“About violating the privacy of a convent for no good reason? You think so?”
“What would you have done?”
“Whatever Sister Joan asked me to do.” He gave Emma an irreverent smile. “Nuns scare me.”
She couldn’t resist a small laugh. Nothing scared her brother. “Thanks, Lucas.”
“Sure. You can stay here if you want. Fair warning, though. I think the place is haunted, and it has bats.”
“Your kind of house.”
He grinned. “That it is.” He cuffed her on the shoulder. “Hang in there, okay, kid? And if that SOB Yankowski decides to fire you, you know you always have a place back with the family biz. You can always sweep floors, file—”
“Bastard,” Emma said with a laugh, and headed back to her car.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Emma drove down a busy, attractive waterfront street of inns, marinas and graceful older homes, and stopped in front of the small, gray-shingled house that served as the unexpected main offices of Sharpe Fine Art Recovery. Her grandfather, Wendell Sharpe, had worked out of the front rooms and lived in back until fifteen years ago, when, in his late sixties, he’d decided to open up an office in his native Dublin.
Lucas had been tempted to move the offices to Boston, but Heron’s Cove was part of the Sharpe mystique. He’d finally opted to modernize and had worked up plans with a local architect to gut the place down to the studs. The process had started a month ago with relocating the offices temporarily to their parents’ house in the village. Since they were spending a year in England, the timing was perfect.
Emma had promised to come up one weekend and help clear out the attic and the living quarters.
It wouldn’t be this weekend, she thought as she walked around to the back of the house.
Matt Yankowski was standing on the grass at the edge of the retaining wall above the docks at the mouth of the Heron River. Two hundred yards to his left, past a parking lot and an inn, a deep channel led into the Atlantic. Next door on the right was a marina.
Yank gave Emma a sideways glance as she eased next to him. He was a tall, fit, good-looking man with silver streaks in his dark hair and an unrelenting toughness in his dark eyes. “I thought you came up here to pick apples.”
“I did.”
“The Sisters of the Joyful Heart have apple trees?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I had a local orchard in mind.”
A sailboat drifted past them, a scruffy white dog sitting in the stern. Yank said nothing. He was the senior agent in charge of a small, specialized team that investigated and responded to high-impact incidents involving criminals with virtually unlimited resources. HIT, for short. Four years ago, he’d personally recruited Emma to join the FBI. She’d left the Sisters of the Joyful Heart and worked with her grandfather in Dublin for a year before she finally called Yank and said she wanted to give the FBI a shot. Six months ago, he’d summoned her to his unit.
His days as a field agent were legendary. If he’d been at the convent that morning, Emma had no doubt Sister Joan would still be alive.
“When do you leave for Dublin?” he asked.
She didn’t let his seeming non sequitur throw her. Several weeks ago she’d arranged to spend a few days with her grandfather as he packed up his work and turned over the Dublin office to one of his Irish protégés. “Sunday night.”
“Good. I’ll carry your suitcase and drive you to the airport.”
A battered warhorse of a lobster boat passed them. Emma noticed the faded script on the stern: Julianne. She didn’t recognize the boat or the man at the wheel. He was big and broad shouldered with medium brown hair and a couple days’ growth of beard. A worker. She half expected him to catch her staring at him but he didn’t even glance in her direction. She imagined his life and then imagined herself with a different life, but she’d had different lives. A nun. A Sharpe art detective. Now an FBI agent.
Yank scowled at her. “What are you doing, lusting after lobstermen?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There are worse distractions. Finding a dead nun would be among them.”
Emma knew better than to let him get to her. He’d straddled the supervisory and operational worlds for years but had always been more comfortable in the field. He looked out of place on the Heron’s Cove waterfront in his wrinkle-free charcoal-gray suit, striped tie and polished shoes. She doubted her lobsterman would mark him as an FBI agent, or even armed, but Matt Yankowski was both.
He was also frustrated, concerned and angry. Not everyone would notice. Emma did; she could see it in his rigid stance, the tightness at the corners of his mouth, the pinched look to his eyes.
Sister Joan’s inexplicable murder and her own actions that morning had gotten to Yank.
It hadn’t been a good day.
“Let’s go up to the porch,” he said. “We can pretend we’re normal.”
Emma nodded and followed him onto the back porch of her grandfather’s house. Yank glanced at an old metal wind chime that clinked pleasantly in the breeze. She wondered if he already knew it was one of Mother Linden’s early folk-art efforts, a gift to the Sharpes before she’d founded the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.
He ignored the wicker chairs set in front of a small table and instead stayed on his feet. He pointed at Emma’s right thigh, where she’d torn a hole in her jeans. “Hurt?”
“No.”
“There’s blood.”
“It’s
