by Jill Winters
***
Later, Nicole leaned against the kitchen counter, fiddling with the handle of her coffee cup, trying to gather together the threads of her mind.
Unsuccessful, she eventually looked up at Michael, who was watching her. He set down his Santa mug and crossed over to her. “So let me see if I understand this,” she began. "Either the man who came to see me at Tinsdale wasn't Abel Kelling, but rather someone pretending to be—because the real Abel Kelling was lying dead in my basement. Comforting thought, by the way. Or—more realistically—I'm mistaken about the identity of the dead man. After all, he was sort of...well...”
She stopped herself from saying “decayed” or something equally devastating—and yet at the same time, she couldn't bear to trivialize the shadows of what they'd seen by describing the deceased as “worse for wear.”
“Either way,” Michael pointed out, “we're dealing with one real Abel Kelling and one guy who looks a helluva lot like him. Right?”
“So I really haven't cleared anything up,” she admitted. “You know, it's so ironic. I was ready to pack my bags and leave that night I was grabbed on the beach—and at that point, I had no reason to assume I was still in any kind of danger. And now...I know I might be in serious danger yet going home is that last thing on my mind.” She searched his eyes with determination. “I have to find out the truth of all this, Michael. I’ve gone too far with this now to turn around and just try to forget everything.”
“I'll help you,” he said. “You know that.”
“One thing I know is that the man who showed up at Tinsdale was the same man who was at the reading of the will. At Cedric Davy's office, in Boston. Ugh, I'm so confused,” she said, burying her face in her hands.
“Me, too,” Michael agreed. “But no matter what, the guy in the basement—whether it was Abel or a look-alike—he was obviously here looking for something.”
Softly, she gasped. “You think he knew about the treasure?”
“It's possible. And if he knew about the treasure, well, who else might?”
“Oh my God, Michael—what are we gonna do?”
He folded her into one of his warm, strong hugs. “We'll do the only thing we can,” he said. “Find the treasure first.”
Chapter Forty-one
Usually Michael and Nicole slept well together, with her body curving perfectly into his, but tonight his arm was draped over her possessively, protectively. At some time in the night, they both awoke touching each other. She squirmed against him and he stirred back. With a hand on her abdomen, he pressed up against her. Heat rose between them, pure carnality, as Nicole made a soft moan and Michael dipped his fingers below the waistband of her panties and pulled them down. Moments later they were clinging to each other, tangled together in a sexual frenzy.
Eventually, she sighed, and her eyes drifted shut. Her breathing became rhythmic. Idly, Michael ran his fingers up and down her arm, unable to get back to sleep. His mind was wildly awake, darting from one theory to the next as to how to clean up the mess he had started.
When he was sure Nicole was deeply asleep, he moved quietly from her bed and into the hallway. The answer had to be in that library. With Nicole being a librarian and Nina Corday's obvious love of books herself—plus the fact that the library held so many paintings—well, it just made sense that the culmination of all this be somehow found in there. And wouldn't the library be the room Nicole would be most drawn to?
Uncomfortably, Michael acknowledged his own weakness. He was edgier now than he had been since this whole thing started. Because he cared too much about figuring this out. Before Nicole got hurt. Had the corpse in the basement really been a random case of natural causes? No way. Too coincidental, considering what Nina Corday had been hiding.
Michael might not know all the pieces yet, but now he had every reason to think the person running this job—whoever Lucius was reporting to—was dangerous.
Damn it, this was never what he'd wanted. He should've known better than to get mixed up with anything involving Craig Lucius. But at the time it had sounded like a perfect, even easy way to re-coup the money that Michael had cost Caleb. All he had to do was get inside the house using charm not force, find the Demberto painting of “a girl in a blue dress,” and take it. Done. Simple. A victimless crime.
Only not quite. Suddenly it was way too complicated.
At this point, if it weren't for Nicole, he'd cover his bets and go. Logic dictated that he get out now before the cops started to look into his background, before they discovered that none of the Michael Kings in Massachusetts was him.
What a mess.
Arturo Demberto had been a moderately successful painter at the turn of the last century. A “lost” work of his today could be worth around two million dollars, maybe more illegally, but Michael was not too involved in the art world and didn't care to be. His cut was supposed to be cash up front, and walk away. Whoever had tapped Lucius for this mission had somehow known that Nina Corday had come to possess the Demberto.
Obviously Michael had overestimated his own ability to turn the tables on Lucius. He thought he would come here and basically taking over this whole thing, on his terms, but he'd really been kidding himself. He'd never anticipated getting so close to Nicole, spending this much time with her. He'd never figured it would take him this long to find the hidden Demberto amid the other works in the house, or even under a bed, in a wall safe, something. Face it, he told himself now, you were thinking in goddamn clichés.
And now time was closing in and he still had no idea where the thing was. What if Nicole was on the verge of ending up like the guy in the basement? Balling up his fist, Michael felt tension tighten his very bones. No, he wouldn't let that happen.
Now he entered the library and flicked on the light. Not knowing where to look first. Not knowing how to look differently at things than he had been.
Who, in town, was working with Lucius? And would he be circulating among them tomorrow at the Harvest Parade? Was it the so-called handyman who hung around here all day? What about Zack Hyat, who seemed determined to interfere from the sidelines?
But how would any of them even know someone like Craig Lucius? How would they know if Nina Corday had come into possession of an original Demberto? Unless...could she have confided that fact? Was that it? Could whoever had orchestrated this operation have been a friend of hers?
Now Michael walked the perimeter of library, scanning the walls. He had already looked over the paintings. Could another painting fit behind the bookshelves? No—the brackets for the shelves were screwed right into the wall. What about hiding it behind the books? The height between each shelf might just accommodate that if the painting were laid on its side.
One by one, Michael took books off, balancing them in his arms, his muscles straining under the weight, pointed corners digging into his bare flesh, but he kept piling them in his clutch and looking for any signs of a painting, or even a safe or hidden compartment in the wall. With an impatient sigh, he came up empty and shoved the books back on the shelves, hearing them fall like bricks, and then realized he was being too noisy; he was going to bring Nicole out of bed.
Okay. Think.
He rubbed his forehead, pinching it with his fingers as he walked toward the fireplace. Resting one hand on the mantle, he looked at his own reflection in the stately mirror that hung there. Carefully, he lifted the mirror up at the bottom, pulling it away from the wall but not detaching it. No safe there, either. Gingerly, he set it back down.
Deep in contemplation now, he sighed and looked ahead, into the mirror, but not really focusing on his own reflection—and then he noticed something. He sharpened his gaze, as he continued looking into the mirror—and at the narrow oblong picture that was on the opposite wall. A framed black and white photograph of a lighthouse. It was straight behind him—or anyone—looking in this mirror.
Behind you.
He whipped around. With his blood pumping, he darted across the ro
om. Funny how he had dismissed this thing entirely when he had first surveyed the library. Because of its petite dimensions, he hadn't given it a second thought. Of course, that was before he realized that Nicole's aunt had left her niece an abundance of strange clues, all presumably leading her to the painting.
You'd never look twice at this thing, and yet, now Michael couldn't look away from it. Anxiously he reached for it, pulled it off its hooks and turned it over. With greedy fingers, he peeled back the brown backing, which was only loosely adhered on two sides.
In that familiar handwriting that Nicole had identified many times as her aunt's were the words: Go to a place for princesses. With his grip tightening on the frame, Michael thought, Finally, this was it.
***
Sleepily, Nicole rolled in her sheet, twisting her tee shirt up as she dreamed. She was dreaming of the beach, not the one outside her door, but a different one, a remote, imagined one, and she was there with Michael, and the beach was crowded and loud, and in her dream everyone was yelling about a shark in the water, but no one was getting out of the water, and then confused but feeling stuck in the surf herself, she turned and looked at Michael, who was standing on the shore. He wore a baseball cap and had no shirt on, and was squinting in the sun at her, and he smiled at her and put on a pair of sunglasses. And suddenly she was floating up to him, the water carrying her feet and up close it was like she saw his face for the first time—
She gasped awake.
In the darkness of the room, it took several moments for her mind to clear and for Nicole to realize where she was, that she was now awake. She could hear her own breathing, short and choppy—panicked.
She played the image back in her mind, arguing against it even as the sinking, certain déjà vu became worse with each replay. Michael wearing a cap and large tinted glasses—and the sudden recognition. She had seen him before. And not here in Chatham, but back in Boston.
He had been the man sitting alone in the restaurant. She had been out with her family. Got up to use the ladies’ room and dropped her phone. This was no dream—and that was real.
Technically she couldn’t swear with any certainty that transcended gut feelings or women’s intuition, but both of those were good enough for her. Suddenly she was convinced: it had been Michael at the restaurant that day. And if she was right, was she supposed to conclude that it was coincidence? Destiny?
Contrary to both those notions, Nicole now felt a terrible anxiety seize her chest. Inexplicably, she felt afraid, as she realized that Michael was not in the room with her, and she wasn’t sure what scared her more—him being there or not being there.
She didn’t know what to think, so her mind raced without direction. Her thoughts ran in frantic laps as she considered that perhaps her memory was deceiving her. Perhaps the uneasiness of everything up to now had taken over, because after all, hadn’t she gone from one person to the next as “suspicious” in her mind? Wasn’t Michael just the newest in a string of paranoid conclusions she had jumped to lately?
Yet, as much as Nicole wanted to believe that, and dismiss her concerns altogether, she couldn’t, because her paranoia, if that’s what this was, was suddenly on screeching alarm levels.
Just then she heard Michael coming up the steps. Her heart jumped into her throat as she slid deeper into the covers and turned her body, to pretend to be asleep.
“Sweetheart, wake up, wake up.”
With her heart beating rapidly, she decided to say nothing about what she’d remembered and to behave as normally as possible. She didn’t trust him now. But she didn’t trust her own judgment either. She was too confused and unsettled to be certain about anything.
“Nicole? Wake up.”
“Hmm?” she mumbled, trying to sound sleepy. She turned to Michael, who had just knelt on her side of the bed.
Their eyes locked.
Michael proceeded carefully.
There was no way he could wait for Nicole to find this clue—the pivotal one, he suspected. With one guy dead in the basement, Lucius circling, and the identity of Lucius's silent partner still a mystery, Michael had to act now.
“Sweetheart, I have to show you something,” he said, trying to keep his voice gentle and coaxing, despite feeling urgent.
“What is it?” she asked softly. She pulled herself up on her elbow. Her tee-shirt clung to her breasts as she twisted to get higher up on the bed.
“I found something, Nicole. Something...important.”
Even with a sleepy gaze, she had concern in her eyes. “What?”
He switched on the bedside lamp. “Look at this.” He presented the note that had been tucked behind the lighthouse photo. Squinting into the light, Nicole read the note. Instantly her mouth curved open. A spark of something—maybe recognition—flickered across her face. “Oh my gosh...where was this?”
Quizzically, she looked at Michael, who responded way too quickly, “Behind a framed picture in the library. I took the backing off and found it.”
In obvious confusion, she scrunched her face. “You were down there...without me?”
“Well, I…I couldn't sleep so I was looking for clues. You know, to help you with this whole thing.” Slowly, she nodded, but eyes dropped, not quite meeting his gaze. “What's wrong?”
After a pause, she shook her head. “Nothing. I'm just surprised that you would look for clues without me. Since we've been doing this whole thing together, that's all.”
Uncomfortably, Michael sensed that that was not all. Did she think he was going after the treasure without her? That greed was driving him now, not his relationship with her, and that he intended to steal whatever it was out from under her? Jesus, how ironic. Most of his time in Chatham he had been looking for ways to steal the painting out from under her, but now he was scrambling to find it for Nicole's own good.
“Well, I didn't want to wake you.” That sounded asinine to his own ears even, given that he'd just woken her up without compunction. “I mean, unless I found something, but I didn't want to ruin your sleep if there was nothing to find.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. This was backfiring on him; he could see it all over her face.
“It was actually more of an accident,” he continued, trying to make it better. “I was in the library by the fireplace, when I looked in the mirror and suddenly remembered those letters you'd unscrambled. That made me notice what was directly behind me—which was a photo of a lighthouse. And that was what got me thinking...” His voice trailed off, as he figured Nicole would jump in, become more animated about his discovery.
“So, does it mean anything to you?” he asked casually. “'A place for princesses'? What was your aunt referring to?”
A few beats passed and she shrugged. “I don't know what that means.”
Her eyes slid up to meet his. They looked at each other. For the first time, Michael felt a brick wall between them that wasn't stacked by him.
Nicole was lying.
Chapter Forty-two
The next day Michael paced the confines of his cabin with concern, frustration. It was all spilling out of his control. Whatever tenuous control there had been to start with; that was the thing when your business was other people, control was always tenuous—everything was goddamn tenuous. People might be predictable but it was that one time they surprised you that fucked you over. Now the boat rocked as he walked back and forth, recalculating.
First thing that morning, Nicole had told Michael that she had some “stuff to do around the house.” He had gotten the distinct feeling that she actually just wanted him to leave.
He had blown it last night, and he knew it the minute he saw Nicole hesitate. She was questioning what he was telling her. That question inevitably sparked others, like: Who are you? How much do I really know about you?
Great time for Nicole's lack of blind faith to kick in. He had looked out his window numerous times but had not seen signs of life over there—no taking Puddle out back, no movement of the kitchen curtains. Mi
chael wanted nothing more than to keep an eye on Nicole and see what she did next, if anything, but he could hardly skulk about if she was already distrusting him.
The most frustrating part was that in an ideal situation, he would simply back off and then set about slowly re-gaining their rapport—but at this point, he didn't have that kind of time. They still didn't know how the guy in the basement had died.
Michael held back a sigh, rubbed his forehead. He had this terrible feeling that if Lucius didn't get the painting soon—if his silent partner in Chatham did not get it—Nicole might be in serious danger. He recalled her aunt's note: Go to a place for princesses. Playing the sentence in his head, he wondered what it meant. He was almost sure that Nicole knew. Would she tell him tonight?
Impatiently he grabbed his cell phone. Dialed Lucius and waited. “Yeah,” Lucius barked into the phone. “Did you get it yet?”
“Let's meet. I've got something to show you,” Michael bluffed. “This thing is bigger than we think.”
“What do you mean—bigger?” Lucius said, sounding intrigued yet suspicious.
“There's more involved than your benefactor has led you to believe,” Michael lied, though it certainly could be true. Either way, his only chance to get an animal to back off was to appeal to his hunger.
“What are you saying, Corso?”
“I'm saying you haven't been told everything. Let's meet; it will be worth your while. But I wouldn't tell your partner about this.”
If he could trick Lucius into believing he was being swindled, he might reveal who he had been working with (or for), and Michael would gain a greater ability to protect Nicole. Hey, if it could buy some time, it was worth it.
He could only assume that “the place for princesses” held the painting; now he just had to decode what that place was. Of course, once he did, if all he found was another goddamn clue... No, he couldn't think that. “How about the Spoonful Diner on 28? In two hours,” Michael said.
