Garrison stared at his grandfather. “I always knew you were a cold son of a bitch, but . . . murder? Didn’t know you had it in you.”
“He didn’t,” Cleary said distinctly. “When Paul showed him Lisbeth’s letter demanding the return of the pages, Father laughed. He said she could go to the cops for all of him, he would be dead before the lawyers sorted it out, and dead men don’t give a damn. But I did,” she said fiercely. “I’ve spent my life working to make the House of Warrick the leading auction house in the world. I wasn’t going to let some blackmailing old bitch ruin me!”
Warrick tilted his head and studied the woman who was connected to him by a brief sexual spasm that had occurred so long ago he couldn’t remember it. “You? You killed Lisbeth?”
“Paul did.” Cleary’s chin lifted proudly. “For me. Paul loved me. But you wouldn’t know about that kind of love, would you?”
“Neither would Paul,” Warrick said, disgusted. “Stupid female. Paul loved his own comfort. If Garrison had been the only way into the House of Warrick’s money, Paul would have fucked him rather than you. Probably had more fun of it, too.”
Shrieking, Cleary shot out of her chair and launched herself at her father with murder in her eyes. Garrison grabbed her and held her as gently as possible until her screams subsided into a shattered kind of silence.
“Get her out of here before she drools on something valuable,” Warrick said.
Garrison looked at his grandfather over his mother’s bent head. “Shut up. Just. Shut. Up. Too bad you weren’t on Paul’s kill list. You can’t die soon enough for me.”
Stunned into silence, Warrick watched while Garrison picked up his mother and carried her away from the man who never should have had children at all.
“Are you happy now that you’ve turned my grandson against me?” Warrick asked Dana bitterly. “But if you expect to prosecute anyone, forget it. You have your pound of flesh. I have a university full of psychiatrists who will be happy to swear that Cleary isn’t competent to stand trial.”
Dana and Niall exchanged looks. Dana nodded slightly.
Niall spoke for the first time. “We’re willing to let Paul Carson go to his grave as a murderer working with one hired hand, William Wallace. We even have a motive: he was protecting the House of Warrick’s reputation during the delicate sales negotiations between you and—”
“How did you know about that!” Warrick interrupted. “No one but—”
“When more than one person knows,” Niall cut in impatiently, “there’s no such thing as a secret. A lot of what you were selling was your reputation. Linking you to a trade in forgeries—much less the creation of those forgeries—would have killed the sale and left Cleary a much less wealthy woman. As Paul expected to marry Cleary as soon as you died, he had several million dollars’ worth of motive for murder.”
Warrick sat slowly, then nodded. “Makes more sense than her mewing about love.”
“In return for keeping your reputation intact,” Dana said, “you will agree to open your files so we can trace the missing pages from the Book of the Learned. You can put whatever face you want on it, but I would suggest you say that you have reason to suspect the pages are forgeries and you’re willing to buy them back for their most recent purchase price since the error was originally yours in identifying them as valid pages.”
Warrick grunted. “I’ll think about it.”
“Not good enough,” Dana said crisply. “You will agree now to help make the Book of the Learned whole or you won’t. There will be no waffling.”
Warrick’s mouth thinned until it disappeared into the grim lines of his face. “Agreed.” Then he pointed to Serena. “But if you think I’m going to do anything else to help that misbegotten bitch, you’re mistaken. I will never acknowledge her as my granddaughter. Never!”
Serena smiled with all the savagery of the last sorceress of Silverfells. “I will hold you to that.” Then she looked at Dana. “Get it in writing.”
Without another glance at her grandfather, Serena turned and walked out, carrying the Book of the Learned in her hands.
Chapter 73
LEUCADIA
WEDNESDAY EVENING
Serena sat at her loom, flanked by colorful yarns hanging from bobbins. Her unbound hair shifted and burned with each motion she made as she worked the heddles and threw the shuttle with tireless, timeless rhythms of her body. She worked as she had for the last two nights, in candlelight, with Erik reading aloud from the Book of the Learned.
The pattern that was growing under her deft hands was as old as the intertwined initials of E and S, and as new as the peace she felt each time she looked up and saw Erik watching her, smiling. She had been terrified that he would bleed to death before the paramedics came, but he had been right when he said that the wound wasn’t as bad as it appeared. The medics had muttered about ribs like steel plate and how lucky he was. Healthy, too.
He had healed with a speed that made Niall mumble about weird cloth and things that go bump in the night.
“Go on,” Serena said to Erik, her voice husky with memory.
“You sure you want the story to end?”
“I’m sure I want to know how it ends.”
He laughed. It caused a small twinge along his ribs, but only a small one. Whatever had been woven into that old cloth was better than penicillin. His wound had healed the way corn grew in Kansas—while you watched. He still wore the scarf wrapped around his ribs beneath his shirt. Every time he took it off, he started to hurt.
He took the hint and left the uncanny cloth in place.
“You’re going to torment me, aren’t you?” Serena said with an exaggerated pout. “You can read it and I can’t, so you’re going to make me beg.”
He looked at his beautiful fire-haired lover and felt an ache like time twisting through his gut. “Never.”
He began to read aloud.
Today the mists parted for me.
She waited within them, hair like fire, eyes like amethyst. When she saw her cloak held tenderly in my hand, the cloak brought to me by the daughter I never knew I had, she smiled despite the tears burning silver on her cheeks.
I held out my hand, asking.
She came to me, answering.
The crystal bells of Silverfells sang around us.
When Erik stopped reading, the silence in the room quivered with candle flames and the whisper of leaves of time turning and returning. Gently he closed the Book of the Learned.
“I’m glad they got past their unhappiness,” Serena said, putting aside her shuttle.
“More like pigheadedness,” he said dryly.
“That, too.” She sighed. “Think of it. She bore twins alone and raised them alone. She was last of an outlaw clan, protected only by uncanny mists that kept retreating farther inward each year when Erik the Learned went back to seek . . . What was it he sought, revenge?”
“I’m sure that’s what he told himself. He had enough pride for a regiment of men.”
“You don’t think he wanted revenge?”
“I think,” he said deliberately, sliding his arms around her, “that once he got his hands on his beautiful witch, revenge would have been the last thing on his mind. He spent those thirteen years of separation in living hell.”
“What about her?” Serena objected. “She hardly had an easy time of it.”
“At least she had children to love.” He bent and tasted her neck with deliberate intent.
She tilted her head to give him access to more skin. “And a lover whose memory was like a knife in her heart every time his smile flashed on his son’s face or his daughter’s eyes burned gold while she wove.”
“My point exactly.” Teeth nipped lightly. “Pigheaded. You’re not going to be like you’re ancestor, are you?”
“Are you saying I might be pigheaded?”
“Yeah.”
“So are you.”
“Yeah. What are we going to do about it?”
> Smiling, she looked over her shoulder at him. “Enjoy every bit of it while we look for the rest of the Book of the Learned.”
“Good idea. Any time limit? Even with Warrick cooperating, Cleary on meds, and Garrison back to being charming, it could take years to track everything.”
“No time limit.” She lifted her head proudly and looked him in the eye. “How about you?”
He drew in a slow breath. It was scented with spice and cloves, alive with overlapping colored shadows and the trembling song of crystal bells.
Silently they looked at each other, accepting what neither could understand.
He had sun-bright hair cut so that it would fit beneath a war helmet. His cloak floated on a breeze, revealing the chain mail hauberk beneath. A peregrine falcon rode his left arm. At his feet lay a staghound the size of a pony. He was watching a woman weave on a loom that was taller than a man. Her unbound hair tumbled in a fiery torrent down her back to her knees. She was looking over her shoulder at him with eyes the color of woodland violets. Instead of castle walls, they were surrounded by a rain-drenched forest, as though nothing on earth existed but these two people caught in the mists of time.
“I want a thousand years,” Erik said. “Minimum. We’ve earned at least that much.”
Excerpt from Dangerous Refuge
ONE
THERE WAS NO doubt about it. He was dead.
Shaye Townsend swallowed hard, breathed carefully through her clenched teeth, and swallowed again. The sick feeling subsided. The grief didn’t. Although it wasn’t the first time she had seen death, it was the first time she had known the person who died.
Lorne Davis was lying on his back, lean and dark and motionless as the black shoulders of the mountains holding up the western sky. The air had a bite that whispered of summer’s end. The first sunlight of day was caressing the highest icy peaks, but there was no warmth yet. The sky was clear, endless.
No need to feel for a pulse, she thought as tears blurred her vision. No need to cry, either. He died the way he wanted to, boots on, working the land he loved more than anything else.
The deeply slanted sidelight revealed no sign of a struggle around the body or any flailing pain before the end. Death had come quickly. It had taken the scavengers a while longer, but they, too, had arrived. If Lorne had been wearing a hat, it had vanished in the restless wind. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, either. It must have been warm when he died.
Whenever that had been.
The rising sun showed more than Shaye wanted to see, more than enough for her to guess that Lorne had spent at least a day in the open. Probably more.
I can’t even cover his ruined face.
The local deputies would lecture her if she went any closer to the body than she was now. So would her volunteer search-and-rescue unit. Her training had been very clear: If there was no chance of life, the body was to be left undisturbed until the authorities arrived.
He’ll never laugh and call me a skinny city blonde again. Never serve me coffee that would etch glass and silently dare me to ask for sugar or cream. Never stand in the dusty yard next to me and watch night flow like a lover up the mountain slopes.
Roosters crowed from the direction of the barn, telling the hens it was time to get out and scratch for a living. Lorne had enjoyed the busy chickens, and Dingo, his half-wild dog, had known they were off-limits for eating or chasing.
Tears streaked Shaye’s cheeks as she fumbled in her fleece jacket pocket for her phone. The lining of the pocket felt almost hot against her cool fingers.
Her movement sent a rustling through the nearby sagebrush, where the animals that had scattered at her appearance waited for her to leave. Magpies and crows had come with the increasing light. They settled on the rails of the ancient corral, watching, waiting. Two vultures flapped harshly overhead, fighting gravity for a chance to feed.
It was early for the big birds to be flying. Usually they waited for the sun to heat the air enough to raise thermals. Then the vultures would rise on the warming air and do lazy cartwheels, waiting for something to die.
They must have been here yesterday, knew food was waiting for them today.
She choked off an irrational need to scream at the scavengers. They were what they were—nature’s cleanup crew. Nothing personal.
His last words to me were a furious phone message. He died cursing me.
A slow wind blew down from the mountains. It dried the tears on shaye’s cheeks as it dried everything else it touched. The country on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains was arid, unforgiving, and beautiful in a spare, open way.
She punched in three numbers on her cell phone, waited, and then realized there was no cell service where she was. She thought of the backpack of search-and-rescue basics she always kept in her bronco. The flashlight, first-aid kit, bear spray, and other necessary tools wouldn’t help her now, but the SAR beacon could.
I could use the locator, she thought. It’s close and has a radio. I wouldn’t have to leave Lorne.
But the beacon was only to be used in a life-or-death emergency. This was urgent, yet it wasn’t an emergency. Death didn’t care about a few minutes or a thousand eons.
She muttered something unhappy, waved her arms wildly to drive the waiting scavengers farther back, and retreated toward the weathered barn across the dusty ranch yard. By some quirk of geography, the barn was one of the few places on the ranch that had any cell connection. Lorne had been disgusted when she had discovered it. He had prided himself on needing nothing from civilization—and giving nothing in return.
The only exception to his daily solitude was Dingo, the tawny mutt with erect ears, curled tail, and dainty feet. Lorne had allowed the dog to share first the edges of his life, then his small home. Like Lorne himself, Dingo was aloof with people, independent, but had a reluctant need for companionship.
Both mutt and man had softened toward Shaye in the last months. In Dingo’s case it was the treats she brought him. In lorne’s it was the slow understanding that she shared his love for the land in all its enduring, unforgiving grandeur.
A few days. A few days gone and she came back to this.
And all because her boss had never met any paperwork she couldn’t trash.
Shaye turned away and walked quickly toward the barn. The dawn wind flexed, ruffling the feathers of the bald-headed black birds sidling closer to lorne’s body. She spun around, shouted, waved her arms, and threw rocks. The birds grudgingly retreated. She thought about pulling out the bear spray and blasting them with concentrated capsicum, but that was anger and revulsion talking. Rocks would work better.
Watching them, she touched the three numbers on her cell phone and waited, automatically turning into the wind so that her hair wouldn’t end up in her eyes. Even when she fussed and carefully pinned it up, some of the slippery stuff would always escape to tickle her ears and neck and get in her eyes and mouth.
After hearing Lorne’s message, she hadn’t taken the time for more than pulling her hair into a clasp at her nape. Now it was flying everywhere.
“911. What is the nature of the emergency?” asked a calm voice.
“A death,” Shaye said. Her voice was too hoarse. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I found a body.”
TWO
TANNER DAVIS HAD been driving since morning.
The news of Lorne’s death had been both surprising and inevitable. He was, after all, eighty-six and counting. The surprise came because it was always that way with death. Young or old, dirt farmer or descendant of great wealth, no one expected to die. Someday, sure, everyone dies. But today?
Even after years as a Los Angeles cop—the last twelve of them as a homicide detective—Tanner didn’t take death for granted.
He looked into the rearview mirror. Cobalt-blue eyes looked back. Hard eyes. Cop’s eyes. He didn’t have to see the rest of the package— black hair, dark stubble, angular lines, flat mouth—to know that he wouldn’t make a convincing s
anta Claus. He’d never looked pretty, and years as an L.A. Cop hadn’t added any warm-and-fuzzy charm to him.
A road sign told him that Refuge was the home of nine churches and four civic groups. If memory served, there were more than twice as many bars.
The sun was already behind the Sierras and the valley was filled with the radiant not-quite twilight he had loved in his youth. He drove through the center of town, a collection of low brick buildings where merchants served a mostly local clientele. Refuge was close enough to Carson City that people who were on their way to or from the state capital weren’t likely to stop. Refuge had never been a destination for anyone but the ranchers who settled the south end of the valley and the merchants, preachers, and pimps who served them.
He turned his Ford—a former police car—up Emery, past single farmhouses where lights were coming on and barns were set in acres of ragged green grass, fenced by barbed wire or wood corrals. From the top of telephone poles, hawks and small falcons watched for a last chance at a warm meal before real darkness came. Without even thinking about it, he knew the birds’ names and hunting habits, legacy of summers at Lorne’s old house near Glory springs.
Some of the ranches and farms sported signs on the fences promoting future development, something newer, bigger, better than the way of life that had settled in for more than a hundred-year stay. The smell of wet graze and pastureland flowed through the open window across his face. The water’s scent had a subtle mineral tang beneath it. Drinkable, but hard as the rocks it flowed through.
The jagged, blue-black line of the Sierra Nevada Mountains loomed large as Emery cut into Ridgeline. For all that he could see, the valley might well have been lost in time. Only the addition of satellite dishes, both large and small, and slightly more modern pickup trucks, disturbed the illusion of having stepped back into the world of his childhood memories.
There were a few more houses than there had been, but nothing like the sprawl of L.A. Most of the newer construction was for people who wanted a ski or gambling getaway but didn’t want to pay city prices. The rest was sage and pasture, willows and pines.
Moving Target Page 39
