“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?”
She sighed. “It’s hard not to be.”
She laughed unexpectedly, and Finian found himself laughing, too. As they walked back along the steep hillside, staying close to the trees to avoid the incoming tide, he realized he was noticing the beauty of his surroundings more than his sense of loss and the presence of the dead.
They came to the near-vertical steps back up to the cemetery, and he paused. “The right man for you won’t care that you were a novice for a time, Emma. It’s part of who you are. The right man will see you for yourself.”
“Maybe there is no right man, Father.”
He had no answer for her.
She brushed against the branches of a holly. “I need to focus on figuring out what’s going on. Do you want more time here, or can you come with me?”
“I’ll meet you on the terrace of the Park Hotel in an hour.”
“If you don’t,” Emma said, “I’ll find you. Understood?”
Finian smiled, relaxing for the first time since his arrival in Ireland. “Yes, Agent Sharpe.”
She smiled, too. “Call me Emma,” she said.
“I’m Fin or Finian.”
She started up the steep steps. “All right, Fin. I’ll meet you at the Park. Don’t be late.”
Finian suspected Colin wouldn’t be far behind her and decided to wait for the tide to come a little closer before he returned to the graveyard on the hill above.
CHAPTER 24
COLIN WAITED IN THE SHADE AMONG THE HEAD-STONES of the Irish dead. He stood next to a small family plot in the far corner of the old cemetery and watched Emma slip back out through the gate. She hadn’t come there by car. She must have walked from the village, or parked at the luxury hotel that bordered the graveyard.
He wanted to talk to Bracken first.
He had gathered the facts on his priest friend. Even if he was late, he was thorough. Finian Bracken was thirty-nine years old. He and his fraternal twin, Declan, were the eldest of five Bracken siblings. They had three younger sisters. Seventeen years ago, the brothers had pooled their resources—limited as they were—and borrowed from anyone who’d lend them money, bought an abandoned distillery near Killarney and started Bracken Distillers.
Finian had married at twenty-four. His wife, Sally, was a marketing whiz who’d helped Bracken Distillers make its mark in the competitive whiskey business. Declan married later, shortly after the deaths
