The Burns Enigma (Burns! Mystery 6)

By Erin O'Quinn

When Burns walks into that good night in The Unicorn’s Secret, how will Thomas cope with the rest of his bleak existence? Is there a way these two lost souls can still find each other?

Turn the clock forward...from the day before today, to the present. A tough cop and a reclusive civilian discover that an old crime and a new murder are connected. Worse, the common denominator is one of them.

Thomas Fitzgerald and a “new” lover are in the shadow of a criminal, one who has set his mind on brutal revenge.

The first five Burns! Mysteries tiptoed to the brink of the paranormal and finally teetered over the edge. What will happen in this mystery, as then and now and tomorrow start to merge? The enigma begins with Burns...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin O'Quinn
• Release date: Jul 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310940194

Erin O'Quinn

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she's met.Erin has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also historical fantasy for all ages.

Book preview

The Burns Enigma

Burns! Mystery 6

Erin O’Quinn

Copyright © 2016 Erin O ’ Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN: 9781310940194

First electronic edition published by New Dawn Press

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover Design by Erin O’Quinn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author ’ s imagination or are used fictitiously; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

WARNING: This writing contains explicit sexual descriptions and is intended for a mature audience over the age of 18.

Dedication

As always, to Robert Burns, the one and eternal.

Foreword

This novella deals with the fluid concept called time. The action itself follows moments after the previous mystery, The Unicorn’s Secret . And yet in a sense—in that day before today—it’s entirely possible that days and months, even lifetimes, have been lived, and are still being experienced. You may read this present tale as a standalone, because I always try to ensure that each story make sense by itself. And yet, both this mystery and its prequel…and its sequel…. lie together, like lovers.

Thank you for choosing to continue the love song of Thomas and Burns.

Erin O’Quinn

July 2016

I ntroduction

When Burns walks into that good night in The Unicorn’s Secret , how will Thomas cope with the rest of his bleak existence? Is there a way these two lost souls can still find each other?

Turn the clock forward…from the day before today, to the present. A tough cop and a reclusive civilian discover that an old crime and a new murder are connected. Worse, the common denominator is one of them.

Thomas Fitzgerald and a new lover are in the shadow of a criminal, one who has set his mind on brutal revenge.

The first five Burns! Mysteries tiptoed to the brink of the paranormal and finally teetered over the edge. What will happen in this mystery, as then and now and tomorrow start to merge? The enigma begins, and ends, with Burns…

Chapter One

______________________

Turning and Turning

Burns had long ago discarded his first name. The surname was sore thumb enough, sticking out and begging people to ask the same questions, with the inevitable smirk. Will you show me your poetry? Married how many times? Do you have umpteen children?

His father, rest his soul, had named him, but his mother had sung to him. And when she sang, her lullabies were always murmured to a certain wee bairn…to a special name he kept on a shelf deep inside his crusty heart.

He’d thought of her in some way every day for the last 28 years, since his second birthday, the day she left and never returned. Father had joined her a decade later.

And three weeks ago was Randolph’s turn. The only people he’d ever loved were now motes of dust in his entropic universe. A few lines from Yeats swirled around the vortices in his brain.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

He slid behind the wheel of his leased car, the one designed to take him places very fast, and slipped the fluid gear straight into second then quickly into third. His large gabled house near Edinburgh Castle was close enough to his office that only rarely could he shift into fourth before reaching its familiar cobbled, narrow street.

It had been a long time since he’d looked forward to easing between crisp sheets on his bed. These days, the linens were soiled with sweat, and worse. He really should stop chasing away the cleaning staff. The idea of home had come to mean a place of dreaded loneliness instead of welcome solitude, and he seemed to be wallowing in it since Randolph left.

But tonight he drove with an odd sense of ease. Not once did he flout the posted speed markers. He was thinking about the call.

The conversation turned over and over in his mind.

I—what if we meet somewhere? I’m in Dundee. But I could be at the Bide-A-Wee rest stop this afternoon, about four I think. On the A-92. Do you know the place?

Aye. It’s one I’ve never rested at.

An Irish whiskey would taste damn good.

And I should drive for ninety minutes why?

Be-because we need to meet.

That voice, somehow familiar, tickled and teased his memory. The deep syllables with musical rests in between…the lilt and fall of the accent…the tone that invited intimacy even while keeping a shy aloofness…

Over the years he’d given his business card to hundreds of people. It seemed everyone wanted some bloody thing restored: a piece of furniture, a family heirloom, a decaying manuscript. His expertise in history and art had kept the money rolling in, from hand-picked clients with large bank accounts. So lately he’d been much more circumspect about giving his cell number to anyone who asked.

Why would he have left his card with a bloody Irishman, one with hardly any manners at all? He grinned for the second time that evening and thumbed the remote before pulling his car into the lockup next to his house.

He meant to find out.

~oOo~

Since Randolph had died, the entropy in his old house had increased exponentially. Burns found a clean tumbler somewhere and poured a Drambuie. He absently toed off his shoes and dropped his suit pants where he stood at the liquor cabinet. Kicking the trousers out of the way, he padded down the long hall to the bedroom, flicked off the lamp, and sat on the edge of his rumpled bed.

The room seemed to move around him, plagued by moon shadows. A full moon tonight. The sign of good fortune. He lifted his glass.

To another day.

He drank, not slowly enough, tasting the oak-and-spice on his tongue and welcoming the burn in his throat, all the way to the pit of his stomach.

It had been a