Carla Neggers: The Mist

“You’re American. Where are you from?”

“ Las Vegas.” Arguably true, given her lifestyle. There was a Rush hotel in Las Vegas, and she’d spent a great deal of time there.

“Is this your first trip to Ireland?”

“No, but it’s my first visit to the Beara Peninsula.” Lizzie turned the book of folktales to the front-cover illustration of a lush, magical-looking glen with fairies frolicking in the green. “Keira Sullivan has a talent for painting places that people can believe, want to believe, are real. Do you believe in fairies, Lord Will?”

“It’s just Will. I allow Eddie his fun. What’s your name?”

She didn’t want to get into names. “I should go,” she said, slipping the book into her backpack and leaving enough euros on the table to cover her tab.

Will said nothing as she hoisted her pack onto one shoulder. The dog looked up at her with his big brown eyes, and she leaned over to him and whispered, “Slán a fhágáil ag duine.” Which, if she remembered correctly, was Irish for some kind of goodbye. She liked to think it was a phrase her Irish-born mother would have taught her if she’d lived.

The local men watched her from their tables, Eddie O’Shea from behind the bar, all of them accustomed, she thought, to the routines of their lives. Farm, sea, village, church, family. They’d all come up in the talk Lizzie had overheard. Her own life had few such routines, and she doubted Will Davenport’s did, either.

She grabbed her jacket off the peg by the door and pulled it on, zipping it up as the men at the tables roared with laughter at a story one was telling. Why not stay and sit by the fire for the evening and never mind why she’d come to Ireland and this tiny, out-of-the way village?

But that, of course, was impossible.

She headed outside. The wind and rain had eased, leaving behind a fine, persistent mist. She dug out her cell phone and saw she had two text messages from her cousin Jeremiah, the third-born of her Rush cousins. He worked at the Whitcomb, her family’s hotel in Boston. He was tawny-haired, blue-eyed and good-looking and claimed, as his brothers did, that Lizzie had them wrapped around her little finger.

An exaggeration.

Jeremiah never used text shorthand. His first message read:

Cahill and March in Boston.

No Keira.

Lizzie read the message again to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake. Simon Cahill, a special agent with the FBI, and John March, the director of the FBI, were in Boston?

Why?

She’d run into Simon a half dozen times over the past year. He was a handsome, broad-shouldered bruiser of a man, a black-haired, green-eyed natural charmer who had persuaded Norman Estabrook that he was an ex-FBI agent with an ax to grind against March, his former boss.

Such, however, was not the case.

Had Simon already been on his way to Boston when she’d left for Ireland last night? Lizzie almost laughed out loud. Talk about ironic. She’d come to Ireland to convince Simon to do all he could to keep Norman in custody and not to fall for his line about having stumbled into a network of violent criminals. He had meant every word of his threat against Simon and Director March. It wasn’t just about vengeance, either. Norman was no longer willing to sit on the sidelines. He was itching to do something dramatic and violent himself.

Lizzie returned her phone to her jacket pocket and shivered in the chilly early evening air.

If Keira Sullivan hadn’t gone to Boston with Simon, where was she now?

And why was Will Davenport here and so serious?

Lizzie smelled pipe smoke and noticed an old man in traditional farmer’s clothes seated on the front bench of a wooden picnic table by the pub door. His face was deeply lined, his eyebrows bushy above steady eyes that were a clear, even fierce, blue. He held up his pipe, smoke curling into the mist. “You’ll be wanting to go to the stone circle.”

She eased her pack off her shoulder. “For what?”

“For what you’re looking for, dearie.”

“How do you know what I’m looking for?”

He pointed his pipe up the quiet street. “There. It’s down the lane and up the hill. You’ll find your way.” His eyes, gleaming with intensity, fixed on her. “You always do, don’t you, dearie?”

Steadying herself against a sudden gust of wind that blew up from the harbor at her back, Lizzie peered past the rows of brightly painted houses-fuchsia, blue, yellow, red, mustard, all a welcome antidote to the gray weather. She loved the unique light, the special feel of being back in Ireland.

But find her way to what?

When she turned to ask, the old man was gone.

Eddie O’Shea’s springer spaniel wandered out of the pub and trotted up the village street in the direction the old man had pointed.

There was no one else about. A basket of flowers hung from a lamppost, swinging in the breeze, and Lizzie could identify with its drooping and dripping pink geraniums, purple petunias and sprays of lavender.

The dog paused and looked back at her, his tail wagging.

Lizzie could no longer smell the old farmer’s pipe smoke in the damp air. If she’d been drinking Guinness instead of coffee she’d have been sure she conjured him up. As it was…she had no idea.

“All right,” she called to the spaniel. “I’ll follow you.”

Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland

5:50 p.m., IST

August 25

Will Davenport stabbed the toe of his shoe into the wet gravel in front of the small, traditional stone cottage where Keira was staying while Simon was in Boston. The cottage was situated on a narrow lane cut along an ancient wall that ran parallel to the bay and the mountains. A steady wind blew dark clouds across the rugged, barren hills that swept up from the harbor to the spine of the peninsula.

He had resisted the temptations of Eddie O’Shea’s pub-a pint, a fire, camaraderie-and returned to his car, finding his way here. Rambling pink roses scented the damp, cool air as the remains of the storm pushed east across Ireland. To the north, across Kenmare Bay, he could see the jagged outlines of the McGilli-cuddy Reeks of the Iveragh Peninsula, another finger of land that jutted into the Atlantic.

Keira’s car was parked in the drive by the roses, and a light glowed in the cottage kitchen, but she hadn’t come to the door when he’d knocked.

Was she having a bath, perhaps?

She had arrived in Ireland in June to paint and look into the Beara Peninsula origins of the folktale she’d heard in a South Boston kitchen. The Slieve Mikish-the Mikish Mountains -at the tip of the peninsula held rich veins of copper that had drawn settlers to the region thousands of years ago. Will had driven along Bantry Bay on the southern side of the peninsula, the weather deteriorating the closer he came to the Atlantic and Allihies. He’d talked to Simon briefly and had hoped to find Keira poking around among the skeletal remains of the long-abandoned Industrial Age mines scattered across the remote, starkly beautiful landscape. When he hadn’t found her, he’d headed to the pub on Kenmare Bay, discovering not his friend’s new love but a hiker with striking light green eyes and one of Keira’s books.

Pushing back a nagging sense of worry, Will checked his BlackBerry and saw he had a message from Josie Goodwin, his assistant in London, who had arranged for his flight into Cork and the car that had awaited him.

Josie’s words were straight to the point:

Estabrook free 9 AM MDT.

With a grimace at the unpleasant, if not unexpected, news, Will dialed Josie’s number.

“I was about to call you,” she said without preamble when she picked up. “I have more. Apparently Estabrook couldn’t wait to get off his ranch and left in his private plane immediately after signing his plea agreement. I gather he’s never been one to sit still. He must be stir-crazy after two months.”