The Whisper. Carla Neggers

but she knew from experience that it could handle rough seas.

      She spotted Tim by a post and waved to him. He was a tall, burly, Irish fisherman with a bushy, sand-colored beard and emerald-green eyes. He glanced in her direction, and even at a distance, she heard him groan. She could hardly blame him, given his unwitting involvement in her own strange experience on the Irish coast a year ago—months before Keira Sullivan’s encounter with a serial killer.

      Whispers in the dark. Blood-soaked branches. Celtic artifacts gone missing.

      A woman—me, Sophie thought—left for dead in a cold, dank cave.

      Suppressing a shudder, she made her way onto the concrete pier. Tim had managed to avoid her for months, but he wouldn’t today. She moved fast, determined to get to him before he could jump into his boat and be off.

      When she reached him, she made a stab at being conversational. “Hey, Tim, it’s good to see you.” She pointed up at the fading rainbow. “Did you notice the rainbow just now?”

      “If you want me to take you to chase a pot of gold, the answer is no.”

      “I’m not chasing anything.”

      “You’re always chasing something.” He yanked on a thick rope with his callused hands and didn’t look at her as he spoke in his heavy Kerry accent. “How are you, Sophie?”

      “Doing great.” It was close enough to the truth. “I gave up my apartment in Cork and moved into our family house in Kenmare. My parents and sister will be here later today. I’ve been here two weeks. I thought I’d run into you by now.”

      “Ah-huh.”

      “Have you been seeing to it I didn’t?”

      “Just doing my work.”

      “I’ve been back and forth to Cork and Dublin a fair amount. My father’s family is originally from Kenmare. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?”

      “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