Carla Neggers - Liar's Key

“I hear you,” Colin said.

“Emma’s following up with him. In the meantime, if I were Detective Garda Murphy, and you and Oliver York showed up in my country at the same time, I’d want to talk to you, too. We have no reason to suspect York wasn’t on the level when he told Emma he was in Ireland to see her grandfather and stopped in Declan’s Cross on a whim.”

“All innocence,” Colin said, skeptical.

Yank grunted. “There’s nothing innocent about Oliver York. When he was eight, yes. Now? No.”

“If he’s gone back to London and I decide I need to talk to him after I meet with Sean?”

“Go. I hate to pull you away from the lavender, though.”

“Maybe it’s mint. Mint’s purple, isn’t it? The rhododendrons are impressive. They’re not the invasive kind. Emma explained the difference when we were here last fall.”

“Well, don’t explain it to me. Stay in touch.”

Yank disconnected, and Colin continued on the walk to the cafeteria in a newer building next to the sprawling Victorian mansion. He hadn’t done the mansion tour but he’d read the tour guide. All that stuck was that it had sixty-five rooms and the gardens had been expanded ahead of a visit from Queen Victoria in 1861.

He’d rather be thinking about Queen Victoria’s long-ago visit to Ireland than Oliver York and whatever he was up to now.

Especially if it involved the Sharpes.

Colin went into the modern cafeteria, got rhubarb crumble and a coffee and sat at a small table by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the gardens. It wasn’t crowded. He wished he had Emma with him. She knew her flowers from her time as Sister Brigid. He hadn’t been in touch with her in weeks, out of necessity. He’d promised he would be home in time for their wedding. Beyond that...she knew little about where he’d been, what he’d done.

Yank had told him she was on her way to Maine for the Sharpe open house.

A fine drizzle started and the afternoon turned grayer as Colin drank his coffee and ate his crumble. He wondered what he’d be doing now if he’d decided on a Scottish honeymoon instead of an Irish one. His throat tightened, and he could feel his fatigue clawing at him, his frustration that his forty-eight-hour break in Ireland had gone to hell.

He got up abruptly and went back out into the gardens, and he kept going until he reached a narrow path into the woods. The drizzle let up, and he stood on a rock outcropping above the gray, quiet lake. He breathed in the mist and let the silence envelop him. He saw himself here in a few weeks with his bride at his side, and he knew he was in the right place. And that it would happen—their wedding, their life together.

* * *

Two hours later, Colin wasn’t settling into a cozy Irish pub for the evening, as he’d anticipated when he’d gotten up that morning, but was standing in the cluttered office at Bracken Distillers, where Mary Bracken, the youngest of the five Bracken siblings, organized her distillery tours. Sean Murphy was pacing in front of a glass partition that looked out on the main floor. He’d just arrived and wanted to stay on his feet after his mad dash, as he called it, from Declan’s Cross to the east.

Declan Bracken, a good-looking Irishman in his late thirties, co-founder with his twin brother, Finian, of the distillery, sat on a tall wooden stool next to a worktable. He was silent and grim-faced. Understandable, perhaps, with an American FBI agent and a Dublin-based garda detective on the premises.

Sean reported on his stop in Declan’s Cross and his conversation with Mary ahead of her drive to Dublin and her morning flight to Boston. Colin wasn’t surprised anymore by anything Oliver York did, but Sean’s mention of Claudia Deverell got his attention. According to Yank, she’d been at the London party on Sunday.

Declan confirmed what Mary had told Sean in Declan’s Cross. “Mary told me about Claudia Deverell’s visit last week. I didn’t meet her myself. She told Mary the connection between Fin and you lot helped her decide on Bracken Distillers for her whiskey tour.”

You lot. Not much Colin could say to that. He’d let the two Irishmen interpret the silence. So far, Colin thought he was doing a good job of looking both competent and uninformed given the encounter between Irish Mary Bracken and English Oliver York in a small Irish village—by itself, not a matter for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“If you’ll excuse us,” Sean said, addressing Declan.

Declan hesitated, glancing at Colin and then again at Sean before giving a curt nod. “I’ll be just outside,” he said as he retreated, shutting the solid wood door behind him.

Colin took a seat on the stool Declan had vacated and eyed Sean. “You know I’m here to plan my Irish honeymoon, right? For real. No games.”

“When exactly did you arrive?”

“Late Tuesday. I spent yesterday catching up on sleep at Fin’s cottage in the Kerry hills.”

Sean had an ambivalent look about him, as if he already regretted this meeting. “You’re not in Ireland because of Oliver York, then?”

Colin winced. “No, I’m not. Honeymoon, Sean. Oliver wasn’t on my mind at all. Trust me.”

“I’ve made your headache worse,” Sean said with a quick smile. “I got one, too, when Kitty texted me that Oliver was in Declan’s Cross. He’d already left by the time I could get there.”

Colin listened closely as Sean provided a few more details about Mary Bracken’s encounter with the mysterious English mythologist up by the church ruin and old crosses above the tiny, picturesque village. Sean knew as well as Colin did that Oliver was an accomplished, unrepentant art thief who’d begun his larcenous career on the south Irish coast, but Sean also knew, as did Colin, there was nothing he, the FBI or Scotland Yard could do about it.

Or would do, maybe, given Oliver’s unique skills and contacts.

“I was due a visit to Declan’s Cross,” Sean said. “I only wanted a casual word with Oliver. I have no actionable reason to limit his movements in Ireland or to detain him. Then Mary told me about meeting him, and about this Deverell woman.”

“You don’t think Claudia Deverell’s distillery tour and Oliver’s visit to Declan’s Cross are a coincidence?”

Sean didn’t hesitate. “No.”

Colin noted the bottles of Bracken Distillers whiskey lined up on a shelf, including the award-winning fifteen-year-old single malt that Finian Bracken had casked himself, before tragedy had changed his destiny. One rainy night after his arrival in southern Maine a year ago, he’d told Colin that drinking the rare peated expression and its nonpeated counterpart was like reaching into the past and touching the man he’d once been.

It wasn’t difficult for Colin to picture his friend here as a young man, working night and day, shoulder to shoulder with his twin brother, to convert the abandoned seventeenth-century distillery just outside Killarney into a modern enterprise. Tilters at windmills, Finian said he and Declan had called themselves.

“Do you know this Deverell woman?” Sean asked, bringing Colin back to the late spring evening and the business at hand.

He shook his head. “I don’t.”

“Her relationship with the Sharpes?”

Colin debated for a fraction of a second. “Her family on her mother’s side has a house up the street in Heron’s Cove. I don’t know any details.”

Sean pounced. “But you do know more,” he said.

Colin saw no need to respond. He and Sean had met in Declan’s Cross last fall, over a murder that had involved both the Sharpes and the Donovans, at least on the periphery. While in the tiny Irish village, Colin had learned about a serial art thief who’d first struck the O’Byrne house ten years earlier and had been taunting the FBI and the Sharpes ever since.