The Angel (24 page)

“We managed to fit.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “We certainly did.”

He saw the flush in her cheeks, and she slipped out from under him, gathered up her clothes, pulled on her rugby 218

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shirt and underwear. Her blond hair shone in the city lights pouring through the small windows. Her eyes gleamed with that gorgeous cornflower blue. If she couldn’t believe what they’d just done, she didn’t show it. She waved a hand at the bedding. “If you need help with the sofa bed, just let me know. It’s still early, I know—my body’s not on Irish time or Boston time. I’m beat.”

“Keira.”

“Don’t say anything. Please. This was perfect. No regrets. I just…” She adjusted her shirt, pushed back her hair. “We both need to get some sleep.”

“Not going to trust your invisible electric fence tonight?”

She grinned at him. “Not a chance,” she said, heading into her bedroom and shutting the door firmly behind her. Simon noticed a light under her door. Well, he thought, she had to be tired. And he supposed part of her was thinking she needed to figure out what was going on before she got in over her head with him.

Part of him was thinking he should get a flight back to London in the morning.

But regrets?

No regrets, whatsoever, he thought, pulling open the sofa bed. The mattress was hellishly thin, but he’d endured worse conditions than an artist’s garret on Beacon Hill. He shook out the sheets and a summer-weight blanket. A white lace sachet fell out, filled with some kind of scented herb. Lavender, he suspected.

And the lace would be Irish.

Of course
.

Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

9:30 p.m., EDT

June 23

Abigail brought a glass of white wine outside, thinking she’d be alone, but Bob was at the table with a beer, and Scoop was weeding his garden in the semidarkness of the long June night. Owen was back from dropping Keira and Simon off, but he was inside on a call from a training team in Hawaii.

Scoop stood up from his tomato plants. “Oh, my aching back,” he said with a grin.

Bob grunted. “Do you even feel pain?”

“Only when I have to. This thing with Keira—I don’t know. I’ll be around tomorrow if you need any help.”

“Thanks,” Bob said, unusually somber.

But Scoop didn’t respond, and Abigail could see they were all troubled by the news from Ireland. The mutilated sheep raised the stakes. She’d heard the concern in Seamus Harrigan’s voice when he’d relayed Eddie O’Shea’s dis

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coveries to her, a marked change from when they’d talked earlier in the day. Clearly, the Irish detective didn’t know just what they were confronting.

“I should be the one talking to this Irish cop,” Bob said. Abigail shook her head. “No, you shouldn’t be.”

He started to say something, but Scoop nodded toward the back steps. “Hey—look who’s here.”

Fiona O’Reilly jumped off the steps into the yard. “Hi, guys. Owen says he’ll be out in a sec.” She cheerfully kissed her father on the cheek. “How’re you doing, Dad? You look grumpy.”

“Hi, kid,” Bob said, obviously struggling to dismiss his somber mood. “What’re you doing out running around in the middle of the night?”

“It’s not even ten o’clock. I told Colm Dermott I was stopping by here, and he asked me to give this to Abigail.”

Fiona handed a file folder to Abigail. “I went to a lecture he gave at BU tonight on Irish folklore and the sea. It was amazing. I’m seriously considering switching my major to Irish studies.”

“There are no more jobs for someone with a degree in Irish studies than a degree in harp,” Bob said, teasing her, but he nodded to the folder. “What’s that all about?”

Fiona shrugged. “I don’t know. Colm didn’t say.”

“Shouldn’t you be calling him Professor Dermott?”

“He said Colm is fine. He and Keira are friends— I love to talk about Irish music with him.” She turned to Abigail and Scoop. “I’m majoring in classical harp, but I’m totally into Irish music right now. I still want to visit Keira in Ireland.”

“Don’t count on it,” Bob said.

Fiona rolled her eyes. “I’m nineteen, Dad. I have a passport. I can buy my own ticket and go.”

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“You’re a student. You don’t have any money. Besides, Keira’s back in Boston, at least for a couple days.”

“She is? Why? What happened?”

“Nothing you need to worry about. You have a ride back to your apartment?”

“Yeah,” Fiona said, clearly distracted by news of her cousin’s sudden return. “I just wanted to drop off the folder. Dad…”

Bob looked up at her. “Is your ride a he?”

“It’s a friend.”

“The fiddle player in your band?”

Abigail recalled a very cute fiddler the other night at the auction and noticed Fiona blush as she answered her father.

“As a matter of fact.”

“Why didn’t he come in? What’s he doing, sitting out in his car waiting for you?”

“Yes—”

“I’ll walk you out,” Bob said, but he reached over and tapped the folder. “Well?”

Abigail sighed, annoyed. “It’s the guest list for the auction at the Garrison house. I ran into Colm earlier today and asked him for it.”

“You didn’t run into him. You looked him up. Why?”

“You know why, Bob.”

A muscle in his jaw worked. Scoop blew out a breath but said nothing.

Fiona frowned. “What’s going on? Why’s Keira back in Boston? What does this list—” She stopped, then winced.

“Oh. I get it. You want to know if the man who died in the Public Garden was on his way to the auction. To see Keira? Is that what you think?”

“Abigail’s speculating,” Bob said, making it sound like an accusation.

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Abigail tried not to let her irritation with him get to her.

“It’s an informal, incomplete list. Colm says they’re not that sophisticated an operation.”

Bob got to his feet. “You want to waste your time, fine.”

He turned to Fiona. “Let’s go meet your fiddle player.”

“Dad…”

“Did I ever tell you I took fiddle lessons as a kid?”

he asked her.

That obviously piqued Fiona’s interest, but as she headed out with her father, she glanced back at Abigail with a worried look.

With O’Reilly father and daughter gone, Scoop shook his head at Abigail. “You’re playing with fire. We’re talking about Bob’s family.”

“I’m just doing my job.” She flopped back in her chair.

“I didn’t mean for Colm to give these names to Fiona.”

“That’s the risk you took. Turn the Sarakis case over to someone else, Abigail.”

Since Scoop never interfered with her conduct on the job or off, clearly he thought she was seriously out of line. Abigail drank some of her wine. “I’m not on a fishing expe

dition, and I’m not trying to provoke Bob. You tell me what you’d do, Scoop, under the circumstances.”

“I just told you. I’d turn the case over to someone else.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” She paused, feeling a twinge of guilt. “I didn’t have a clue about his sister. Makes you wonder what else he hasn’t told us, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t go there.”

Abigail didn’t back off. “Come on, Scoop.You don’t like this situation any more than I do. Bob’s sister is a religious hermit, and his niece goes off to Ireland to investigate an old story about a stone angel and is damn near killed—and I’ve got a dead guy who was obsessed with the devil.”

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“Would he have been interested in this missing angel?”

“Possibly. His sister and brother-in-law are dealers in fine art and antiques. They have a particular interest in Classical and Medieval works. I don’t know where this angel falls—”

“Keira said it could be from Wal-Mart for all she knows.”

“Someone messing with her head?”

“Maybe it was part of an animal sacrifice. Grab an angel statue, torture a sheep.”

“That’s sick,” Abigail said. “From what I can gather, Victor Sarakis’s interest in evil and the devil was intellec

tual—I don’t see him having anything to do with that sheep.”

“Carving up a sheep like that is pretty damn evil, if you ask me,” Scoop said. “But angels, devils. Not the same thing.”

“Lucifer is a fallen angel. He was an archangel—the highest order of angels.”

“Gabriel, Michael. Those guys are archangels, right?”

Abigail smiled. Scoop had a remarkable ability to change the mood of a conversation, depending on what he wanted to accomplish. “Right. Lucifer couldn’t accept that he was a creation of God—he wanted to be an autonomous power. He rebelled against God, and God threw him out of heaven.”

“Rough,” Scoop said.

“In a nutshell, Lucifer becomes Satan. The devil. He’s in a perpetual fight with God for supremacy. He recruits others to acts of rebellion against God’s will. He demands loyalty above all else, but he doesn’t care about being loved or feared—his overriding emotion is hatred, specifi

cally, hatred of God.”

Scoop, eminently practical, nodded. “So the rest of us have to choose between God and Satan.”

“That’s fundamental to the understanding of the devil 224

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and evil—we choose. Satan will do anything to get us to choose the path of evil, and therefore him.” Abigail thought back to the book Charlotte Augustine had loaned her.

“There’s a lot more to this subject, but so much hangs on this basic concept.”

“I can imagine,” Scoop said, then gave Abigail an incisive look. “Do you think your guy’s interest in Lucifer had a hand in his death?”

“I don’t know.”

“A lot of people believe in angels and the devil, Abigail.”

“But not everyone has a room filled with flamespewing, fork-tongued devils,” Bob said as he rejoined them, picking up his empty beer bottle off the table with a calm that Abigail found unsettling. “That’s what Abigail here is fixed on, Scoop.”

She forced herself not to respond, and Scoop just shrugged.

Bob continued. “Keira paints pretty pictures of folk

tales and flowers. No devils. Her only interest in angels is the one in this crazy story.”

“All right,” Scoop said, starting for the back steps to his second-floor apartment. “I’ve had enough. I’m going on up. You two can fight it out.”

Abigail didn’t blame him. In his place, she’d have fled inside a long time ago.

She opened the folder Fiona had delivered and peeked at the printout of names. Victor Sarakis’s name was no secret. Colm could easily have figured out what she was up to and checked the list, deleted names if he’d wanted to. Not that he had any reason, but she realized she hadn’t been all that clever in asking him for the list.

“You weren’t aware of Keira’s reasons for going to Ireland, were you?”

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Bob remained on his feet, but he seemed uncertain, which wasn’t like him. Finally, he sighed, shaking his head. “Keira doesn’t confide in me or anyone else. She’s an O’Reilly, after all. She does what she needs to do.” He returned to his chair at the table. “That was you last summer in Maine, Abigail. You had to check out that tip on your own. You shut out Scoop, me, your father, the Maine police. It’s just that you’re not used to shutting people out, and Keira is.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be used to it.”

“I don’t know about that. She wants to do things, see the world, draw, paint, talk to people. But deep down I think she’s worried she’s going to end up a recluse like her mother.”

“Does she blame herself for her mother’s decision to become a religious hermit?”

Bob didn’t answer and seemed to stare out at nothing.

“Bob,” Abigail said, “do you blame yourself?”

She half expected him to tell her to mind her own business, but he didn’t. “Eileen came home from Ireland pregnant with Keira. She was nineteen—quit college. She’s never talked about what went on in Ireland. Not to me, not to our folks. As far as I know, she never told a friend. I don’t even think she told her husband. He was a great guy. He adopted Keira, loved both of them—” Bob paused, raked his forearm over the top of his head. “Hell of a thing, his death. Freak accident in the Callahan Tunnel. They happen, you know. Freak accidents.”

Abigail ignored the jibe. “Do you think Keira latched on to this old story because her mother looked for the village when she was in Ireland and hoped it’d lead her to her father?”

“John Michael Sullivan was her father. Keira missed him like crazy when he died. She was just this little tyke, 226

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but you could see it. She kept wanting her mother to read her stories and poems. One after another. Eileen loved it. Helped her, too. They moved to southern New Hampshire, and she opened an art supply store. I got out there when I could.” He looked up at the darkening sky. “I don’t know what more I could have done.”

“Bob, it’s not your fault.”

He shifted his gaze back to her. “What, that my sister’s abandoned her family, her friends, the whole damn world to live by herself in a cabin with no running water, no elec

tricity? Keira doesn’t have a phone, but her nutty mother…” He stopped himself. “I respect Eileen’s relig

ious convictions, but this life—it isn’t her, Abigail. Her choice isn’t easy on the rest of us, but we could live with it if we thought it was her. It’s not. She’s never married again, but she’s always been social—lots of friends, all that. Now she sits in the woods and doesn’t see anyone for days on end.”

“What about Keira? It must feel as if her mother’s rejected her, even if that wasn’t her intention.”

“We haven’t talked that much about it. My opinion, she’s not trying to talk Eileen out of the woods so much as trying to figure out what it means about who she is. Keira’s pretty as hell, but she—well, you’ve seen her. She marches to the beat of her own drummer.”

“Sounds like an O’Reilly to me,” Abigail said with a smile. “Except the pretty part. You’re not pretty, Bob.”