Carla Neggers - The Mist

Estabrook laid the cue on the pool table. “You shouldn’t deliberately try my patience, Detective.”

His tone-cool, remote-turned her stomach. He was, she thought, a man eager to commit violence. Keeping her own tone conversational, she changed the subject. “Where are we going? Do you own property on the New England coast? Are we heading to some place in particular-a friend’s house maybe? Or are we just sailing in circles?”

He picked up the eight ball and cupped it in his fleshy palm. “What’s a friend, Detective?”

There was a sudden sadness about him that Abigail wasn’t about to fall for. She knew it had nothing to do with real fellow feeling but only with his narcissistic view of himself and his place in the world.

He set the ball back on the table and shifted to Fletcher. “You know what I want,” he said, and abruptly left the stateroom.

Fletcher waited a few seconds after the door shut before he walked over to Abigail. “You can stand up if you’d like.” He nodded back toward the pool table. “Go ahead and return to your game.”

“Not afraid I’m going to shove a pool cue up your-”

“No,” he said with an unexpected smile, “I’m not, and not because you’re not capable of doing so but because you know you need me.”

“And why do I need you, Mr. Fletcher?”

His gray eyes settled on her. “Because I can get you out of here alive.” He took her by the hand and helped her to her feet. “Simon Cahill and your father had help from someone else with close ties to Mr. Estabrook.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Abigail removed Estabrook’s cue from the table, returned it to the rack and got hers. She kept her voice even. “They’re FBI. I’m BPD. Two different things.”

“Mr. Estabrook wants the identity of this person.”

“What difference does it make now?”

“I get paid more if I deliver whoever it is to him.” Fletcher gathered up the scattered balls and racked them. “You know, Abigail, or you know more than you realize.”

She picked up the white cue ball. A name came to her. She pushed it back down deep. But it was there.

Lizzie Rush.

Lizzie was wealthy, elegant and attractive and would fit in with Estabrook’s friends and hangers-on, but her family was connected to Boston and she had a personal interest in Abigail’s father.

In fact, Lizzie Rush was the main reason Abigail had asked Simon and her father to meet her that morning, before the bomb went off.

She set the ball on the table and lined up her pool cue, even as regret washed over her. She hadn’t told Owen about her questions, her suspicions. She could rationalize her silence: she didn’t know enough; she was acting as a police officer and not just out of personal curiosity.

The truth was, she’d learned to keep secrets at her father’s knee.

Her father, who would be terrified for her now, was one of the best men she’d ever known. His secrets arose out of his sense of duty and commitment. They were a product of who he was-a man who could be trusted, who didn’t speak out of turn and often faced tough choices.

Fletcher lifted the rack from the triangle of balls and stood back. Abigail shot the cue ball across the table. It smashed into the racked balls and sent them spinning everywhere. Three solid-colored balls went into pockets. Pure luck. She had no idea what she was doing.

“You were right,” Fletcher said with a smile, “you’re not very good.”

She almost laughed as she lined up another shot. “You’re connecting dots that can’t be connected,” she said. “I can’t help you. I’ve been busy with my own job.”

“Who can help me, then, love?”

Her stomach lurched.

Fiona.

Abigail tapped a solid red ball into a corner pocket and forced Bob’s daughter out of her mind. Her name, her image, everything about her. But she could see Fiona just last night, playing a small harp with her Irish band at Morrigan’s Pub at the Whitcomb, the Rush hotel in Boston.

“This isn’t a good idea, Fiona.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t explain. Who do you know here? Who have you met?”

“No one, really.”

Fiona had blushed, and Abigail had noticed a young, cute, male Rush standing in the door and wondered if she’d overreacted and Fiona wasn’t about to stumble into one of John March’s labyrinths. As much as Abigail loved her father, she was well aware that he had left a complex trail behind him in his near sixty years on the planet.

Fiona knew every Irish bar in town that offered live music, and Morrigan’s would be one of the better paying and more prestigious. She could have found it on her own, but she hadn’t. She’d found it because her father knew Abigail, who was head over heels in love with Owen Garrison. And Owen’s family, with its strong ties to Beacon Hill, often stayed at the Whitcomb and put up friends there.

Abigail’s father had known the Garrisons even before she’d met Chris Browning, who had grown up just down the rockbound shore from their summer home on Mount Desert Island. But her father’s relationship with the Garrisons had nothing to do with her concerns about Fiona O’Reilly playing Irish music at Morrigan’s.

Her concerns had everything to do with the woman in whose honor the bar had been named-Shauna Morrigan, Lizzie Rush’s mother.

Even to think about any of them now, with Fletcher watching her, Abigail knew, was dangerous.

As she leaned forward, lining up another shot, she felt the strain of the last hours in her lower back. She was dehydrated and knew she needed to drink more water, but the thought nauseated her. “You’ll have to speak up,” she said. “My ears are still ringing from you bastards blowing up my apartment and smacking me in the face.”

“We have time.”

She concentrated on taking her shot, but she was too late.

Fletcher had already seen that she’d lied.

“Enjoy your game,” he said quietly, and left.

Dublin, Ireland

7:23 a.m., IST

August 26

The bedroom door was still shut when Lizzie awoke, the early morning sun finding its way through the sides of the room-darkening window shade. She slipped into comfortable slim black pants, a black top and her new flats and dabbed on just enough makeup to convince people she’d slept okay.

Making as little noise as possible, she went out into the hall and took the stairs down to the lobby. She smiled at the woman at the front desk, who was new, and headed for the hotel’s small street-level restaurant, its tables covered in Irish lace. Lizzie chose one on the back wall that had a view of the door out to the lobby. She ordered coffee and scones and chatted a moment with her waiter, a college student from Lithuania. Last night on the Beara Peninsula suddenly seemed surreal, and she half expected her cousin to wander in and act as if she’d just arrived from Boston and none of it had happened. Her fight in the stone circle, the bomb, Abigail Browning, Norman ’s disappearance…the fair-haired Brit asleep in her suite.

Lizzie could blame her delusions on jetlag and go shopping.

But as she spread her scone with butter and raspberry jam, her handsome suitemate, dressed in another deliciously soft-looking sweater, joined her at her table.

Without waiting for an invitation, he sat across from her. “My sister loves Dublin. I’ll have to ask her if she’s stayed here.”

“She’s a wedding dress designer in London. Arabella. It’s a pretty name. You have an older brother, too. Peter. He manages the family farm, that being a five-hundred-year-old estate in the north of England.”

“All of which,” Will said, marginally impressed, “you could find on the Internet.”

“In fact, I did.”