The Secret Chord: The Virtuosic Spy - Book 2
Read The Secret Chord: The Virtuosic Spy - Book 2 Online
Authors: Kathryn Guare
Copyright © 2013 Kathryn Guare
PO Box 1175
Montpelier, VT 05601
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:
978-0-9911893-3-5
ISBN:
0991189337
The "Secret Sits" from the book THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright ©1942 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
Book 1 in The Virtuosic Spy Series:
“An intense adrenaline-pumping plot…Guare has masterfully crafted a plot-driven book with a deep character-study. In one word: Wow.”-
Compulsion Reads, Irresistible Collection
“A brilliantly written piece of storytelling…” -
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“A well-written debut novel…full of action and suspense…a great read.” -
The Kindle Book Review
For
Eleanor and Tom,
who inspired the setting,
and graciously let me linger in it.
Prologue
April, 2004
Dingle Peninsula, Ireland
T
HE
HOUSE
WAS
STILL
FAR
FROM
EMPTY
. A
PART
FROM
a few personal items sent to hired storage it remained intact, the fate of its contents left for others to judge. He was grateful for the illusion of permanence the furnishings offered, helping sustain the pretense that he had something left to lose.
He considered it another small mercy—one he'd not always appreciated—that they'd never been the sort of family that collected things. His mother, with her abiding air of transience, had eschewed the decorative bric-a-brac colonizing every surface of the typical Irish household. She was singular in this respect among others. Brigid McBride was the ultimate esoteric day-tripper, fluent in the geography of dimensions most never visited. She traveled light and gathered no souvenirs.
He remembered a particular period during his boyhood when her ways had seemed unbearably eccentric to him. Once, for a Christmas gift, he'd bought a cheap ceramic bird at a school jumble sale—a goldfinch, neck stretched in song, anatomy truncated by a clunky base encasing the area where its legs ought to have been. He presented the bauble with the half-formed hope of tickling some dormant gene, to nudge her into becoming someone more conventional, someone more like the mothers of his friends.
She made much of the gaudy little ornament, and so much of him for his thoughtfulness that he'd felt sheepish, and almost relieved when it quickly disappeared from view. A few weeks later he caught sight of the thing on her bedside table, nestled into a tiny bower of dried sage and hawthorn twigs. It should have looked hopelessly cloying and twee but it didn't. The painted eyes gleamed in the shadows, seeming to peer straight at him, and a heady energy had passed through him. Suddenly, he was everywhere and nowhere at once, like lying on his back and staring too hard at the sky. He sensed an unseen presence sizzling the air close around him and was frightened, then somehow knew he needn't be. It was the first time he'd experienced this pulsing aura but not the last, and it was the moment when he recognized how wrong it would be to try changing his mother.
So, it wasn't for any sentimental bits of rubbish Conor mourned, wandering back and forth through the house like a greedy ghost wanting to haunt all the rooms at once. It was for the aroma of its interior, every molecule saturated in decades of peat smoke, and for the ivy on its exterior walls rustling in tune with the ocean breeze, reflecting pieces of sunlight in its polished leaves. And for the land itself, arranged in parceled acres all around him. The unconditional love for a small patch of earth—and the desire to keep and hold it no matter how rocky, desolate or unforgiving—was the immutable obsession of his people. He'd thought to escape it at one time, but the land had captured him in the end.
In the growing darkness Conor drifted into the kitchen and registered the ice-blue glimmer of computer light leaking from the adjacent pantry-turned-office. Bending around the door he found his farm manager, Phillip Ryan, where he'd left him hours earlier. Conor opened the door a little wider.
"Jaysus, awfully late isn't it? I didn't know you were still here."
Phillip raised his eyes from the laptop, surveying him with the jaded stare that had grown habitual over the past week. "You look half-dead. Are you all right?"
"I'm okay. Just tired."
"I brought some lunch 'round hours ago. It's in the fridge—the only feckin' thing in the fridge, in fact. Eat before you fall over for Christ's sake."
"I'll have something later. Thanks, though." Conor smiled. "Next you'll be telling me I need a good dose of Bovril."
"Bovril's your only man for puttin' the life back into you." Phillip glanced up as though he might play along, but then gave a dismissive shrug of his broad shoulders and dropped his eyes back to the keyboard. "But go ahead and fall over, if you'd rather."
He'd turned up in the local pub more than five years earlier, a penitent émigré looking for re-entry, happy to absorb any insult to his Americanized accent if it led to a job. Conor was twenty-six at the time, grappling with his brother's disappearance and the chaos left behind for someone else to fix. He was in over his head and got talked into hiring Phillip. He wasn’t sure he even wanted a farm manager, but two weeks later Conor wondered how he would have survived without one. The two of them worked well together and their camaraderie had grown stronger over the years, a fellowship that helped him overcome the bitterness and confused anguish of his brother's desertion.
For that and so much more, he owed Phillip Ryan a great deal. Certainly he owed him a better ending than this. In selfish moments and in the face of his friend's new aloof distrust, Conor ached for confession but couldn't risk it. His secrets were not safe for sharing. Phillip couldn't understand—nor should he be expected to—so the sacrifice of a friendship became one more penance to absorb as he went about the business of ending things.
"That's it, then." Phillip shut the laptop and got to his feet, running a hand over his wiry rust-colored hair. "Thanks for letting me have it. I wiped it clean. Your stuff is all on the flash drive. You're flying out in the morning?"
"I am."
"Should I tell her you'll be there tomorrow, then? She wants to know."
"Oh…ehm, not tomorrow, no. Can you say about a week?"
"A week? Where are you—ah jayz, forget it." Phillip scowled. "I suppose I can tell her that."
"Thanks. What about you? Have you got something lined up, yet?"
"Yeah, they had a place open up on the ferry run over at Dunquin. Keep me going through the summer, I guess."
"Right, so." Conor paused before adding, "For what it's worth Pip, I hate this, too."
"I know you do. I see that much, anyway." Phillip's face softened into something approaching its old affection and he offered a parting handshake. "Look after yourself boss, and be careful, yeah? 'Be wide,' like they say. Be dog wide."
A
N
HOUR
BEFORE
dawn he walked to the barn one last time and stood in its doorway, staring through the shadows at the floor's rucked up layers of sawdust, waiting to see if he would weep. A breeze rumbled against the tin roof, sending an echo like a rolling drum into the empty space below.
Like a final farewell.
It had been his decision, and he'd needed it to happen quickly, but watching his birthright stripped almost to bedrock within a few days had torn something from him he'd never get back.
Conor turned away and headed back across the pasture, dry-eyed.
He was too damned tired to cry.
1
Hartsboro Bend, Vermont
F
ROM
THE
SOUTH
-
FACING
WINDOW
OF
HER
ATTIC
STUDIO
, K
ATE
Fitzpatrick surveyed a landscape that usually enchanted her and blew out a sigh. Yesterday, the first grass of spring had uncurled to stretch over the long rolling meadow below her house, but now only twenty-four hours later, the new blades lay stunned, smothered under a snowfall coating them like a layer of rock salt. She sensed their shock and disappointment as keenly as her own.
In the distance, the bowl-shaped surface of Lake Rembrandt was colorless, its thinning crust of blue ice again obscured by a winter that had long ago outworn its welcome.
Kate tossed her brush into a canning jar where it clattered against the others. A full complement of paint-free artist brushes. Stopping herself from sighing again, she gathered up the dark copper hair that fell around her face and let it drop behind her shoulders. A shadow caught the corner of her eye and she turned to the front window, which faced a dirt road that was falling short of even the lowest expectations for its Class 3 status. Already pot-holed by the sweep of winter plows, the road had thawed, rutted into impressively deep furrows . . . and then had frozen again.
Jared Percy was on its opposite side, head down and slump-shouldered, lumbering up the steep driveway toward the barn. After a full day's work on his own property the young farmer was on his way to milk her sixteen cows.
"I should go help him." Kate noted a habitual surge of guilt and indecision as soon as the words left her mouth. She tracked his weary progress to the top of the hill before turning back to her easel, but the room had grown cold and the blank canvas confronted her like an accusation. Surrendering, she crossed the floor at a trot, pulled the door shut on the ascetic chill of the artist's garret, and fled down to the more hospitable domain of the innkeeper.
The temperature rose as she descended to the first floor but Kate's mood remained low. The Rembrandt Inn was just starting the second month of its annual two-month closure, and an inn on hiatus projected a forlorn emptiness that didn't exist in one simply waiting for its next guests. She went looking for comfort in the kitchen and found while she'd been moping, her chef—with sleeves rolled up under a blue tartan jumper—had been making more productive use of the day.