“Let me get the key and show you. It’ll be easier than trying to explain.” Sister Joan stepped off the walk onto the lush, wet grass, still very green late in the season, and looked back at Emma. “I want to thank you for not bringing a weapon onto the grounds.”

Emma made no comment about the .38 tucked under the hem of her jeans. She’d left her nine-millimeter Sig Sauer locked in its case in her car outside the convent’s main gate but had never considered going completely unarmed.

Without waiting for a response, Sister Joan followed the fence into a half dozen mature

evergreens. The evergreens would open into a beautiful garden Mother Superior Sarah Jane Linden, the foundress of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart, had started herself more than sixty years ago in a clearing on a rocky ledge above a horseshoe-shaped cove. The sisters had added to it over the years—Emma herself had planted a pear tree—but the design remained essentially the one Mother Linden, who’d died almost twenty years ago, had envisioned.

As she lost sight of Sister Joan in the fog and trees, Emma stayed close to the tall gate. Even the breeze drifting through the evergreens and the taste of the salt in the damp air called up the longings of the woman she’d been—the possibilities of the woman she’d never become.

She pushed them aside and concentrated on the present. The morning fog, rain and wind would have attracted passing boats into the protected cove, one of the well-known “hurricane holes” on the Maine coast.

Watching guys on the boats when she was supposed to be in deep reflection and contemplation had been an early clue she wasn’t cut out to be a nun.

Sister Joan, honest and straightforward to a fault, had always known. “You’re an art detective, Emma. You’re a Sharpe. Be who you are.”

Emma touched a fingertip to a raindrop on Saint Francis’s shoulder. The statue was the work of Mother Linden, an accomplished artist who’d have considered the absent tail feathers part of its charm as it aged.

The Sisters of the Joyful Heart was a tiny religious order, independently funded and self-sufficient. The twenty or so sisters grew their own fruits and vegetables and baked their own bread, but they also ran a shop and studio in the nearby village of Heron’s Cove—Emma’s hometown—and were skilled in art restoration, conservation and education. During the summer and early fall, the convent held retreats for art educators and conservators, as well as people who just wanted to learn how to protect family treasures. Various sisters were dispatched to Catholic schools throughout the region as art teachers. Hope, joy and love were central to their work and to their identity as women and religious sisters.