The Whisper. Carla Neggers

headed back out to the gate, picked up his stuff and unlocked his car, sinking into the driver’s seat. He’d have no problem readjusting to driving on the right. He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. He looked as if he’d flown on the wing of the plane instead of in an aisle seat. He needed a good night’s sleep.

      Where? Should he take Lizzie Rush up on her offer to put him up at her family’s five-star Boston hotel—the one where Sophie Malone used to work?

      “Might as well,” he said aloud, and started the car.

      7

      Boston, Massachusetts

       S ophie’s iPhone jingled, signaling an incoming text message. She’d texted Damian when she’d landed in Boston. She checked her screen as she emerged from her subway stop onto Boston Common. Her brother’s response was about what she’d expected: Nothing new. Go dig in the dirt.

      She smiled. The Malones were known for not mincing words, Damian especially.

      After the long flight, she welcomed the walk up to Beacon Hill. The narrow, familiar streets and black-shuttered town houses helped her to shake off the odd feeling that she was out of her element, on strange and unpredictable ground. She’d gone to college in Boston. She had friends there. It wasn’t as if she’d just landed in a foreign country or a city where she didn’t know anyone.

      She descended steep, uneven stone steps to a black iron gate between two town houses. Since giving up her apartment in Cork, she’d felt uprooted, but unlike Scoop Wisdom and his detective friends, her homelessness was by choice and finances.