—”
“Not your problem.”
It wasn’t that March had acted as something of a surrogate father to Simon for the past twenty years that would get to Abigail. It was that she’d never known. At first, Simon was too caught up in his own anger and grief even to notice that March never took him to meet his family. He’d show up at Simon’s ball games—a few times at the police station, after Simon got into fights—and stay in touch with the occasional phone call. When Simon headed off to the University of Massachusetts, March paid him a couple of visits each semester, taking him out for pizza, checking in with him about grades. March never suggested the FBI as a career. He wasn’t director in those days, and when Simon decided to apply to the academy, he never discussed the idea with him.
March opened the door. “Stay in touch,” he said.
“I will. By the way, do you know Keira Sullivan?”
“We’ve met. Very pretty—talented artist.”
“She found a dead guy in the Public Garden last night.”
“That was her?”
Simon didn’t know why he’d brought her up. “She’s heading to Ireland tonight to research some story about Irish brothers, fairies and a stone angel. I don’t know. I could forget Will and go chase fairies in the Irish hills—” But he stopped, noticing a change in March’s expression. “Something wrong?”
“I’m just preoccupied with this Estabrook thing.” He seemed to manufacture a smile. “Keira Sullivan’s a temptation you don’t need right now, wouldn’t you say?”
Simon didn’t answer, and March left, shutting the door sharply behind him as he went out into the hall.
With a groan of pure frustration, Simon plopped down on a plush chair and lifted his feet onto a coffee table. He noticed a copy of the morning Boston Globe on the table. On the front page was a grainy black-and-white shot of the man who’d drowned in the Public Garden. Well off, middle-aged, no wife or children. The BPD Homicide Unit was investigating, but there was no indication of foul play.
Simon pictured Keira Sullivan bursting into the Beacon Hill house last night after she’d called 911. Pale, soaked, dressed like a lumberjack. Twenty minutes later, she’d floated back into the drawing room looking like a willowy Irish fairy princess herself. He admitted he was intrigued, but March had a point. Without even trying, Simon could think of about a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t waste his time indulging in fantasies about Keira Sullivan. Artist, folklorist, flake. BPD detective’s niece. Off to Ireland.
She was also friends with Owen Garrison, who was already keeping what he knew about Simon from Abigail and didn’t need to worry about lying to Keira, too.
Simon dropped his feet back to the lounge floor.
Who was he kidding? He was indulging in fantasies about Keira Sullivan.
Just as well he had the trip to London. Best to find some water and a candy bar for his flight.
As he exited the lounge, he envisioned—as if it were right in front of him—the painting of the Irish cottage he’d bought at last night’s auction. It was as if he was there, in Keira’s world, and he imagined her with brush in hand, her pale blond hair pulled back, her blue eyes focused on where the next dab of paint would go.
Simon heaved a cathartic sigh. “Get a grip,” he muttered.
The hall was empty of FBI agents. His flight would be boarding soon.
He went in search of a candy bar.
Chapter 7
Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland
6:30 p.m., IST
June 20
On her second night in Ireland, Keira indulged in a “toasted special”—a grilled ham, cheese, tomato and red onion sandwich—and a mug of coffee liberally laced with some Irish whiskey. She hadn’t specified a brand. She’d told Eddie O’Shea, the owner of the only pub in the tiny Beara Peninsula village where she was to spend the next six weeks, that she wanted whiskey, whiskey from Ireland. Otherwise, she didn’t care.
“Another coffee?” Eddie asked her. He was a sandy-haired, slight man with a quick wit and a friendly nature that seemed tailor-made for his work.
“No, thank you.” Keira heard the touch of Boston in her voice, a surprise to her given her wandering lifestyle. She picked up a triangle of her sandwich, melted cheese oozing from the toasted white bread, a bit of onion curling into a charred sliver of ham. Less than two days on the southwest coast of Ireland, and she was settling in fine and looking forward to her stay there. “If I had more coffee, I’d have more whiskey, and then I’d be in a fix.”
Eddie eyed her with what she could only describe as skeptical amusement. “You’re not driving.”
“I plan to take a walk.” She picked up her mug, the coffee still very hot, and let it warm her hands. “I love these long June days. Tomorrow’s the summer solstice. You never know what mischief you might encounter this time of year.”
“Off to dance with fairies and engage in a bit of magic, are you? Well, be careful, or you’ll be mistaken for a fairy princess yourself.”
“Do you believe in the Good People, then, Eddie?” she asked with a smile.
“I’m not a superstitious man.”
She hadn’t told him Patsy’s story. Investigating a tale of Irish brothers, fairies and a stone angel, Keira had decided, required a clear-but-not-too-clear head. She wanted to be gutsy but not reckless, determined but not insane. She hoped the combination of whiskey and caffeine would do the trick.
Eddie moved off with a tray of drinks, delivering them to a knot of men gathered in a semicircle of spindly chairs in front of a small television. She’d learned they were local farmers and fishermen who’d known each other all their lives. They’d arrived at the pub one by one over the past hour to watch a hurling match and argue good-naturedly among themselves. If they’d been arguing about fairies, magic, ancient rituals and ancient stories told by the fire—that, Keira thought, would have compelled her to eavesdrop, perhaps even to join them. She didn’t know much about hurling, except that it was fast, rough and immensely popular with Eddie O’Shea and his friends.
She’d had dinner at the pub last night, too. She’d hit it off with Eddie right away. Nonetheless, she was keenly aware that the locals were beginning to construct a story about her and her presence in their village. She supposed she’d helped by dropping an odd tidbit here and there—not fiction so much as not the whole truth. She’d never once lied to any of them.
They believed she’d come to Ireland in the typical Irish-American search for her roots and herself, and she supposed, in a way, she had.
She left a few euros on the wooden bar and took her coffee with her as she stepped outside into what was, truly, one of the finer evenings of this and her two previous visits to Ireland. A good beginning to her stay, she thought. She could feel her jet lag easing, the tension of her last hours in Boston finally losing its grip on her.
A man in a threadbare tweed jacket, wool pants, an Irish wool cap and mud-encrusted wellies sat at a picnic table next to the pub’s entrance. He faced the street, smoking a cigarette. He looked up at Keira with eyes as clear and true a blue as she’d ever seen. His skin was weather-beaten, laced with deep wrinkles. He had short, straight gray hair. He could have been sixty or eighty—or a hundred-and-eighty, she thought. He had a timeless quality to him.
He said something in Irish that didn’t include one of the fifty or so words she knew. Her mother spoke Irish—or used to. “I’m sorry—”
“Enjoy your walk, Keira Sullivan.” He blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke and gave just the slightest of smiles. “I know you. Ah, yes. I know you well.”
She was so stunned, she jumped back, stumbling and nearly spilling coffee down her front.
When she righted herself, coffee intact, the man was gone.
Where had he slipped off to so fast?
Keira peered up the quiet, narrow village street, lined with brightly colored stucco houses. The vivid blue, fuchsia, green, yellow and red could light up even the gloomiest Irish weather. Baskets of lavender and dark pink geraniums hung from lampposts. A few cars were parked along the sides of the road, but there was no traffic. Except for a single dog barking toward the water and the occasional hoots from the men in the pub, the street was quiet.
Keira debated going back into the pub to see if the man was there, or asking Eddie O’Shea if he’d seen him, but as much as she and Eddie had hit it off, she’d known him less than two days and didn’t want to stir up any further gossip.
Maybe the mysterious man had overindulged in Guinness and was staggering up a nearby lane, or he lived in one of the houses on the main street and simply had gone home.
Maybe he’d decided to have a little fun with the American tourist.
She couldn’t read anything into what the man—a perfect stranger—had said.
Keira took his spot at the picnic table, and as she sipped her coffee, lukewarm now, she noticed there wasn’t even a hint of cigarette smoke in the pleasant evening air.
After she left the pub, Keira shoved her hands into the pockets of a traditional Irish wool knit sweater she’d bought in Kenmare, a pretty village famous for its shops and restaurants. It was located farther up Kenmare Bay, which separated the Beara and the Iveragh peninsulas, two of the five fingers of land in southwest Ireland that jutted out into the stormy Atlantic Ocean.
She turned onto a bucolic lane that ran parallel to the village’s protected harbor, gray and still now at low tide, and across the bay, the jagged silhouette of the MacGillicuddy Reeks of the Iveragh Peninsula were outlined against the muted sky. Off to her right, the rugged, barren mountains of the sparsely populated Beara Peninsula rose up sharply, with tufts of milky clouds, or fog, maybe, sinking into rocky crevices.
Keira could hear the distant bleating of the sheep that dotted the hills.
The ancient stone walls along the lane were overgrown with masses of pink roses and wildflowers—blue, purple and yellow thistles, pink foxglove, various drifts and spikes of white flowers.
And holly, Keira saw with a smile, lots of it. By tradition, cutting down a holly tree was bad luck.
There were tall rhododendrons and the occasional pop of a bright fuchsia that had long ago escaped cultivation. The southwest Irish climate, warmed by the Gulf Stream, was mild year-round, hospitable to subtropical plants in spite of fierce gales.
Her rented cottage was just up ahead, a traditional structure of gray stone that, to her relief, was charming and perfect for her stay. Keira made a mental note to send a postcard to Colm Dermott thanking him for his help in finding it.
She hugged her sweater closer to her and pushed back any thoughts that might entice her to duck into her cottage and pour herself another whiskey and put on music, then tuck herself among her warm blankets and sketch pretty pictures of Irish scenery. It was tempting just to forget her mission.
After another thirty yards, she turned onto a dirt track that wound through the middle of a rock-strewn pasture, marked off with barbed wire and rising sharply. She’d walked up this way yesterday to get a feel for her surroundings. She was surprised at how well they corresponded to the details in Patsy’s story.
Sheep grazed far up into the hills, part of the Slieve Miskish Mountains that ran down the lower spine of the peninsula to the Atlantic and the now-defunct copper mines, where Patsy’s grandfather had worked.
The track leveled off briefly, and Keira heard a grunt nearby.
A cow. It’s only a damn cow.
Then came a shriek of laughter, and a woman’s voice. “Oh, no! Look—I stepped in it!”
A man chuckled. “Apparently cows don’t care about prehistoric ruins.”
The couple climbed over a barbed-wire fence onto the track. They were obviously American, the slight breeze catching the ends of their graying hair as they checked their scuffed walking shoes for cow manure. The woman smiled at Keira. “I suppose if one’s going to traipse through a cow pasture, one should expect cow patties. Are you going out to the stone circle?”
“Not tonight,” Keira said.
She’d checked out the stone circle yesterday after her arrival. It was one of over a hundred of the mysterious megalithic structures in County Cork, a particularly good example because it was relatively large and missing just one of its eleven stones. Getting to it required climbing over fences and navigating cows, rutted ground, rocks and manure.
The woman gave up on her shoe. “It’s incredible—and to see it this time of year…” She beamed, obviously delighted with her adventure. “Such a thrill. We half hoped we’d run into fairies dancing.”
Her companion sighed. “You hoped we’d see fairies.”
She rolled her eyes with amusement and addressed Keira. “My husband has no sense of romance.” She gestured broadly toward the harbor and village below. “We’re staying in Kenmare. You’re American, too?”
“I’m from Boston—I’m renting a cottage here,” Keira said, leaving her explanation at that.
“Lovely. Well, enjoy your walk.”
“Mind the cow flops if you go in the pasture,” her husband said.
Keira wished the couple a good-night, and as they ambled down the gravel track, she felt more relaxed. It wasn’t as remote out here as it seemed. She’d come prepared. She had food, water, a flashlight, a first-aid kit and a whistle for emergencies.
“You’ll be in Ireland on the summer solstice. Look for the angel then.”
The summer solstice wasn’t until tomorrow, but Keira figured she’d have a good look around tonight, get the lay of the land. With a little luck, maybe Patsy’s story would lead her straight to the hermit monk’s hut.
Regardless, it was a beautiful evening, and Keira was enjoying herself on her first full day of what promised to be a perfect six weeks in Ireland.
Chapter 8
Cambridge, Massachusetts
3:00 p.m., EDT
June 20
Abigail parked her unmarked BPD car on a quiet street off Memorial Drive lined with mature trees and stately homes. Very Cambridge. Victor Sarakis’s house was a traditional Colonial with gray-painted shingles and black shutters. He was relatively wealthy, she’d discovered, and also something of an eccentric.
She turned the engine off and scowled at Bob O’Reilly next to her. He’d jumped into the passenger seat at BPD headquarters a half second before she could hit the locks and take off without him. He was getting on her nerves, but wasn’t everyone? “Shouldn’t you be pushing papers somewhere?”
He opened his door and glanced over at her. “What did you do, sit there stewing all this time and thinking up that one?”
“No, it just popped out.”
“Good. I’ll pretend it didn’t.”
Abigail didn’t respond. She knew he objected to her coming out to Cambridge. He had good reason. The medical examiner had determined that Victor Sarakis had drowned. There was no indication of foul play, a contributing natural cause or the involvement of alcohol or drugs, illegal or otherwise. A full autopsy report, with the results of more tests, was in the works, but everything still pointed to a bizarre accident. From past death investigations, Abigail knew it was entirely possible they’d never figure out the exact sequence of events that had led to Sarakis’s death.
Bob had already made clear he didn’t care what the exact sequence of events was. He wanted Abigail to focus on clear-cut homicide cases. She didn’t report to him, but he’d been charged with improving BPD’s percentage of solved versus unsolved homicide cases after a withering series of pieces in the media and figured that gave him license to get in anyone’s and everyone’s face, including hers.
Abigail had hoped to get to Cambridge and back without Bob ever knowing, but that hadn’t worked out. A middle-aged man in apparent good health drowning in two feet of water was provocative—worth a bit of follow-up, at least in her judgment. Bob was free to disagree, provided he stayed out of her way.
She got out of the car, shutting her door with more force than was necessary. It was hot—too hot for June. Tomorrow it’d rain, and then she’d be griping about that. Given her mood, she had to admit that Owen had picked the perfect time for a quick trip to Fast Rescue’s Austin headquarters.
She went around the front of the car to the sidewalk. Tom Yarborough, her partner for the past six months, shared Bob’s opinion of the Sarakis drowning but hadn’t made a stink when she’d said she wanted to head out here on her own.
Bob motioned for her to go ahead of him up Sarakis’s front walk. “It’s your investigation,” he said.
Ignoring his sarcasm, Abigail took in her surroundings. The brick walkway was chipped. The front door needed a fresh coat of its dark green paint. The iron railing was loose on the steps. She had no cause to look into Sarakis’s finances yet, but she wondered if eccentricity explained the run-down condition of his place. Everything sagged or was in need of scraping, paint, a good carpenter. A termite inspection wouldn’t hurt, either.
She took note of the full attic, one-story sunroom and attached two-car garage. “What do you think, Bob—five, six bedrooms?”
“At least, except they won’t all be bedrooms. No wife, no kids. Retired at fifty. He’ll have a library, a game room, a dead-animal room—you know, to display stuffed birds and deer heads.”
“Think he was a hunter?”
“Didn’t have to be.”
From her years working with Bob, Abigail knew he wasn’t being literal. He was sizing up Victor Sarakis as a moderately wealthy, eccentric loner who probably had serious amateur interests—ones that probably didn’t include gardening, she thought as she noted the dandelions, crabgrass and bare spots that dominated the small front lawn. His was definitely the ugly duckling house on the street.
She rang the doorbell, the faint sound of a ding inside the house telling her it worked.
“Tomorrow’s the summer solstice,” Bob said next to her, as if that explained an unusual death in the Boston Public Garden.
Abigail glanced back at him. “Don’t start that again. The summer solstice is a happy time. Lots of sun, flowers, bonfires, dancing.”
“Too much daylight, people go nuts. They can’t take it. Brings out the worst in them.”
She had no idea if he was serious.
“I know what’s eating me,” he said simply. “The summer solstice, and my crazy niece chasing fairies in Ireland. You, though. What’s going on with you?”
“What’s going on is that I’m trying to do my job, and you’re here interfering.”
“That’s not what’s going on. You’re used to me interfering. You know you don’t have to be here. You’re letting a straightforward death investigation consume you.”
“What was Sarakis doing that close to the water? It must have been raining when he ended up in the lagoon.” She knew she’d said lagoon instead of pond just to get on Bob’s nerves. He deserved it. “You’d think he’d have stuck to the walks and gotten to shelter as fast as possible.”
“Maybe he was feeding the pigeons.”
Just as she reached for the bell again, the door opened. A trim man with close-cropped graying hair stood on the threshold, looking tired, grim. He wore neatly pressed slacks and a loose-fitting silky sweater. From his expression, Abigail guessed he already knew who they were, but she showed him her badge and introduced herself and Bob.
“I’m Jay Augustine, Victor’s brother-in-law.” He stood back, opening the door wider. “Please, come in.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Augustine,” Abigail said.
“Thank you.” He waited for her and Bob to enter the foyer, then shut the door. “Why don’t we talk in the sunroom—”
“That’d be fine,” Abigail said.
He led them down a center hall. From what she could see, the interior of the house was immaculate and tastefully decorated, a decided contrast to the ratty exterior. They went through an elegant dining room into a small, adjoining room with windows on three sides and French doors that opened onto a brick terrace. Abigail noticed Bob was paying attention, taking in every detail—habit from years on the job, she thought, if not any real interest in her case.
Jay Augustine stood in the middle of the sunroom as if he didn’t know what else to do with himself. “Victor spent a great deal of time in here. It’s the only casual room in the house. He—” Augustine’s voice cracked, and he paused, clearing his throat. “Every room in the house is crammed with his various collections. Except this one. Funnily enough, he spent most of his time in here.”
“What did he collect?” Abigail asked.
“My brother-in-law had many interests and the time and money to indulge them. He went all over the world. My wife and I are dealers in fine art and antiques, but Victor bought most of the pieces you see here on his travels. He lived a full life, Detective Browning. That’s at least some consolation.”
Abigail didn’t respond.
“Well.” Augustine took in a breath. “You’re homicide detectives, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “It’s routine to conduct an investigation when—”
“When a man trips and falls in the Boston Public Garden?”
She noted the slightest edge to his tone. “Where do you and your wife live, Mr. Augustine?”
“We have a home in Newton. Our showroom is in Boston, on Clarendon Street.”
“When did you last see your brother-in-law?”
“I stopped by two weeks ago. Charlotte—that’s my wife—was with me, but I can’t speak for her. She may have seen Victor since then. They were close, but they didn’t live in each other’s pockets.”
Bob walked over to the French doors and looked out at the terrace, as run-down as the front of the house. “Where’s Mrs. Augustine now?” he asked.
“In Boston at our showroom,” Jay said. “It’s quiet there. Most of our business is done by appointment. She’s having a difficult time. Victor was such a vital presence in our lives. I actually met Charlotte through him. We’ve only been married two years… I’d located an Italian Renaissance tapestry Victor had been looking for. He was different, as you can see for yourselves, but he was a good man.”
“Where were you the night your brother-in-law died?” Abigail asked.
“In New York on business. Charlotte was at home.” He swallowed visibly, then nodded to the terrace. “Victor had been talking about hiring a yard service and getting repairs done on the house. He’d had complaints from neighbors. He wasn’t angry. He was aware that he was oblivious to things like peeling paint, chipped shutters and weeds. He just didn’t care, provided the house was keeping out the elements and his collections were protected.”
Bob started to pace, a sign he was getting impatient. Abigail moved back toward the dining room, noticed a knee-high wooden elephant, ornate silver, an array of Asian masks, a huge, colorfully painted bowl in the middle of the table. She’d never been one for a lot of antiques and collectibles around her.
“My wife and I are busy, Detective,” Jay Augustine said behind her. “We had no warning—we’re dealing with our shock as best we can. I could take the time to show you around, but I don’t see what point it would serve.”
At that point, neither did Abigail. Augustine ducked past her, and she and Bob followed him back out to the hall.
“What do you and your wife do now?” Bob asked.
Jay seemed surprised by the question. “Now? Oh, you mean with this house and Victor’s collections. He left a will, thank heaven. Charlotte is meeting with the attorney tomorrow.”
Bob bent over slightly and peered at a parade of statues of giraffes on a console. “Guess he collected giraffes, huh? Is your wife his sole next of kin?”
“Yes. Victor never married.”
“Did he keep good records of what he owned?”
“Not particularly.”
“He have anything a museum might want?”
Augustine inhaled through his nose, as if to rein in his impatience. “Potentially a considerable amount of what Victor collected would interest a museum—and Charlotte and me, too, if that’s what you’re going to ask next.”
Bob didn’t respond. Abigail knew he didn’t care if he was getting on Augustine’s nerves. “Did your brother-in-law spell out what he wanted done with his collections?”
“He left those decisions to my wife. To be quite frank, I’m saddened but not surprised that Victor died the way he did. He was very absentminded. He often lost track of where he was and what he was doing. You’re wasting your time, Detective Browning. I’m sure the citizens of Boston have more urgent things for you to do than to investigate an accidental drowning.”
“Again, I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.
“No, you’re not,” he snapped, walking briskly up the hall.
As they came to the foyer, Abigail noticed that the pocket doors to a room on her right had popped open a few inches. Just inside was a bronze statue with horns, bulging eyes and a forked tongue.
It was a five-foot-tall statue of the devil.
“Mind if we take a peek in here?” she asked mildly.
Jay regarded her impassively. “As you wish, Detective.”
Using two fingers, Bob slid open the pocket doors and gave a low whistle as he and Abigail entered the wood-paneled room. The devil statue was frightening, but it wasn’t alone. The walls and the furnishings—large oak library-style tables, smaller side tables, open and glass-fronted bookcases—were jam-packed with items that all appeared to involve, in some way, the devil.
“Ol’ Scratch lives,” Bob said.
“Victor was a gifted amateur scholar and independent thinker,” Jay Augustine said, not defensively.
Abigail noted a stack of books on a small table that all appeared to be about hell, damnation, devils or evil. “Where did he get this stuff?” she asked.
“Various places,” Jay said. “Victor was obsessive once he sunk his teeth into something. About three years go he developed an interest in evil, hell and the devil. He considered it no more unusual than someone else’s interest in goblins and trolls.”
“I like flowers myself,” Abigail said.
“Not everything in here is an original.” Jay nodded toward a disturbing painting on the front wall of naked men suffering in a fiery hell. “That Bosch, for instance, is a copy. You know Bosch, don’t you?”
“I don’t,” Bob said blandly.
“Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch painter in the Middle Ages known for his vivid depictions of hell and damnation. He had a fervent belief in the fundamental evil of man. In his world—depicted brilliantly in his work—man was redeemable only by faith in God.”
“Doesn’t look as if anyone got redeemed in this painting,” Abigail said.
“It’s called Hell. Appropriate, don’t you think? It’s one in a series of four paintings Bosch did in the late fifteenth century. The others are Ascent of the Blessed, Terrestrial Paradise and The Fall of the Damned.”
“Sounds as if you know something about this collection yourself,” Abigail said.
Augustine shrugged. “Charlotte and I saw the originals on a trip to Italy last summer. We helped Victor find a painter to do this copy.”
This obviously struck a nerve with Bob. “What for?”
“He wanted it.”
Bob moved closer to the painting. “Kind of looks like Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movies, doesn’t it? I haven’t read the books. My daughters have—I got through The Hobbit, and that was it for me.”
By habit and conviction, Abigail knew, he never used the names of any of his three daughters—Fiona, Madeleine and Jayne. At nineteen, Fiona was the eldest and more or less on her own, but Madeleine and Jayne were just fourteen and eleven. They lived with their mother in Lexington, close enough to visit their father regularly. They were good kids and got along with him, not always an easy task.
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Carla Neggers
Inside an ancient ruin, Keira discovers the mythic stone angel she seeks—but also senses a malevolent presence…just before the ruins collapse around her.Search-and-rescue veteran Simon Cahill finds Keira in the rubble just as she's about to free herself. Simon holds no stock in myths or magic, so he isn't surprised that there's no trace of her stone angel.But there is evidence of startling violence and—whatever the source—the danger to Keira is quite real. The long-forgotten legend that captivated her has also aroused a killer…a calculating predator who will follow them back to Boston, determined to kill again.
Praise for the novels of
CARLA NEGGERS
“No one does romantic suspense better!”
—Janet Evanovich
“A believable, gripping story that will keep armchair sleuths guessing… Here is intelligent writing that remains highly entertaining.”
—Publishers Weekly on Betrayals
“Neggers has created yet another well-matched pair of characters and given them a crackerjack mystery to solve—complete with a seriously creepy villain.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Abandon
“[Neggers’s] skill at creating colorful characters and deliciously twisted story lines makes this an addictive read.”
—Publishers Weekly on Stonebrook Cottage
“When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”
—Jayne Ann Krentz
“A keen ear for dialogue and a sure hand with multidimensional characterizations are Neggers’s greatest gifts as a storyteller…. By turns creepy and amusing, the story engages on several levels.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Breakwater
“Neggers keeps the reader guessing ‘whodunit’ to the end of her intriguing novel.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Widow
“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more could a reader ask? The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”
—Tess Gerritsen
The Angel
Carla Neggers
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To Kate and Conor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Brendan Gunning for all the wonderful Irish and Irish-American stories, and to Myles Heffernan, Paul Hudson, Jamie Carr and Christine Wenger for sharing your knowledge and expertise.
To Sarah Gallick for the help with Irish saints and for sending me early excerpts from The Big Book of Women Saints.
To my daughter, Kate Jewell, and my son-in-law, Conor Hansen, for getting us all to southwest Ireland. Conor, I’ll never forget standing in the stone house where your great-grandfather was born, or meeting your cousins on the Beara Peninsula.
To Don Lucey for the insight into Irish music and all the great recommendations.
To my agent, Margaret Ruley, and to my editor, Margaret Marbury, for the unwavering patience and support, and to the rest of the fabulous team in New York and Toronto—Donna Hayes, Craig Swinwood, Loriana Sacilotto, Dianne Moggy, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Heather Foy, Michelle Renaud, Stacy Widdrington, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson and everyone who makes MIRA Books such an incredible pleasure to work with.
And to Joe Jewell, my husband, for all the great times in Boston, “our” city, and to Zack Jewell, my son…yes, another trip to Ireland is in the works. Can’t wait!
Carla Neggers
P.O. Box 826
Quechee, VT 05059
www.carlaneggers.com
Contents
Prologue (#ud5449597-b012-5ef6-bd06-3bec8c162c56)
Chapter 1 (#ua391c8ba-1ba2-5c3a-9555-6ebbb3f20e2b)
Chapter 2 (#u5d89be55-9f76-5d0a-bdb7-400396966297)
Chapter 3 (#u3976cb89-96a3-5632-83ad-f629b14c611f)
Chapter 4 (#u65454ecc-1e3a-5801-a5fe-89de2c485bdb)
Chapter 5 (#u70b016ef-34af-54ca-8e83-99cd4a0e74c9)
Chapter 6 (#uc0712b68-4a87-564b-a9db-22bebdb06f71)
Chapter 7 (#u618a6c76-de94-5740-be03-305f188b98db)
Chapter 8 (#u20be9987-d4e9-575a-aff1-7ce283120ca3)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
South Boston, Massachusetts
2:00 p.m., EDT
July 12, Thirty Years Ago
A scrap of yellow crime scene tape bobbed in the rising tide of Boston Harbor where the brutalized body of nineteen-year-old Deirdre McCarthy had washed ashore. Bob O’Reilly couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Neither could Patsy McCarthy, Deirdre’s mother, who stood next to him in the hot summer sun. Coming out here was her idea. Bob didn’t want to, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t let her go alone.
“Deirdre was an angel.”
“She was, Mrs. McCarthy. Deirdre was the best.”
Ninety degrees outside, and Patsy shivered in her pastel blue polyester sweater. She’d lost weight in the three weeks since Deirdre hadn’t come home after her shift as a nurse’s aide. At first the police had believed she was just another South Boston girl who’d gone wrong. Patsy kept at them. Not Deirdre.
She disappeared on the night of the summer solstice. The longest day of the year.
Appropriate, somehow, Bob thought.
Patsy’s eyes, as clear and as blue as the afternoon sky, lifted to the horizon, as if she were trying to see the island of her birth, as if Ireland could bring her the comfort and strength she needed to get through her ordeal. She’d left the southwest Irish coast forty years ago at the age of nine and hadn’t been back since. She loved to tell stories about her Irish childhood, how she was born in a one-room cottage with no plumbing, no central heat—not even an outhouse—and how she’d learned to bake her famous brown bread on an open fire.
Bob wondered how she’d tell this story. The story of her daughter’s kidnapping, rape, torture and murder.
The police hadn’t released details, but Bob, the son of a Boston cop, had heard rumors of unspeakable acts of violence and depravity. He was twenty and planned on becoming a detective, and one day he would have to wade through such details himself. He hoped the victim would never be someone he knew. He and Deirdre had learned to roller-skate together, had given each other their first kiss, just to see what it was like.
“I heard the cry of a banshee all last night,” Patsy said quietly. “I can’t say I do or don’t believe in fairies, but I heard what I heard. I knew we’d find Deirdre this morning.”
The fine hairs stood on the back of Bob’s neck. A retired firefighter walking his golden retriever at sunrise had come upon Deirdre’s body. The police had come and gone, working with a grim efficiency, given Boston’s skyrocketing homicide rate. Now they had another killer to hunt.
With the city behind them and the boats out on the water and planes taking off from Logan Airport, Bob still could hear the lapping of the tide on the sand. He’d never felt so damn helpless and alone.
“Deirdre Ita McCarthy.” Patsy crossed her arms on her chest as if she were cold. “It’s the name of an Irish saint, you know. Saint Ita was born Deirdre and took the name Ita when she made her vows. Ita means ‘thirsting for divine love.’”
Patsy was deeply religious, but Bob had stopped attending mass regularly when he was sixteen and his mother said it was up to him to go or not go. He knew he’d go back to church for Deirdre’s funeral.
“I’ve never been good at keeping track of the saints.” He tried to smile. “Even the Irish ones.”
“Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and Saint Ita are early Celtic saints. Saint Ita had the gift of prophecy. Angels visited her throughout her life. Do you believe in angels, Bob?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“I do,” she whispered. “I believe in angels.”
It wouldn’t strike Patsy as particularly contradictory to say in one breath she’d heard a banshee—a solitary fairy—and in another that she believed in angels. If her beliefs brought her comfort, Bob didn’t care. He didn’t know what to tell her about banshees or angels or anything else. Her husband had died of a heart attack four years ago. Now this. “The police will find who took Deirdre from us.”
“No. They won’t. They can’t.” Patsy shifted her gaze back to the crime scene tape floating in the water. “The police are only human after all.”
“They won’t rest until they catch whoever did this.”
“It was the devil who took Deirdre. It wasn’t a man.”
“Doesn’t matter. If the police have to go to hell to find and arrest the devil, that’s what they’ll do. If I have to do it myself, I will.”
“No—no, Bob. Deirdre wouldn’t have you sacrifice your soul. She’s with her sister angels now. She’s at peace.”
Bob suddenly realized Patsy meant the devil literally. He pictured Deirdre with her blond hair and blue eyes, her translucent skin and innocent smile. She was as good as good ever was. She wouldn’t have stood a chance with someone who meant her harm. Devil or no devil.
He’d miss her. He’d miss her for as long as he lived.
He pushed back his emotions. It was something he’d need to learn to do if he was going to be a detective and catch people the likes of whoever had killed Deirdre.
“We don’t want this cretin to hurt someone else.”
“No, we don’t.” Patsy turned from the water. “But there are other ways to fight the devil.”
Two hours later, Bob found his sister, Eileen, reciting the rosary on a bench in the shade of a sprawling oak on the Boston College campus, where she had a summer work-study job at the library.
“I didn’t know you still had rosary beads,” he said.
“I didn’t, either. I found them in my jewelry box this morning.” She spoke in a near whisper as she held a single ivory-colored bead between her thumb and forefinger. “I haven’t said the rosary in ages. I thought I might not remember, but it came right back to me.”
Bob sat next to her. His sister was the smart one in the family. She’d returned two days ago from a summer study program in Dublin. No one had called to tell her Deirdre had gone missing. What could Eileen do from Ireland? Why spoil her time there, when they all hoped Deirdre would turn up, safe and sound?
When news of the discovery of Deirdre’s body reached the O’Reilly household that morning, Eileen pretended nothing had happened and left for work.
“I’ve just come from the waterfront with Mrs. McCarthy,” Bob said.
Eileen tensed, as if his words were a blow, and he didn’t go on. Her hair was more dirty blond than red like his, and she had more freckles. She’d never thought she was all that attractive, but she’d always been hard on herself—his sister had no limit to her personal list of faults big and small.
“There’s nothing the police can do now.” Eileen lifted her eyes from her rosary beads and shifted her gaze to her older brother. “Is there?”
“They can find Deirdre’s killer. They can stop him from killing again.”
“They can’t undo what happened.”
His sister’s left hand trembled, but her right hand, which held her rosary beads, was steady. Bob noticed how pale she was, as if she’d been sick. His smart, driven sister had so many plans for her life, but coming back home from Ireland to Deirdre’s disappearance had thrown Eileen right back into the world she was trying to exit.
And now Deirdre was dead.
Eileen’s fingers automatically moved to the next bead, and he saw her lips move as she silently recited the Hail, Mary.
He waited for her to finish the entire rosary and return her beads to their navy velvet pouch. She clutched it in her hand and leaned back against the bench.
They both watched a squirrel run up a maple tree.
Without looking at her brother, Eileen said, “I’m pregnant.”
Of all the things Bob had anticipated she might say when she’d finished praying, he hadn’t imagined that one. Their parents would be shocked. He was shocked. She didn’t have a boyfriend that he knew about.
He fought an urge to run away. Get out of Boston, away from the aftermath of Deirdre’s death, from what was to come with his sister. It all flashed in his mind—Patsy grieving next door, the police hunting for Deirdre’s killer, Eileen getting bigger, trying to figure out what to do with the baby.
The baby’s father. Who the hell was he?
Bob curled his hands into tight fists. He was young. He didn’t have to stay in Boston and deal with all these problems. He could go anywhere. He could be a detective in New York or Miami or Seattle.
Hawaii, he thought. He could move to Honolulu.
“How far along are you?” he asked.
“Not far. I haven’t had the test yet, but I know.”
“Eileen…” Bob looked at his younger sister, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “What happened in Ireland?”
But she jumped to her feet and walked quickly toward the ivy-covered building where she worked, and he didn’t follow her.
A week later, a series of calls into the Boston Police Department alerted them to a man who had just leaped from a boat into Boston Harbor.
He was in flames when he hit the water.
By the time a passing pleasure boat reached him, he was dead.
Within hours, the dead man was identified as Stuart Fuller, a twenty-four-year-old road worker who rented an attic apartment three blocks from the house where Deirdre McCarthy lived with her mother. Police discovered overwhelming evidence that tied him to Deirdre’s murder.
They had their devil.
The autopsy on Fuller determined that he’d drowned, but his burns would have killed him if he hadn’t gone into the water.
That evening, Bob found Patsy on her back porch with about twenty small angel figurines lined up on the top of the wide wooden railing. Despite the summer heat, she wore a pink polyester sweater, as if she expected never to be warm again.
“Deirdre collected angels,” Patsy said.
“I know. It made it easy to buy her presents.” Bob pointed at a colorful glass angel he’d found for her on a high school trip to Cape Cod. “I got her that one for her sixteenth birthday.”
“It’s beautiful, Bob.”
His throat tightened. “Mrs. McCarthy—”
“The police were here this morning. They told me about Stuart Fuller. They asked me if I knew him.”
“Did you?”
“Not that I recall. I suppose I could have seen him in the neighborhood.” She narrowed her eyes slightly. “At church, perhaps. The devil is always drawn to good.”
Bob watched her use a damp cloth to clean a delicate white porcelain angel holding a small Irish harp. It was one of the more valuable figurines in Deirdre’s collection and one of her favorites. She’d loved all kinds of angels—it didn’t matter if they were cheap, cheesy, expensive, ethnic. She used to tell Bob she wanted to buy a glass curio cabinet in which to display them.
“Patsy…do you know anything about Fuller’s death?”
She seemed not to hear him. “I have a story I want to tell you.”
Bob didn’t have the patience for one of her stories right now. “Which one?”
“One you’ve never heard before.” She held up the cleaned figurine to the light. “My grandfather first told it to me as a child in Ireland. Oh, he was a wonderful storyteller.”
“I’m sure he was, but—”
“It’s a story about three brothers who get into a battle with fairies over an ancient stone angel.” Patsy’s eyes sparked, and for a moment, she seemed almost happy. “It was one of Deirdre’s favorites.”
“Then it can’t be depressing. Deirdre didn’t like depressing stories.”
“She didn’t, did she? Come, Bob. I’ll make tea and heat up some brown bread for you. It’s my mother’s recipe. I made it fresh this morning. My father used to say my mother made the best brown bread in all of West Cork.”
Bob had no choice but to follow Patsy into her small kitchen and help her set out the tea and the warm, dense bread. How many times had he and Eileen and Deirdre sat here, listening to Patsy tell old Irish stories?
She joined him at the table, her cheeks flushed as she buttered a small piece of bread. “Once upon a time,” she said, laying on her Irish accent, “there were three brothers who lived on the southwest coast of Ireland—a farmer, a hermit monk and a ne’er-do-well, who was, of course, everyone’s favorite…”
Bob drank the tea, ate the bread and pushed back tears for the friend he’d lost as he listened to Patsy’s story.
Chapter 1
Near Mount Monadnock
Southern New Hampshire
4:00 p.m., EDT
June 17, Present Day
Keira Sullivan swiped at a mosquito and wondered if its Irish cousins would be as persistent. She’d find out soon enough, she thought as she walked along the trail to her mother’s cabin in the southern New Hampshire woods. She’d be on a plane to Ireland tomorrow night, off to the southwest Irish coast to research an old story of mischief, magic and an ancient stone angel.
In the meantime, she had to get this visit behind her and attend a reception tonight in Boston. But she couldn’t wait to be tucked in her rented Irish cottage, alone with her art supplies, her laptop, her camera and her walking shoes.
For the next six weeks, she’d be free to think, dream, draw, paint, explore and, perhaps, make peace with her past.
More accurately, with her mother’s past.
The cabin came into view, nestled on an evergreen-blanketed hill above a stream. Keira could hear the water tumbling over rocks and feel it cooling the humid late spring air. Birds twittered and fluttered nearby—chickadees, probably. Her mother would have given all the birds on her hillside names.
The mosquito followed Keira the last few yards up the path. It had found her at the dead-end dirt road where she’d left her car and stayed with her throughout the long trek through the woods. She was less than two hours from Boston, but she might as well have been on another planet as she sweated in the June heat, her blond hair coming out of its pins, her legs spattered with mud. She wished instead of shorts she’d worn long pants, in case her solo mosquito summoned reinforcements.
She stood on the flat, gray rock that served as a step to the cabin’s back entrance. Her mother had built the cabin herself, using local lumber, refusing help from family and friends. She’d hired out, reluctantly, only what she couldn’t manage on her own.
There was no central heat, no plumbing, no electricity. She had no telephone, no radio, no television—no mail delivery, even. And forget about a car.
On frigid New England winter nights, life had to get downright unbearable, if not dangerous, but Keira knew her mother would never complain. She had chosen the simple, rugged existence of a religious ascetic. No one had thrust it upon her.
Keira peered through the screen door, grateful that her mother’s stripped-down lifestyle didn’t prohibit the use of screens. The pesky mosquito could stay outside.
“Hello—it’s me, Mum. Keira.”
As if her mother had other children. As if she might have forgotten her only daughter’s name since chucking the outside world. Keira had last visited her mother several weeks ago but hadn’t stayed long. Then again, they hadn’t spent much time together in the past few years, never mind the past eighteen months when she’d first announced her intention to pursue this new commitment.
Her mother had always been religious, which Keira respected, but this, she thought as she swiped again at her mosquito—this isolated hermit’s life just wasn’t right.
“Keira!” her mother called, sounding cheerful. “Come in, come in. I’m here in the front room. Leave your shoes on the step, won’t you?”
Keira kicked off her hiking shoes and entered the kitchen—or what passed for one. It consisted of a few rustic cupboards and basic supplies that her mother had scavenged at yard sales for her austere life. Her priest had talked her into a gas-powered refrigerator. He was working on talking her into a gas-powered stove and basic plumbing—even just a single cold-water faucet—but she was resisting. Except for the coldest days, she said, she could manage to fetch her own water from the nearby spring.
Winning an argument with Eileen O’Reilly Sullivan had never been an easy task.
Keira crossed the rough pine-board floor into the cabin’s main living area. Her mother, dressed in a flowing top and elastic-waist pants, got up from a high stool at a big hunk of birch board set on trestles that served as her worktable. Her graying hair was blunt cut, reminding Keira of a nun, but although her mother had turned to a religious life, she’d taken no vows.
“It’s so good to see you, Keira.”
“You, too.” Keira meant it, but if she wanted to see her mother, she had to come out here—her mother wouldn’t come to her in Boston. “The place looks great. Nice and cozy.”
“It’s home.”
Her mother sat back on her work stool. Behind her, a picture window overlooked an evergreen-covered hillside that dropped down to a stream. Keira appreciated the view, but, as much as she needed solitude herself at times, she couldn’t imagine living out here.
A nearby hemlock swayed in a gust of wind, sending a warm breeze through the tiny cabin. Except for a wooden crucifix, the barn-board walls of the main room were unadorned. Besides the worktable and stool, the only other furnishings were an iron bed with a thin mattress, a rocking chair and a narrow chest of drawers. Not only was the small, efficient cast-iron woodstove the sole source of heat, it was also where her mother did any cooking. She chopped the wood for the stove herself.
The land on which the cabin was built was owned by a South Boston couple whose country home was through the woods, in the opposite direction of the path Keira had just used. She considered them complicit in her mother’s withdrawal from the world—from her own family. They’d let her choose the spot for her cabin and then stood back, neutral, until she’d finally moved in last summer.
A year out here, Keira thought. A year, and she looks as content as ever.
“It really is so good to see you, sweetheart,” her mother said quietly.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.”
A large sheet of inexpensive sketch paper was spread out on her worktable. Before retreating to the woods, she’d owned an art supply store in the southern New Hampshire town where she’d moved as a young widow with a small daughter. Over the years, she’d become adept at calligraphy and the tricky art of gilding, supplementing her income by restoring gilt picture frames and mirrors and creating elaborate wedding and birth announcements. Now she was applying her skills to the almost-forgotten art of producing an illuminated manuscript. The same couple who’d let her build on their land had found someone willing to pay her to illustrate an original manuscript of select Bible passages. Other than requesting an Irish Celtic sensibility and choosing the passages, the client left her alone.
It was painstaking work—deliberate, skilled, imaginative. She had her supplies at arm’s reach. Brushes, pens, inks, paints, calligraphy nibs, gilding tips, a gilding cushion, polishing cloths and burnishers.
“You’re working on your own Book of Kells,” Keira said with a smile.
Her mother shook her head. “The Book of Kells is a masterpiece. It’s been described as the work of angels. I’m a mere human.”
Another wind gust shook the trees outside on the hill. Storms were brewing, a cold front about to move in and blow out the humidity that had settled over New England during the past week. Keira wanted to get back to her car before the rain started.
“Did you see the Book of Kells when you were in Ireland in college?”
“I did.” Her mother’s tone was distant, controlled. She shifted her gaze to the blank, pure white paper on her desk, as if envisioning the intricate, thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript. “I’ll never forget it. What I’m doing is quite different. Much simpler.”
“It’ll be wonderful.”
“Thank you. The Book of Kells consists mainly of the four Gospels, but I was asked to start with the fall of Adam and Eve.” Her mother’s eyes, a striking shade of cornflower blue, shone with sudden humor. “I haven’t settled on the right serpent.”
Keira noticed a series of small pencil sketches taped to the birch board. “Those are some pretty wild serpents. It doesn’t get to you, being up here all alone drawing pictures of bad-assed snakes and bolts of lightning?”
Her mother laughed. “No bolts of lightning, I’m afraid. Although…” She thought a moment. “I don’t know, Keira, you could be onto something. A bright, organic bolt of lightning in the Garden of Eden could work, don’t you think?”
Keira could feel the tension easing out of her. She’d moved to Boston in January after a brief stint in San Diego and had trekked up here on snowshoes, hoping just to find her mother alive and reasonably sane. But her mother had been warm and toasty, a pot of chili bubbling on her woodstove, content with her rigid routines of prayer and work. Keira had thought living closer would mean they’d see more of each other. It hadn’t. She could have stayed in San Diego or moved to Miami or Tahiti or Mozambique—or Ireland, she thought. The land of her ancestors.
The land of her father.
Maybe.
Her mother’s sociability didn’t last, and the humor in her eyes died almost immediately. A studied blankness—a sense of peace, she would no doubt say—brought a neutrality to her expression. She seemed to take a conscious step back from her engagement with the world. In this case, the world as represented by her daughter.
Keira tried not to be offended. “I came to say goodbye for a few weeks. I leave for Ireland tomorrow night for six weeks.”
“Six weeks? Isn’t that a long time?”
“I’m doing something different this trip.” Keira hesitated, then said, “I’m renting a cottage on the southwest coast. The Beara Peninsula.”
Her mother gazed out at her wooded hillside. A second screen door opened onto another rock step and a small yard where she’d planted a vegetable garden, fencing it off to keep out deer and who knew what other animals.
Finally, she let out a breath. “Always so restless.”
True enough, Keira thought. As a child, she’d roamed the woods with a sketch pad and colored pencils. In college, she’d snapped up every opportunity to go places—backpacking with friends out West, jumping on a lobster boat with a short-lived boyfriend, spending a summer in Paris on a shoestring. After college, she’d tried several careers before falling back on what she loved most—drawing, painting, folklore. She’d managed to combine them into a successful career, becoming known for her illustrations of classic poems and folktales. That her work was portable, allowing her to indulge her sense of adventure, was another plus.
“When I was here last,” she said, “I told you about a project I’m involved with—I’m working with an Irish professor who’s putting together a conference on Irish folklore next spring. It’ll be in two parts, one in Boston and one in Cork.”
“I remember,” her mother said.
“One of the emphases will be on twentieth-century immigrants to America. I’ve been working that angle, and I ended up deciding to put together and illustrate a collection specifically of their stories. I have a wonderful one Gran told me before she died. She was from West Cork—”
“I know she was. Keira…” Her mother’s eyes were pained.
“What’s wrong? I’ve been to Ireland before. Not the Beara Peninsula, but—Mum, are you afraid I’m going to run into my father?”
“Your father was John Michael Sullivan.”
But Keira was referring to her biological father. Her mother had returned home from a summer study program in Ireland at nineteen, pregnant with Keira. When Keira was a year old, her mother had married John Sullivan, a South Boston electrician ten years her senior. He was killed in a car accident two years later, and his widow and adopted daughter had moved out of Boston and started a new life.
Keira had no clear memory of him, but when she looked at pictures of him, she felt an overwhelming sense of affection, gratitude and grief, as if some part of her did remember him. Her mother never discussed that one trip to Ireland thirty years ago. For all Keira knew, her biological father could have been a Swedish tourist or another American student.
She debated a moment, then said, “A woman on your old street in South Boston heard about the folklore project and got in touch with me. She told me this incredible story about three Irish brothers who fight with each other and fairies over an ancient stone angel—”
“Patsy McCarthy,” her mother said in a toneless voice.
“That’s right. She says she told you this story, too, before your trip to Ireland. The brothers believe the statue is of one of the angels said to visit Saint Ita during her lifetime. The fairies believe it’s not an angel at all but actually one of their own who’s been turned to stone. There’s more to it—it’s quite a tale.”
“Mrs. McCarthy told a lot of stories.”
“Her grandfather heard this one when he worked in the copper mines on the Beara Peninsula and told it to Patsy when she was a little girl in Ireland. The village where the brothers lived isn’t named, but there are enough details—”
“To pinpoint it. Yes, I know.”
“And the spot where the hermit monk brother lived. You could make a stab at finding it, at least, if you know the story.” Keira waited, but when her mother didn’t respond, continued. “Patsy told me you were determined to find the village and look for the hermit monk’s hut on your trip to Ireland before I was born.”
“She’s a gifted storyteller.”
“Yes, she is.”
Her mother lifted a small, filmy sheet of gold leaf to the light streaming in through the window. The use of gold—real gold—was what distinguished a true illuminated manuscript, but Keira knew it was far too soon for her mother to apply gold to her work-in-progress.
“Do you know the difference between sin and evil, Keira?”
Keira didn’t want to talk about sin and evil. She wanted to talk about Patsy’s old story and magic, mischief and fairies. “It’s not something I think much about.”
“Adam and Eve sinned.” Her mother turned the gold leaf so that it gleamed in the late-afternoon light. “They wanted to please God, but they succumbed to temptation. They regretted their disobedience. They took no delight in what they did.”
“In other words, they sinned.”
“Yes, but the serpent is a different case altogether. He delights in his wrongdoing. He exults in thwarting God. He sees himself as the antithesis of God. Unlike Adam and Eve, the serpent didn’t commit a sin in the Garden of Eden. The serpent chose evil.”
“Honestly, Mum, I don’t know how you can stand to think about this stuff out here by yourself.”
She set the thin gold leaf on the pure white paper. Keira knew from experience that the gold leaf was difficult to work with but resilient, able to withstand considerable manipulation without breaking into pieces. Applied properly, it looked like solid gold, not just a whisper of gold.
“We all sin, Keira,” her mother said without a hint of a smile, “but we’re not all evil. The devil understands that. Evil is a particular dispensation of the soul.”
“Does this have anything to do with Ireland? With what happened there when you—”
“No. It has nothing at all to do with Ireland.” She took a breath. “So, how’s your work?”
Keira stifled her irritation at the abrupt change of subject. It felt like a dismissal and probably was, but she reminded herself that she hadn’t come out to the woods to judge her mother, or even for information. She’d come simply to say goodbye before flying out of Boston tomorrow night.
“My work’s going great right now, thanks.” Why go into detail when that world no longer interested or concerned her mother?
“That’s good to hear. Thank you for stopping by.” She got to her feet and hugged Keira goodbye. “Live your life, sweetheart. Don’t get too caught up in all these crazy old stories. And please don’t worry about me out here. I’m fine.”
On her way back through the woods, Keira resisted the urge to look over her shoulder for the devil and serpents. Instead, she remembered herself as a child, and how her mother would sing her Irish songs and read her stories. Every kind of story—stories about fairies and wizards and giants, about hobbits and elves and dark lords, princes and princesses, witches, goblins, cobblers, explorers and adventurers.
How could such a fun-loving, sociable woman end up alone out here?
But Keira had to admit there had been hints of what was to come—that she’d seen glimpses in her mother of a mysterious sadness and private guilt, of a longing for a peace that she knew could never really be hers in this life.
Her mother insisted she hadn’t withdrawn from the world or rejected her family but rather had embraced her religious beliefs in a personal and profound way. She viewed herself as participating in a centuries-old monastic tradition.
That was no doubt true, but Keira didn’t believe her mother’s retreat to her isolated cabin was rooted entirely in her faith. As she’d listened to Patsy McCarthy tell her old story, Keira had begun to wonder if her mother’s trip to Ireland thirty years ago had somehow set into motion her eventual turn to the life of a religious hermit.
Another mosquito—or maybe the same one—found Keira, buzzing in her ear and jerking her back to the here and now, to her own life. She swiped at the mosquito as she plunged down the narrow trail through the woods to the dead-end dirt road where she’d parked.
The story of the three Irish brothers, the fairies and the stone angel wasn’t about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Ultimately, Keira thought, it was about the push-pull of family ties and the deep, human yearning for a connection with others, for happiness and good fortune.
Mostly, it was just a damn good yarn—a mesmerizing story that Keira could illustrate and tell on the pages of her new book.
“They say the stone angel lies buried to this day in the old ruin of the hermit monk’s hut.”
Maybe, maybe not. Patsy McCarthy, and her grandfather before her, easily could have exaggerated and embellished the story over the years. It didn’t matter. Keira was hooked, and she couldn’t wait to be on her way to Ireland.
In the meantime, she had to get back to Boston in time for a reception and a silent auction to benefit the Boston-Cork folklore project that had brought her to Patsy’s South Boston kitchen in the first place.
She glanced back into the woods, wishing her mother could be at the reception tonight. “Not just for my sake, Mum,” Keira whispered. “For your own.”
Chapter 2
Boston Public Garden
Boston, Massachusetts
7:00 p.m., EDT
June 17
Victor Sarakis didn’t let the heavy downpour stop him.
He couldn’t.
He had to warn Keira Sullivan.
Rain spattered on the asphalt walks of the Public Garden, a Victorian oasis in the heart of Boston. He picked up his pace, wishing he’d remembered to bring an umbrella or even a hooded jacket, but he didn’t have far to go. Once through the Public Garden, he had only to cross Charles Street and make his way up Beacon Street to an address just below the gold-domed Massachusetts State House.
He could do it. He had to do it.
The gray, muted light and startling amount of rain darkened his mood and further fueled his sense of urgency.
“Keira can’t go to Ireland.”
He was surprised he spoke out loud. He was aware that many people didn’t consider him entirely normal, but he’d never been one to talk to himself.
“She can’t look for the stone angel.”
Drenched to the bone as he was, he’d look like a madman when he arrived at the elegant house where the benefit auction that Keira was attending tonight was being held. He couldn’t let that deter him. He had to get her to hear him out.
He had to tell her what she was up against.
What was after her.
Evil.
Pure evil.
Not mental illness, not sin—evil.
Victor had to warn her in person. He couldn’t call the authorities and leave it to them. What proof did he have? What evidence? He’d sound like a lunatic.
Just stop Keira from going to Ireland. Then he could decide how to approach the police. What to tell them.
“Victor.”
His name seemed to be carried on the wind.
The warm, heavy rain streamed down his face and back, poured into his shoes. He slowed his pace.
“Victor.”
He realized now that he hadn’t imagined the voice.
His gaze fell on the Public Garden’s shallow pond, rain pelting into its gray water. The famous swan boats were tied up for the evening. With the fierce storms, the Public Garden was virtually empty of people.
No witnesses.
Victor broke into an outright run, even as he debated his options. He could continue on the walkways to Charles Street, or he could charge through the pond’s shallow water, try to escape that way.
But already he knew there’d be no escape.
“Victor.”
His gait faltered. He couldn’t run fast enough. He wasn’t athletic, but that didn’t matter.
He couldn’t outrun such evil.
He couldn’t outrun one of the devil’s own.
No one could.
Chapter 3
Beacon Hill
Boston, Massachusetts
8:30 p.m., EDT
June 17
Not for the first time in his life, Simon Cahill found himself in an argument with an unrelenting snob, this time in Boston, but he could as easily have been in New York, San Francisco, London or Paris. He’d been to all of them. He enjoyed a good argument—especially with someone as obnoxious and pretentious as Lloyd Adler.
Adler looked to be in his early forties and wore jeans and a rumpled black linen sport coat with a white T-shirt, his graying hair pulled back in a short ponytail. He gestured across the crowded, elegant Beacon Hill drawing room toward a watercolor painting of an Irish stone cottage. “Keira Sullivan is more Tasha Tudor and Beatrix Potter than Picasso, wouldn’t you agree, Simon?”
Probably, but Simon didn’t care. The artist in question was supposed to have made her appearance by now. Adler had griped about that, too, but her tardiness hadn’t seemed to stop people from bidding on the two paintings she’d donated to tonight’s auction. The second was of a fairy or elf or some damn thing in a magical glen. Proceeds would go to support a scholarly conference on Irish and Irish-American folklore to be held next spring in Boston and Cork, Ireland.
In addition to being a popular illustrator, Keira Sullivan was also a folklorist.
Simon hadn’t taken a close look at either of her donated paintings. A week ago, he’d been in Armenia searching for survivors of a moderate but damaging earthquake. Over a hundred people had died. Men, women, children.
Mostly children.
But now he was in a suit—an expensive one—and drinking champagne in the first-floor chandeliered drawing room of an elegant early nineteenth-century brick house overlooking Boston Common. He figured he deserved to be mistaken for an art snob.
“Beatrix Potter’s the artist who drew Peter Rabbit, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
Simon swallowed more of his champagne. It wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t a snob about champagne, either. He liked what he liked and didn’t worry about the rest. He didn’t mind if other people fussed over what they were drinking—he just minded if they were a pain in the ass about it. “When I was a kid, my mother decorated my room with cross-stitched scenes of Peter and his buddies.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Cross-stitch. You know—you count these threads and—” Simon stopped, deliberately, and shrugged. He knew he didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d had Beatrix Potter rabbits on his wall as a kid, but he was telling the truth. “Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder what happened to my little rabbits.”
Adler frowned, then chuckled. “That’s very funny,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe Simon was serious. “Keira Sullivan is good at what she does, obviously, but I hate to see her work overshadow several quite interesting pieces here tonight. A shame, really.”
Simon looked at Adler, who suddenly went red and bolted into the crowd, mumbling that he needed to say hello to someone.
A lot of his arguments ended that way, Simon thought as he finished off his champagne, got rid of his empty glass and grabbed a full one from another tray. The event was catered, and most of the guests were dressed up and having a good time. From what he’d heard, they included a wide range of people—academics, graduate students, artists, musicians, folklorists, benefactors, a couple of priests and a handful of politicians and rich art collectors.
And at least two cops, but Simon steered clear of them.
“Lloyd Adler’s not that easy to scare off,” Owen Garrison said, shaking his head as he joined Simon. Owen was lean and good-looking, but all the Garrisons were. Simon was built like a bull. No other way to say it.
“I’m on good behavior tonight.” He grinned, cheekily putting out his pinkie finger as he sipped his fresh champagne. Owen just rolled his eyes. Simon decided he’d probably had enough to drink and set the glass on a side table. Too much bubbly and he’d start a fight. “I didn’t say a word.”
“You didn’t have to,” Owen said. “One look, and he scurried.”
“No way. I’m charming. Everyone says so.”
“Not everyone.”
Probably true, but Simon did tend to get along with people. He was at the reception as a favor to Owen, whose family, not coincidentally, owned the house where it was taking place. The Garrisons were an old-money family who’d left Boston for Texas after the death of Owen’s sister, Dorothy, at fourteen. It was a hellish story. Just eleven himself at the time, Owen had watched her fall off a cliff and drown near the Garrison summer home in Maine. There was nothing he could have done to save her.
Simon suspected the trauma of that day was the central reason Owen had founded Fast Rescue, an international search-and-rescue organization. It was based in Austin and operated on mostly private funds to perform its central mission to put expert volunteer teams in place within twenty-four hours of a disaster—man-made or natural—anywhere in the world.
Simon had become a Fast Rescue volunteer eighteen months ago, a decision that was complicating his life more than it should have, and not, he thought, because the Armenian mission had fallen at a particularly awkward time for him.
Owen, a top search-and-rescue expert himself, was wearing an expensive suit, too, but he still looked somewhat out of place in the house his great-grandfather had bought a century ago. The decor was in shades of cream and sage green, apparently Dorothy Garrison’s favorite colors. The first floor was reserved for meetings and functions, but the second and third floors comprised the offices for the foundation named in Dorothy’s honor and dedicated to projects her family believed would have been of particular interest to her.
Owen glanced toward the door to the house’s main entry. “Still no sign of Keira Sullivan. Her uncle’s getting impatient.”
Her uncle was Bob O’Reilly, her mother’s older brother and one of the two cops there tonight Simon was avoiding. Owen’s fiancée, Abigail Browning, was the other one. She and O’Reilly were both detectives with the Boston Police Department. O’Reilly was a beefy, freckle-faced redhead with a couple decades on the job. Abigail was in her early thirties, slim and dark-haired, a rising star in the Homicide Unit.
She was also the daughter of John March, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the reason Simon’s association with Fast Rescue had become complicated. He used to work for March. Sort of still did.
He’d decided to avoid Abigail and O’Reilly because both of them would have a nose for liars.
“Any reason to worry about your missing artist?” he asked Owen.
“Not at this point. It’s pouring rain, and the Red Sox are in town—rained out by now, I’m sure. I imagine traffic’s a nightmare.”
“Can you call her?”
“She doesn’t own a cell phone. No phone upstairs in her apartment, either.”
“Why not?”
“Just the way she is.”
A flake, Simon thought. He’d learned, not that he was interested, that Keira was renting a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the Garrison house until she figured out whether she wanted to stay in Boston. He understood wanting to keep moving—he lived on a boat himself and not by accident.
“Abigail’s bidding on one of Keira’s pieces,” Owen said.
“The fairies or the Irish cottage?”
“The cottage, I think.”
They were imaginative, cheerful pieces. Keira had a flare for capturing and creating a mood—a part-real, part-imagined place where people wanted to be. Her work wasn’t sentimental, but it wasn’t edgy and self-involved, either. Simon didn’t have much use for a painting of fairies or an Irish cottage in his life. No house to hang it in, for one thing.
Irish music kicked up, and he noticed an ensemble of young musicians in the far corner, obviously enjoying themselves on their mix of traditional instruments. He picked out a tin whistle, Irish harp, bodhran, mandolin, fiddle and guitar.
Not bad, Simon thought. But then, he liked Irish music.
“The girl on the harp is Fiona O’Reilly,” Owen said. “Bob’s oldest daughter.”
Simon wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about Owen’s friends in Boston, especially ones in, or related to, people in law enforcement. It was all too tricky. Too damn dangerous. But here he was, playing with fire.
Owen’s gaze drifted back to his fiancée, who wore a simple black dress and was laughing and half dancing to the spirited music. Abigail caught his eye and waved, her smile broadening. They were working on setting a date for their wedding. Whenever it was, Simon planned to be out of the country.
“You can’t tell her about me, Owen.”
“I know.” He broke his eye contact with Abigail and sighed at Simon. “She’ll find out you’re not just another Fast Rescue volunteer on her own. One way or the other, she’ll figure out your relationship with her father—she’ll figure out that I knew and didn’t tell her. Then she’ll hang us both by our thumbs.”
“We’ll deserve it, but you still can’t tell her. My association with March is classified. We shouldn’t even be talking about it now.”
Owen gave a curt nod.
Simon felt a measure of sympathy for his friend. “I’m sorry I put you in this position.”
“You didn’t. It just happened.”
“I should have lied.”
“You did lie. You just didn’t get away with it.”
The song ended, and the band transitioned right into the “The Rising of the Moon,” a song Simon knew well enough from his days in Dublin pubs to hum. But he didn’t hum, because if he’d been mistaken for an art critic—or at least an art snob—already tonight, next he’d be mistaken for a music critic. Then he’d have to rethink his entire approach to his life, or at least start a brawl.
“In some ways,” he said, “my lie was more true than the truth.”
Owen grabbed a glass of champagne. “Only you could come up with a statement like that, Simon.”
“There are facts, and there’s truth. They’re not always the same thing.”
A whirl of movement by the entry drew Simon’s attention, and he gave up on trying to explain himself.
A woman stood in the doorway, soaking wet, water dripping off the ends of her long, blond hair.
“The missing artist, I presume.”
Even as he spoke, Simon saw that something was wrong. He heard Owen’s breath catch and knew he saw it, too. The woman—she had to be Keira Sullivan—was unnaturally pale and unsteady on her feet, her eyes wide as she seemed to search the crowd for someone.
Simon surged forward, Owen right with him, and they reached her just as she rallied, straightening her spine and pushing a sopping lock of hair out of her face. She was dressed for the woods, but even as obviously shaken as she was, she had a pretty, fairy-princess look about her with her black-lashed blue eyes and flaxen hair that was half pinned up, half hanging almost to her elbows.
She was slim and fine-boned, and whatever had just happened, Simon knew it hadn’t been good.
“There’s a body,” she said tightly. “A man. Dead.”
That Simon hadn’t expected.
Owen touched her wrist. “Where, Keira?”
“The Public Garden—he drowned, I think.”
Simon was familiar enough with Boston to know the Public Garden was just down Beacon Street. “Are the police there?” he asked.
She nodded. “I called 911. Two Boston University students found him—the body. We all got caught in the rain, but they were ahead of me and saw him before I did. He was in the pond. They pulled him out. They’re just kids. They were so upset. But there was nothing anyone could do at that point.” Despite her distress, she was composed, focused. Her eyes narrowed. “My uncle’s here, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Simon said, but he wasn’t sure she heard him.
He noticed Detectives Browning and O’Reilly working their way to Keira from different parts of the room, their intense expressions indicating they’d already found out about the body through other means. They’d have pagers, cell phones.
The well-dressed crowd and the lively Irish music—the laughter and the tinkle of champagne glasses—were a contrast to stoic, drenched Keira Sullivan and her stark report of a dead man.
Abigail got there first. “Keira,” she said crisply but not without sympathy. “I just heard about what happened. Let’s go into the foyer where it’s quiet, okay?”
Keira didn’t budge. “I didn’t see anything or the patrol officers on the scene wouldn’t have let me go.” She wasn’t combative, just firm, stubborn. “I’m not a witness, Abigail.”
Abigail didn’t argue, but she didn’t have to because Keira suddenly whipped around, water flying out of her hair, and shot back into the foyer, out of sight of onlookers in the drawing room. Simon knew better than to butt in, but he figured she wanted to avoid her uncle, who was about two seconds from getting through the last knot of people.
Simon wished he still had his champagne. “I wonder who the dead guy is.”
Owen stiffened. “Simon—”
“I’m just saying.”
But Owen didn’t have a chance to respond before Detective O’Reilly arrived, his hard-set jaw suggesting he wasn’t pleased with the turn the evening had taken. “Where’s Keira?”
“Talking to Abigail,” Owen said quickly, as if he didn’t want to give Simon a chance to open his mouth.
O’Reilly gave the unoccupied doorway a searing look. “She’s okay?”
“Remarkably so,” Owen said. “She’s not the one who actually found the body.”
“She called it in.” Obviously, that was plenty for O’Reilly not to like. He sucked in a breath. “How the hell does a grown man drown in the Public Garden pond? It’s about two feet deep. It’s not even a real pond.”
Good question, but Simon didn’t go near it. He wasn’t on O’Reilly’s radar, and he preferred to keep it that way.
The senior detective glanced back toward his daughter, Fiona, the harpist. She and her ensemble were taking a break. “I need to go with Abigail, see what this is all about,” O’Reilly said, addressing Owen. “You’ll make sure Fiona stays here until I know what’s going on?”
“Sure.”
“And Keira. Keep her here, too.”
Owen looked surprised at the request. “Bob, she’s old enough—”
“Yeah, whatever. Just don’t let her go traipsing back down to the Public Garden and getting into the middle of things. She’s like that. Always has been.”
“There’s no reason to think the drowning was anything but an accident, is there?”
“Not at this point,” O’Reilly said without elaboration and stalked into the foyer.
Simon didn’t mind being a fly on the wall for a change. “Does the uncle get along with his daughter and niece?”
“They get along fine,” Owen said, “but Bob sometimes forgets that Keira is ten years older than Fiona. For that matter, he forgets Fiona’s nineteen. They’re a complicated family.”
“All families are complicated, even the good ones.” Simon moved closer to the foyer doorway just as Keira started up the stairs barefoot, wet socks and shoes in one hand. She was prettier than he’d expected. Drop-you-in-your-tracks pretty, really. He noticed her uncle scowling at her from the bottom of the stairs and grinned, turning back to Owen. “Maybe especially the good ones.”
Ten seconds later, the two BPD detectives left.
The Irish ensemble started up again, playing a quieter tune.
Owen headed for Fiona O’Reilly, who cast a worried look in his direction. She had freckles, but otherwise didn’t resemble her father as far as Simon could see. Her long hair had reddish tints but really was almost as blond as her cousin’s, and she was a lot better looking than her father.
People in the crowd seemed unaware of the drama over by the door. Caterers brought out trays of hot hors d’oeuvres. Mini spinach quiches, some little flaky buttery things oozing cheese, stuffed mushrooms, skewered strips of marinated chicken. Simon wasn’t hungry. He noticed Lloyd Adler pontificating to an older couple who looked as if they thought he was a pretentious ass, too.
Simon went in the opposite direction of Adler and made his way to the back wall where Keira’s two donated watercolors were on display.
He decided to bid on the one with the cottage, just to give himself something to do.
It was a white stone cottage set against a background of wildflowers, green pastures and ocean that wasn’t in any part of Ireland that he had ever visited. He supposed that was part of the point—to create a place of imagination and dreams. A beautiful, bucolic place. A place not entirely of this world.
At least not the world in which he lived and worked.
Simon settled on a number and put in his bid, one that virtually assured him of ending up with the painting. He could give it to Abigail and Owen as a wedding present. Even if he didn’t plan to go to the wedding, he could give them a present.
He acknowledged an itch to head down to the Public Garden with the BPD detectives, but he let it go. He’d seen enough dead bodies, enough to last him for a long time. A lifetime, even. Except he knew there would be more. There always were.
Instead, he decided to find another glass of champagne, maybe grab a couple of the chicken skewers and wait for a dry, calmer Keira Sullivan to make her appearance.
Chapter 4
Beacon Hill
Boston, Massachusetts
8:45 p.m., EDT
June 17
Keira peeled off her hiking shorts and added them to the wet heap on the bathroom floor of her attic apartment. Her hands shook as she splashed herself with cold water and tried not to think about the dead man and the expressions of the two students as they’d frantically checked him for a pulse, uncertain of their actions, desperate to do the right thing even as they were repulsed by the idea of touching a corpse.
“The poor man,” she said to her reflection. “I wonder who he is.” She saw herself wince, and whispered, “Was.”
She towel-dried her hair as best she could, expecting a twig or a dead mosquito to fall out, a souvenir from her earlier hike to her mother’s. None did, and she combed out the tangles and pinned it up. She’d been looking forward to tonight’s auction and reception, but her visit with her mother and then the awful scene in the Public Garden had sucked all the excitement out of her. She just wanted to get the evening over with and be on her way to Ireland.
But for Ireland, she wouldn’t have even been in the Public Garden tonight. She’d dropped her car off with a friend in Back Bay to look after for the next six weeks and ran into the students dragging the man out of the pond on her way to the Garrison house. As she’d raced up Beacon Street after the police had arrived, she couldn’t shake the notion that her mother’s talk about sin and evil had put her in the Public Garden at exactly the wrong moment.
But that was unfair, Keira thought, and as she returned to her bedroom, she found herself wishing she could call her mother and tell her what had happened.
Everything changes.
She dug through her small closet, pulling out a long, summery skirt and top. The apartment was no more permanent than anywhere else she’d lived, but she liked the space—the efficient, downsize appliances, the light, the view of the Common. It wasn’t on the grand scale as the rest of the house, but it had charm and character and worked just fine for now. Compared to her mother’s cabin, Keira thought, her apartment was a palace.
In five minutes, she had wriggled into her outfit, put on a bit of makeup and was rushing back down the stairs again. Two deep breaths, and she entered the drawing room. Her cousin Fiona’s ensemble was playing a jaunty tune that didn’t fit Keira’s mood, but she tried to appreciate it nonetheless.
Owen immediately fell in alongside her, and she smiled at him. “I’m okay,” she said before he could ask.
“Good.”
He had a way about him that helped center people. Keira could imagine how reassuring his presence would be to a trapped earthquake victim. “Who was the man I saw you with earlier?” she asked. “Big guy. Another BPD type?”
She thought Owen checked a grin, but he wasn’t always easy to read. “You must mean Simon Cahill. He’s a volunteer with Fast Rescue.”
“From Boston?”
“From wherever he happens to be at the moment.” Owen smiled as he grabbed a glass of champagne from a caterer’s tray and handed it to her. “A little like you in that regard. I don’t know what happened to him. He was here two seconds ago.”
Just as well he’d taken off, Keira thought. She’d spotted him at the height of her distress, and if Owen was a steadying presence, Simon Cahill, she thought, was the opposite. Even in those few seconds of contact, she’d felt probed and exposed, as if he’d assumed she had something to hide and was trying to see right through her.
She thanked Owen for the champagne and eased into the crowd, realizing her hair was still damp from the downpour. For the most part, people she greeted seemed unaware of her earlier arrival, which spared her having to explain.
Colm Dermott, a wiry, energetic Irishman, approached her with his usual broad smile. She’d met him two years ago on a trip to Ireland, where he was a highly respected professor of anthropology at University College Cork. He’d arrived in Boston in April after cobbling together grants to put together the Boston-Cork conference and had immediately recruited Keira to help.
“The auction’s going well.” He seemed genuinely excited. “You must be eager to go off tomorrow.”
“I’m packed and ready to go,” she said.
“Ah, you’ll have a grand time.”
She’d given Colm a copy of the video recording she’d made of Patsy McCarthy telling her story, but hadn’t told him about her mother and her long-ago trip to Ireland.
They chatted a bit more, but Keira couldn’t relax. Finally, Colm sighed at her. “Is something wrong, Keira?”
She took a too-big gulp of champagne. “It’s been a strange day.”
Before she could explain further, her emotional younger cousin burst through the crowd, her blue eyes shining with both excitement and revulsion. “Keira, are you okay?” Fiona asked. “Owen just told me about the man you found drowned. I wondered why Dad and Abigail left so fast.”
Colm looked shocked. “I had no idea. Keira, what happened? No wonder you’re distracted.”
She quickly explained, both Colm and Fiona listening intently. “It wasn’t a pleasant scene. I wish I could have arrived sooner, but it might not have made any difference. He could have had a heart attack or a stroke, and that’s why he ended up in the water.”
“Do you know who he was?” Colm asked.
Keira shook her head. “No idea.”
“I hope he wasn’t murdered,” Fiona said abruptly. “I hope not, too,” Keira said, reminding herself that her cousin was the daughter of an experienced homicide detective. “The police are there in full force, at least.”
Owen returned and spoke to Fiona. “I just talked to your father. He’s going to be a while and asked me to give you a ride back to your apartment—”
“I can take the subway.”
“Not an option.”
Fiona rolled her eyes. “My dad worries too much.”
But she seemed to know better than to argue with Owen. She and some friends were subletting an apartment for the summer that her father considered a rathole, on a bad street, too far from the subway and too big a leap for a daughter just a year out of high school. Keira had stayed out of that particular discussion.
“I’ll water your plants while you’re in Ireland,” Fiona said, giving a quick grin. “Maybe I’ll talk Dad into buying me a ticket to Ireland for a week. You and I could visit pubs and listen to Irish music.”
“That’d be fun,” Keira said.
“It would be, wouldn’t it? Right now I guess I should go pack up.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear more of your band.”
“They were fantastic,” Colm interjected.
Fiona beamed and headed across the room with Owen.
Colm turned back to Keira with a smile. “Fiona’s more like her father than she thinks, isn’t she?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, his smile fading as he continued. “If there’s anything I can do, you know how to reach me.”
“I appreciate that. Thanks, Colm.”
He rushed off to speak to someone else, and Keira found herself another glass of champagne. As she took a sip, feeling calmer, she noticed small, white-haired Patsy McCarthy in the foyer.
Keira immediately moved toward her. “Patsy—please, come in. I’m so glad you could make it.”
“Thank you for inviting me.” Within seconds of meeting almost a month ago, Patsy had dispensed with any formalities and insisted Keira call her by her first name. She nodded back toward the door. “I thought it’d never stop raining.”
“I know what you mean. It was quite a downpour.”
With a sudden move, Patsy clutched Keira’s hand. “I wanted to see you before you left for Ireland. You’re going to look for the stone angel, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be in the village that undoubtedly inspired the story—”
“You’ll be there on the summer solstice. Look for the angel then.”
The summer solstice played a key role in the story. “I’ll do my best.”
“The Good People want to find the stone angel as much as you do. The fairies, I mean. The angel’s been missing for so long, but they won’t have forgotten it. If you’re clever, you can let them help you.” Patsy dropped Keira’s hand and straightened her spine. “I’m not saying I believe in fairies myself, of course.”
Keira didn’t tackle the older woman’s ambivalence. “If they believe the angel’s one of their own turned to stone and want it for themselves, why would they help me?”
“That’s why you must be clever. Don’t let them know they’re helping you.”
“I’ll try to be very clever, then.”
“The brothers will be looking for the angel, in their own way. They and the fairies all want the tug-of-war over it to resume. It’s meant to resume.” Patsy tightened her grip on Keira’s hand. “If you find the angel, you must leave it out in the open. In the summer sun. It’ll get to where it belongs. Don’t let it go to a museum.”
“I promise, Patsy,” Keira said, surprised by the older woman’s intensity. “I’ll look for the angel on the summer solstice, then, I’ll be clever and if I find the angel, I’ll leave it out in the sun—assuming that’s up to me. The Irish might have other ideas.”
Patsy seemed satisfied and, looking more relaxed, released Keira’s hand and eyed a near-empty tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries.
Keira smiled. “Help yourself. Would you like to take a look around?”
“I would, indeed,” Patsy said, lifting a fat strawberry onto a cocktail napkin. “I have every one of your books, you know. Do you think you’ll illustrate my story one day?”
“I’d love to.”
“That’d be something. It’s a good story, isn’t it?”
“It’s a wonderful story.”
Patsy smiled suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “Irish brothers, an angel and fairies. All the best stories have fairies, don’t you think?”
“I love stories with fairies.”
With Keira at her side, Patsy ate her strawberry and moved from artwork to artwork, as if she were in a museum, gasping when she came to Keira’s two paintings. “Oh, Keira. My dear Keira. Your paintings are even more incredible in real life.” She paused, clearly overcome by emotion. “This is the Ireland I remember.”
Whether it was an accurate statement or one colored by time and sentiment, Keira appreciated Patsy’s response. “It means a lot to me that you like my work.”
When Patsy finished her tour of the drawing room, she took another chocolate-covered strawberry and started for the foyer. “Can I see you back home?” Keira asked.
Patsy shook her head. “My parish priest drove me. Father Palermo. Like the city in Sicily. He couldn’t find a parking space, so he’s driving around until I finish up. Did you know that my church is named after Saint Ita?”
Keira smiled. “The Irish saint in your story.”
“It’s strange how life works sometimes, isn’t it?” They walked outside together. A simple black sedan waited at the curb. A handsome, dark-haired man in a priest’s black suit and white clerical collar got out and looked across the car’s shiny roof. “Are you ready, Mrs. McCarthy, or shall I drive around the Common one more time? I don’t want to rush you.”
“I’m all set. This is the artist I told you about, Father. Keira Sullivan.”
“Ah. Miss Sullivan. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Keira couldn’t read his tone, but Patsy added politely, “Keira, I’d like you to meet Father Michael Palermo.”
He tilted his head back slightly, as if appraising her. “Mrs. McCarthy tells me you’re collecting stories from twentieth-century Irish immigrants.”
“That’s right. She’s been very generous with her time.”
Patsy waved a hand in dismissal. “I’m just an old woman with an ear for a good story.”
Father Palermo kept his gaze on Keira. “Your mother grew up a couple doors down from Mrs. McCarthy.”
“Two,” Keira said without elaboration. “A pleasure to meet you, Father.”
“Likewise.”
He climbed back in behind the wheel, and Patsy got into the passenger seat and smiled at Keira. “Give my love to Ireland,” she said with a wink.
After they left, Keira lingered on the sidewalk. The wind had picked up, but after the heat and humidity of recent days, she appreciated the drier conditions that came with the gusts. The puddles that had formed in dips in the sidewalk would be dry by morning.
“So you’re off to Ireland in search of angels and fairies.” Simon Cahill grinned at her as he leaned against the black iron railing to the steps of the Garrison house. “Do you believe in fairies?”
“That’s not what’s important in my work.”
“Ah, I see. That’s a dodge, but whatever. Keira, right?”
“That’s right—and you’re Simon. Owen’s friend. I didn’t realize you were still here.”
“I have to pay for my painting.”
“Your painting?”
“Your watercolor of the Irish cottage. I couldn’t resist.”
“You bid on my painting? Why?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
Keira didn’t answer. He was obviously a man who could charm his way into or out of anything. And he made her uncomfortable—no, not uncomfortable…self-conscious. Aware. Maybe it was because he was the first person she’d spotted when she’d arrived from the Public Garden. Some kind of weird imprinting that was inevitable, unavoidable.
Finally, she said, “You don’t care about a painting of an Irish cottage.”
“I care. I just didn’t bid on it for myself. Abigail wanted it, but she was going to lose out. I decided it’d be a nice wedding present for her and Owen. He’ll like it because she likes it.” The corners of Simon’s mouth twitched with amusement. “Don’t frown. He thinks you’re good, too.”
Not only, Keira thought, was Simon dangerously charming, but he was also observant. And frank. “Thank you for bidding on the painting. The proceeds from the auction will be put to good use. You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Not really.”
“Then where do you live?”
“Direct, aren’t you? I have a boat. It’s at a pier in East Boston at the moment, but it’s only been there since yesterday. Before that, it was in Maine. I met Owen and some other Fast Rescue people at his place on Mount Desert Island after our mission to Armenia.”
Keira had read about the devastating earthquake. “That must have been tough.”
“It was.” He didn’t elaborate. “I was in London when it happened. I go back tomorrow.”
“What’s in London?”
“The queen. Castles. Good restaurants.”
The man had an appealing sense of humor, and, in spite of the tension of the past few hours, Keira felt herself relaxing. “Very funny. I meant what’s in London for you?”
“I’m visiting a friend. What about Ireland? What’s there for you, besides angels and fairies?”
Answers, she thought, but she shrugged. “I guess I’ll find out.”
His eyes narrowed on her, and she noticed they were a vivid, rich shade of green. “Up for a bit of adventure, are you?”
“I suppose I am.”
“Have a good trip, then.”
He ambled off down Beacon Street. When she returned to the drawing room, Keira checked with Colm. “How much did my cottage painting go for?”
“Ten thousand.”
She couldn’t hide her surprise. “Dollars?”
“Yes, dollars, Keira. It was four times the highest bid. Simon Cahill bought it. Do you know him?”
“No, I just met him tonight. What about you?”
“I talked with him for all of thirty seconds. Well, he must want to support the conference.”
“He must. I’m grateful for his generosity.”
“As am I,” Colm said.
Keira said good-night and headed for the stairs up to her apartment, amazed at how Simon had managed to get under her skin in such a short time.
It had to be because of the intensity of the past few hours. What on earth did they have in common?
She’d be back to normal by morning, finishing up her packing and heading to the airport by evening. At least she wasn’t going to Ireland by way of London; there was no risk they’d be sitting next to each other on the same flight.
It was a long way across the Atlantic.
Chapter 5
Boston Public Garden
Boston, Massachusetts
10:00 p.m., EDT
June 17
Abigail Browning paced on the sidewalk along the edge of the man-made pond where the two college students had discovered the body of Victor Sarakis, a fifty-year-old resident of Cambridge who apparently, even according to the initial take of the medical examiner, had drowned in about two feet of water.
Normally, Abigail found the Public Garden a soothing, pleasant place to be, with its graceful Victorian walks and statues, its formal flower beds and labeled trees, its mini suspension bridge over the curving pond. Technically, it was a botanical garden—a refuge in the heart of the city of Boston.
Tonight, it was the scene of a bizarre, as yet unexplained death. Police lights and the garden’s own Victorian-looking lamps illuminated the scene as detectives, patrol officers, crime scene technicians and reporters did their work. By tomorrow morning, there would be virtually no sign of what had gone on here tonight. The swan boats, a popular Public Garden attraction for over a century, could resume their graceful tour of the shallow water.
Abigail stopped pacing, grateful, at least, that she’d worn flats to tonight’s reception. Trees, flowers and grass were still dripping from the downpour. Most likely, it had been raining, and raining hard, when Victor Sarakis ended up in the water. The medical examiner had already removed the body for an autopsy. Anything was possible. Heart attack, stroke, an unfortunate slip in the heavy rain.
Pushed, tripped, hit on the back of the head.
Abigail wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions.
She glanced sideways at Bob O’Reilly, who’d decided, on his own, to interview the two students. Reinterview, Abigail thought, irritated. The responding officers had talked to the students. She’d talked to them. Now Bob was talking to them. For no good reason, either, except that he was a senior detective with decades of experience on her and presumably knew what he was doing. But she wished he’d go back up to Beacon Street and listen to his daughter play Irish music.
The students—summer engineering students from the Midwest—looked worn out. They could have gone back to their dorm a long time ago—they just didn’t.
They’d told Bob the same story, about cutting through the Public Garden from a bookstore on Newbury Street, hoping to beat the storm and get to a friend’s apartment on Cambridge Street. When the skies opened up on them, they debated going back to the bookstore or pushing on to their friend’s place.
Then they’d spotted a body in the pond.
“You could tell he was dead by looking at him?” Bob gave them one of his trademark skeptical snorts. “How?”
“I don’t know,” the thinner of the two students said. He had a scraggly beard and was shivering as his wet clothes dried in the breeze. “It was obvious.”
“He didn’t look like he’d been in the water that long,” his friend said. He was meatier, and he’d gotten just as wet, but he wasn’t shivering.
“Long enough,” Bob said.
The students didn’t respond.
“You didn’t see him before you noticed him in the pond?” Bob asked.
They shook their heads. They’d answered the same question before, maybe twice already. Abigail knew she’d asked it.
Bob gave them a thoughtful look. “How do you like BU?”
The skinny student didn’t hide his surprise—and maybe a touch of annoyance—at the personal question as well as his friend did. “What?”
“My daughter goes there. Music major.”
“We don’t know any music majors,” the meaty kid said quickly.
Abigail bit her tongue at the exchange, but Bob didn’t mention Fiona by name and finally told the students to go on back to their dorms. This time, they didn’t hesitate.
Bob turned to her. His red hair had frizzed up in the humidity and rain, and his freckles stood out on his pale skin. “You look like you want to smack me.”
“It’s a thought.”
He obviously didn’t care. She’d never met anyone with a thicker hide. She owned a triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, with him and a third detective, an arrangement that for the most part worked out well, but tonight, for the first time, she could see the potential for complications.
“Press is all over this one,” Bob said, nodding to a camera crew. “Some rich guy from Cambridge tripping on his shoelaces and drowning in the Public Garden swan pond.”
“We don’t know he’s rich, and, actually, it’s called the lagoon.”
“Lagoon? Lagoon reminds me of Gilligan’s Island. Why don’t they just call it a pond?”
“Maybe it’s a Victorian thing.” Abigail ran both her hands through her short, dark curls, noticing wet spots where water had dropped onto her head from leaves of the nearby shade trees. “And Mr. Sarakis was wearing loafers. No laces to trip over.”
“Figure of speech.”
Abigail said nothing.
“This is a straightforward death investigation, Abigail. Guy running in the rain slips or trips and goes flying, hits his head on the concrete, falls into the drink and drowns. A freak accident.”
“A good detective doesn’t let assumptions drive conclusions,” she said, adding with just a touch of sarcasm, “I wonder who gave me that advice when I decided to become a detective?”
“Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not in the mood.”
She didn’t blame him for wanting Victor Sarakis’s death to be an accident, considering his niece was the one who’d called 911.
Abigail kept her mouth shut. Normally she would appreciate Bob’s insight, his questions. He’d been in Boston law enforcement through some of its most difficult crime years. He wasn’t bitter and burnt-out so much as cynical. He’d seen it all, he liked to say, and not much of it had been good. But she didn’t want him around right now. It wasn’t just because of Keira’s involvement with the case, either.
“Never mind my bad mood,” he said. “You’ve been prickly for days.”
“So?”
He didn’t answer, and she felt him studying her in the same way he had when they’d first met eight years ago. He hadn’t believed she’d make a good police officer, much less a good homicide detective. She’d won him over slowly, despite what he considered a lot of baggage. Her father was the FBI director, a liability from Bob O’Reilly’s perspective because it brought attention to her. By itself, it was enough for him to rule her out as police officer material. But that wasn’t all. She’d quit law school after her husband was murdered four days into their Maine honeymoon, a case that had remained unresolved for seven years, until a break last summer.
Finally, she knew how Chris—her first love—had died, and who had killed him. For seven years, it was all she’d wanted in life. Answers. Justice. The lifting of the burden of not knowing what had happened that awful day.
But the break in the case had changed her life in a way she hadn’t anticipated. During her hunt for her husband’s killer last summer, she’d also opened herself up to falling in love again.
She could feel Bob’s eyes on her and brought herself back to the present. “There’s no evidence of foul play,” he said.
Abigail chose her words carefully. “So far, no, there isn’t.”
“He had his wallet in his back pocket.”
Indeed, the wallet had made identifying Victor Sarakis easy because it came complete with his driver’s license, ATM card, credit cards, insurance cards, bookstore frequent-buyer card and seventy-seven dollars in cash. No loose change, unless it had fallen out of his pants into the water or grass. If it had, the crime scene guys would find it.
But Abigail knew Bob had raised the point about the wallet because it played into his desire for Sarakis’s death to be an accident.
“What do you suppose he was doing out here in the rain?” she asked, knowing Bob wouldn’t like the question but refusing to let him bulldoze her.
“Movie, play, Starbucks. It’s Boston in June. He could have been doing a million different things.”
“He’s from Cambridge.”
“A lot of people from Cambridge cross the river for a night on the town.”
She knew that and wasn’t sure why she’d brought it up, except that Victor Sarakis didn’t strike her as a night-on-the-town sort. He wore expensive, if traditional, clothes—khakis, polo shirt and loafers. No socks. She hadn’t found a receipt from a nearby restaurant or shop or ticket stubs in his pockets. Patrol officers were at his house in Cambridge attempting to notify next of kin, but, so far, no one was home.
“Keira arrived at the party late. I wonder—”
“Don’t even go there.” Bob’s tone had sharpened. “You have no cause to push this thing.”
Abigail wasn’t intimidated. “A dead man. That’s cause enough.”
He tilted his head back slightly in that way she knew so well. It said that he knew she was deliberately pushing his buttons, that he wasn’t saying anything now because he was going to give her a chance to dig a deeper hole for herself.
So she did. “I wonder if Victor Sarakis was on his way to the auction. Maybe he was going to bid on one of Keira’s paintings.”
Bob rocked back on his heels. He and Abigail had worked together a long time, and she knew her comment would set him off. He could be volatile, or he could be patient. The choice depended on what he wanted, what tactic he thought would work to his best advantage. He wasn’t unemotional. He just had his emotions under tight wraps.
As far as Abigail could see, Bob had never known what to make of his niece. At almost thirty, Keira was a successful illustrator and folklorist, but with no roots, no sense of place. She’d been on the move since high school. Bob, on the other hand, had never lived anywhere but Boston.
“I doubt it was the only event on Beacon Hill tonight, but go ahead, Abigail,” he said. “Check the guest list. Knock on every door within ten blocks of here. It’s not like you have anything else to do, right?”
She had a full caseload. Every detective in the department did. But she shrugged. “I’m trying to remember how I heard about the auction. I don’t remember getting an actual invitation. I think it was just an announcement.” She sighed. She didn’t know why she was antagonizing Bob. “Forget it. I’m getting ahead of myself.”
He seemed to soften slightly, but that could be a tactic, too. “It’s the time of year. Summer solstice is getting close. It’s worse than a full moon. Too damn much sun, I swear. Brings out the weirdos.”
Abigail couldn’t resist a smile. “Bob, nobody says weirdos anymore.”
He grinned at her. “I do.”
“What’s with you and the summer solstice?”
“Nothing.” He yawned—deliberately, Abigail thought—and did a couple of shoulder rolls, as if he needed to loosen up. “I should get back. When you see Owen, thank him for giving Fiona a ride home for me.”
“Sure, Bob. I’m sorry Keira got here when she did. It’s not an easy thing, coming upon a body.”
“Fiona wants to spend a week in Ireland with Keira visiting pubs and playing music. Can you imagine the two of them?” He wrinkled up his face and blew out a breath. “Fiona keeps telling me I worry too much. Maybe I do. I don’t even like her taking the subway alone, never mind getting on a plane to Ireland by herself.”
“She takes the subway all the time. She’s a music student. She’s got lessons, ensemble practice.”
“Plays the freaking harp. You believe I have a daughter majoring in harp?” He rubbed the back of his neck as if he were in pain. “And I have a niece who paints pictures of fairies and wildflowers and collects loony stories people tell by the fire.”
“They’re both incredibly talented, and Keira’s successful in a highly competitive business. Plus, they both get along with you, which is saying something.”
Bob let his hand drop to his side. “Wait’ll you have kids.”
His words were like a gut punch, and Abigail looked away quickly, muttering a good-night and making a beeline for the crime scene guys, thinking of something she could ask them. Anything. Didn’t matter what. She didn’t want Bob to see her expression, to wonder what demons were haunting her now.
This was private, damn it. Personal. Up to her and her alone to figure out.
Kids.
She pictured herself with a big belly, Owen with a toddler on his shoulders—the three of them in the Public Garden on a beautiful June day. But it was a fantasy. Reality was so much more complicated. She and Owen weren’t even married yet, and babies would change her life, change his life.
Abigail turned her attention back to the pond. What had brought Victor Sarakis to Boston tonight? Never mind her mood or Bob’s mood, it was a question that needed an answer.
She spotted a crime scene guy she recognized. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. He was new. Really young. Grew up on a tough street in Roxbury.
“Malcolm,” she whispered, then raised her voice, calling to him. “Malcolm—hang on a second.”
“Yes, Detective?”
She glanced back at Bob, who pointed a finger at her and shook it—his way of telling her he knew what she was up to and would be watching.
Malcolm frowned at her. Abigail pointed to the sidewalk. “I just want to make sure we get photos of any cracks in the walks that could trip a guy running in the rain.”
“Of course. No problem.”
“Thanks.”
Bob continued across the picturesque mini suspension bridge over the pond. With a sigh of relief, Abigail studied the spot where Victor Sarakis had come to the end of his life. There was no fence on this section of the pond. If he’d tripped—or whatever—on the opposite bank, the knee-high cable fence could have broken his fall, perhaps kept him from drowning. But the water was so shallow—he must have been unconscious, otherwise why didn’t he just get up?
The autopsy would tell her more, but she had to agree with Bob and the medical examiner that Victor Sarakis’s untimely death was likely an accident.
In the meantime, she had work to do, and a long night ahead of her.
She touched her cell phone, but decided—no. Owen already knew she had a case and would be back to her place late. He had an early start in the morning for a Fast Rescue meeting in Austin. He was always on the go—Austin, Boston, his place in Maine, disaster sites and training facilities all over the world.
Let him get to bed, Abigail thought, and not worry about her. She wouldn’t want him to hear anything in her voice that would tell him she was gnawing on a worry, a problem. Because he’d ask her to explain, and she wasn’t sure she could. Whatever was going on with her wasn’t about him. It was about her.
And in those long years after Chris’s death, she’d grown accustomed to working out her issues on her own.
She wondered if Victor Sarakis had left behind any children, but pushed the thought out of her mind as she joined Malcolm in looking for cracks in the walks.
Chapter 6
Logan International Airport
Boston, Massachusetts
10:00 a.m., EDT
June 18
FBI Director John March greeted Simon with a curt handshake in an ultraprivate VIP lounge at Boston’s Logan Airport. March had flown up from Washington, D.C., that morning specifically for this meeting. He had an entourage of hulking FBI special agents and staffers with him, but they stayed out in the hall.
He was sixtiesh and trim, and although his hair was iron-gray, its curls reminded Simon of March’s daughter, Abigail. But March wouldn’t be seeing her today. He wouldn’t risk it. Simon knew it wasn’t just that March was protecting a classified mission. He didn’t want to have to explain his complicated history with the Cahills to a daughter—a cop daughter, no less—who knew nothing about it. It didn’t have to be a secret. It just was one.
“Some days, Simon,” the FBI director said, “I wish you’d decided to become a plumber.”
“If it’s any consolation, some days I wish I had, too.” Simon had been fourteen, crying over his father’s casket at a proper Irish wake in the heart of Georgetown when he’d first met March. “At least when you’re a plumber and you’re knee-deep in crap, no one tries to convince you it’s gravy.”
“I’ve put you in a difficult position.”
“I put myself there. You’re just capitalizing on it. That’s your job. I’m not holding it against you.”
“My daughter will.” March’s tone didn’t change from its unemotional, careful professionalism. “I’ve kept too many secrets from her as it is.”
Simon thought he detected a note of regret in the older man’s tone, but maybe not. Simon didn’t have the details, but apparently John March had known more about the circumstances surrounding the murder of his daughter’s first husband, an FBI special agent, than he’d let on. Nothing that would have led to his killer any sooner. But Abigail didn’t necessarily see it that way.
“Comes with the territory,” Simon said without much sympathy.
He hadn’t asked for March’s help all those years ago, when the then FBI special agent was wracked with grief and guilt after failing to stop the execution of Brendan Cahill, a DEA agent and friend, in Colombia. But there was nothing March could have done. The killers had videotaped themselves. The video showed them tying up Simon’s father. Blindfolding him. Firing two bullets into his forehead. Simon had seen the tape. For years, he thought he’d stumbled onto it—that he’d been clever, outwitting the brilliant, powerful John March. He was over that illusion now. March had arranged for Simon to find the tape and see his father’s murder.
Instead of feeling angry, bitter and betrayed, Simon had felt understood. March had known that once Brendan Cahill’s young son had realized the tape existed, he’d find a way to see it.
What Simon hadn’t realized, until recently, was that March had never mentioned him or his father to his daughter. Not once in twenty years.
He was a hard man to figure out.
March stayed on his feet. “I’ve told you as much as I know about what comes next.”
Simon doubted that, but he shrugged. “Great. I’ll be in London cooling my heels.”
“We’ve got him, Simon. We’ve got Estabrook, thanks to you.”
With a little luck, the “thanks to you” part would stay between Simon and March, but Simon had learned not to count on luck. “I’ll feel better when he’s in custody.”
“Understood.”
Simon could sense March’s awkwardness. Ordinarily he would keep his focus on the big picture and not concern himself with what a mission meant for Simon personally. But this mission was different. Eighteen months ago, Simon had left the FBI and started a new life—volunteering for Fast Rescue, making a living helping businesses and individuals plan for disasters. It wasn’t a bad life. He had a good reputation, a decent income and the kind of freedom he’d never had as a federal agent.
Enter Norman Estabrook.
To the public, Estabrook was a thrill-seeking billionaire hedge fund entrepreneur into extreme mountain climbing, high-risk ballooning, kayaking down remote, snake-infested rivers—whatever gave him an adrenaline rush. To a tight inner circle of trusted associates, he was also at the center of a network that dealt in illegal drugs and laundered cash for some very nasty people. Estabrook didn’t need the money, obviously, and he sure as hell didn’t care about advancing any particular cause. He liked the action. He liked thwarting authority.
In particular, Norman Estabrook liked thwarting John March.
Simon was in the perfect position to infiltrate Estabrook’s network, and that was what he’d done. He’d known from the beginning if Norman Estabrook was arrested as a major-league criminal—which he would be—and Simon’s role as an undercover federal agent remained a secret, his name would still be associated with Estabrook and his criminal network. Who’d hire him for anything, never mind trust him with their lives?
If he was exposed as an FBI agent, there went that career, too.
Either way, Estabrook would want him dead.
But Simon figured those were the breaks in his line of work. He stayed on his feet and noticed March did, too, the comforts of the lounge immaterial to either of them. They’d simply needed a private place to meet.
Simon grinned at the no-nonsense FBI director. “If this blows up in my face, I can always become a plumber.”
“You could do worse,” March said.
“Estabrook didn’t make a fortune by being stupid.”
“You’ve done your part, Simon. You provided what we needed to unravel this bastard’s network. He’s a bad actor, and so is the company he keeps.” March gave a thin smile. “Excluding you, of course.”
“Of course.”
“There’s nothing more you can do right now. Estabrook’s at his ranch in Montana, and he thinks you’re visiting a friend and recuperating from the Armenia mission.”
Simon shrugged. “I tend to get into brawls when I’m at a loose end.”
“You’re not at a loose end. You’re in wait mode.”
“Same thing.”
“If there’s another disaster—”
“I wouldn’t wish a disaster on anyone just to give me something to do. Owen’s trying to get me to get involved with Fast Rescue training. Makes my eyes roll back in my head, thinking about training people to do what I already know how to do.”
March looked down, and Simon could have sworn he saw him smile. “Just do what a disaster consultant and search-and-rescue specialist would do between jobs, and you’ll be fine.”
“Will Davenport’s putting me up in London.”
“Ah. Sir Davenport. Or is it Lord Davenport?”
“One or the other. Both. Hell, I don’t know.”
March’s eyes didn’t change. Nor did his mouth. Nothing, but Simon detected a change nonetheless. Will Davenport was a wealthy Brit who believed he owed Simon his life. Maybe he did, but Simon wasn’t keeping score. Apparently Will also had a history—a less favorable one—with the FBI director. Simon didn’t know what it was and wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“I take it Davenport is unaware of your reasons for going to London.”
It was a statement, but Simon responded. “If he is, he’s keeping it to himself.”
“That’d be a first,” March said, making a move for the door. “Simon, we’ve got Estabrook, and we’ll blow open his network and save lives. A lot of lives. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do, sir. I also know Abigail’s eventually going to find out my history with you—”
“Not your problem.”
It wasn’t that March had acted as something of a surrogate father to Simon for the past twenty years that would get to Abigail. It was that she’d never known. At first, Simon was too caught up in his own anger and grief even to notice that March never took him to meet his family. He’d show up at Simon’s ball games—a few times at the police station, after Simon got into fights—and stay in touch with the occasional phone call. When Simon headed off to the University of Massachusetts, March paid him a couple of visits each semester, taking him out for pizza, checking in with him about grades. March never suggested the FBI as a career. He wasn’t director in those days, and when Simon decided to apply to the academy, he never discussed the idea with him.
March opened the door. “Stay in touch,” he said.
“I will. By the way, do you know Keira Sullivan?”
“We’ve met. Very pretty—talented artist.”
“She found a dead guy in the Public Garden last night.”
“That was her?”
Simon didn’t know why he’d brought her up. “She’s heading to Ireland tonight to research some story about Irish brothers, fairies and a stone angel. I don’t know. I could forget Will and go chase fairies in the Irish hills—” But he stopped, noticing a change in March’s expression. “Something wrong?”
“I’m just preoccupied with this Estabrook thing.” He seemed to manufacture a smile. “Keira Sullivan’s a temptation you don’t need right now, wouldn’t you say?”
Simon didn’t answer, and March left, shutting the door sharply behind him as he went out into the hall.
With a groan of pure frustration, Simon plopped down on a plush chair and lifted his feet onto a coffee table. He noticed a copy of the morning Boston Globe on the table. On the front page was a grainy black-and-white shot of the man who’d drowned in the Public Garden. Well off, middle-aged, no wife or children. The BPD Homicide Unit was investigating, but there was no indication of foul play.
Simon pictured Keira Sullivan bursting into the Beacon Hill house last night after she’d called 911. Pale, soaked, dressed like a lumberjack. Twenty minutes later, she’d floated back into the drawing room looking like a willowy Irish fairy princess herself. He admitted he was intrigued, but March had a point. Without even trying, Simon could think of about a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t waste his time indulging in fantasies about Keira Sullivan. Artist, folklorist, flake. BPD detective’s niece. Off to Ireland.
She was also friends with Owen Garrison, who was already keeping what he knew about Simon from Abigail and didn’t need to worry about lying to Keira, too.
Simon dropped his feet back to the lounge floor.
Who was he kidding? He was indulging in fantasies about Keira Sullivan.
Just as well he had the trip to London. Best to find some water and a candy bar for his flight.
As he exited the lounge, he envisioned—as if it were right in front of him—the painting of the Irish cottage he’d bought at last night’s auction. It was as if he was there, in Keira’s world, and he imagined her with brush in hand, her pale blond hair pulled back, her blue eyes focused on where the next dab of paint would go.
Simon heaved a cathartic sigh. “Get a grip,” he muttered.
The hall was empty of FBI agents. His flight would be boarding soon.
He went in search of a candy bar.
Chapter 7
Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland
6:30 p.m., IST
June 20
On her second night in Ireland, Keira indulged in a “toasted special”—a grilled ham, cheese, tomato and red onion sandwich—and a mug of coffee liberally laced with some Irish whiskey. She hadn’t specified a brand. She’d told Eddie O’Shea, the owner of the only pub in the tiny Beara Peninsula village where she was to spend the next six weeks, that she wanted whiskey, whiskey from Ireland. Otherwise, she didn’t care.
“Another coffee?” Eddie asked her. He was a sandy-haired, slight man with a quick wit and a friendly nature that seemed tailor-made for his work.
“No, thank you.” Keira heard the touch of Boston in her voice, a surprise to her given her wandering lifestyle. She picked up a triangle of her sandwich, melted cheese oozing from the toasted white bread, a bit of onion curling into a charred sliver of ham. Less than two days on the southwest coast of Ireland, and she was settling in fine and looking forward to her stay there. “If I had more coffee, I’d have more whiskey, and then I’d be in a fix.”
Eddie eyed her with what she could only describe as skeptical amusement. “You’re not driving.”
“I plan to take a walk.” She picked up her mug, the coffee still very hot, and let it warm her hands. “I love these long June days. Tomorrow’s the summer solstice. You never know what mischief you might encounter this time of year.”
“Off to dance with fairies and engage in a bit of magic, are you? Well, be careful, or you’ll be mistaken for a fairy princess yourself.”
“Do you believe in the Good People, then, Eddie?” she asked with a smile.
“I’m not a superstitious man.”
She hadn’t told him Patsy’s story. Investigating a tale of Irish brothers, fairies and a stone angel, Keira had decided, required a clear-but-not-too-clear head. She wanted to be gutsy but not reckless, determined but not insane. She hoped the combination of whiskey and caffeine would do the trick.
Eddie moved off with a tray of drinks, delivering them to a knot of men gathered in a semicircle of spindly chairs in front of a small television. She’d learned they were local farmers and fishermen who’d known each other all their lives. They’d arrived at the pub one by one over the past hour to watch a hurling match and argue good-naturedly among themselves. If they’d been arguing about fairies, magic, ancient rituals and ancient stories told by the fire—that, Keira thought, would have compelled her to eavesdrop, perhaps even to join them. She didn’t know much about hurling, except that it was fast, rough and immensely popular with Eddie O’Shea and his friends.
She’d had dinner at the pub last night, too. She’d hit it off with Eddie right away. Nonetheless, she was keenly aware that the locals were beginning to construct a story about her and her presence in their village. She supposed she’d helped by dropping an odd tidbit here and there—not fiction so much as not the whole truth. She’d never once lied to any of them.
They believed she’d come to Ireland in the typical Irish-American search for her roots and herself, and she supposed, in a way, she had.
She left a few euros on the wooden bar and took her coffee with her as she stepped outside into what was, truly, one of the finer evenings of this and her two previous visits to Ireland. A good beginning to her stay, she thought. She could feel her jet lag easing, the tension of her last hours in Boston finally losing its grip on her.
A man in a threadbare tweed jacket, wool pants, an Irish wool cap and mud-encrusted wellies sat at a picnic table next to the pub’s entrance. He faced the street, smoking a cigarette. He looked up at Keira with eyes as clear and true a blue as she’d ever seen. His skin was weather-beaten, laced with deep wrinkles. He had short, straight gray hair. He could have been sixty or eighty—or a hundred-and-eighty, she thought. He had a timeless quality to him.
He said something in Irish that didn’t include one of the fifty or so words she knew. Her mother spoke Irish—or used to. “I’m sorry—”
“Enjoy your walk, Keira Sullivan.” He blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke and gave just the slightest of smiles. “I know you. Ah, yes. I know you well.”
She was so stunned, she jumped back, stumbling and nearly spilling coffee down her front.
When she righted herself, coffee intact, the man was gone.
Where had he slipped off to so fast?
Keira peered up the quiet, narrow village street, lined with brightly colored stucco houses. The vivid blue, fuchsia, green, yellow and red could light up even the gloomiest Irish weather. Baskets of lavender and dark pink geraniums hung from lampposts. A few cars were parked along the sides of the road, but there was no traffic. Except for a single dog barking toward the water and the occasional hoots from the men in the pub, the street was quiet.
Keira debated going back into the pub to see if the man was there, or asking Eddie O’Shea if he’d seen him, but as much as she and Eddie had hit it off, she’d known him less than two days and didn’t want to stir up any further gossip.
Maybe the mysterious man had overindulged in Guinness and was staggering up a nearby lane, or he lived in one of the houses on the main street and simply had gone home.
Maybe he’d decided to have a little fun with the American tourist.
She couldn’t read anything into what the man—a perfect stranger—had said.
Keira took his spot at the picnic table, and as she sipped her coffee, lukewarm now, she noticed there wasn’t even a hint of cigarette smoke in the pleasant evening air.
After she left the pub, Keira shoved her hands into the pockets of a traditional Irish wool knit sweater she’d bought in Kenmare, a pretty village famous for its shops and restaurants. It was located farther up Kenmare Bay, which separated the Beara and the Iveragh peninsulas, two of the five fingers of land in southwest Ireland that jutted out into the stormy Atlantic Ocean.
She turned onto a bucolic lane that ran parallel to the village’s protected harbor, gray and still now at low tide, and across the bay, the jagged silhouette of the MacGillicuddy Reeks of the Iveragh Peninsula were outlined against the muted sky. Off to her right, the rugged, barren mountains of the sparsely populated Beara Peninsula rose up sharply, with tufts of milky clouds, or fog, maybe, sinking into rocky crevices.
Keira could hear the distant bleating of the sheep that dotted the hills.
The ancient stone walls along the lane were overgrown with masses of pink roses and wildflowers—blue, purple and yellow thistles, pink foxglove, various drifts and spikes of white flowers.
And holly, Keira saw with a smile, lots of it. By tradition, cutting down a holly tree was bad luck.
There were tall rhododendrons and the occasional pop of a bright fuchsia that had long ago escaped cultivation. The southwest Irish climate, warmed by the Gulf Stream, was mild year-round, hospitable to subtropical plants in spite of fierce gales.
Her rented cottage was just up ahead, a traditional structure of gray stone that, to her relief, was charming and perfect for her stay. Keira made a mental note to send a postcard to Colm Dermott thanking him for his help in finding it.
She hugged her sweater closer to her and pushed back any thoughts that might entice her to duck into her cottage and pour herself another whiskey and put on music, then tuck herself among her warm blankets and sketch pretty pictures of Irish scenery. It was tempting just to forget her mission.
After another thirty yards, she turned onto a dirt track that wound through the middle of a rock-strewn pasture, marked off with barbed wire and rising sharply. She’d walked up this way yesterday to get a feel for her surroundings. She was surprised at how well they corresponded to the details in Patsy’s story.
Sheep grazed far up into the hills, part of the Slieve Miskish Mountains that ran down the lower spine of the peninsula to the Atlantic and the now-defunct copper mines, where Patsy’s grandfather had worked.
The track leveled off briefly, and Keira heard a grunt nearby.
A cow. It’s only a damn cow.
Then came a shriek of laughter, and a woman’s voice. “Oh, no! Look—I stepped in it!”
A man chuckled. “Apparently cows don’t care about prehistoric ruins.”
The couple climbed over a barbed-wire fence onto the track. They were obviously American, the slight breeze catching the ends of their graying hair as they checked their scuffed walking shoes for cow manure. The woman smiled at Keira. “I suppose if one’s going to traipse through a cow pasture, one should expect cow patties. Are you going out to the stone circle?”
“Not tonight,” Keira said.
She’d checked out the stone circle yesterday after her arrival. It was one of over a hundred of the mysterious megalithic structures in County Cork, a particularly good example because it was relatively large and missing just one of its eleven stones. Getting to it required climbing over fences and navigating cows, rutted ground, rocks and manure.
The woman gave up on her shoe. “It’s incredible—and to see it this time of year…” She beamed, obviously delighted with her adventure. “Such a thrill. We half hoped we’d run into fairies dancing.”
Her companion sighed. “You hoped we’d see fairies.”
She rolled her eyes with amusement and addressed Keira. “My husband has no sense of romance.” She gestured broadly toward the harbor and village below. “We’re staying in Kenmare. You’re American, too?”
“I’m from Boston—I’m renting a cottage here,” Keira said, leaving her explanation at that.
“Lovely. Well, enjoy your walk.”
“Mind the cow flops if you go in the pasture,” her husband said.
Keira wished the couple a good-night, and as they ambled down the gravel track, she felt more relaxed. It wasn’t as remote out here as it seemed. She’d come prepared. She had food, water, a flashlight, a first-aid kit and a whistle for emergencies.
“You’ll be in Ireland on the summer solstice. Look for the angel then.”
The summer solstice wasn’t until tomorrow, but Keira figured she’d have a good look around tonight, get the lay of the land. With a little luck, maybe Patsy’s story would lead her straight to the hermit monk’s hut.
Regardless, it was a beautiful evening, and Keira was enjoying herself on her first full day of what promised to be a perfect six weeks in Ireland.
Chapter 8
Cambridge, Massachusetts
3:00 p.m., EDT
June 20
Abigail parked her unmarked BPD car on a quiet street off Memorial Drive lined with mature trees and stately homes. Very Cambridge. Victor Sarakis’s house was a traditional Colonial with gray-painted shingles and black shutters. He was relatively wealthy, she’d discovered, and also something of an eccentric.
She turned the engine off and scowled at Bob O’Reilly next to her. He’d jumped into the passenger seat at BPD headquarters a half second before she could hit the locks and take off without him. He was getting on her nerves, but wasn’t everyone? “Shouldn’t you be pushing papers somewhere?”
He opened his door and glanced over at her. “What did you do, sit there stewing all this time and thinking up that one?”
“No, it just popped out.”
“Good. I’ll pretend it didn’t.”
Abigail didn’t respond. She knew he objected to her coming out to Cambridge. He had good reason. The medical examiner had determined that Victor Sarakis had drowned. There was no indication of foul play, a contributing natural cause or the involvement of alcohol or drugs, illegal or otherwise. A full autopsy report, with the results of more tests, was in the works, but everything still pointed to a bizarre accident. From past death investigations, Abigail knew it was entirely possible they’d never figure out the exact sequence of events that had led to Sarakis’s death.
Bob had already made clear he didn’t care what the exact sequence of events was. He wanted Abigail to focus on clear-cut homicide cases. She didn’t report to him, but he’d been charged with improving BPD’s percentage of solved versus unsolved homicide cases after a withering series of pieces in the media and figured that gave him license to get in anyone’s and everyone’s face, including hers.
Abigail had hoped to get to Cambridge and back without Bob ever knowing, but that hadn’t worked out. A middle-aged man in apparent good health drowning in two feet of water was provocative—worth a bit of follow-up, at least in her judgment. Bob was free to disagree, provided he stayed out of her way.
She got out of the car, shutting her door with more force than was necessary. It was hot—too hot for June. Tomorrow it’d rain, and then she’d be griping about that. Given her mood, she had to admit that Owen had picked the perfect time for a quick trip to Fast Rescue’s Austin headquarters.
She went around the front of the car to the sidewalk. Tom Yarborough, her partner for the past six months, shared Bob’s opinion of the Sarakis drowning but hadn’t made a stink when she’d said she wanted to head out here on her own.
Bob motioned for her to go ahead of him up Sarakis’s front walk. “It’s your investigation,” he said.
Ignoring his sarcasm, Abigail took in her surroundings. The brick walkway was chipped. The front door needed a fresh coat of its dark green paint. The iron railing was loose on the steps. She had no cause to look into Sarakis’s finances yet, but she wondered if eccentricity explained the run-down condition of his place. Everything sagged or was in need of scraping, paint, a good carpenter. A termite inspection wouldn’t hurt, either.
She took note of the full attic, one-story sunroom and attached two-car garage. “What do you think, Bob—five, six bedrooms?”
“At least, except they won’t all be bedrooms. No wife, no kids. Retired at fifty. He’ll have a library, a game room, a dead-animal room—you know, to display stuffed birds and deer heads.”
“Think he was a hunter?”
“Didn’t have to be.”
From her years working with Bob, Abigail knew he wasn’t being literal. He was sizing up Victor Sarakis as a moderately wealthy, eccentric loner who probably had serious amateur interests—ones that probably didn’t include gardening, she thought as she noted the dandelions, crabgrass and bare spots that dominated the small front lawn. His was definitely the ugly duckling house on the street.
She rang the doorbell, the faint sound of a ding inside the house telling her it worked.
“Tomorrow’s the summer solstice,” Bob said next to her, as if that explained an unusual death in the Boston Public Garden.
Abigail glanced back at him. “Don’t start that again. The summer solstice is a happy time. Lots of sun, flowers, bonfires, dancing.”
“Too much daylight, people go nuts. They can’t take it. Brings out the worst in them.”
She had no idea if he was serious.
“I know what’s eating me,” he said simply. “The summer solstice, and my crazy niece chasing fairies in Ireland. You, though. What’s going on with you?”
“What’s going on is that I’m trying to do my job, and you’re here interfering.”
“That’s not what’s going on. You’re used to me interfering. You know you don’t have to be here. You’re letting a straightforward death investigation consume you.”
“What was Sarakis doing that close to the water? It must have been raining when he ended up in the lagoon.” She knew she’d said lagoon instead of pond just to get on Bob’s nerves. He deserved it. “You’d think he’d have stuck to the walks and gotten to shelter as fast as possible.”
“Maybe he was feeding the pigeons.”
Just as she reached for the bell again, the door opened. A trim man with close-cropped graying hair stood on the threshold, looking tired, grim. He wore neatly pressed slacks and a loose-fitting silky sweater. From his expression, Abigail guessed he already knew who they were, but she showed him her badge and introduced herself and Bob.
“I’m Jay Augustine, Victor’s brother-in-law.” He stood back, opening the door wider. “Please, come in.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Augustine,” Abigail said.
“Thank you.” He waited for her and Bob to enter the foyer, then shut the door. “Why don’t we talk in the sunroom—”
“That’d be fine,” Abigail said.
He led them down a center hall. From what she could see, the interior of the house was immaculate and tastefully decorated, a decided contrast to the ratty exterior. They went through an elegant dining room into a small, adjoining room with windows on three sides and French doors that opened onto a brick terrace. Abigail noticed Bob was paying attention, taking in every detail—habit from years on the job, she thought, if not any real interest in her case.
Jay Augustine stood in the middle of the sunroom as if he didn’t know what else to do with himself. “Victor spent a great deal of time in here. It’s the only casual room in the house. He—” Augustine’s voice cracked, and he paused, clearing his throat. “Every room in the house is crammed with his various collections. Except this one. Funnily enough, he spent most of his time in here.”
“What did he collect?” Abigail asked.
“My brother-in-law had many interests and the time and money to indulge them. He went all over the world. My wife and I are dealers in fine art and antiques, but Victor bought most of the pieces you see here on his travels. He lived a full life, Detective Browning. That’s at least some consolation.”
Abigail didn’t respond.
“Well.” Augustine took in a breath. “You’re homicide detectives, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “It’s routine to conduct an investigation when—”
“When a man trips and falls in the Boston Public Garden?”
She noted the slightest edge to his tone. “Where do you and your wife live, Mr. Augustine?”
“We have a home in Newton. Our showroom is in Boston, on Clarendon Street.”
“When did you last see your brother-in-law?”
“I stopped by two weeks ago. Charlotte—that’s my wife—was with me, but I can’t speak for her. She may have seen Victor since then. They were close, but they didn’t live in each other’s pockets.”
Bob walked over to the French doors and looked out at the terrace, as run-down as the front of the house. “Where’s Mrs. Augustine now?” he asked.
“In Boston at our showroom,” Jay said. “It’s quiet there. Most of our business is done by appointment. She’s having a difficult time. Victor was such a vital presence in our lives. I actually met Charlotte through him. We’ve only been married two years… I’d located an Italian Renaissance tapestry Victor had been looking for. He was different, as you can see for yourselves, but he was a good man.”
“Where were you the night your brother-in-law died?” Abigail asked.
“In New York on business. Charlotte was at home.” He swallowed visibly, then nodded to the terrace. “Victor had been talking about hiring a yard service and getting repairs done on the house. He’d had complaints from neighbors. He wasn’t angry. He was aware that he was oblivious to things like peeling paint, chipped shutters and weeds. He just didn’t care, provided the house was keeping out the elements and his collections were protected.”
Bob started to pace, a sign he was getting impatient. Abigail moved back toward the dining room, noticed a knee-high wooden elephant, ornate silver, an array of Asian masks, a huge, colorfully painted bowl in the middle of the table. She’d never been one for a lot of antiques and collectibles around her.
“My wife and I are busy, Detective,” Jay Augustine said behind her. “We had no warning—we’re dealing with our shock as best we can. I could take the time to show you around, but I don’t see what point it would serve.”
At that point, neither did Abigail. Augustine ducked past her, and she and Bob followed him back out to the hall.
“What do you and your wife do now?” Bob asked.
Jay seemed surprised by the question. “Now? Oh, you mean with this house and Victor’s collections. He left a will, thank heaven. Charlotte is meeting with the attorney tomorrow.”
Bob bent over slightly and peered at a parade of statues of giraffes on a console. “Guess he collected giraffes, huh? Is your wife his sole next of kin?”
“Yes. Victor never married.”
“Did he keep good records of what he owned?”
“Not particularly.”
“He have anything a museum might want?”
Augustine inhaled through his nose, as if to rein in his impatience. “Potentially a considerable amount of what Victor collected would interest a museum—and Charlotte and me, too, if that’s what you’re going to ask next.”
Bob didn’t respond. Abigail knew he didn’t care if he was getting on Augustine’s nerves. “Did your brother-in-law spell out what he wanted done with his collections?”
“He left those decisions to my wife. To be quite frank, I’m saddened but not surprised that Victor died the way he did. He was very absentminded. He often lost track of where he was and what he was doing. You’re wasting your time, Detective Browning. I’m sure the citizens of Boston have more urgent things for you to do than to investigate an accidental drowning.”
“Again, I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.
“No, you’re not,” he snapped, walking briskly up the hall.
As they came to the foyer, Abigail noticed that the pocket doors to a room on her right had popped open a few inches. Just inside was a bronze statue with horns, bulging eyes and a forked tongue.
It was a five-foot-tall statue of the devil.
“Mind if we take a peek in here?” she asked mildly.
Jay regarded her impassively. “As you wish, Detective.”
Using two fingers, Bob slid open the pocket doors and gave a low whistle as he and Abigail entered the wood-paneled room. The devil statue was frightening, but it wasn’t alone. The walls and the furnishings—large oak library-style tables, smaller side tables, open and glass-fronted bookcases—were jam-packed with items that all appeared to involve, in some way, the devil.
“Ol’ Scratch lives,” Bob said.
“Victor was a gifted amateur scholar and independent thinker,” Jay Augustine said, not defensively.
Abigail noted a stack of books on a small table that all appeared to be about hell, damnation, devils or evil. “Where did he get this stuff?” she asked.
“Various places,” Jay said. “Victor was obsessive once he sunk his teeth into something. About three years go he developed an interest in evil, hell and the devil. He considered it no more unusual than someone else’s interest in goblins and trolls.”
“I like flowers myself,” Abigail said.
“Not everything in here is an original.” Jay nodded toward a disturbing painting on the front wall of naked men suffering in a fiery hell. “That Bosch, for instance, is a copy. You know Bosch, don’t you?”
“I don’t,” Bob said blandly.
“Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch painter in the Middle Ages known for his vivid depictions of hell and damnation. He had a fervent belief in the fundamental evil of man. In his world—depicted brilliantly in his work—man was redeemable only by faith in God.”
“Doesn’t look as if anyone got redeemed in this painting,” Abigail said.
“It’s called Hell. Appropriate, don’t you think? It’s one in a series of four paintings Bosch did in the late fifteenth century. The others are Ascent of the Blessed, Terrestrial Paradise and The Fall of the Damned.”
“Sounds as if you know something about this collection yourself,” Abigail said.
Augustine shrugged. “Charlotte and I saw the originals on a trip to Italy last summer. We helped Victor find a painter to do this copy.”
This obviously struck a nerve with Bob. “What for?”
“He wanted it.”
Bob moved closer to the painting. “Kind of looks like Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movies, doesn’t it? I haven’t read the books. My daughters have—I got through The Hobbit, and that was it for me.”
By habit and conviction, Abigail knew, he never used the names of any of his three daughters—Fiona, Madeleine and Jayne. At nineteen, Fiona was the eldest and more or less on her own, but Madeleine and Jayne were just fourteen and eleven. They lived with their mother in Lexington, close enough to visit their father regularly. They were good kids and got along with him, not always an easy task.
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Carla Neggers
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Inside an ancient ruin, Keira discovers the mythic stone angel she seeks—but also senses a malevolent presence…just before the ruins collapse around her.Search-and-rescue veteran Simon Cahill finds Keira in the rubble just as she′s about to free herself. Simon holds no stock in myths or magic, so he isn′t surprised that there′s no trace of her stone angel.But there is evidence of startling violence and—whatever the source—the danger to Keira is quite real. The long-forgotten legend that captivated her has also aroused a killer…a calculating predator who will follow them back to Boston, determined to kill again.