The Whisper

“Along the way, yes.” His tone suggested that playing on their common Irish roots would have no effect on him.

“Taryn’s only staying for a night or two, but my folks will be here for at least a month.”

“You’re going back to Boston,” Tim said.

“Ah, so you have been keeping tabs on me.”

He glanced up at her. “Always.”

She grinned at him. “You could at least try to look disappointed. We’re friends, right?”

He let the thick rope go slack. “You’re a dangerous friend to have, Sophie.”

With the resurgent sunshine, she unzipped her jacket. “Yeah, well, you weren’t the one who spent a frightening night in an Irish cave.”

“Oh, no—no, I was the one who didn’t talk you out of spending a night alone on an island no bigger than my boat. I was the one who left you there.”

“The island is a lot bigger than your boat. Otherwise,” she added, trying to sound lighthearted, “you’d have found me faster than you did.”

“I was lucky to find you at all, never mind before you took your last breath.” He gripped the rope tight again but made no move to untie it and get out of there. Still, he regarded her with open suspicion. “I’m not taking you back there. Don’t ask me to.”

“I’m not asking. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to go back.” She fought off another involuntary shudder. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe one day.”

Or maybe not ever, but she wasn’t telling Tim that. Whether she was being stubborn or just had her pride, she didn’t want him to think she was afraid to return to the tiny island off the Iveragh coast where she’d encountered…she wasn’t sure what. She knew she’d almost died there.

“Do you still have nightmares?” he asked, less combative.

“Not as many. Do you?”

He grunted. “I never did have nightmares, but as you say, I wasn’t the one—”

“That’s right, you weren’t, and I’m glad of that.”

“I hear you finished your dissertation.”

She nodded. “It’s been signed, sealed, delivered, defended and approved.”

“So it’s Dr. Malone now, is it?” He seemed more relaxed, although still wary. “What will you be doing in Boston?”

“Mostly looking for a full-time job. I have a few things lined up that’ll help pay the rent in the meantime.”

Tim’s skepticism was almost palpable. “What else?” he asked.

Sophie looked out at the water, dark blue under the clearing early-afternoon sky. Tim O’Donovan was no fool. “Did you know a Boston police detective’s staying out on the Beara?”

“Sophie.” Tim gave a resigned sigh. “You went to see Keira Sullivan’s ruin, didn’t you?”

“It makes sense. I’m an archaeologist. I’ve crawled through literally hundreds of ruins over the past ten years.”

“This isn’t just another ruin. It’s where that Yank serial killer—” He stopped abruptly. “Ah, no. Sophie. Sophie, Sophie. You’re not thinking he was responsible for what happened to you. Don’t tell me that.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“Sophie.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. He’s in jail. He can’t hurt me or anyone else.”

“I never should have told you that story,” Tim said quietly.

Sophie understood. Over Guinness and Irish music one evening a year ago, he had transfixed her with a tale he’d heard from a long-dead uncle who had served as a priest in a small village on the Iveragh Peninsula across Kenmare Bay. A coastal monastery, Viking raids, a secret hoard of pagan Celtic artifacts—how could she have resisted? For centuries—at least according to Tim—the story had been closely held by the priests in the village. It was a tangle of fancy, history, mythology and tradition—with, she’d suspected, a large dose of Tim’s Guinness-buzzed Irish blarney.

“I was procrastinating,” she said to him now. “That’s why I started going out there. I was mentally exhausted, and I just wanted to go on a lark.”

“A shopping spree in Dublin wouldn’t have done the trick?”

“I never expected to find anything, or end up in a dark cave with spooky stuff happening around me. It wasn’t a dream, Tim. It wasn’t a hallucination.”

“You were knocked on the head.”

She sighed. She didn’t remember how she’d been rendered unconscious—whether she’d accidentally hit her head scrambling to hide, or whether whoever had been on the island with her had smacked her with a rock. When she’d come to, it was pitch dark, cold and silent in the cave.

Tim unknotted the rope automatically, as he had since he’d been a boy. There were seven O’Donovans. He was the third eldest. “My mother prays for you every night,” he said. “She’s afraid it was black magic at work, or dark fairies—nothing of this world, that’s for certain.”

“Thank your mother for me.”

“I try not to mention your name to her. I should never have told her what happened. She’s the only one who knows—”

“It’s okay, Tim.”

They’d set off a year ago on a warm, clear late-September morning—Sophie remembered how calm the bay was, how excited she was. She’d had her iPhone and everything she needed for less than twenty-four hours on her own. Tim had returned to pick her up the following morning. When she wasn’t at their rendezvous point, he’d set out on foot to look for her. At first he’d assumed she’d got herself sidetracked and was annoyed with her for delaying him. Then he’d found her backpack in a crevice near the cave. She remembered the panic in his voice when she’d heard him calling her, and the relief she’d felt knowing he was there and she would survive her ordeal.

Of course, he’d wanted to kill her himself when she’d crawled out of the cave.

He’d called the guards. By then, there was nothing for them to find. They believed, in spite of Sophie’s academic credentials, that what she claimed to have seen and heard was the product of a concussion, dehydration, adrenaline, a touch of hypothermia and no small amount of imagination. They’d made it clear they thought both she and Tim were nuts. She for going out there, no matter how experienced and well prepared, he for letting her talk him into leaving her alone overnight on the thimble of an island.

“How long are you going to stay mad at me?” Sophie asked Tim now.

“Until I’m explaining myself before St. Peter, should he have me.”

She smiled. “He’ll have you because the devil won’t.”

He grinned back at her, a glint of humor in his green eyes. “True enough. Don’t think I don’t know why you’re here, Sophie Malone. You want to know if anyone’s asked me about you, and the answer is no.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, trust me, I’d remember.”

“Keira Sullivan is romantically involved with an FBI agent—Simon Cahill—and her uncle’s a Boston homicide detective.”