The second photograph took Oliver’s breath away. It was of three Celtic stone crosses on the headland above the tiny Irish village of Declan’s Cross, on a grassy hilltop above the sea. He sank onto the edge of the bed and choked back tears. It was as if whoever had taken the photograph had known it would reach into his heart and draw him back to a place he loved, and to a time he didn’t want to revisit. A cold, rainy November night...alone with his stolen loot...unable to fathom what he’d done, why he’d done it...certain the Irish police would find him and arrest him, and he’d be in a jail cell and the art returned to the O’Byrne family by noon.
But none of that happened, and so he’d continued.
Bolder, cheekier and never caught. Technically, that last held true today.
He’d first encountered Jeremy Pearson a year ago, around the time Emma and Colin had pegged him as the elusive international art thief Wendell Sharpe and a variety of law enforcement entities had been chasing for a decade. Jeremy had turned up on the farm, on a public trail that went past a dovecote Oliver’s grandmother had converted into a garden shed. A few years after her death, Oliver had added a secret stone working studio. He’d become quite a competent carver, polisher and engraver. He’d perfected engraving small polished stones with a simplified Celtic cross like the one he’d lifted from the O’Byrne house in Declan’s Cross. Once world-renowned art detective Wendell Sharpe set after him, he’d send a cross to the old man in Dublin after every heist. Taunting him. Energizing him in his later years. Amusing himself. Asking to be caught, perhaps.
Jeremy had stopped at the dovecote that rainy late-autumn morning. The taunting was immature, Oliver. The stonework is quite good, however, although Michelangelo you’ll never be. Close up shop. Get yourself straight with your stolen works. Then we’ll see about making amends. You know a lot. Interesting people, places, methods. Art, mythology. You can kick ass with your martial arts training. We couldn’t have trained you better ourselves for what I have in mind for you.
We?
That grim smile Oliver had come to know so well. Jeremy had pointed his walking stick toward the lane. How far to the main road?
A ten-minute walk that I’ve no doubt you can do in five.
You see? We know each other already.
And so Oliver had become an MI5 asset and Jeremy Pearson his handler. Bad things will happen, Oliver. We can’t stop them all, but we can stop some of them.
He’d never asked how much Henrietta knew about their arrangement, their work together. He never had the full picture of what Jeremy was up to, only a few crucial pieces of a larger mosaic of an investigation within the scope of the UK intelligence services.
Oliver looked up at the photograph of Declan’s Cross. To be there now, walking with Henrietta, the sea breezes whipping through her curls and her smile reminding him he was no longer alone.
Instead, they were in Maine, and Jeremy Pearson was in trouble. And possibly Henrietta, too.
Oliver had told himself he didn’t want to know what his chat with Robin Masterson had to do with his MI5 handler. He returned to his Cotswolds farm on Sunday as planned. He’d expected to confer with Henrietta on what needed to be done with the flower beds before winter. She’d promised to guide him on mulching and pruning and such since, of course, he had no clue.
When he arrived at the farm, he discovered Henrietta had left a message with Martin Hambly, first Oliver’s grandparents’ assistant and now his right-hand man—if not always a deferential one. But he counted on Martin’s clarity, didn’t he? They’d never discussed the thieving. They never would. In his fifties, never married, closemouthed and particular, Martin had guessed Henrietta was MI5 before Oliver had.
In his understated way, Martin explained Henrietta was unexpectedly detained. She said you should feel free to pull the dahlias and place their tubers on the worktable in the garden shed to dry out over the winter. She welcomes your opinions on where to move them. It’s too shady where they are now.
Did she say how long she’ll be detained?
No.
Did she say why she’s detained?
No.
Martin, help me out here.
She also said the dahlias in the pots aren’t worth saving and you can toss them into the compost bin.
Oliver had done nothing of the kind—he found gardening mind-numbing unless he had Henrietta with him—and occupied himself rooting out any books in his library on the subjects he’d discussed with Robin Masterson, and digging into what was up these days with foraging. Quite the explosion in interest, apparently. He’d noticed various wild things popping up on his plate at restaurants but hadn’t given them much thought.
Henrietta finally turned up Thursday evening. Find your passport and pack your bags.
We’re going somewhere?
We fly to Boston and then drive to Maine.
When?
First thing tomorrow.
Should I tell—
No one, Oliver. You tell no one.
Only after they’d landed in Boston had she released the tiniest bit of information. We’re making a surprise visit to your friends in Maine. I thought we could stay with Finian Bracken.
Not Emma Sharpe and Colin Donovan, Oliver noticed. Does Finian know we’re coming?
Not yet. If he’s busy or out of town, we can book a room at an inn.
He won’t be out of town. We exchanged emails last week. He has a wedding tomorrow. Colin’s brother Andy is getting married.
Balderdash. That means he and Emma will be in Rock Point, too.
Only Henrietta could pull off such a word as balderdash without sounding ridiculous, and it was likely on the tip of her tongue because she’d been going through her grandfather’s opera collection. An MI5 legend, Freddy Balfour had died when she was five but had been quite the opera buff, a form of relaxation for him. Oliver wasn’t an expert, but he recalled a few operas involved poisons.
He noticed his bedside light created eerie shadows. He supposed they were eerie given his mood. On another evening, they might strike him as romantic.
He tugged off his clothes, and when he got into bed and switched off the light, he could see himself on the headland above the tiny Irish village of Declan’s Cross...he could feel the soft, wet ground among the ruins of a church and its gravestones and Celtic crosses...and he could hear the sheep in the dark fields and taste the sea on the breeze.
He heard Henrietta enter the bathroom, and then, after a half minute, the rush of water as she turned on the shower. She hadn’t fallen straight to sleep, had she? She’d leave the bathroom steamy, smelling of shampoo and soap. He listened to the water, imagining the possibilities of their lives together. Not now, perhaps, with Jeremy Pearson up to something and Henrietta preoccupied with whatever it was. But someday.
What were the odds it was ordinary food poisoning today? Oliver had learned not to operate according to odds. Georgina Masterson was Robin Masterson’s daughter, and he was a neurotoxicologist and she was a chef. They could figure out how to make people sick but not kill them, couldn’t they?
Where was Robin Masterson now? Had something happened to him?
Oliver wanted to ask Henrietta, but to ask her meant explaining to her how he knew about him—and that would have to wait until tomorrow, once they had a chance to see Jeremy Pearson.
Where had Henrietta gone when she’d left him to the dahlias? Wherever it was, it had to do with Jeremy Pearson, Robin Masterson and his daughter, an Aoife O’Byrne painting and, very possibly, at least, poison.
Oliver realized he hadn’t finished the pot-still. He sat up, propped against pillows, and watched the shadows and drank the Irish whiskey as he listened to Henrietta turn off the water and pictured her stepping out of the shower.
* * *
Finian Bracken finished his whiskey in the den, in the ridiculously comfortable lou
nger. He took his time with the eight-year-old pot-still, savoring its smoothness, its notes of sherry, chocolate, elderberry and oak. With the Maine wind buffeting the rectory windows, he nonetheless thought of Ireland. He could see himself and Declan as lads, hiking the Kerry hills, shearing sheep, working in the garden and plotting—always plotting—their own whiskey distillery. Few believed it would ever happen, or succeed if it did.
He smiled at the Bracken Distillers label on the pot-still. He and Declan had done it, hadn’t they? Against the odds, they’d found backers, bought a hundred-year-old distillery in ruin in the Killarney hills, refurbished it, put their first whiskey in casks and held on as those first casks matured. In the meantime, they produced a popular gin, put together marketing plans, launched a whiskey school and prayed it would all work out.
And it had, until he lost Sally, Mary and Kathleen. He’d abandoned Bracken Distillers, his twin brother, their sisters, in-laws, nieces and nephews, and, eventually, Ireland itself.
Not abandoned, he reminded himself. He’d responded to a call to God that had led him away from grief and drunkenness to seminary and now here, to the southern coast of Maine, his struggling church and his friends with dangerous jobs and adventurous lives.
He sipped the last of his whiskey. It wasn’t regrets about the Brackens and the distillery back in Ireland that preoccupied him now. They were a distraction, a way for his mind to divert him from the real matter at hand.
He hadn’t expected Aoife O’Byrne’s name to come up.
He could see her in Declan’s Cross, in the dark days between his family’s deaths and his call to God. It was as if he had transported himself back to that cold, tormented November so long ago. Caught together in her uncle’s wreck of a house on the south Irish coast, now her sister’s boutique hotel, he and Aoife had lost themselves in each other’s arms. She was the up-and-coming painter, beautiful and wrapped up in her work. He was the tortured widower, the grieving father, a man who had found no solace anywhere in the months since a freak sailing accident had robbed him of his wife and their daughters.
He should have been with them. He’d been meant to be with them. For that rainy weekend in the O’Byrne house, he’d let himself stop thinking as he’d made love to the only other woman he’d ever been with besides his wife. It was a weekend that never should have happened, but it had. He could hear Aoife’s whisper now, years later, as if he were another man.
I don’t want strings, Fin. I don’t want attachments.
You’re dedicated to your work.
I am. It would be easy to fall in love with you, if I were inclined to romantic entanglements.
Her words had suited him. They’d parted after that weekend. Aoife had returned to her life and work in Dublin. Her star was on the rise, and she knew what she had to do. He’d returned to his whiskey bottles and the little stone cottage he’d shared with his wife and their girls. Seeking oblivion, racked with grief and guilt, he’d expected he’d die there. But he hadn’t. He’d experienced a spiritual awakening, and now, seven years later, he was serving a small church in Rock Point, Maine.
Finian considered Aoife a dear friend, but was that truly possible, given their history?
It hadn’t been just sex that November weekend in her uncle’s house. They’d had long talks by the fire and in the rain, and they’d cooked together in the ramshackle kitchen. A couple of years earlier, a thief had relieved the upstairs drawing room of two valuable west Ireland landscapes by Jack Butler Yeats, an unsigned local landscape by an unknown artist now believed to be Aoife, and a silver wall cross carved with symbols depicting Saint Declan, an early medieval Irish saint who’d settled in the area.
The thief was upstairs in a rectory guest room. He’d returned the stolen items last fall, except for the local landscape.
Finian smiled, thinking of cheeky, wily, irrepressible Oliver York. The unreturned landscape depicted a church ruin and crosses on the headland above Declan’s Cross, a place of special meaning to the lonely man who’d taken it.
That was all before Finian’s call to the priesthood—to this life he had now. The priesthood isn’t a prison sentence, Fin. If you want to leave, you can.
His friend Colin, not long ago. Finian smiled. Colin wasn’t a man who minced words. Finian didn’t know what Aoife believed, but he didn’t want her to use their brief interlude as a crutch to avoid a romantic life for herself. He was the forbidden love, the man she could never have—the soul mate who’d rejected her for the priesthood and a vow of celibacy. Meanwhile she could immerse herself in her work and think of nothing and no one else.
On a book shelf was a photograph of the cottage where Andy and Julianne would enjoy their honeymoon. It was constructed of stone, with thick walls and a loft. Finian was glad to have the means to keep it, and he enjoyed loaning it to friends—as he had this very day. He’d refused to let Andy and Julianne pay him. “This is my gift to you,” he’d told them.
Over time he’d shifted from thinking the cottage as a place of sadness and loss—a place he’d succumbed to drunkenness and rage in his immeasurable, unimaginable grief and pain in the immediate aftermath of the sailing tragedy that had claimed his family and changed his life forever. Now he thought of the smiles and laughter and love he’d experienced there, and of the happy memories others were creating in this little cottage that had meant so much to his small family.
He got up abruptly and took his breviary, switched out the lights and went upstairs. He’d wash his whiskey glass in the morning. His guests—an art thief and a British intelligence officer, regardless of what anyone admitted—had settled down for the night, no lights under their bedroom doors or the bathroom door.
In his days as a whiskey man in the Kerry hills, Finian had never known spies, thieves and FBI agents.
Was Aoife involved in today’s crisis aboard the yacht? In the reasons for Henrietta’s and Oliver’s presence on Rock Point and Colin’s and Emma’s stern looks?
He knew it wasn’t his concern, reminded himself it wasn’t—warned himself it wasn’t. Yet as he got ready for bed, he could see Aoife that late autumn in Declan’s Cross so long ago...her dark hair and translucent skin, her sea-blue eyes and bright smile. Intense, brilliant, troubled, racked by her sensitivities and her dreams and ambitions, she’d needed oblivion as much as he had. His because he was lost in the past. Hers because she was caught up in the unknowns of the future.
He’d entered seminary and begun an intensive process of discernment and study, never imagining he’d find himself in a small church in a Maine fishing village, a friend and confidant to men and women with tough jobs to do in a scary and unsafe world.
He itched to text Aoife and ask her about the yacht.
Colin would strike him dead for interfering in an FBI investigation.
An exaggeration, perhaps, but only a bit of one.
When he climbed into bed, Finian realized he was aching for home. It wasn’t Oliver’s and Henrietta’s mysterious arrival and its connection to the food poisoning aboard the yacht in Heron’s Cove. It was today’s wedding, the love between Andy and Julianne, that of their friends and family. For the first time in many weeks, Finian hadn’t felt a part of things in Rock Point but, rather, a man apart, isolated and alone.
He opened his breviary and placed it on his lap.
All was well in his life. He just had to accept it was so.
7
Georgina Masterson hung out in a small waiting area down the hall from Bryce Fanning’s room. He and William Hornsby did end up being the only two admitted after today’s disastrous lunch, and she tried to tell herself that was a positive outcome, all considered. No one had died. Everyone would recover, if hating her.
Nick was getting food in the cafeteria for Melodie. Georgina didn’t want anything to eat. When Melodie was ready to leave, he’d bring the car around to the lobby entrance, so she wouldn’t hav
e to trek out to where he’d parked. Georgina would like nothing better than a good walk. She could have gone back to the yacht but she was hoping to see Bill Hornsby. So far, the nurses insisted he wasn’t to have visitors until morning and wouldn’t let her into his room.
She exhaled, trying to get a firm grip on her emotions. How could she make sense of today? A dozen people sick due to something they’d eaten.
The Aoife O’Byrne painting...
Why had she asked the FBI agent about the painting?
Why?
She wasn’t one to blurt things. What if someone had stolen the painting and used the food poisoning as cover—as a distraction to smuggle it off the yacht?
But that was a leap. Georgina knew she had to calm down and apply logic to the situation. She had zero evidence to suggest anything criminal had occurred today.
Kevin Donovan spotted her and joined her in the waiting room. A nurse was with him—Beth from the ER, Georgina remembered. Beth had her coat on over her uniform, obviously finished with her shift and heading home.
“You okay?” Kevin asked.
Georgina smiled and nodded. “Yes, fine, thanks, but it’s been a horrid day.”
“It’s not going to help if we told you it could have been worse?”
His easy manner helped her throttle back on her nervousness, frustration and sense of general dread. She was used to an adventurous life as a yacht chef and tended to keep her emotions in check. That they were driving her now was unsettling.
“Have you been in to see Bill Hornsby?” she asked. “Do you know how he’s doing?”
“He’s hanging in there,” Kevin said.
“I’d like to see him.”
“He’s had a rough day,” Beth said. “Best to let him rest. Are you family?”
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