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.
CHAPTER 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.
