Liar's Key

by Carla Neggers

  When they finished their chat—and Finian his taoscán of the twelve-year-old—he walked with Emma up from the harbor to Colin’s house. She remained tight, restless and tense, unusual for a woman who was typically analytical and in control.

  The evening was cool and quiet, the air clearing with nightfall. Perhaps it was opening the twelve-year-old or his sister’s imminent visit, but Finian felt out of place and far, far from home—and yet, inexplicably, he didn’t question he was where he was called to be. His twin brother and his youngest sister, he knew, would never understand.

  “The fog’s lifted sooner than I expected,” Emma said as they navigated the narrow residential streets of the small fishing village. “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it, Fin?”

  “It is.” He smiled, welcoming her use of his first name. His friendship with Colin was more natural, had come easily to them both. It was different with Emma, in part because of her past as a religious sister. But it was the past, and he considered her a friend.

  But her lighter mood didn’t last, and she was again preoccupied when they reached the house she and Colin shared. “Good night, Fin,” she said. “Thank you for the company—and the new Bracken whiskey.”

  “Anytime. You know where to find me if you need anything.”

  She smiled. “I do. Thank you.”

  * * *

  Finian entered the rectory through the front door and noticed at once how chilly it was. He’d left early that morning and had been lulled into the fine spring weather and hadn’t shut the windows. With the fog and now nightfall, the temperature had dropped. But he didn’t mind. After almost a year in Rock Point, he was comfortable with the changeable weather and his tidy, comfortable home next to St. Patrick’s Holy Roman Catholic Church. Built in the 1890s, the house needed work, but he appreciated its nods to decades past—original moldings, old-fashioned light switches, 1960s wood paneling in the den.

  The dining room beckoned with its stillness and shadows. To welcome him to Rock Point, the church ladies had covered the table with an Irish lace cloth. He had yet to use the table. He always ate in the kitchen, even when he had company, which he seldom did.

  Mary would be fine eating in the kitchen.

  Finian shuddered at the thought of his youngest sister encountering Oliver York up by the ruins in Declan’s Cross.

  Had she followed the Englishman?

  Leaving the question hanging, Finian went into the kitchen and put on a kettle to boil. The small electric kettle had been his purchase. He made Irish Breakfast tea and took it with him into the den. With the five-hour time difference, it was too late in Ireland to ring his sister again. Phoning her at this hour would only stir up trouble. It would be impossible to convince her a middle-of-the-night call was casual, no worries.

  Oliver could have concealed his presence in Declan’s Cross if he’d wanted to. He had the skills and brazenness to slip into secured museums, businesses and homes and steal art. Slipping into a small Irish village without being seen would pose no problems.

  Finian poured his tea and sat at the kitchen table. He could phone Aoife O’Byrne, who often worked late into the night, but that was the long hand of temptation touching him.

  Best not to think about Aoife, much less contact her.

  He could get up early and check in with Mary before her flight.

  He was halfway through his tea when his phone vibrated next to him on the table, signaling an incoming text message.

  It’s true, then. Mary is visiting you in Maine?

  Finian grimaced when he saw the message was from Oliver York. He typed his response. Yes. Where are you?

  London. I walked with Mary in Declan’s Cross this morning.

  I heard. Pure coincidence?

  No. Speak with her.

  Finian didn’t have a chance to send a message before another came from the Englishman.

  Be well, my friend. Yours ever, Oliver.

  Finian almost rang him anyway, but he knew Oliver would communicate only on his terms. If he’d wanted to talk, he’d have called. Finian felt like throwing his phone but settled for placing it firmly back on the table.

  Should he ring Emma about Oliver’s texts?

  No, not tonight. There was nothing in them that she didn’t already know. Mary had little if any interest in art or even the theft at the O’Byrne house a decade ago that had launched Oliver’s career as an accomplished art thief. She was curious by nature, and she longed for adventure—and she worried about him, the brother she didn’t understand.

  Finian got up and brought his tea dishes to the kitchen.

  He reminded himself that Mary was a capable, professional woman who managed her life perfectly well without his interference. She’d been in college, studying business, when his wife and two small daughters had died. He’d disappeared after the unfathomable tragedy, first into grief and whiskey, then into seminary and now the priesthood—a small parish on the southern Maine coast.

  I feel abandoned, Fin. We all do.

  Mary had never been one to hide her true feelings, or to keep them to herself.

  Finian’s gaze fell to a shelf by the table, at the framed photograph of the five Bracken siblings and their parents on their south Kerry farm. He and Declan had been seventeen, filled with their dreams, their lives before them. Their parents had gone to God too soon: their mother struck by cancer, their father by a heart attack and a stubborn refusal to see a doctor, particularly after the tragic deaths of his two small granddaughters. Caught up in his own grief and self-destruction, Finian had failed to see that his father wasn’t taking care of himself. But truth be told, his father had hidden from all five of his children that he was hurrying himself into the grave.

  Finian had been a time bomb himself in those dark days after his wife—his dear Sally—and their little Mary and Kathleen had started their sailing holiday without him. Busy with work, he’d intended to join them, but their reunion was never to be, at least not in this life.

  He believed his mother, also named Mary, for her mother, had greeted her daughter-in-law and granddaughters in heaven.

  His youngest sister had told him she believed no such thing.

  He returned to the dining room and the cabinet where he kept the Bracken 15, the last of the peated expression he’d casked all those years ago, before tragedy, before the thefts in Declan’s Cross, before he’d heard of the Sharpes and the Donovans or had ever met an FBI agent, an English thief or the O’Byrnes on the south Irish coast.

  12

  Gordy dropped his things at his cottage after driving around Heron’s Cove and trying to talk some sense into himself. He hadn’t been straight with Emma and she knew it, but what could he do? He was caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

  It was early in the season and no one was at the two other cottages on the property, located in the marshes and woods a half mile from the more picturesque and desirable Heron’s Cove waterfront on Ocean Avenue. His cottage had one bedroom, a bathroom and a combination kitchen and living room, with lobster buoys and cheesy paintings of lighthouses on the white-painted walls. But the place was clean, convenient and quiet, and that worked for him.

  He didn’t stay. Joan would tell him he was a worm in hot ashes.

  His throat tightened with emotion. He should never have taken Claudia’s call last week. Should have hung up on her when he did pick up. Should never have gone to London. Should have bowed out of attending the Sharpe open house.

  So many should-haves the past year and a half. Before that—before attractive, alluring Claudia Norwood Deverell—he’d lived and worked by the book. Right and wrong. Do or don’t.

  But his behavior wasn’t Claudia’s fault. It was his own.

  “Love you, Joanie,” he whispered as he went back outside, shivering since it was spring i
n Maine and not spring in North Carolina.

  He left his car in the pitted dirt driveway of his cabin and walked toward Ocean Avenue, expecting he’d turn around before he reached the water. As he’d thought, Claudia hadn’t shown up after her conference call—if there’d even been a conference call. He’d finally gone down the hall in her friends’ apartment and checked the bedroom. He hadn’t found a suitcase, cosmetics, shoes—she’d been packed and ready to go when he’d walked into the gallery.

  He had her cell phone number and had debated texting her she needn’t have bothered giving him the slip. What could he do to her? He was the one who’d done wrong, whose reputation was on the line. She was his victim.

  Unless he could prove she was involved in the world of so-called blood antiquities.

  But it wouldn’t matter. He’d still be the FBI agent who’d stepped over the line.

  He’d left the apartment keys on a kitchen counter and rented a car for the drive to Maine. At one point in the past week of emotional lurches and delusions, he’d envisioned driving up here with Claudia.

  “Idiot,” he muttered.

  The action wasn’t in Boston, anyway. Claudia might be persona non grata with Lucas Sharpe, but she was in Heron’s Cove and her father and brother would be at the Sharpe Fine Art Recovery open house on Saturday.

  Gordy had tucked the incriminating photos in an inner jacket pocket. He hadn’t figured out what to do with them. He’d let himself get caught up in too many fantasies—things he didn’t even want if push came to shove but that nonetheless had him in their grip. He told himself he was trying to make things right, but was he? Then why had he thought about Claudia’s smile on the flight to London, imagined her welcoming him with a hug and a kiss, the promise of more sweet nights together?

  And how could he make anything right? What was done was done.

  Maybe he’d heed the warning and go home. It wasn’t his fight anymore. It was up to young agents like Emma Sharpe to prevent ancient art and cultural artifacts ending up funding murderous scumbags and their plots, their bombs and their missiles, guns and ammunition.

  He could feel the freshness of the breeze off the water and see a few lights in the summer homes up ahead. He liked it here. Heron’s Cove reminded him of Cabot Cove on Murder, She Wrote. His mother had loved Jessica Fletcher. He could imagine himself retiring here. He wasn’t crazy about the condo complex in North Carolina where he and Joan lived now, but it was close to the kids and she liked being back “home.” It had amenities—beach, pool, tennis, health club, access to a golf course. He needed to get off his butt and enjoy himself.

  He walked down a single-lane road between two large summer homes. He could see stars glittering on the horizon, their light glistening on the dark ocean waters. On a knoll to his left, the Norwood-Deverell summer home was lit up inside and outside, as if its occupants were afraid of the dark out here on the southern Maine coast, far from their lives in London, New York, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Later in the season, there’d be more people around, but as Gordy crossed Ocean Avenue to the water, he saw only a few houses with any lights on.

  A movement caught his eye, and he paused, shoving his hands in his pockets as he recognized Claudia in a window, laughing with her brother, Adrian, who was as successful in Atlanta real estate as his father was in Philadelphia real estate.

  Isabel Greene was standing on the porch smoking a cigarette. She was facing northeast, as if something had caught her eye farther up the street. Gordy doubted she saw him. He fought an urge to join her and bum a cigarette. He’d tossed the pack he’d bought last night.

  He glanced up at the window to the sunroom where he and Claudia had made love.

  Figured it was one of the few that remained dark.

  He followed Ocean Avenue down to Wendell Sharpe’s old house, now the state-of-the-art offices of Sharpe Fine Art Recovery. When he’d been here last year, Gordy hadn’t stopped to say hi to Lucas or whoever else was around. He’d rationalized his trip to Heron’s Cove as work-related, but there was no way he could rationalize screwing Claudia Deverell.

  He cut through a parking lot by the inn next door and walked down to the docks on the tidal river. A breeze had kicked up, and he could hear waves beating against boats and wooden posts and washing onto the riverbank with its polished stones.

  “Special Agent Wheelock.” Wendell Sharpe emerged from the shadows up by the marina next door to the Sharpe house. “As I live and breathe.”

  Gordy grinned. “For however long you live and breathe. You’re scrawnier than ever, Wendell. All those years worrying about messing up and ruining your reputation keeping you spry?”

  “I don’t know about spry but I don’t feel a day over eighty.”

  “You’ve developed a sense of humor now that you’ve retired. I’ve often imagined what I’d find if I turned over all the rocks in your past and saw what squirmed out from under them.”

  “A few things I don’t know are there, no doubt. The odd corrupt FBI agent, perhaps?”

  Gordy let that one go. Wendell looked younger than his years. He wore a lightweight jacket unzipped over a dark turtleneck, khakis and boat shoes, looking maybe less at home here on the coast than when Gordy had seen him last in Dublin. That could be the circumstances, running into an FBI agent who reminded him of days gone by.

  “We worked okay together for a long time,” Gordy said. “Well, not ‘together.’ You had your interests and I had mine.”

  “Still do,” Wendell said. “Lucas is here. Care to join us for a nightcap?”

  “No, thanks. I’m just out for an evening stroll.”

  “I understand you were in London last week. I was there early in the week for Alessandro Pearson’s funeral. I believe you knew Alessandro.”

  “Not well enough to attend his funeral,” Gordy said, keeping any sarcasm out of his tone.

  “He was a scholar and that I’m not. I’d already planned to stop in London to see Tim and Faye before I came here. You saw them, didn’t you?”

  “You know I did, Wendell.” Gordy inhaled deeply, noting the faint scent of salt in the air. Stronger was the smell of dead fish. Maybe it was seaweed. He’d grown up on the North Carolina coast but had never learned much about the ocean—sand, rocks, tides, clams, crabs and all the rest of it. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he added, half under his breath.

  “Oh, I think you do,” Wendell said, turning to face the river. “It’s a pleasant evening for this time of year. I thought the fog might settle in for the night, but it didn’t. The air’s different here than in Dublin.”

  “Have you missed Maine?”

  “I miss the people here. The people who were once here.”

  Gordy felt the older man’s nostalgia but tried not to let it worm its way into him. “If I were you, I’d give up Ireland,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a smaller world these days, but Dublin is still across an ocean and in a different country. This place is great. It’s easy to forget what a beautiful part of the world Maine is. You have family here. Lucas has a house in the village, Emma and her fiancé have a house up the road in Rock Point and work in Boston. Your son and his wife won’t stay in London forever. Don’t they have a house here?”

  Wendell nodded without glancing at Gordy. “I like how you have my life all sorted.”

  “I should work on my own instead?”

  “Not for me to say. I was born in Ireland. My folks immigrated to Boston when I was a tot and we ended up here.” Wendell’s voice was quiet, steady, as if he’d been out here contemplating the past. “They loved Heron’s Cove. They worked hard. I was damn lucky, Gordy. Damn lucky.”

  “They’d be proud of you,” he said, meaning it.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. They believed in an honest day’s work, I’ll say that.” He pulled his gaze from the river and glanced back at t
he Sharpe house, up above the docks, a light on over the back porch. “My wife and I used to have a glass of wine out on the back porch, rain or shine, cold or warm. Her insights were always spot-on. Even with the renovations, every inch of this place still reminds me of her.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “It just is.”

  Gordy thought of his own wife back in North Carolina. He wanted to call her. He wanted to hear her voice. He felt the weight of the photos in his jacket pocket. He needed to burn those bastards first.

  He watched a dinghy bob in the waves. “I’ll bet your wife kept you from walking into walls and blind alleys,” he said to the old man next to him.

  “Constantly.” Wendell’s voice lightened, and he seemed to pull himself out of his reflective mood. “I learned so much from her and always benefited from her insights. Tim has her analytical abilities. So does Emma, but she employs them with the Feds rather than the family business.”

  “She’s good, Wendell.”

  “Yeah. I know. Lucas is more like me, except he doesn’t have my rougher edges. Grew up in a different Heron’s Cove than I did.”

  “You’re all closemouthed,” Gordy said.

  “Part of the job.”

  “I just had chowder with Emma. It turned my stomach. Should have ordered the fish chowder like she did. I think I’m developing a thing with shellfish.”

  Wendell scrutinized him. “Sure it was the chowder?”

  Gordy ignored him. “She’s coming into her own as an agent. It’s great she’s getting married in a couple of weeks. Did you know the Donovans when you lived here?”

  “I bought a lobster or two from them. Otherwise, no, not really.”

  “Emma’s fiancé is probably putting his career on the line marrying a Sharpe. You Sharpes must give Matt Yankowski headaches. Not my problem. Are you staying in town through the wedding?”

  “That’s my plan.”