The Whisper

by Carla Neggers

  “I have a thirteen-year-old son who wants to follow your footsteps straight into the SAS,” she said tartly. “I suppose that qualifies as brave.”

  Myles jumped out of the car with a bounce to his step and greeted Justin Rush as if they were longtime friends. Josie had no illusions that being with her had put Myles in a lighthearted, sardonic mood. He grabbed his rucksack and trotted up the steps and through the brass-trimmed door into the hotel. However tired he was, he wouldn’t let it get in the way of his mission, which, at the moment, was Sophie Malone.

  As Josie climbed out of the car, Justin Rush retrieved her bag from the back. “Lizzie would like you to meet her in her room when you’ve got yourselves settled,” he said. “Keira will be joining you, too.”

  “Lovely,” Josie said.

  Explaining that the hotel was quiet, Justin carried Josie’s bag into the lobby, where a fire glowed in a marble fireplace. He slipped behind the elegant front desk. “I’ve jotted down Lizzie’s room number for you. She’s on the second floor. You’re on the third. She booked you and Mr. Fletcher each a room. They’re adjoining.” He handed Josie the keys, adding, matter-of-factly, “There’s a connecting door between them. I’ve given you that key, as well.”

  “Wonderful,” Josie said briskly. “Thanks much, Justin. I’ll take my bag from here. Do tell Lizzie we’ll be down shortly, won’t you?”

  “Happy to,” Justin said.

  Mercifully, Myles had stayed out of the exchange. He silently followed Josie up the curving stairs off the lobby. Just thinking about hotel rooms and beds and baths and towels had her feeling all afire and on edge, but she quickly blamed her sleepless night and the interminable drive across Ireland.

  As they came to their rooms, she handed Myles his set of keys. “Good job, love,” he said. “I’ll see you in Lizzie’s room in a few.”

  “Taking a nap, Myles, or checking on Will and Simon?”

  But he was already through the door, which automatically shut quietly behind him. Josie resisted pounding her fist on it and instead went into her own room, a charming and tasteful mix of modern and traditional furnishings. From what she’d learned in having known Lizzie Rush for a month, each of the boutique hotel’s twenty-seven rooms was individually appointed, with an eye to the comfort of the guests.

  Now that she was finally alone, Josie let down her guard and tried to diminish the tension in her back and shoulders with a few stretches while the tub filled. She added a dollop of the ginger-and-ginseng-scented bath oil that came with her room, stripped, left her clothes in a heap on the floor and sank into the steaming water, closing her eyes as the events of the day drifted away for a bit.

  When she imagined Myles letting himself in through the connecting door, she bolted straight up out of the tub, toweled off and slipped into a soft, cuddly hotel bathrobe ready on a hook on the door.

  By then, Scoop Wisdom was ringing her from Boston. She’d tried him several times on the drive from Dublin and expected to dive in and tell him about her conversation with Tim O’Donovan, but he had developments of his own. Josie sat on a chair in a window overlooking a darkening Dublin street and listened without interruption as the Boston detective related his unpleasant news—that he and Sophie Malone had found a man dead.

  “Cliff Rafferty,” Scoop said.

  Josie frowned. “I’m not familiar with the name.”

  “He was a police officer. He had a peripheral role with the Augustine case until he retired a few weeks ago. He took a private security job with Percy and Helen Carlisle.”

  “Who’re the Carlisles?”

  “Wealthy couple from Boston—at least he is. He stopped to see Sophie in Kenmare her last night in Ireland. His wife had already left. She’s back in Boston now. Her husband didn’t return with her, but we don’t know where he is. We’d like to find him.”

  “Do you suspect he’s involved in this officer’s death?”

  “I’m not on the case.”

  That wasn’t exactly an answer, but Josie assumed Scoop hadn’t intended for it to be one. “Did he stay in Ireland? Is he here somewhere?”

  “We don’t know what he did after he saw Sophie in Kenmare. He travels a lot. He has a home in London and friends and favorite hotels all over the place.” Scoop paused. “Where’s your friend Myles Fletcher? He’s there with you?”

  “What makes you think he’s here?”

  “The lilt in your voice.”

  She clicked her tongue behind her teeth. “Cheeky bastard.”

  He laughed, which wasn’t, Josie decided, bad to hear, but he was serious again when he went on. “Tell Fletcher to call me.”

  After Scoop disconnected, Josie gritted her teeth at her phone as if he were still there giving orders. He could be a decidedly annoying man. She used the house phone to ring Myles in his room. “Your new detective friend in Boston wants you to call him. He and our Sophie Malone just found a dead police officer.”

  “I’ve already told him all I know.”

  “You never tell anyone all you know,” Josie said. “Ring him now. I’d prefer not to have him involve the guards. I like my room. The ginger-and-ginseng bath salts are particularly delightful.”

  “I’m getting images, love.”

  “Enjoy them, because that’s all you’ll get. Make the call, Myles. I don’t want to spend the night in an Irish jail cell because you’re too stubborn to meet Detective Wisdom halfway. He’ll call the guards. You know bloody well he will.”

  Myles was silent a moment. “All right. I’ll join you in Lizzie’s room after I’ve had a chat with Wisdom. Unless, of course, you’d rather—”

  “Lizzie’s room in a few minutes is perfect.”

  She cradled the phone, feeling flushed and agitated. She glanced at the connecting door. What would she do if Myles came through it wearing nothing but a bathrobe and carrying a jar of bath salts?

  “Dear heavens,” she muttered at her wild imagination and quickly got dressed.

  She took the stairs to the second floor. Lizzie opened the door to a small suite as elegant and quirky as the rest of the hotel. A table in front of the sofa was laid out with plates of fruit, cheese, brown bread and scones, with little dishes of jams and butter and a large pot of tea. Keira was there, too, both women casually dressed and clearly unaware of more violence in Boston. Josie filled them in with what she’d learned from Scoop Wisdom.

  Neither Lizzie nor Keira knew the dead man, Cliff Rafferty.

  “This has turned ugly fast, hasn’t it?” Lizzie gathered up a deck of playing cards on the table, next to a graceful copper vase, and shuffled them idly, a long-standing habit. “Arabella Davenport wants to measure Keira and me for dresses in London. Given this latest news, I suppose that’s what Will and Simon would have us do.”

  Will’s younger sister was primarily a wedding dress designer, but Josie decided not to point that out; obviously Lizzie would know, and the state of her and Will’s relationship was none of Josie’s affair—not that she lacked for an opinion. She believed their whirlwind romance was true love at work and Will Davenport, so hard to read about so much else, had found his soul mate in Lizzie Rush.

  Josie trusted herself to judge other people’s love lives. With her own, she was clueless.

  She plucked a perfectly chilled grape from the tray.

  “Arabella sounds as happy and content as ever,” Lizzie continued. “I’m sure it helps that she has no idea where Simon and Will are. Do you know, Josie?”

  Josie nibbled on her grape, grateful that for once she could give a complete and honest answer to that particular question. “No.”

  “Would you tell us if you did?” Keira asked, skeptical.

  Lizzie set the cards back on the table and plopped onto the soft cushions of the sofa. “Egad, Josie. You look terrible.”

  Apparently her bath hadn’t helped as much as she’d hoped. “It’s been a strange day.” As she helped herself to a perfectly browned scone, she remained on her feet and told her
two friends about her conversations with Seamus Harrigan and then Tim O’Donovan in Kenmare. “During the entire drive across Ireland that afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sophie being left for dead in a dark, dank cave on a remote island.”

  Keira rose, her pale hair pulled back, gleaming in the room’s pleasant light. “There are obvious similarities between what happened to Sophie and my night in the ruin on the Beara, but there are differences, too. I heard whispers, and I was left there, trapped, but I didn’t come across the blood smeared on the tree branches until the next morning, after I was already safe.”

  “Augustine left the blood for you—or whoever came looking for you—to find,” Josie said. “It wasn’t part of a grand plan. He happened onto a recently dead sheep in the pasture. He didn’t kill the poor thing.”

  Keira pulled back a drape and stared out the window. “You said the bloody branches Sophie saw in the cave disappeared before the fisherman and the guards got there. Simon was with me when I found the sheep’s blood. I had a witness. I had evidence to corroborate my story.”

  Not minding that she was the only one eating, Josie added little mounds of clotted cream and raspberry jam to the side of her small plate. “Augustine hasn’t explained himself. To my knowledge, he’s hardly spoken a word since his arrest.”

  “We may never know how many people he’s killed.” Keira spoke with remarkable self-control, although her ordeal early that summer was clearly still a struggle for her. “I just want to live my life. Draw, paint, laugh, love. I don’t want to think about killers anymore.”

  Lizzie, who had gone somewhat pale, nodded. “I don’t, either.”

  “That’s precisely what you both should do, then,” Josie said. “You needn’t be involved with whatever’s happening now in Boston. Arabella Davenport awaits you in London with her measuring tape.”

  As Keira moved away from the window, she exhibited none of her usual positive spirit, the carefree wanderlust that Josie had seen in her even just a few weeks ago. Normally Keira was bubbling with creativity and enthusiasm. “I was never afraid in the ruin,” she said. “I can’t explain it, but I felt safe.”

  “The fairies,” Josie said.

  “The black dog was there, too,” Lizzie interjected from her position on the sofa. “Of course, for all we know, he’s a shape-shifting fairy himself.”

  “Anything’s possible.” Keira settled her troubled gaze on Josie. “I can’t not be involved, Josie. I have to do what I can.”

  Josie added fresh fruit to her plate and finally sat with it on a side chair that seemed to envelop her in its soft cushions. “Oh, my, Lizzie,” she said, deliberately cheerful. “Did you choose this particular chair to remind people how tired they are?” But when Lizzie managed only a weak smile, Josie made up her mind. “I think it best that you two return to London first thing tomorrow. I’ll make the arrangements. If you don’t want to let Arabella measure you for dresses, you can all have tea or visit Buckingham Palace—”

  “Or catch Taryn Malone on stage,” Lizzie said, perking up.

  Josie sighed. “That’s not what I had in mind.”

  Lizzie didn’t give up. “I’d love to see Arabella, but Keira and I can look into whether Percy Carlisle is in London.”

  “Lizzie,” Josie said, “the Boston police want to talk to Percy in connection with the highly suspicious death of one of their own.”

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  Keira, too, seemed to rally now that a plan was in the works. “Maybe he’s in London and just didn’t tell his wife—not necessarily for nefarious reasons but because he’s not used to being married.”

  “I can get us names of his friends and acquaintances there,” Lizzie added.

  The Rushes were themselves wealthy Bostonians, but even if they weren’t, Josie had no doubt that Lizzie and Keira would manage to get the names. These were two very capable women—capable on multiple levels—but Josie wasn’t keen on having to explain to her bosses in London, should Lizzie and Keira land themselves in trouble, why she’d given them free rein and even encouraged them.

  There was also the prospect of explaining herself to Will and Simon, too.

  “You’ve done your investigative bit these past few months,” she said, “and you have no legal authority to start poking into this man’s affairs.”

  “It’s perfectly reasonable that I’d look him up,” Keira said.

  “How? You just said you don’t know him.”

  “We’re both from Boston,” Keira said, “and we share an interest in art, history and archaeology. He’s a natural to approach about the Boston-Cork folklore conference. I’m surprised I haven’t thought of him before now.”

  Josie put far too much clotted cream on the last bit of her scone, but she didn’t care. “That’s utterly transparent. He’ll know in a minute you have an ulterior motive.”

  Lizzie dropped her feet to the floor and reached for a piece of brown bread and a small plate. “So? We’ll have found him.” She dipped a knife into soft butter and smeared it on her bread. “That’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

  “There’s no danger, Josie,” Keira said, the life returning to her eyes. “Even if this police officer in Boston was murdered and didn’t commit suicide, his killer is there, not here.”

  Josie recognized defeat when it was upon her. “I’ll have someone meet you in London.”

  “Who? Scotland Yard?” Definitely more animated now, Keira walked over to the small table and took the smallest triangle of cheese from the tray. “MI5—MI6?”

  Josie smiled. “Such an imagination.”

  She was spared further grilling by Myles’s belated arrival. He was freshly showered, shaved and as sexy as she’d ever seen him. She told herself her heightened emotions were a result of the troubling news from Boston and how it might intersect with the Kenmare fisherman’s tale of a cave, blood and lost Celtic gold—not, she thought, to the reemergence of one formerly dead military and intelligence officer in her life.

  Well, not in her life. In her presence, at best. Myles wasn’t a man who let himself be in anyone else’s life. He preferred to stand apart. She’d known that about him even before the ill-fated firefight in Afghanistan.

  She noticed his gray eyes were less red-rimmed than an hour ago, and he moved with his usual energy and purpose. He plucked two slices of brown bread from the tray, skipped a plate, jam and butter and sat next to Lizzie. “Sorry to interrupt your chat.”

  “We were discussing wedding dresses,” Lizzie said with a wry smile.

  “Terrifying. Put me back on the Maine coast with Norman Estabrook’s thugs. You were quite the firecracker ally that day, Lizzie, love.”

  She scooted to the corner of the sofa with her knees tucked up under her chin, so that she was facing Myles. “I had no choice,” she said.

  “We always have a choice. Yours was to act. Your father taught you well.”

  She frowned. “It’s him. In London. It’s my father you’re having meet us, isn’t it, Josie? He was just in Ireland for the first time since my mother’s death. I haven’t heard from him in a week or so, but I know he hasn’t returned to Las Vegas.”

  Josie relished another bite of scone. “Let’s chuck everything and open a tea shop on a tree-lined street in a little town on the Irish coast.” She took a moment to consider the myriad complications that the mention of Harlan Rush presented. Widower, gambler, hotelier, veteran spy—and a man very devoted to Lizzie, his only child. “If your father is in London, Lizzie, perhaps he’s there to help you site the very first Rush hotel in Great Britain.”

  “Not a chance,” Lizzie said. “My dear father may be a vice president in the family business, but that doesn’t mean he knows a thing about it. My uncle would never let him get involved in opening a hotel.”

  Josie ate some of her fruit, although she wanted another scone. “When I made that comment, I had no one specific in mind. I can’t say I’ve ever met your father.”

  Myles ey
ed Lizzie with a measure of respect he reserved for very few. They’d bonded in the last hours of Abigail Browning’s captivity, when Norman Estabrook and his thugs had holed up in the old Rush house on the Maine coast. Once Estabrook and most of his men were dead and Abigail and Lizzie were safe, Myles had jumped in a boat and disappeared. Will could have stopped him, but he hadn’t.

  Lizzie seemed to curl up into an even tighter ball. “You came back here voluntarily. Simon and Will couldn’t order you. Even if they tried to, you’d only listen if you thought it was in the interest of your mission to do as they asked.”

  Myles popped a chunk of brown bread into his mouth. “I’m starving. There’s a pub in this place, isn’t there?”

  “Lower level,” Lizzie said. “You know I hate being ignored, don’t you?”

  He grinned. “You’ll definitely keep Lord Will on his toes.”

  Keira shook her head. “You people,” she said cheerfully. “If I could paint, I’d hole up here, but I can’t.” She returned to the window and looked out at the Dublin night again. “Maybe I’ll turn into a painter of dreary, depressing scenes.”

  “That’s not even possible,” Josie said.

  “I hope not.” She let the drape fall back in place. “Lizzie, are you going to tell them about Justin?”

  “Oh, right.” Lizzie seemed to put aside trying to get more information from Myles. “My cousin Justin reminded me that Jeremiah—his older brother—had a fierce crush on Sophie Malone when she worked at our hotel in Boston. He was still in high school.”

  Josie resisted the crumbs on her plate. “Where is Jeremiah now?”

  “He’s working reception at the Whitcomb. I called him while I was waiting for you all to get here.” Lizzie sat up, dropping her feet to the floor. “He helped me remember that Sophie got to know John March. The FBI director. It could mean nothing—”

  Josie shook her head. “In my experience, the words ‘John March’ in a sentence never mean nothing.”