LITMIR.BIZ

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miss ‘em, too,” Dec admitted. “I miss the way Ma would read to us before she tucked us into bed. Haven’t slept right since we came here.”

      Ian crawled up the ladder to the top of the mow and plopped down next to Marcus. A few seconds later, Dec joined them. They sat on the wide plank floor, their legs dangling over the edge.

      “It’s pretty cool up here,” Dec commented.

      “Nice animals,” Ian added, pointing to the menagerie lined up against the wall. “Is that what you do up here? Carve those little animals?”

      Marcus nodded. Though he’d always considered this spot his private retreat, it was nice to have his brothers paying attention to him for once. They usually didn’t want anything to do with him. “I miss her smile,” Marcus murmured.

      Dec and Ian nodded, and they all sat silently, staring down into the barn. “I know a secret,” Marcus ventured.

      Dec turned to look at him. “You do not.”

      “I do, I do,” Marcus insisted. “I found a treasure map.”

      “You’re full of shite!” Ian declared. “Where?”

      Marcus hesitated. He’d hoped to find the treasure himself. He’d been studying the map for months and couldn’t figure it out, so he’d already resigned himself to asking for help. Between the three of them, they could figure it out.

      “If we find the treasure, we split it three ways,” Marcus said. He spit on his palm and held it out. “Swear.”

      Dec quickly shook his brother’s hand. “I swear on my mother’s—” He stopped suddenly. “I swear,” he murmured.

      Ian wasn’t so quick to join in the deal. Finally he shrugged and added his promise. With that, Marcus scrambled to his feet and crossed the plank floor to the far wall. Ian and Declan followed him and waited as he brushed aside a small pile of hay.

      “Here,” Marcus said, pointing to a cubbyhole in the stone wall. Tucked inside was a yellowed piece of paper, rolled tightly and secured with a leather string. From the string dangled a small gold medallion with an odd inscription embossed into it.

      “What’s that?” Dec asked.

      Marcus held up the medallion. “It’s very old. I think it’s a charm, like for luck. Or maybe it’s magic.” He unwound the medallion from the paper and showed it to his brothers, then smoothed the map out on the floor so they could all read it.

      The two older boys bent down to study the pencil drawing. Dec reached out and touched a mark on the map. “X marks the spot,” he said, his voice filled with disbelief. “Do you think it’s pirates?”

      “Could be,” Ian said.

      “Maybe there’s gold,” Marcus said, “or jewels. Enough so we could buy plane tickets to go back home.”

      Ian studied the medallion. “Maybe this is a clue, too. It’s in some kind of different language.”

      “Maybe it’s Irish,” Dec suggested.

      Ian gave him a shove. “Jaysus, Dec, you are a smart lad.”

      “We need to keep this a secret,” Dec said. “We can’t tell anyone, not even Nana.” Dec wrapped the medallion around the paper and tucked it back into its hiding spot. “We’ll come back later to study it.”

      They all crawled down from the haymow. Ian slipped his arm around Marcus’s shoulders as they walked to the door. Marcus leaned into him, desperate for any reassurance that he still had a family.

      “You’re a clever lad, Marky,” Ian said.

      Marcus smiled. “If I were to ask Nana real nice, I bet she’d take us to see Aliens.”

      Ian chuckled, and Dec reached out to ruffle Marcus’s hair. “Now there’s an idea,” Ian said. “Pretty damn smart for a seven-year-old.”

      “Eight,” Marcus corrected.

      “Yeah, right,” Ian replied. “I guess you’re a big guy now. Just like us.”

      A wide grin broke across Marcus’s face. They were brothers and no matter what happened along the way, that would never change. Maybe now that he was eight, they would forget that he was the baby of the family. “I’m smart enough to know a treasure map when I see one,” he said.

      “That you are, Marky,” his brothers said. “That you are.”

      1

      “DO YOU EVER WONDER whether they’re worth it? Women, I mean.”

      Marcus Quinn glanced up from the bucket of varnish he was stirring to see a gloomy expression cloud his brother Ian’s face. “I don’t know,” he replied with a slight shrug.

      “I guess I can’t imagine what it would be like without them,” Ian said. “They’re nice to look at and they smell good. And sex … well, sex wouldn’t be the same without them.” He sank back into the battered couch, staring at his beer bottle as he scraped at the label with his thumbnail. “It just seems like it never gets anywhere. I remember the first girl I kissed like it was yesterday. And since then my life has gone straight to hell. You can’t do with ‘em and you can’t do without ‘em.”

      A chuckle echoed in the stillness of the boathouse, and they both looked over at Declan, who sat amidst the awls and chisels on Marcus’s workbench, his legs dangling. “I remember that day. You looked like you were about to lose your lunch all over her shoes.”

      “You weren’t even there,” Ian challenged.

      “I was,” Dec replied. “Me and my mates used to watch you guys all the time. We were trying to pick up tips. The older lads were so smooth with the ladies. Except you, of course.”

      “Hell, you get French kissed when you’re twelve years old and see if you can handle the shock,” Ian snapped back.

      Dec jumped down from the workbench and tossed his empty beer bottle in the rubbish, then strolled to the small refrigerator in the corner to fetch another. “She was a flah little scrubber all right,” he said, thickening the Irish accent that still colored the Quinn brothers’ voices. “By the time Alicia Dooley got around to you, she’d already kissed half the boys in your form at school. She even let a boy feel her up for a bag of crisps and a candy bar.”

      Ian’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t.”

      Dec twisted the cap from the beer and took a long swig. “I was supposed to refuse? She was thirteen. And she had the nicest knobs at St. Clement’s. I’d have been off my nut not to take advantage of a deal like that. Besides, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

      Ian turned to Marcus, sending him an inquiring look, but Marcus shook his head. “Don’t look at me.”

      “By the time Marky was old enough to have those thoughts, Alicia had got herself knocked up by Jimmy Farley and closed up her little schoolyard enterprise,” Dec explained.

      A comfortable silence descended over the boathouse. The Friday-night ritual between Marcus and Ian and Declan had begun. Usually they’d meet for a few beers, sometimes at a pub, sometimes at Ian’s place in town and sometimes in the old boathouse at their father’s boatyard. They’d catch up with the week’s events, the talk centering on work or sports. But occasionally they talked about women.

      Marcus grabbed the bucket of varnish and climbed the ladder he’d propped up against his newest project, a twenty-one-foot wooden-hulled sloop that had been commissioned by a Newport billionaire for his son’s sixteenth birthday. He’d been designing and building boats for three years now, working out of the old boathouse and living upstairs in a loft that was half studio and half apartment.

      “Considering the number of women we’ve collectively been with, I wouldn’t be

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