Secret Sisters

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  But the glossy trappings of his successful fund concealed a secret, one that was growing more dangerous by the day. From the outside, Egan still appeared to be the master of his universe, but she knew the truth. The great moneymaking engine that he had constructed twenty years ago had begun to wind down. Egan had privately blamed the problems on the volatile nature of the global economy—the unpredictability of oil, the financial troubles in the Eurozone, the surging influence of China.

  She listened to his excuses, but she knew the truth. She wondered when his investors would start to get nervous. There had been some turnover among the top clients recently, but most were still satisfied with their monthly statements. After all, those statements still glowed with the luster of gold. But she wondered how long Egan could continue to dazzle his audience. Successful hedge funds often followed a predictable trajectory—fast out of the gate, astonishing results for a time, and then a crash-and-burn.

  But if there was one thing she knew for certain about Egan, it was that he was a survivor.

  She walked partway into the gloom-filled room.

  “Travis and Patricia have agreed to join us for dinner this evening.”

  Egan turned away from the gray vista. “And Xavier?”

  With the ease of long habit she suppressed the little whisper of despair that always fluttered, wraithlike, at the edge of her awareness. Xavier was better now. Stable.

  “His assistant phoned with regrets a short time ago. The campaign team is due in from Seattle this afternoon. He wants to take them out for drinks and a meal at a local restaurant. Something about giving them a taste of life here on the island so that they can convey a sense of Travis’s small-town upbringing to the media.”

  Egan grunted. “For the most part Travis and Xavier were raised in Seattle.”

  “Yes.”

  The silence stretched taut between them. She had stopped loving Egan years ago when she realized that the womanizing would never cease. She had finally accepted the reality of their relationship. He had never truly loved her. He had coveted her beauty and her family’s money. She had brought him both, but she had made the mistake of giving him her heart, as well.

  Whatever they’d had back at the start of their marriage had long since evaporated. But they were forever bound by their two sons. Xavier and Travis had inherited so many of their father’s gifts—his striking looks, his blue eyes, and his talent for mesmerizing an audience.

  But beneath the surface they were very different men. It was Travis who held the promise of a brilliant future in politics. He was preparing for his first run for office, and Louisa knew that meant Egan now had to deal with the one thing he was not good at—accepting the fact that he was not going to get something he wanted very badly.

  He had long been obsessed with the vision of one of his sons becoming a U.S. senator and eventually taking the White House. Egan’s problem was that he had always believed it was Xavier who was destined to wield great political power, not Travis. For years he had convinced himself that Xavier was his true heir—the strong one; the son who was capable of the ruthlessness it took to survive in the tough worlds of finance and politics. But it had become clear that Xavier’s flaws ran too deep. It was Travis who was headed for the Oval Office.

  Egan turned back to the window. “I talked to Travis about the wisdom of making Xavier his campaign manager.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The same thing he told you.”

  Louisa’s stomach tightened in a knot of anguish. “‘Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.’”

  “In this case, keep a certain member of your family where you can watch him.” Egan snorted softly. “He may be right. Travis is weak in some ways, but he is not naïve—at least not when it comes to Xavier.”

  “Xavier has been stable for some time now,” Louisa said. But she knew it was the mother in her speaking, not the realist. “The medication they started him on at the Institute last year has been working well, and managing Travis’s campaign seems to have given him direction and focus. Travis says Xavier is doing an excellent job. He knows how to charm the media.”

  Egan clasped his hands behind his back. “We both know it’s just a matter of time before there’s another . . . incident. We’ve managed to keep things under control in the past, but we had the advantage of privacy. That’s gone now. If Xavier has another break he could destroy Travis’s election chances. That can’t be allowed to happen. There is too much at stake.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I’ve been considering our options. There aren’t many. But Xavier has been demanding access to his inheritance. He wants to prove that he has a talent for the hedge fund business. I’m thinking of granting his request. Let him set up his own fund with his name on the wall. That may satisfy him and occupy his attention, at least long enough to ensure that Travis gets elected.”

  Hope flickered somewhere deep inside Louisa. It had been so long since she had experienced the sensation, she almost failed to recognize it.

  “That is . . . a brilliant idea,” she said slowly, thinking it through. “It just might work.”

  Egan’s jaw jerked once. “For a while.”

  “Yes. For a while.”

  Nothing could cure the darkness in Xavier. They both knew it, just as they both knew that it was only a matter of time before the fire inside their golden boy exploded into flames again—possibly quite literally.

  Louisa turned to leave. “I have an appointment with the event planner.”

  “I heard that Edith Chase’s granddaughter is in town,” Egan said over his shoulder. “What was the girl’s name? Margaret? Mary?”

  “Madeline,” Louisa said. “Madeline Chase.”

  “I understand that she was the one who found the body of the old man who was taking care of the Aurora Point property.”

  Louisa paused in the doorway. “That’s true. There’s a rumor going around that now that Edith Chase is gone, Madeline will sell the hotel. Evidently she’s brought in a consultant to help her evaluate her options.”

  “If she has any sense, she’ll sell,” Egan said. “Never could understand why Edith hung on to that old hotel.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “This settles one question,” Jack said. He studied the gaping hole in the wall of room 209. Chunks of broken wallboard and insulation littered the floor. “Looks like whoever murdered Tom Lomax has the briefcase.”

  “I was afraid that was what Tom meant when he said he had failed.” Madeline shook her head. “And we have no clue what was inside. We don’t even know if it’s still dangerous. After all, a lot can happen in eighteen years. Maybe whatever was in the briefcase is harmless now.”

  Jack looked at her. She stood in the center of the dusty room, bundled up against the damp chill of the rainy day. The collar of her black parka was pulled up around her neck, framing her expressive face and arresting eyes. There was an edgy tension about her. He knew that in spite of everything that had happened, she had been clinging to the possibility that the killer had not found the briefcase. He wanted to reassure her, but offering false hope was not part of his job description. Besides, he was no good at faking unfounded optimism.

  “Someone murdered Lomax for the briefcase,” he said. “Trust me, whatever is inside is still dangerous.”

  She flinched a little at the unvarnished statement of fact, but she dipped her chin in a single crisp nod.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got some daylight left. Time to take a look around Lomax’s place. You say he lived in one of the cottages on the grounds?”

  “Yes, I’ll show you.” She turned away from the ripped wall and went toward the door. “We don’t have to worry about the daylight. The electricity was turned off in the main hotel buildings but not at Tom’s cottage.”

 
He followed her, circling a sagging bed draped in several hundred generations of spiderwebs. With the exception of the damaged wall, the hotel room looked as if it had been caught in a time warp. A shroud of dust lay over everything. The layers of grime on the window were so thick that very little daylight made it through the glass.

  But the floor had been swept. Recently.

  Nevertheless, he took out his penlight, switched it on, and aimed the beam at the floor. There was one faint set of prints.

  “Huh.”

  Madeline halted. “What is it?”

  “Whoever wore those boots was here within the past few days,” he said. “After the floor was swept.”

  “Tom was murdered yesterday.”

  “If those are his footprints then he came up here recently, presumably to retrieve the briefcase.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that after all this time?”

  “Let’s go take a look at Lomax’s cottage.”

  They left room 209 and went down the hallway toward the main staircase. With most of the room doors closed and no electricity, it was a trek made in deep shadows. The only natural illumination was the weak daylight coming through the windows at opposite ends of the corridor. Jack aimed the beam of the flashlight at one of the rusted metal numbers on a nearby door.

  “Did the person who pursued you yesterday seem to know his or her way around in here?” he asked.

  Madeline considered briefly. “Somewhat. The intruder knew enough to follow me into the hallway beneath the lobby stairs. But whoever it was didn’t know about the service stairs in the kitchen. I could hear him stumbling around, opening and closing doors before he found the service stairs. That’s what bought me enough time to get into one of the rooms and lock the door.”

  “Just wondering how long the killer had been hanging around the hotel.”

  “Long enough to know about the service road in the woods behind the place,” Madeline said grimly. “That’s where the car was left.”

  “Why was your grandmother so afraid of the local cops eighteen years ago?”

  “She wasn’t, at least not that I know of, not before she opened the suitcase. But whatever she found in the briefcase convinced her that she couldn’t call the police.” Madeline paused a beat. “There is one thing I do know, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Egan Webster pretty much owned this island eighteen years ago, including the local cops. Money was rolling in off his hedge fund and he used it to buy anything and everyone who was for sale.”

  “So it’s possible that Edith was afraid that the contents of the briefcase were connected to the Webster family and she assumed the Websters would not have wanted the material made public.”

  “That’s been one of my working theories over the years. But there are other possibilities. What if it was a shipment of drugs or cash connected to a violent cartel or the mob or terrorists? But every time I tried to talk to Grandma about it, she just said, Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  They left the main building through a back door and walked through what had once been a gracious garden. The area looked like a scene from a dark fairy tale now, Jack thought. The foliage was wildly overgrown and choked with forbidding weeds. It was as if nature were trying to reclaim what had once been a civilized part of the island.

  Madeline led the way through a narrow opening in a sagging trellis clogged with half-dead vines.

  On the other side of the trellis Jack saw a dilapidated wooden structure with a low roof. The small windows were murky with the evidence of decades of weathering. No one had bothered to clean them in a very long time. A garage door was set into one wall. At the far end of the building there was another, regular door secured with a padlock.

  The maintenance building, Jack thought. He glanced at Madeline. She did not look at the building.

  The maintenance building, he decided. No doubt about it.

  He had to work to suppress the icy fury that threatened to sweep through him. He reminded himself that Edith Chase and Tom Lomax had killed Madeline’s attacker.

  “That’s Tom’s place,” she said, indicating the first cottage in a row of small, rustic structures. “It’s the only one that isn’t boarded up.”

  Years ago the quaint little houses perched on the bluff above the rocky beach would have appeared cozy and welcoming to guests, Jack decided. But now they were just more elements in the bleak fairy tale of Aurora Point.

  Behind the cottages was a thick stand of trees. He caught a glimpse of a gazebo.

  “Is that—?” he asked. He did not finish the question.

  “Yes.”

  Madeline did not look at the gazebo, just as she had not looked at the maintenance building.

  She went around to the front of the cottage and climbed the steps. When she tried the doorknob, it turned easily. She paused on the threshold.

  “Brace yourself,” she said. “Eighteen years ago Tom was something of a hoarder. Also, he had a passion for photography. He never threw any of his photos away.”

  “I’ve been warned,” Jack said.

  Madeline opened the door and moved into the shadows of the tiny front room. She flipped a switch. Somewhere in the shadows a dim light came on. A dank, musty miasma swirled amid the accumulated clutter of decades.

  “Ugh.” Madeline wrinkled her nose.

  Jack glanced at her. “Don’t worry, it’s not the kind of smell you get when there’s a dead body around.”

  She flicked him a quick, startled glance. “Good to know. Thanks for that cheery observation. Should I ask where you learned about the difference between the smell of a hoarder’s house and a dead body?”

  “I used to do some consulting work for the FBI, remember?”

  “Grandma mentioned it. I got the impression you didn’t profile folks engaged in art fraud or Internet gambling.”

  “Sometimes. But not often enough. The company I was with specialized in behavioral analysis of other kinds of bad guys.”

  Madeline whistled soundlessly. “Serial killers.”

  “I changed career paths a while back.”

  “I can certainly understand why.”

  He looked mildly surprised. “Thanks. Not everyone does understand.”

  “They watch too much TV.” She swept a hand out to indicate the interior of the cottage. “What does all your experience tell you about this place?”

  Jack surveyed the interior. “I’d say Lomax’s hoarding tendencies did not improve in the past eighteen years. And I see what you mean about the photography thing.”

  The cottage had clearly been furnished with leftovers from the hotel—a shabby armchair covered in worn leather, a floor lamp with a torn and badly yellowed shade, odd chunks of carpeting from assorted eras, and curtains decorated with faded floral prints.

  The room was crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of a life lived on the fringe of paranoia. Crumbling, yellowed newspapers were piled high in various corners. Books and magazines were stacked everywhere. There were plastic containers filled with assorted lightbulbs and small batteries that were probably no longer viable. Boxes held frayed extension cords and small tools. What looked like a century’s worth of mail—bills, catalogs, and requests for charitable donations—overflowed old packing boxes.

  And everywhere there were photographs of all descriptions and every conceivable size—black-and-white, sepia toned, and full color. The subjects, as far as Jack could tell, were mostly Cooper Island scenes. There were dramatic shots of the northern lights over the island—brilliant images that captured the spectacle of waves of green and purple fire rippling across the night sky. Striking photos of fierce storms. Atmospheric scenes of the Aurora Point Hotel caught in various stages of renovation and decay.

  More than a dozen large prints had been framed and hung on the walls.

&n
bsp; “Those were his favorites,” Madeline explained, “the only ones he signed. He considered himself an artist. This was his own private gallery.”

  Only a few of the images featured human subjects, usually the same two people—young girls on the brink of womanhood. In some of the scenes they raced carelessly, wildly, across a rocky beach. Other images featured the pair in a more pensive mood, dreaming at the edge of the cliffs. In a few photographs they were silhouetted against sunsets and sunrises. But in every picture there were storm clouds gathering in the distance.

  The inescapable takeaway from every photo was the same. You knew that the innocence of girlhood would not last. Real life was bearing down on them in the form of a storm.

  Jack looked at Madeline. “You and Daphne?”

  “Yes.” A wistful smile curved her mouth. “Tom was a brilliant photographer, but he didn’t like to take pictures of people. Mostly he preferred landscapes. Grandma asked him to take some shots of Daphne and me so that we would have them to give to our children. He agreed. But in the end we left the island without them. I don’t think any of us wanted any reminders of Cooper Island or the hotel.”

  “Understandable.”

  Jack turned away from the pictures.

  “Doesn’t look like Tom ever threw anything away,” Madeline said.

  “He was paranoid. Seriously paranoid people are afraid to toss things into the trash. There’s always a chance that someone will find something that could be used against you—a bank account number or a compromising photo. You never know.”

  Madeline smiled faintly. “Sounds like you’ve dealt with the type on more than one occasion.”

  “Oh, yeah. My favorite kind of suspects. There’s always plenty of stuff to find.”