Unmasked

by Ingrid Weaver

  She held out her hand. “My car keys are in the briefcase,” she said.

  He stopped at the rear bumper of her car, dropped the briefcase to the ground and grabbed her arm with his left hand. “Damn, not again!”

  “What—”

  He pulled her back to his chest and looped his right arm in front of her shoulders. “Hey!” he yelled, turning his head toward the kiosk. “Wake up!”

  The attendant didn’t stir. Through the corner of her eye Charlotte could see Desmond’s motionless form silhouetted against the glass, but she didn’t turn her head. She couldn’t. Once again she pressed into Jackson’s embrace, frozen in shock, and stared at the destruction in front of her.

  Every window in her car had been shattered. Crumbs of broken safety glass sparkled from the dashboard and the seats like drifts of blue-tinted sequins. The upholstery had been slashed to ribbons, baring springs and spilling stuffing. A thin, long-bladed knife, like the one that had been driven into her desk the day before, was embedded in the top of the driver’s seat headrest.

  And trailing from the handle of the knife like some macabre decoration was a string of Mardi Gras beads that had been fashioned into a noose.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JACKSON PRESSED HIS head next to hers. His warmth steadied her, enveloping her in his strength. “Deep breaths, Charlie.” His lips brushed her ear. “You’re okay.”

  Charlotte breathed hard through her nose, shoving back the urge to scream. Somehow the beads were more frightening than the knife. To shape something harmless, something that should have been fun, into a threat was just…obscene.

  “Do you have your phone?” he asked.

  “In my pocket.”

  Still keeping his arm around her shoulders, Jackson patted the front of her suit jacket with his free hand. “I need you to call 911 for me.” He slipped the phone from her pocket and held it up. “I’m going to take a look at that attendant, okay?”

  She fumbled to take her phone, tearing her gaze away from her car to look at the kiosk. The young man on the stool inside still hadn’t stirred. “Go ahead. I—”

  “Charlotte? Jackson? Is everything all right?”

  At the call, Charlotte looked toward the street. Her mother’s car was idling at the entrance to the lot, the interior light on and the driver’s door ajar. Anne Marchand was rounding the hood, her expression troubled. As soon as she caught sight of Charlotte’s face, she broke into a jog and headed toward her daughter.

  Charlotte pulled away from Jackson, concern for her mother overriding everything else. “Mama, I’m fine! Don’t run! Please!”

  But as usual, Anne ignored Charlotte’s caution and covered the distance between them like a woman half her age. “I was just coming home and I saw you both here—” Her gaze went to the car. “Oh, no! What happened?”

  “Someone broke my windshield, that’s all.” She hooked her mother’s arm and tried to turn her away from the mess. “I’m calling the police,” she said, thumbing 911 into her phone with her free hand.

  Jackson paused only long enough to scrutinize Anne’s face, then squeezed her shoulder and backed away. “Her color’s good, Charlotte,” he said, “and she’s not out of breath. So don’t worry.”

  Anne whipped her gaze to Jackson. “Jackson Bailey, don’t you start treating me like an invalid, too. It’s bad enough that my daughter thinks I’m spun sugar.”

  He didn’t take time to reply, turning away from them and loping toward the kiosk. By the time he stepped inside, Charlotte had the emergency operator on the line. While she was giving the location of the parking lot, she watched Jackson try to rouse the attendant.

  “What happened to Desmond?” Anne asked.

  Charlotte could see the gleam of blood on the attendant’s forehead. She told the operator to send an ambulance as well as the police, then put away her phone and took her mother by the shoulders. “There’s nothing you can do, Mama,” she said. “It might be best if you go home.”

  “I’m fine, Charlotte. I wish you wouldn’t fuss so…” Anne pressed her hand to her mouth, her eyes widening as she returned her gaze to the car. “Is that a knife?”

  “Mama—”

  “Mon Dieu!” She shrugged off Charlotte’s hold and leaned over to take a closer look at the interior. “And beads? Why in the world would anyone do that?”

  Charlotte tried not to moan in frustration. The last thing she wanted to do was cause her mother more worry. She strove for a calm tone. “You know how it is at Mardi Gras. Some people have too much to drink and do foolish things.”

  “But this is so…gruesome.”

  “The police will handle it, Mama.”

  As if on cue, the sound of a siren rose above the traces of music from the other side of the block. Charlotte could see Jackson pressing what looked like a handkerchief to Desmond’s forehead with his good hand, evidently doing what he could in spite of his handicap. With relief she noticed that the young man had regained consciousness and was moving on his own.

  “It’s horrible.” Anne crossed her arms and rubbed her hands briskly over her sleeves as if she felt a chill. “I know the city has its problems, but it seems as if our family is seeing far more than our share of crime lately.”

  Charlotte tried to keep her thoughts from showing on her face, but her mother’s comment set off alarms in her head. Detective Fergusson had said something similar the day before. They had been experiencing far more problems than was reasonable. This incident of vandalism was obviously deliberate and had targeted her personally, like the last one. But what about the earlier troubles?

  It had been all she could do just to get from one day to the next. What if all their troubles hadn’t been simply bad luck and coincidence?

  She looked at the shadowed street. Just minutes ago the darkness had felt intimate. Now it felt threatening, as if someone was out there watching…

  She stooped to pick up the briefcase Jackson had dropped. “I’m going to walk you home, Mama. There’s nothing you can do here— Oh!” The briefcase latch must have been damaged when it hit the pavement. The bag sprang open as soon as Charlotte tried to lift it, spilling papers across the ground. She gathered them mechanically, barely looking at them, until a long white envelope caught her eye. She paused to study it and saw that her mother’s name was scrawled across the front in black ink.

  A knot of ice tightened her stomach. Charlotte knew with complete certainty that she hadn’t put this envelope in her briefcase herself.

  The last time she’d seen it had been the previous morning, when Dan Corbin had tried to push it into her hands.

  MIKE BLOUNT LEANED back into the seat cushions and drummed his fingers against the armrest. Lights from the police car that squeezed past on his left flashed through the tinted windows of the limousine. The vehicle’s armor plating muffled most of the noise from the siren, but Mike nevertheless felt an unpleasant rush at the sound.

  Richard Corbin craned his neck to watch the cruiser turn down the street toward the parking lot. He sat beside his brother in the seat that faced the back, his leg jerking up and down as his heel thumped rhythmically against the floor. Trashing the Marchand woman’s car had excited him—he hadn’t been able to keep still yet.

  By contrast, Dan stared out the window, following the police car’s progress. “Are you sure you delivered our message, Luc?”

  Mike turned his head to look at the man who sat beside him and waited for his reply. Carter had been off balance since he’d seen Mike in the lobby. That had been one of the reasons behind his surprise visit—keeping people off balance made them easier to manage.

  “The purchase agreement is in Charlotte’s briefcase,” Carter replied.

  “Excellent,” Mike said. “If they don’t understand their position by now, they will soon.”

  Carter tipped his head toward the retreating cruiser. “If the Marchands can put the pieces together, so can the police.”

  “Don’t worry about the police,” Mike
said. “They won’t be a factor.”

  “You have to keep your cool, Luc,” Dan warned him. “The cops still don’t have anything to tie us to the Marchands’ problems. They can speculate all they want, but there’s no direct evidence that would stand up in court.”

  Richard interrupted his twitching to point at Carter. “You better hope the cops don’t come looking, because if they do, you’ll be the first one they’ll notice.”

  A muscle jumped in Carter’s cheek. “It would help if you quit showing up here. We can’t be seen together or the Marchands will stop trusting me.”

  “Yes,” Mike said. “I hear you’ve made yourself indispensable. That’s good. The Marchands wouldn’t keep someone around who is no longer of any value to them.” He paused deliberately. “Neither would I.”

  Carter picked at the crease in his right pant leg. “What do we do next?”

  Mike looked past Carter to the far side of the street, where the lights of the Hotel Marchand glowed majestically. With the wrought-iron balconies that stretched over the sidewalk and the hanging pots full of greenery it was a classy place, a jewel of the French Quarter. Its reputation was as flawless as its appearance.

  And once the hotel was his, he would turn it into a gold mine. Not only was it the perfect location to expand his gambling operation, it would attract the kind of clientele who liked their hookers in a higher income bracket. No more would Mike need to use his syrup company for cover. He would be presiding over one of the most prestigious addresses in the Quarter, rubbing shoulders with the city’s elite…and he’d be smiling all the way to his favorite Cayman bank.

  “Next?” he repeated. “That depends on how quickly the Marchands accept the Corbins’ generous offer.”

  Richard snickered. “They’ll be sorry they waited. The price already went down.”

  “You need to give them a chance to respond before we stage anything else,” Carter said. “They’re not going to react well to intimidation.”

  “Are you telling me how to conduct my business, Luc?” Mike asked, his voice dangerously soft.

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Good.” Mike flipped open the control panel that was built into his armrest and pressed a button. The door beside Carter unlocked with a soft click. “You should get back to work before someone notices your absence.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll be in touch when we need you again.”

  Carter reached for the door handle a little too slowly in Mike’s opinion. Narrowing his eyes, he watched until the man disappeared into the hotel, then signaled his driver to move off.

  The Marchands might be foolish enough to trust Carter, but Mike didn’t. He would leave him in place for now, though. The concierge’s position on the inside was still of value to him. That idiot Richard had the right idea: if something went wrong with the next phase of the plan, it would be Carter who would take the fall.

  CHARLOTTE PULLED THE blanket around her shoulders and picked up her coffee cup, listening to the familiar sounds of the hotel awakening around her. A gray dawn rain pattered against the window of her mother’s living room, lending a sense of timelessness to the scene. Although Anne was the only one who currently lived here, Charlotte could feel the presence of the rest of the family.

  Sipping her coffee, Charlotte moved her gaze over the framed snapshots that her mother had placed around the room. There was Grand-mère Celeste, her chin lifted regally, the impact of her patrician features undiminished in spite of her eighty-four years. On the entry table was a snapshot of Anne with her brother, Pierre, the uncle Charlotte had never met. He’d been a troublemaker in his youth, and the uncompromising Celeste had ordered him out of their home by his eighteenth birthday. Yet Anne still loved him and never had given up hoping she would see him again.

  She moved toward the mantel, where she could see her father’s bighearted smile. Remy was frozen in time, holding his arms out for baby Melanie to toddle across the lobby carpet. Charlotte looked at the next photo and could almost hear Sylvie’s laughter in the courtyard as she chased the bubbles that Renee blew from a plastic wand. And she could still feel the pride in her mother’s gaze as she straightened Charlotte’s graduation cap. As Jackson had said, there were memories in these walls, as well as so much love.

  She tightened her grip on the coffee cup and took an unladylike but fortifying gulp. There was no way she was going to surrender this place, especially not to a pair of vultures like the Corbins. She couldn’t. This hotel was her parents’ legacy. And it was her life.

  But it wasn’t only her life that was involved, was it?

  The suspicions that had taken root in the parking lot yesterday had grown into certainty over the course of the night. She should have seen it before. Yet sensible, responsible Charlotte wasn’t given to paranoia any more than she was given to flights of fancy. If there was a rational explanation for something, she would find it. The idea of a deliberate plot against the hotel had seemed too far-fetched to consider.

  Yet at what point did rationalization become denial?

  The attempted carjacking her mother had fallen victim to was unlikely to have been random. The hit-and-run that Melanie had been involved in the month before couldn’t have been an accident. She was sure of that now. And regardless of what Detective Fergusson claimed, Charlotte suspected faulty wiring hadn’t caused this week’s fire, either.

  Then there were all those problems that had eaten into the hotel’s profits. Taken separately, the incidents could be explained away. But once she pulled back to look at the big picture, the pattern that emerged was frightening.

  Worse, it was escalating.

  Charlotte set her coffee cup on the mantel, braced her fists beside it and regarded the snapshots once more. She’d sheltered her family from the full truth of how grim their finances were, but if she sheltered them from this truth, their ignorance could put them in danger.

  Her phone trilled, breaking the hush of the rain-dimmed room. Charlotte pushed away from the mantel and lunged for the chair where she’d left her clothes. She took the phone from her suit jacket before the second ring.

  “Hi. Did I wake you?”

  Jackson’s voice, so steady and familiar, brought his presence into the room as easily as the photographs had brought her family. “No, I’m on my second coffee,” she replied.

  “How’s Anne doing?”

  Charlotte glanced down the hall to make sure the door to her mother’s bedroom was still closed, then moved over to sit on the sofa where she’d spent the night and tucked the blanket around her shoulders. “Fine. Annoyed with my fussing over her health but happy for my company.”

  “Did you tell her your suspicions about the Corbins yet?”

  Charlotte pressed her free hand to her temple. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “Never have.”

  “I remember. And, yes, I’m going to tell her. I need to tell my sisters, too. We have to decide how to handle this together.”

  “Want to hear what I think?”

  “That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”

  His low laugh warmed her more than the coffee had. “I called you because I figured phoning would be safer than showing up on your doorstep at this hour. You never were a morning person.”

  She sighed. “And you were always disgustingly cheerful. You have no idea how many times I was tempted to heave my schoolbooks at your head.”

  “Why do you think I insisted on carrying them for you?”

  “How did you get my cell number anyway?”

  “Melanie gave it to me when I went down to the kitchen.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Stealing pastry.” He sounded as if he were chewing. “It’s not as good as your papa’s was, but it’s close. Want some?”

  No matter how much she tried to remind herself that the past was over, it was far too tempting to slip into the old, comfortable pattern. She and Jackson had spent hours on the pho
ne like this. They used to be able to talk about nothing as easily as they had shared their innermost thoughts.

  She slid down on the sofa until her head rested against the arm. “Weren’t you about to let me know what you think?”

  “Right.” His voice sobered. “I realize you’re concerned about Anne’s heart condition. You’d probably feel better if I were there to keep an eye on her when you tell her about the Corbins’ threats.”

  “Jackson…”

  “Before you say the hotel isn’t my business, remember I was with you when we found the Corbins’ handiwork in your office and your car. We spoke to the police together, so I’m already involved.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Charlotte, let me help you.”

  It might have been due to fatigue or because she could hear echoes of the boy who’d been her best friend in the voice of this man. Whatever the reason, Jackson’s softly spoken offer stole through her defenses.

  Pride made her want to refuse, but she forced herself to think logically. Jackson was already involved. And having someone with medical training nearby during the upcoming meeting would indeed ease her worry about causing her mother more stress. In order to keep the hotel, Charlotte could use all the help she could get. “I can’t lose this place, Jackson.”

  “I understand.”

  From someone else the phrase would have been a meaningless platitude, but not from Jackson. Charlotte knew that he understood what she was going through on a level that no one else could. “We can’t lock the shutters and barricade ourselves in here, either, or the hotel would go out of business for sure. We need to make this Mardi Gras a success.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “And I’m certainly not going to run scared from a pair of thugs, no matter what they try.”

  “I know you wouldn’t.”

  “But I don’t have the right to ask my family to take the same risk.”

  “If your family is anything like the way I remember,” Jackson said, “you won’t need to ask.”