Carla Neggers - Keeper's Reach

“Look,” Lucy said, smiling as she raised a shade when they returned to the living room. “We have a tree outside the window. Imagine it in the summer. When do you get leaves on the trees up here?”

“May for sure,” Emma said. “I count on full leaf bloom by Memorial Day at home in Maine.”

“Gad. It’s too late to change my mind. We’ve already signed the lease.” She sighed, gazing out at the bare-limbed tree. “I’m sure there are quirks, but I couldn’t be happier with this place. Matt will freak out if he sees a roach, but it’s the city. There are bound to be roaches. We sleep with a can of Raid and a flyswatter next to the bed in our current apartment.”

“I can see why you’re eager to move,” Emma said.

She lowered the shade again. “I’m giddy. It’s fun to show the place off. Thank you for indulging me.”

“I love checking out Boston apartments.”

“Will you and Colin stay where you are once you’re married?”

“For now.”

“Boston rents are insane. I’m sleeping here tonight. I brought over a few basics from Matt’s place. He won’t be back for a couple more days, and a sleeping bag on the floor here is more appealing than another night on my own with the roaches.”

Emma laughed. “I can’t say I blame you.”

“Do you ever miss convent life?”

Ah , Emma thought. The real reason for her presence here. “I miss the gardens and the scenery. It’s a beautiful place.”

“Matt says you’re heading up there for a couple of nights.”

“Tomorrow after work, yes. It’s a mini retreat.”

“I’ve always loved the name of your order. Sisters of the Joyful Heart. Are they a joyful lot?”

“Most of the time,” Emma said.

“Matt says your time with the sisters has served you well in the FBI. You strike me as centered, Emma. You have good command of your emotions and the ability to stay fully present. I can see how you and Colin do well together. He operates on gut instinct honed by training and experience.” Lucy moved away from the window. “I’m aware Matt was Colin’s contact agent on at least one undercover mission.”

Emma followed Lucy to the entrance, making no comment on her assertion.

The older woman smiled. “Not going to confirm anything, are you? That’s all right. I wouldn’t expect you to. One learns to ferret out tidbits when one is married to a senior federal agent. The isolation, constant danger and pretending to be someone else as an undercover agent can take a toll after a while. Some personalities are more suited to that sort of work than others. There must be a high burnout rate.”

“You have to know when you’ve had enough in any line of work,” Emma said.

“Ah, how true. Here I am thinking about opening a knitting shop. I’m eyeing a spot on Charles Street. I could walk to work. That would be a first for me. A knitting shop might be a fantasy to help me with the transition to life in Boston, but if it is, it’s working. I haven’t been this excited in a long time.”

“Maybe you needed something new.”

“I wonder if that’s part of why I resisted moving for so long. I didn’t want to face my own boredom. Psychology is a relatively portable career, but maybe it’s run its course. I thought maybe my marriage had, too. I’m glad I was wrong about that.”

Emma wasn’t going there. “I can see Yank taking up knitting.”

“My husband’s idea of a hobby is cleaning his gun.”

Lucy thanked Emma again as she left, taking the stairs down to the small lobby and heading out into the February cold. What Lucy Yankowski hadn’t brought up—and clearly hadn’t had any intention of bringing up—was that her husband and Emma’s fiancé were both in Washington, DC, likely meeting with the new FBI director about an undercover mission.

With Oliver York waiting for her, Emma grabbed a cab back to her waterfront apartment. After a quiet winter fitting himself into HIT, Colin had been summoned to FBI headquarters in Washington in late January. He’d returned several times the past month, so far managing to fly back to Boston for weekends.

Wedding or no wedding, he had a job to do.

And so do I , Emma thought, reading Oliver’s text again. Wealthy, solitary and very smart, he might be a man haunted by his past, but he was firmly anchored in the present. It helped, no doubt, that he didn’t fear arrest, by the FBI, Scotland Yard or any of the law enforcement agencies in the other countries where he had helped himself to valuable art over the past decade.

Oliver York was, in a word, untouchable.

* * *

When she reached her tiny apartment, Emma heaped her coat, hat and gloves on a chair and kicked off her boots. She sat on her couch in the living room and dialed up Oliver York on her laptop on her coffee table.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said.

Oliver peered at her from across the Atlantic. A thick, dark blond curl flopped onto his forehead as he leaned closer to his screen. “What happened to your hair, Emma?”

“Hat head.” She had no intention of telling him about trying on wedding dresses.

“It’s cold in Boston?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“My London flat.”

It was a room she didn’t recognize from her one visit last November to his sprawling Mayfair apartment overlooking St. James’s Park. Colin and Yank had accompanied her. Oliver had met them in the library, where his parents had been murdered almost thirty years ago. Now he sat in a tall-backed red-leather chair in front of a draped window and a painting of porpoises in Ardmore Bay on the south Irish coast. Emma knew the painting, an early work by well-known Irish artist Aoife O’Byrne.

“A video chat is more intimate than a phone call, at least. How are you, Emma? It is all right if I call you Emma, isn’t it? It’s more informal than Special Agent Sharpe, but this is an official chat, I assume?”

“I’m an FBI agent. You’re a thief. Yes, it’s an official chat. But Emma is fine.”

He pointed at her. “You’re testier than when I saw you here in November.”

That was when she had figured out that Oliver Fairbairn, a tweedy British mythologist caught in the middle of a murder investigation in Boston, was also Oliver York, a cheeky, wealthy British aristocrat with a tragic past. That Oliver Fairbairn and Oliver York were one and the same wasn’t widely known. He preferred to keep the two identities separate, and Emma had no reason to announce it to the world. In fact, the opposite.

“Tell me about this FBI agent you believe is following you.”

He gave an audible sigh. “Testy. Definitely testy.”

She tried to resist a smile.

“I have reliable radar for FBI agents, and it went off like crazy when I spotted this man. He was in the park outside my apartment. I had just returned from an art gallery. I wouldn’t be surprised if he followed me.”

“Was this today?”

“Around noon, yes.”

“Is the gallery the one holding the show for Aoife O’Byrne?”

“Mmm.”

The Irish O’Byrne family was one of Oliver’s victims—his first, ten years ago. He had made off with two Jack Butler Yeats landscape paintings of western Ireland, a fifteenth-century silver wall cross depicting Saint Declan and an unsigned landscape of a local scene, probably by a young Aoife O’Byrne herself. Her Yeats phase, Oliver called it. The porpoises had come after that, as well as a few crosses of her own, but she was known now for her moody seascapes.

At least Oliver had bought the porpoise painting instead of stealing it.

“What’s the name of this agent you ran into in the park?” Emma asked.

Oliver looked surprised. “I only saw him. I didn’t speak with him.”