But Scoop was tuned in to people, and he said, “Fiona didn’t mean to leave you out. She says she normally doesn’t like family in the audience.”
“Scoop, forget it. It’s okay.” Bob felt lousy for letting a guy in stitches, on morphine, see him crack, even a little. “Did Abigail say anything to you about Fiona, Morrigan’s, the Rushes?”
“Not a word. Does she know, even? Fiona tells me things she doesn’t tell you two.”
“No kidding. Yeah, she knows.”
“Abigail was onto something and not talking.”
Bob grunted. “What else is new?”
“I can tell…Bob. Hell. What’s going on?” Scoop shifted position, which seemed to be a major effort. “Let me out of here.”
“The doctors’ll spring you as soon as you can walk without spilling blood all over the floor. Until then-”
But Scoop had already drifted off. Bob sat there, watching him sleep. He was used to bouncing ideas off Scoop and Abigail, and now he didn’t have either one of them.
Before he could get too pathetic, he drove to BPD headquarters in Roxbury. He’d pull himself together and work the investigations, see what his detectives had on Abigail, the bombs, the dead guy. The task force was set up in a conference room, with maps, computers, charts, timelines.
Nobody talked to him. He must have had that look.
He got Tom Yarborough over in a corner next to a table of stale coffee. “Don’t start on me,” Bob said. “Just listen. I need you to work on Norman Estabrook’s Boston connections.”
“The Rush family?”
Bob sighed. The guy was always a step ahead. “You’ve already started?”
“Just a toe in the water. I wonder what’d happen if we typed Harlan Rush into the system. He’s Lizzie Rush’s father. He’s a reprobate gambler in Las Vegas-except when he’s not.”
“Think the feds would storm the building if we get too close to him?”
“Maybe not the FBI.”
CIA. Terrific. More Washington types meddling in his investigation. “We’d get a visit by humorless spooks with big nasty handcuffs?”
“Cop or no cop, Lieutenant, I don’t want to piss off this guy. Harlan Rush is a player. He’s still in the game.”
Harlan’s daughter, Lizzie, was obviously a chip off the old block. “You’ve talked to him,” Bob said.
Yarborough nodded.
“Good work.”
“I’m not sure it gets us any closer to Abigail.”
Chapter 23
Near Kennebunkport, Maine
8:19 p.m., EDT
August 26
Lizzie took the stairs up to the wraparound deck of her small house built on the rocks near the mouth of the Kennebec River. The tide was going out, pleasure craft and working boats still making their way to the harbor. She let herself into her house-one main room with very little separation of space-and opened up the windows and doors, the evening breeze pouring in through the screens. She walked out to the deck and shut her eyes, listening to the sounds of the boats and the ocean at dusk.
The rambling house her grandfather Rush had built was two hundred yards up the rockbound shore. After an architect friend had walked through it with her, he’d sent her a book of matches in lieu of a plan for renovations. Lizzie loved Maine, but her father avoided it, just as he did Dublin and, to a lesser extent, Boston. “The water’s always too cold,” he’d say. But memories haunted him here, too. Nostalgia not just for what had been but what might have been.
Lizzie was ten when she’d first fantasized her father was a spy and fifteen when she knew he was one. He always deflected her questions without giving a direct answer, even as he taught her how to defend herself, how to spot a tail, shake a tail, do a dead drop-how to think in such terms.
Only when she went to Ireland herself was Lizzie certain that her mother hadn’t tripped on a cobblestone after all, and the circumstances of her death-his inability to stop it-were why her father had taught her how to jab her fingers into a man’s throat. “Don’t be bound by dogma,” he’d say. “Never mind niceties or rules when you’re in a fight for your life. Trust your instincts. Do what you have to do to get out alive.”
Lizzie opened her eyes, noticing a cormorant swooping low over the calm water. Her grandmother, famous for her frugality, had spent as much time as she could in Maine during her last years. She liked her crumbling house the way it was, liked the memories it conjured up for her.
“Sitting here by myself, the memories are like a warm, fuzzy blanket,” she’d told her only granddaughter. But that was a rare display of sentimentality for Edna Whitcomb Rush, and in the next breath, she’d said, “Tear this place down when I’m gone. It’s the location I love.”
Lizzie had smiled. “It’s magical.”
“Ah, you have your mother’s romantic soul.”
“Do you believe she tripped on a cobblestone, Gran?”
It was a question Lizzie had asked before, but her grandmother only answered it then, at the very end of her long, good life. “I’ll ask her when I see her in heaven, Lizzie, but no. No, I never believed your mother simply tripped and fell. But,” her grandmother had continued, some of her old starch coming back into her voice, “I do believe that whatever happened to her, justice was rendered. Your father would have seen to that.”
“What was she like?”
“She was very much like you, Lizzie.”
The sound of a car pulled her out of her thoughts and drew her attention to the gravel driveway down to her left. She walked to the railing and leaned over as a familiar sedan pulled to a stop behind the one she’d borrowed from Martha Prescott.
Jeremiah’s car.
Jeremiah who now owed her, Lizzie thought as she watched Will Davenport get out on the driver’s side and look at the darkening horizon. She waited, but no one else appeared.
At least he’d come alone.
She remained on the deck, listening to his even footsteps on the stairs. When he came around to her, she put both hands on the back of an old Adirondack chair she’d collected from her grandmother’s house farther up the rocks. “You got here even faster than I anticipated.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“No. Not even a little.” It was true, she realized. “You’re more rugged looking up close. I can picture you humping over remote mountains with a heavy pack and a big gun.”
He smiled, walking toward her. “I see your imagination and flare for dramatics are at work again.”
“Ha. SAS and MI6 equal heavy pack and big gun.” She frowned. “Jeremiah told you where to find me? I have blabbermouth cousins.”
“Who adore you and whom you adore in return.”
“Serves me right for using them to run interference.”
But she saw the strain of the past day at the corners of his eyes as he squinted out at the Atlantic, seagulls crying in the distance, out of sight. “Is this your place, or does it belong to your family?”
“It’s mine. My great-grandfather Rush was a Maine fisherman. His son did well and married a Whitcomb from Boston, and he came back here and built a big-but not too big-house. I own it, too. No one else in the family wanted it after my grandmother died two years ago.”
Will turned and leaned against the railing, his back to the ocean, the evening breeze catching the ends of his hair. His eyes were more blue-green now, dark, observant. “Maybe they wanted you to have it.”
Lizzie dropped her hands from the chair and stood next to him on the railing, facing the water. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. My family-I love them all, Will.” She watched a worn lobster boat cruise toward the river harbor. “My parents planned to raise me here. Then my mother died, and my father-well, things changed.”
“Things always change.”
She glanced sideways at him. “How much do you know about me?”
That slight smile again. “Not nearly enough.”