Then he’d returned to his underworld and made sure the right people thought he was dead.
Yank pivoted and started down the dock, stopping abruptly and looking back at Colin. “I don’t like one thing about what happened up here today.” He paused, sucked in a breath. “You know Maine. Do what you can.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s call it an order. As if that would make any difference with you. Damn, Colin. I thought you were dead half the summer.”
“If you thought I was dead, why didn’t you try to come to my funeral?”
“No body. I figured there’d be a memorial service.”
He could be kidding and Colin would never know. Yank had a labyrinthine mind, and he led a tough, tight unit that went after some of the most elusive criminals in the world. Now one of his handpicked people was mixed up in the death of a nun and whatever else had gone on at the isolated Maine convent of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.
“Why did Emma Sharpe join the FBI?” Colin asked. “Sharpe Fine Art Recovery is a successful private business. Did she have a falling out with her family? Did she just want the chance to arrest people herself? The green light to carry a gun?”
“It’s complicated.”
Complicated? That wasn’t the answer Colin had expected.
“I have to go,” Yank said. “I’m not used to the ocean air the way you Mainers are. You’ll keep an eye on her?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Colin said, “but Emma Sharpe is your problem, not mine.”
Yank either didn’t hear him or pretended not to. Colin watched the senior agent—his friend, despite their differences—walk off the wooden dock as if they were just a couple of strangers who’d run into each other over boats and seagulls.
Would that were true, Colin thought as he stretched his lower back, feeling the effects of his days of kayaking. He jumped back into his borrowed boat. More lights were on in the Sharpe house. Was Agent Emma expecting company? Huddled over her own bottle of Bracken whiskey?
Too many questions with no answers.
He had only to head home, grab his kayak and disappear. He was better at disappearing than most. Yank could get someone else to find out what was going on with Special Agent Sharpe.
Colin glanced again at the Sharpe house, unchanged in the past thirty seconds. He was uneasy, on edge. He understood, at least on a gut level, why Matt Yankowski had taken the bait and come down to the water to talk to him. No doubt every instinct his friend had was telling him exactly what Colin’s instincts were telling him.
Emma Sharpe. The break-in at the convent. The dead nun.
All wrong.
He noticed a Maine marine patrol boat easing through the channel into the harbor and spotted his youngest brother, Kevin, at the wheel.
A year after Colin headed to Quantico, Kevin had joined the marine patrol.
Perfect, Colin thought.
He’d get his baby brother to tell him about the goings-on at the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.
CHAPTER 7
A UNIFORMED STATE TROOPER LET EMMA THROUGH the convent’s main gate on what had already turned into a clear, brisk, beautiful fall morning. She walked alone to the motherhouse, a stone mansion built in 1898, with leaded-glass windows, porches, dormers and more drafts than a haunted house. As a child, on a visit there with her grandfather, Emma had convinced herself it was haunted.
She entered through the front door. The sisters again were singing in the chapel down the hall. They would need time to mourn the violent, unexplained death of one of their own, a fifty-three-year-old woman who’d committed her life to her religious vocation.
Emma went into a simple sitting room overlooking a flower garden and the Atlantic Ocean. The horseshoe-shaped cove and the meditation garden were on the opposite side of the small peninsula. The trooper had told her that CID had released the tower as a crime scene and completed their initial interviews, searches and evidence gathering but would be back later this morning.
Too restless to sit on the dove-gray sofa or chairs, Emma stood on the edge of the soft hand-hooked rug and studied a wall of photographs. She noticed several of Mother Linden in her later years. She’d been a stout, cheerful woman, a talented artist, a formidable scholar and a dedicated religious sister. As a much younger woman, she’d encouraged Wendell Sharpe, then a security guard at a Portland art museum, to pursue his interest in art theft and recovery.
Emma turned at the sound of footsteps on the hardwood floor in the hall.
Natalie Aquinas Williams, only the second Mother Superior in the history of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart, entered the sitting room. “Emma, it’s so good to see you again. I’m sorry it’s under such difficult circumstances.”
“I am, too. I know this is a difficult time for you and the sisters.”
Pain flickered in Mother Natalie’s pale green eyes. She held a doctorate in art history and had the mind, the sensibility and the dedication to run a small but active religious order. In her early sixties, she’d been a sister for more than two-thirds of her life.
Her gray hair was cut short, and she wore a simple gray tunic and skirt, black stockings and shoes, her profession cross and ring signifying that she’d made her final vows.
“Nonetheless, welcome, Emma,” she said. “I wanted to speak with you yesterday, but the police wouldn’t allow it until they’d finished interviewing us all. By then you were gone. How are you this morning? The detectives said you weren’t injured.”
“I wasn’t. I’m fine. I only wish I could have done more yesterday.”
“We all do.” Mother Natalie glanced out at the flower garden, the bright colors of the coneflowers, tall phlox and black-eyed Susans a contrast to the somber mood inside the motherhouse. “Of course, we’re
