Nick dug a tray out of a lower cupboard. “Anyone else want anything?”
“Nothing for me,” Melodie said stiffly.
Emma shook her head. “We’re fine, thanks.”
“I’ll bring Bryce a little of everything,” Nick said, opening up the ginger ale. “He can have what he wants, or nothing if that suits him.”
“Thank you, Nick.”
Colin could see she was tired and stressed. She watched Nick pour the ginger ale, as if she appreciated the touch of normalcy in her weekend. She led them to the sundeck. She took in a quick breath when she saw her husband tucked under a blanket on a cushioned lounge. “We had such a lovely few days planned,” she said half to herself. “I know we’re lucky it wasn’t worse, but it’s bad enough, thank you very much.”
Bryce tried to sit up, but he winced and placed his arm across his midsection, the blanket falling to one side. He moaned, clearly in pain. “My muscles ache from vomiting,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m never allowing mushrooms in one of my kitchens again.”
“But you’re doing so much better,” Melodie said.
“I guess. Yesterday I’d have said get me a gun so I could shoot myself. Today I’m sitting in the sun. Progress.” He shivered. “It’s colder than I thought.”
Nick arrived with the tray and set it on a low table in front of Bryce. He yawned, barely awake. Nick gave him a sympathetic look, but said nothing as he moved to the bar.
Melodie adjusted her husband’s blanket. “Maybe we should get you to bed.” When he didn’t answer, she looked up at Colin. “He just wanted to say hello and thank you for your help. Best we let him sleep, I think.”
Colin nodded. “Thanks for letting us collect Bill Hornsby’s stuff, Mrs. Fanning. If you have any concerns, I gave your captain my card. Please don’t hesitate to call.”
He grabbed Jeremy-Bill’s battered bag. Once they were back out on the pier, Emma showed him a text from Oliver. We’re at the rectory getting our friend settled.
As he read the text, Colin realized how much he hated this situation, an uneasy mix of personal and professional.
Emma pocketed her phone. “Meet you in Rock Point?”
He nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
15
Oliver debated raking leaves behind the rectory. It was a glorious afternoon. Why not rake? He itched to do something productive. But not many leaves had yet fallen, and he had a distracted mind, dangerous with bean holes nearby. He didn’t want to tumble into one and break a leg, but he’d discovered they were covered, presumably for safety purposes, until the pots went in them.
He’d about talked himself into searching for a rake—in the garage, perhaps?—when Henrietta banged out of the back door. She’d been getting her restless, irritable colleague settled in the rectory den. Oliver would have taken the sofa in the den, but the first item of contention between Henrietta and Jeremy had been over Jeremy’s ability to get up the stairs. He said he could. Henrietta said it was foolish and would only delay his recovery, and she had no intention of scraping him off the steps if he should collapse. She’d finally argued it would be rude to their host. Jeremy hadn’t agreed, he’d simply started to fall asleep.
“I wonder what his wife would do if she were here,” Henrietta said. “Let him collapse and leave him where he landed, I expect. I’ve never met her. She must be—what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Intrepid.”
“Long-suffering. I told him if he overdoes it, I’ll phone for an ambulance and he’ll be back in the hospital in a flash.”
“He hates having you give him a hand,” Oliver said.
“I told him better me than you.”
Lame humor, Oliver thought. He’d offered to get Jeremy settled. Finian had, too, but Henrietta had seen it as her responsibility.
She glanced around the small lawn with its trees and shrubs. “Not many flowers.” She smiled at Oliver. “I’m sorry if I shouted. Did I shout?”
“You didn’t shout.”
“In my head I was shouting.” She sighed, stretching her arms above her and letting them fall to her sides. “If only we were here for a proper visit. Do you wish you’d stayed in England instead of letting me drag you to Maine?”
“I wish we were on a ramble at the farm. We could hold hands and listen to the baa of sheep, the moo of cows, the distant ring of church bells and the chirping of birds.”
She sputtered into laughter. “I hope you’ve never aspired to write poetry.”
He grinned at her. “Only to you.”
“Oh, Oliver.” She put her arms around him. “Why did we wait so long to fall in love?”
“There’s a time for everything. Now is our time.”
He kissed her softly, not caring who might turn up in the church driveway or out on the street. “I’m played out,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore. The thought of that poor girl losing her father...” She didn’t finish, stood straight and glanced around. “No rake?”
“There must be but I haven’t looked.”
“So you’ve been out here just contemplating raking?”
“And falling into bean holes.”
“I was right to put out my shingle as a garden designer. I love it—I’d have found the rake and then contemplated while raking. We could do it, you know.”
“Do what, Henrietta?” Her thoughts sometimes shot ahead of where he was in the conversation.
“I could design gardens, and we could do justice to the farm. Local sourcing is the rage. There are so many possibilities with vegetables and livestock.” She tilted her head back, those incisive eyes on him. “Could you live a quiet life?”
“I do live a quiet life.”
She snorted. “Compared to your days stealing art from alarmed buildings, I suppose you do, but our friend in the den keeps you busy. You won’t be at his beck and call forever.”
“Won’t I?”
“Nor do you deserve to be,” Henrietta added quietly.
“You’re pining for more than investing in Dexter cattle and kale patches. What is it, love?”
“Babies,” she said, then grinned. “And not cow babies and sheep babies. But, there. I’ve said it, and you can absorb it while we have whatever Father Bracken has in the oven.”
Oliver wasn’t exactly wobbly after her pronouncement, but he did feel a flutter in his knees as he followed her into the rectory kitchen. Leave it to Henrietta to drop something like that on him in the midst of a poison mushroom debacle. Why not on a ramble in the rolling Cotswolds hills or by the fire with a good Scotch?
But this was why he loved her. She could keep classified secrets as a trained, experienced intelligence agent, but in her personal life, once something gelled and needed to be said, out it popped. She wasn’t one to stew.
He eyed a steaming casserole on hot pads. “It smells all right. What is it?”
“Franny Maroney brought it,” Finian said, as if that provided insight into the casserole’s contents. “She’s the widowed grandmother of yesterday’s bride. She referred to it as a noodle casserole.”
“That leaves considerable room for interpretation and execution,” Oliver said.
“Egg noodles, beef, cheese, tomato sauce, green olives. I’ve had it before. It’s surprisingly delicious.”
Oliver didn’t want to come across as ungrateful. “Generous of her.”
“Dropping it off also gave her an excuse to see what’s going on here,” Henrietta said.
Finian smiled. “I’ve learned never to underestimate my white-haired parishioners—which is most of them. They keep me on my toes.”
Oliver pulled off his jacket and hung it on a peg by the door. “Given the sort of friends you keep, it’s probably not a bad idea.”
“No comment.” Finian opened the
refrigerator. “I’ll make a salad. I doubt your sick friend should eat the casserole, even if he does decide he wants to give it a go. I can do toast and tea for him.”
“I’ll let him know and see if he wants anything else,” Henrietta said. Oliver noticed she hadn’t worn a jacket on her brief excursion outside. If anything, she’d needed a dose of the brisk coastal air.
Oliver waited until she withdrew. “I’m sorry, Finian. Henrietta and I never expected to put you in the middle of a drama.”
“I’m delighted to help.”
He didn’t give any indication he wasn’t sincere. Oliver supposed the events of the past twenty-four hours could have livened up Finian’s life in the small fishing village. Rummage sales, bean-hole suppers, visiting the sick, hearing confessions, saying Mass, burying the dead. Not uneventful but not the same as getting mixed up with MI5 and FBI goings-on. Surely their Irish priest friend realized Henrietta wasn’t simply a garden designer and William Hornsby wasn’t simply an art consultant—not at all an art consultant, from what Oliver knew of his MI5 contact.
Finian was working on his salad when Colin and Emma arrived at the back door. Colin set a soft-sided bag on the floor. “Our friend’s clothes and such from his cabin.”
“Above and beyond the call of duty, surely,” Oliver said.
Colin grinned. “Damn right.”
“Any blackmail material?”
“Nothing that exciting. Boxers, Colgate, disposable razor. Pepcid.”
“Pepcid must be a staple for him.”
Henrietta returned from the den, smiling, less tired looking as she greeted Emma and Colin. She turned to Finian. “He’s asleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out until morning. He’s been through quite an ordeal. I told him we identified the probable mushroom in question. He has no recollection of eating anything that struck him as off. He questions his ability to taste. Too much Scotch, I told him. He scoffed. Even as a keen gardener, I would never trust myself with wild mushrooms.”
Finian invited the two FBI agents to stay for dinner. They accepted, and Colin took the suitcase to the den, promising not to awaken his recuperating friend. Oliver struggled to call him by the name he was using with Georgina and the Fannings, but he did so, following Henrietta’s lead. But when Colin returned to the kitchen, he looked at his priest friend. “We know William Hornsby as Jeremy. Keep it to yourself.”
“Of course.” Finian grabbed lettuce out of the refrigerator. “We’ll eat in the dining room. I don’t use it often enough.”
“Here, I’ll help,” Henrietta said. “Breakfast, tea, lunch, dinner—I’ve lost track at this point but I’m famished.”
Finian added a cucumber and tomato to the lettuce in the sink. “We need to bring cutlery from the kitchen. Everything else is in the dining room.”
In another moment, Henrietta had cutlery heaped on a tray and Oliver was following her down the hall to the dining room. Emma and Colin were already there, setting out plates on a long rectangular table. The room had a faded, old-fashioned appeal with its simple furnishings and lace tablecloth. Henrietta set the tray on the table and chatted with Finian. Oliver knew what she was up to. She was pretending she was the garden designer friend visiting from England and had nothing to do with the recovering MI5 officer–art consultant in the den, the two glowering FBI agents or even him, the art thief. Finian wasn’t involved, at least directly, in the current goings-on.
Finian opened a drawer and withdrew cloth napkins that looked as if they’d been in the rectory since the start of the Cold War. He set them in a stack on the table. “I’ll get dinner,” he said, retreating down the hall to the kitchen.
Oliver noticed an antique whiskey alcohol measurement device on the shelf of the cupboard. He was a whiskey enthusiast himself and knew its purpose. It was next to a nearly empty bottle of Bracken Distillers 15-year-old, a rare peated single malt Finian had put into casks himself, before tragedy had changed his life forever. Oliver could see Finian and Declan Bracken as lads, filled with hopes and dreams as they’d launched their whiskey business.
Colin grabbed several knives from Henrietta’s tray.
Oliver distributed the napkins. “I’ve been thinking about my chat with Robin Masterson in London. I wonder if his questions might be relevant. There’s no guarantee. I understand that.”
“Best to err on the side of telling more rather than less,” Colin said, almost amiable.
“I agree,” Emma said. “We’d like to hear everything you can remember about your meeting.”
Oliver glanced at Henrietta for confirmation. She nodded before he could speak. Reading his mind again. She was good at that. He, on the other hand, was hopeless, ever the last to know what someone was thinking.
She lifted two long-stemmed goblets from the cabinet. “This was your first time meeting Robin?”
“Yes,” Oliver said. “He was polite, grateful for my time and appreciative of my expertise. I did my best to point him in the right direction. Once Georgina was on her way, we walked to the pub and chatted about poisons over pints of lager.”
“As one does,” Henrietta said, setting the glasses on the table.
Oliver relaxed slightly, perhaps the intent behind her easy comment. “We covered a wide range of material. He wanted an overview rather than to drill down on any particular topic. As I said earlier, he was interested in the use of poisons in myths and folktales.”
“That’s a broad topic,” Emma said.
“I didn’t have a chance to prepare any materials.” Thanks to Jeremy’s short notice, Oliver thought. “I had to operate off the top of my head. We veered off-topic a few times. He mentioned he’d seen John Everett Millais’s painting of the death scene in Romeo and Juliet.”
Henrietta started putting forks on the napkins he’d placed. “Death by poison. Sadly. I wanted to change that ending as a teenager.”
Oliver smiled, not surprised. Henrietta had a can-do attitude. He finished with the napkins and sat down as she, Colin and Emma continued laying the table. He needed to keep his wits about him with these three. “We started with monkshood, a highly toxic plant—in Greek mythology, Medea poisoned wine with it to try to kill Theseus—and went from there.”
“Any discussion of Aoife O’Byrne’s works?” Emma asked.
“Not in particular, no, but one of her new series of woodland paintings depicts a bed of bluebells. It’s stunning, but according to an old Irish superstition, one can fall under a fairy spell and die if caught in a bed of bluebells. Their bulbs are toxic—it’s theorized that could be the source of the superstition. Robin and I landed on that one, but we didn’t spend much time there.”
Colin placed the last of his knives. “Was there any tale of particular interest to him?”
“Loki. He’s a compelling figure in Norse mythology.”
“I persuaded Oliver to watch the Thor movies with me,” Henrietta said with a wry smile.
“They’re fun. Liberties are taken, of course. Robin had seen the movies, too. I told him a version of the tale of Loki getting poisoned by snake venom, as punishment by the gods for his misdeeds. He’s chained in a cave and a serpent is placed above him, dripping his venom into a bowl. When it overflows, a few drops land on Loki. He’s left to suffer in agony, but Loki being Loki, he does eventually escape.” Oliver paused, picturing Robin Masterson, an eager listener who three days later was himself poisoned. “As we finished our chat, I realized Robin was particularly drawn to fictional world-building. He was a fan of The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and the Marvel franchises. Books, comics, movies.”
“Was he building a world of his own?” Colin asked.
Oliver shrugged. “We didn’t get that far. He did say snakes weren’t his thing. He’d have poisoned Loki a different way.”
Finian arrived with the casserole. He placed it on the table on hot pads and removed the lid,
just as someone pounded on the front door. He started toward the entry, but Colin swept past him.
A breathless Georgina Masterson burst into the entry. She was in running clothes, panting, perspiring and angry. “You are all spooks, and my father is a spook, and now he’s dying.” She barely managed to choke out the words. She held up a folded sheet of white paper. “And this.” She gulped in air. “My father didn’t make a mistake with death caps, did he? It’s one of his bloody nerve agents that’s killing him.”
Colin shut the door behind her. “You’d better come in.”
16
Emma got Georgina seated between her and Henrietta at the table. Finian hurried out of the dining room to fetch a towel and a glass of water from the kitchen. The sheet of paper she’d brought with her clutched in one hand, Georgina flicked sweat off her brow with the fingertips of her free hand and then grabbed a napkin. She was still breathing hard, from both her long run from Heron’s Cove, Emma thought, and from spilling her pent-up emotions.
Colin sat across from her, studying her. “How did you know to find us here?”
Georgina looked stricken at his stern tone “I knew Bill Hornsby was staying with the Rock Point priest. I googled the church’s address. It’s about a mile farther than I needed to run today, but it felt good. Bill Hornsby is here, isn’t he? I want to speak with him.”
“He’s not well,” Henrietta said. “He’s asleep.”
“I don’t care. Wake him.” She wiped more sweat off her upper lip. Her fine hair was matted and her running shirt drenched with sweat. “I took the coastal route. It was gorgeous with the waves crashing on the rocks. It’ll get dark soon but I’ll manage. I’ve run in the dark lots of times. Running clears my head.”
Oliver sat at the far end of the table, next to a bay window overlooking the side yard and church. Emma could tell he was itching as much as she was to get a look at Georgina’s paper.
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