a good trip, then.”
He ambled off down Beacon Street. When she returned to the drawing room, Keira checked with Colm. “How much did my cottage painting go for?”
“Ten thousand.”
She couldn’t hide her surprise. “Dollars?”
“Yes, dollars, Keira. It was four times the highest bid. Simon Cahill bought it. Do you know him?”
“No, I just met him tonight. What about you?”
“I talked with him for all of thirty seconds. Well, he must want to support the conference.”
“He must. I’m grateful for his generosity.”
“As am I,” Colm said.
Keira said good-night and headed for the stairs up to her apartment, amazed at how Simon had managed to get under her skin in such a short time.
It had to be because of the intensity of the past few hours. What on earth did they have in common?
She’d be back to normal by morning, finishing up her packing and heading to the airport by evening. At least she wasn’t going to Ireland by way of London; there was no risk they’d be sitting next to each other on the same flight.
It was a long way across the Atlantic.
Chapter 5
Boston Public Garden
Boston, Massachusetts
10:00 p.m., EDT
June 17
Abigail Browning paced on the sidewalk along the edge of the man-made pond where the two college students had discovered the body of Victor Sarakis, a fifty-year-old resident of Cambridge who apparently, even according to the initial take of the medical examiner, had drowned in about two feet of water.
Normally, Abigail found the Public Garden a soothing, pleasant place to be, with its graceful Victorian walks and statues, its formal flower beds and labeled trees, its mini suspension bridge over the curving pond. Technically, it was a botanical garden—a refuge in the heart of the city of Boston.
Tonight, it was the scene of a bizarre, as yet unexplained death. Police lights and the garden’s own Victorian-looking lamps illuminated the scene as detectives, patrol officers, crime scene technicians and reporters did their work. By tomorrow morning, there would be virtually no sign of what had gone on here tonight. The swan boats, a popular Public Garden attraction for over a century, could resume their graceful tour of the shallow water.
Abigail stopped pacing, grateful, at least, that she’d worn flats to tonight’s reception. Trees, flowers and grass were still dripping from the downpour. Most likely, it had been raining, and raining hard, when Victor Sarakis ended up in the water. The medical examiner had already removed the body for an autopsy. Anything was possible. Heart attack, stroke, an unfortunate slip in the heavy rain.
Pushed, tripped, hit on the back of the head.
Abigail wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions.
She glanced sideways at Bob O’Reilly, who’d decided, on his own, to interview the two students. Reinterview, Abigail thought, irritated. The responding officers had talked to the students. She’d talked to them. Now Bob was talking to them. For no good reason, either, except that he was a senior detective with decades of experience on her and presumably knew what he was doing. But she wished he’d go back up to Beacon Street and listen to his daughter play Irish music.
The students—summer engineering students from the Midwest—looked worn out. They could have gone back to their dorm a long time ago—they just didn’t.
They’d told Bob the same story, about cutting through the Public Garden from a bookstore on Newbury Street, hoping to beat the storm and get to a friend’s apartment on Cambridge Street. When the skies opened up on them, they debated going back to the bookstore or pushing on to their friend’s place.
Then they’d spotted a body in the pond.
“You could tell he was dead by looking at him?” Bob gave them one of his trademark skeptical snorts. “How?”
“I don’t know,” the thinner of the two students said. He had a scraggly beard and was shivering as his wet clothes dried in the breeze. “It was obvious.”
“He didn’t look like he’d been in the water that long,” his friend said. He was meatier, and he’d gotten just as wet, but he wasn’t shivering.
“Long enough,” Bob said.
The students didn’t respond.
“You didn’t see him before you noticed him in the pond?” Bob asked.
They shook their heads. They’d answered the same question before, maybe twice already. Abigail knew she’d asked it.
Bob gave them a thoughtful look. “How do you like BU?”
The skinny student didn’t hide his surprise—and maybe a touch of annoyance—at the personal question as well as his friend did. “What?”
“My daughter goes there. Music major.”
“We don’t know any music majors,” the meaty kid said quickly.
Abigail bit her tongue at the exchange, but Bob didn’t mention Fiona by name and finally told the students to go on back to their dorms. This time, they didn’t hesitate.
Bob turned to her. His red hair had frizzed up in the humidity and rain, and his freckles stood out on his pale skin. “You look like you want to smack me.”
“It’s a thought.”
He obviously didn’t care. She’d never met anyone with a thicker hide. She owned a triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, with him and a third detective, an arrangement that for the most part worked out well, but tonight, for the first time, she could see the potential for complications.
“Press is all over this one,” Bob said, nodding to a camera crew. “Some rich guy from Cambridge tripping on his shoelaces and drowning in the Public Garden swan pond.”
“We don’t know he’s rich, and, actually, it’s called the lagoon.”
“Lagoon? Lagoon reminds me of Gilligan’s Island. Why don’t they just call it a pond?”
“Maybe it’s a Victorian thing.” Abigail ran both her hands through her short, dark curls, noticing wet spots where water had dropped onto her head from leaves of the nearby shade trees. “And Mr. Sarakis was wearing loafers. No laces to trip over.”
“Figure of speech.”
Abigail said nothing.
“This is a straightforward death investigation, Abigail. Guy running in the rain slips or trips and goes flying, hits his head on the concrete, falls into the drink and drowns.
