Saint's Gate

by Carla Neggers

  She pushed open the door, expecting to find her grandfather at his desk and whisk him off for coffee and an Irish breakfast. She noticed boxes stacked by the desk and felt a twist of nostalgia at the idea of Wendell Sharpe no longer having his own office after six decades. He had worked on cases with individuals, law enforcement agencies and private companies throughout the world. He would continue to serve as a consultant when needed, but he planned to travel while he was still in good health and divide his time between his apartment in Dublin and the soon-to-be-renovated living quarters at the Sharpe offices on the waterfront in Heron’s Cove.

  Emma heard a moan and whirled around, just as her grandfather got up onto his knees on the floor behind his cluttered desk.

  “Granddad!”

  She ran to him and helped him to his feet, getting one arm around his thin frame. He winced, squinting at her as if he were trying to focus. “Emma?”

  “I’m here, Granddad. I’ll get help—”

  He waved her off and stood up on his own. “I’ll be all right. Give me a moment.” He sank into his desk chair. His bow tie and navy plaid suspenders were askew, his skin ashen as he winced, clearly in pain. “I’m fine, Emma. I just got the wind knocked out of me.”

  She heard footsteps in the hall and spun across the office, stopping a half step short of tackling Colin Donovan. He loomed in the doorway, wearing a charcoal wool sweater and looking as if he’d just rolled off an overnight flight himself.

  He narrowed his dark eyes on octogenarian Wendell Sharpe. “Did he fall?”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t fall,” her grandfather said, his voice stronger. “Someone jumped me from behind. Who are you?”

  “This is Colin Donovan,” Emma said. “He’s an FBI agent.”

  “The one who defused the bomb in my attic?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  Colin entered the office and walked over to the desk. “I’ll call the police. They can send an ambulance.”

  Her grandfather shook his head. “No ambulance. I don’t have a concussion or any broken bones.”

  “You could have internal injuries,” Emma said.

  “I don’t. I’ve been whacked before.” He grunted, shoving a palm over his thinning white hair. “I was unlocking the door. I was thinking about how to get these boxes down the stairs. Next thing I know I’m flying across the room.”

  “Shoved?” Colin asked crisply.

  “Sneaked up on from behind and kicked out of the way. I’m not as young as I used to be, and I didn’t jump right up. I figured I’d be better off pretending to be unconscious. I didn’t want whoever was in here to finish me off.” He slumped back against the chair. “I couldn’t help but think about poor Sister Joan.”

  Colin unearthed the landline from a stack of papers and dialed. “Did you get a look at the person who attacked you?” he asked.

  “No, it happened too fast.”

  “Man, woman?”

  Emma found herself wanting to rush in and protect her grandfather against Colin’s brusque questions, but instead of being cowed, he rallied, as if they helped clear his head. “I don’t know. These days, who the hell can tell? Whoever it was didn’t stay long. Rifled through a few boxes and file drawers and took off again. I tried to get up so I could get to the window….” He gave a small, involuntary moan, in more pain than he wanted to admit. “Then Emma was here.”

  Colin spoke into the phone, giving precise details on the situation and assuring the person on the other end there was no immediate danger. He hung up, shifted his focus back to the old man struggling to regain his composure. “Did you see anyone in here, or outside, before you entered the building?”

  “I saw a priest on the corner when I stopped for a newspaper across the street. I didn’t get a good look at him.” He pointed to his eyes. “He was wearing sunglasses.”

  Emma shot Colin a look. “Where’s your friend Bracken? Did he come with you?”

  “There are a lot of priests in Ireland,” Colin said, “even these days.”

  “Not as many as fifty years ago.” Her grandfather coughed, then swore under his breath. “That hurt.”

  Emma touched his shoulder. “You should try not to move, Granddad. You might be hurt worse than you think. Adrenaline can mask pain.”

  “I got hurt worse in Irish pubs in Boston back in the day.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  His blue eyes sparked. “Don’t be so sure, missy. Any news from Heron’s Cove? I’m glad you’re here, but there must be a reason you didn’t cancel your trip, given what’s been going on at home.”

  “I wanted to see you. Talk to you.”

  Emma pushed back a wave of jet lag. This wasn’t the Irish morning she’d expected. An attack on her grandfather, and now Colin hovering behind her. She glanced at the surprisingly contemporary office and noticed signs of a quick, disorganized search.

  “Talk to me about what?” her grandfather asked.

  “Saint Sunniva,” she said, turning back to him. “A painting of a young woman trapped in a cave—”

  “On an island, with a Viking warship about to arrive.” Her grandfather rallied, his interest piqued. “I remember it well.”

  “Then I didn’t imagine it.” She noticed Colin stiffen, but he said nothing.

  Her grandfather’s color had already improved. “You loved that painting as a little girl. I had it up on a wall in the attic for a while, and you liked to sit in front of it and make up stories about the woman in the cave.”

  “I remember,” Emma said.

  “I sometimes wondered if it influenced you to try out being a nun.” He jerked a thumb at Colin. “It’s okay? He knows you—”

  “It’s okay, Granddad.” Emma avoided Colin’s eye. “What happened to the painting?”

  “Nothing. It’s in Heron’s Cove. I took it off the wall, but it’s still in the attic, in the vault.”

  “It’s not in the attic anymore.”

  “Ah.” Her grandfather tilted his head back and looked at her with interest, his intensity a reminder of his decades of experience as an international art detective. “Our mad bomber was after Sunniva.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  He answered without hesitation. “Claire Peck Grayson.”

  Emma frowned. “Who is she, Granddad?”

  “Claire Grayson was a tragic mess of a woman. I haven’t thought about her in ages. It’s been forty years at least. Your grandmother was alive then. She and I came home one afternoon, and we found Sunniva on the porch, with a note from Claire thanking me for introducing her to Mother Linden.”

  “Mother Linden?” Emma asked, surprised.

  “She gave Claire painting lessons. Claire was from Chicago.

  Her family owned a house in Maine, just outside Heron’s Cove. They’d fallen on hard times, and then tragedy struck. Claire’s parents were killed in a small plane crash.”

  Emma walked over to a tall window. “How awful.”

  “Claire was already trapped in an unhappy marriage and basically unraveled. She came to Maine—to heal, she said. I suspect she was trying to hide from her troubles. She loved to paint.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Her grandfather grabbed the edge of his desk and pulled himself to his feet. He seemed steadier, if still in pain. “She was killed when her house caught fire. Claire was a genteel, lovely, very screwed-up woman. She was fascinated with saints and Norse history and mythology. Hence, Sunniva.”

  Colin studied the older man a moment. “Did Grayson know Jack d’Auberville?”

  “They were friends. I never got the whiff of anything romantic between them. He bought her old carriage house—it was all that survived the fire. Jack was a ladies’ man, but Claire was a married woman.”

  “Married women have affairs,” Emma said.

  Her grandfather shook his head. “Not Claire. She was in a bad marriage, but adultery wasn’t an option. I didn’t know her that well but she just wasn’t the t
ype.”

  “How well did you know Jack d’Auberville?” Colin asked.

  “Not well at all. He did excellent work. He had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the snobs who dismissed him as a serious artist. He wanted their respect at the same time he hated them. He was something of a rake but he finally found true love late in life.”

  With Ainsley’s mother, Emma thought. “Were he and Mother Linden friends?”

  “Sarah Linden loved everyone and considered most people her friend,” Wendell Sharpe said, his voice softening. “She was a great teacher and a gentle soul.”

  A Dublin garda car arrived on the street below. Emma gave her grandfather a hurried summary of The Garden Gallery, the painting, also now missing, that Ainsley d’Auberville had brought to Sister Joan.

  Her grandfather eyed her with interest. “Quickly, Emma. Before the guards get up here. Tell me more. What other paintings are portrayed in this garden gallery besides Sunniva?”

  “I don’t know, Granddad. I was hoping you might be able to help.”

  Colin came over to the window and looked down at the street at the police car. “I’ll go downstairs and meet them.”

  Meaning he’d buy her a few more minutes to talk to her grandfather. Emma nodded. “Thanks.”

  As Colin left, her grandfather dropped back into his chair. “Claire’s family—the Pecks—were avid art collectors. Her grandfather Peck started their collection when he bought a few paintings in Europe after the war. Claire’s parents donated several valuable works during their good days, then sold off almost everything when they were hurting for cash. There was a rumor that she took the last of their collection—pieces they couldn’t, or just didn’t, sell—with her when she headed East.”

  “Did they burn, too?” Emma asked.

  “That’s what everyone assumed. If they didn’t and they’re depicted in this missing Jack d’Auberville painting…” Her grandfather rubbed his temples, as if his head ached. “It was all a long time ago, Emma.”

  “Don’t worry, Granddad. The Maine police, FBI and Lucas are on this thing.” The Irish police now, too, Emma thought, hearing them on the stairs. She moved from the window. “This priest you saw. Could it have been Finian Bracken of Bracken Distillers?”

  He sat up straight, clearheaded. “Do you know him?”

  Emma kept any emotion out of her tone. “He’s Colin’s friend. What do you know about him?”

  “Bracken Distillers was started seventeen years ago by the twin Bracken brothers. They were just kids, in their early twenties. Then Finian’s wife and two daughters died in a terrible sailing accident off the southwest coast.” He glanced at his granddaughter. “It’s been six or seven years. You were with the sisters then.”

  Emma touched a bruise she noticed forming on the right side of his face. “Did Father Bracken do this to you?”

  “Father Bracken?”

  “He’s a priest now.”

  “Of all things,” her grandfather said.

  “He’s serving the church in Rock Point, but I doubt he’s there right now.”

  “I don’t know who attacked me, Emma. I wish I did.”

  The guards arrived. Two uniformed officers entered the small office.

  Colin wasn’t with them. He hadn’t gone to meet them. He’d given them all the slip.

  A ghost, Emma thought. If she and her grandfather kept their mouths shut, the guards would never know he was there. Either way, they would never catch up with him.

  23

  FINIAN BRACKEN WALKED ON AN OVERGROWN, uneven path of the old burial ground above the inner waters of Kenmare Bay. He passed a simple memorial to the thousands of victims of starvation and disease in the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, when the infamous blight wiped out the potato crop. The suffering felt close even with the lively, pretty town of Kenmare across the water and Macgillicuddy’s Reeks outlined in the distance.

  The morning sun in Dublin had turned to a gray, misty Irish afternoon in the southwest. Finian didn’t mind. He found the ivy-covered ruins of Saint Finian’s Church among crooked tombstones, then made his way down to a tree-lined stone wall that marked the edge of the old cemetery.

  He took a steep path, shrouded in damp ivy and holly, strewn with sodden leaves, straight down through dense trees and underbrush to the water’s edge. Low tide had exposed gray mud and small, copper-colored stones. He saw a large black-winged bird—he didn’t know what it was—sail a few feet above the shallow water and heard more birds on the wooded hillside.

  Finian hesitated, sinking into the mud. He’d changed into a sweater, canvas pants and simple—if expensive—leather walking shoes.

  He knew he shouldn’t have come, yet now what was there to do but to go on?

  Aware of the buried dead above him, he walked fifty or so feet in the mud to Saint Finian’s holy well, built in rough stone at the base of the steep bank. Tree branches were draped with a few prayer offerings, shredded now by wind and rain.

  “Ah, Sally. Sally, my love.” He felt his throat tighten, heard the despair in his voice. “Kathleen and Mary, my sweet girls.”

  He blessed himself and said a prayer, then turned from the well and looked up at the clouds, as if he would see his wife and daughters there. Sally had been the love of his life. She and their daughters had been his purpose, his reason for getting up each morning. They’d made his life worth living.

  For those years, he had been the luckiest man in the world.

  He turned again to the dark, quiet well and added a prayer for the repose of the soul of the recently departed Sister Joan Mary Fabriani. As he turned back to the water, dozens of shorebirds suddenly stirred in the trees, then flew out en masse, cawing, wings flapping, branches rustling with their movement.

  Something must have startled them.

  “Damn! That was wild. I feel like I’m in a Hitchcock movie.” Emma Sharpe ducked past the low branches of an oak as more birds swooped over her head. “As if an old cemetery isn’t bad enough, now I get birds.”

  Finian couldn’t hold back a smile. “Welcome.”

  She stood straight and grinned at him. “Next, I’ll end up on my butt in the mud. How are you, Father?”

  “I’m well, Emma. How did you find me?”

  “You mentioned this place when we spoke the other night. I thought Saint Finian might be on your mind.” She watched the birds dissipate into the surrounding marshes and hills. The humor vanished from her deep green eyes. “My grandfather, Wendell Sharpe, was attacked this morning in Dublin.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was he injured?”

  “He’s a little bruised and shaken up, but he’ll be fine.” She adjusted her leather jacket but kept her gaze on him. “Where were you this morning, Father?”

  Finian studied her a moment and saw the hard set of her jaw, a reminder that she was an FBI agent. “I didn’t attack your grandfather.”

  “He saw a priest.”

  “Probably me. I was there. I saw him go into a shop. I didn’t linger. I had no reason to speak to him. I wanted a look at his office.”

  “Why?”

  “To be sure I hadn’t been there before and forgotten. To see if I’d remember anything that might help your investigation.”

  Her suspicion didn’t ease. “Did you see anyone else?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “The guards think the attacker followed him up the stairs. They’re investigating, but if it’s the same person who killed Sister Joan and placed the bomb in the vault, we’re dealing with someone who’s not only good at not being seen but also brazen.”

  Finian moved a few feet back from the well.

  “Bracken Distillers.” Emma’s boots sank into the mud but she didn’t lose her footing. “I didn’t think you when I saw the bottle. I thought you picked out that particular brand because you happen to have the same name.”

  “My brother, Declan, and I started it together,” Finian said.

  “Declan still runs the
company. He lives nearby. It’s not just happenstance that you ended up at a parish in Maine. You deliberately chose Rock Point. Why?”

  “There are millions of people in the States with Irish roots. Father Callaghan is one of them. His desire to spend a year in Ireland coincided with my desire to spend a year in America.” Finian saw that the tide had risen noticeably, the water moving closer to him and Emma. “I didn’t know anyone in your family or the Donovan family before I arrived in Maine.”

  “Are you an art collector?”

  He shook his head. “What art I owned I gave away when I entered seminary.”

  Emma shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. “I know about your wife and daughters, Father. I’m sorry.” She paused, looking across the water toward the village of Kenmare. “I understand there was no suspicion of foul play in their deaths.”

  “My decision to go to Rock Point is unrelated to anyone in my life,” Finian said, keeping his voice even, if not unemotional. “But I’m meant to be there.”

  “You and Colin Donovan have become quite close friends in a short time.”

  “It was unexpected, I must say. He’s a man who stands apart from his family and friends, perhaps even from himself.”

  “A kindred soul?”

  “Perhaps.” Finian noticed the water was mere feet from them. “We should go. The tide comes right up to the well and sometimes covers it. If we stay too long, we’ll get our feet wet.”

  Emma didn’t move. “I was recruited right out of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart. Colin knows some of my history.”

  “Are you embarrassed by your past?”

  She shook her head.

  He thought he understood what she was trying to say. “You get tired of explaining that you were a nun and confronting people’s stereotypes and ignorance.”

  She smiled. “People have funny ideas about priests, too.”

  “Yes, they do,” he said.

  “You were a husband and a father. I’ve never been a wife and a mother.”

  Finian tilted his head back and thought he saw something in the younger woman’s expression. “You’re attracted to Colin, aren’t you, Emma?”