The Indigo Brothers Trilogy Boxed Set

by Vickie McKeehan

  “You don’t understand,” Jackson went on, “Nathan and I used to hang out here quite a bit when we were kids. It wasn’t as morbid as it sounds. It wasn’t just a place to smoke pot as teenagers. That came later.”

  “If you say so,” Mitch noted. “But to me, it explains all those crypt-keeper comic books you used to read.”

  “Like you weren’t weird in your own way,” Jackson fired back, as he took out the flashlight he’d brought and focused the beam on the walkway so they could see where they were going in the dark.

  Laden with the sweet, dewy smell of magnolia, the six of them walked among the headstones, with Jackson leading the way.

  “It might sound strange. Sure. But when you’re two nine-year-old boys looking for something to do on a Friday night during a sleepover, it’s not so weird. Think about it. We’d sit up on the roof of his family’s vault because it was the highest one around with a mostly flat surface. We’d take out the telescope we bought—the one we pooled our allowance for and ordered out of a catalog together—to look for comets or meteors or falling stars. We used to keep our gear and accessories inside the vault. We each had a key.”

  Raine pulled her sweater tighter around her body. “Tell me again why we have to do this at night. It’s creepy out here. I’m not sure I want to be a part of opening a crypt.”

  “Because we have a better chance of doing it out of the prying eyes of you-know-who,” Tessa reminded. “At the same time we’re keeping an eye on Baskin and Dandridge, they’re more than likely returning the favor. But if you want to wait in the car, that’s okay with me.”

  “By myself? No way,” Raine tossed back. “I’m not waiting in the car alone. I’ll just watch you guys…do…whatever…from afar.”

  Mitch clutched her hand. “I’m right there with you. I’m not exactly happy about being out here.” Looking around, he added, “I still say it’s weird that Nathan would choose this place to stick a bunch of documents he stole from Livvy.”

  “Not so weird really,” Jackson insisted. “You had to know Nathan. And I’ve been going back over things, reading some emails he sent me from a couple years back. Nathan was obviously stone-cold bored with his job at the bank, had been almost from the beginning. I think he knew his marriage was a bust right out of the gate. In one of his longer emails to me, he mentioned Wendy was in love with her job and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. I read this stuff and never realized the importance of it all. At least I didn’t at the time. I mean, who would? It turns out, the man wasn’t any happier with Wendy than Livvy was with Walker.”

  “No wonder they were drawn to each other,” Raine decided as they approached the last row of crypts. “Is it bad of me to hope they both found some measure of happiness before…all this?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Jackson said.

  “We’re hoping that you’re getting to a point somewhere in that story,” Garret cracked. “Hopefully it’ll be before morning gets here.”

  “I am,” Jackson said as he came to a stop in front of a stone crypt with a plaque that read Hollister above a tarnished, bronze door wide enough for casket entry. He stuck his key into the lock. “There’s no bodies inside lying in state.”

  “None at all? Are you certain of that?” Mitch asked.

  Jackson grinned. “Positive. All Nathan’s relatives were cremated, all the way back to his great-grandparents. Nathan’s great-grandfather, Gordon Hollister, bought this mausoleum to show his status in the community, no other reason. No one’s inside because he felt like it was a bad idea to bury above ground. Period. He didn’t like the idea of a hurricane rolling through here and uprooting him or his loved ones, centuries later. Gordon felt so strongly against it that he didn’t trust the funeral home and its owners to follow his wishes, so he instructed his lawyer to supervise each cremation personally.”

  “You might’ve mentioned that chunk right up front instead of scaring Raine half to death with this trek through American Horror Story,” Mitch grumbled.

  Jackson sent Raine a sheepish grin. “Sorry. It’ll be okay.”

  But she still wasn’t keen on the idea of standing around in the dark waiting to get into a crypt. “So you’re saying it’s an empty vault?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. See for yourself.” Jackson opened the metal door, listened to the hinges creak as it swung back and hit the stone wall.

  Once inside the chamber, he aimed the beam of his flashlight around so everyone could get a good look at the interior. In the middle of the room stood an ornate slab pedestal that could hold a casket, but of course it held nothing.

  The vestibule itself was a ten-by-fourteen-foot space with shelves made of granite and two stained glass windows on opposite side walls. “See, no caskets. It’s completely empty as far as bodies resting here.”

  “The lack of cobwebs suggests someone’s been here recently,” Garret decided as he wandered around the chamber with his own beam of light. “Where would Nathan have hidden those papers?”

  “I have an idea,” Jackson assured him. “Hold my flashlight, Tessa, while I get us some more light in here.” Once he’d relinquished the penlight to her, he went over to a familiar section of the vault with an arch opening built into the wall and took down an old-fashioned lantern from the shelf. From his pocket he drew out a lighter and lit the wick.

  Light danced off the four walls, creating flickering shadows. He handed the lantern off to Mitch before proceeding to another area, deeper into the vault. He went over to a spot in the wall, waist-high, and stood in front of what looked like a solid piece of marble. He began to try to work the stone plaque out of its block. “This is where they would place the urns.”

  Raine took a few steps into the shadows. “Wait. So there are Hollister remains in here? I knew it!”

  “Yes. Just not bodies, but not in the one I’m opening up. This one is where Nathan and I used to hide our stash.” It took some muscle to get the square plaque to budge where he could get a good grip on it. But once the panel came loose, Jackson stared at the hole. “Shine the light in there for me, Tessa.”

  Tessa pointed the beam into the black cranny. “There’s something back there all right.”

  Jackson heaved the solid mass of stone toward Garret, dropping it into his hands. “Hold onto this.”

  “Sure,” he groaned, taking the weight and trying to keep from dropping the block of granite on his toes.

  Without the stone in the way, it left a cubbyhole that wasn’t so empty. There was an old, brown leather attaché case crammed toward the back. The well-worn briefcase showed its age, frayed around the flap, possibly from years of lugging it around from place to place. The flap carried a Nazi emblem, along with the name Klaus Mühlhauser engraved on the clasp.

  Mitch breathed out an air of shock. “How did we get here? In a million years I’d’ve never thought to look in the Hollister crypt for Hugo’s papers.”

  Jackson handed the messenger bag to Mitch. “Open it up.”

  From her position at the doorway, Raine cleared her throat. “Uh, guys, if I might make a suggestion. Could we maybe do this somewhere else? Let’s go back to my place where the lighting’s a lot better and I’m not waiting for Sinclair to bust us on some trumped up charge.”

  Anniston spoke up. “I’m all for that. I’m not spending the night in jail for robbing a grave. My vote is we get the hell out of here before someone finds out we’ve been inside this place.”

  Back on the houseboat, Raine put on a pot of coffee while they examined what looked like a lawyer’s bag. After they’d spread the contents out on the table, Raine watched Mitch paw through the papers like a cat playing with a mouse.

  “A lot of people died for what’s in that briefcase,” Raine pointed out.

  Garret latched onto several pairs of Nazi dog tags. “This is just like what Hugo slash Dietrich described to us, the stuff he was looking for. I’ve wondered why he was so forthright. He could’ve easily lied to us about the
documents and made something else up. I mean, Dietrich was play-acting the whole time we knew him, pretending to be someone else. And here we are staring at just about everything he mentioned.”

  Mitch picked up a pay book belonging to the man named Klaus Mühlhauser, flipped through the pages. “This would be pretty damning for anyone. There’s proof here that one Mühlhauser named Walter was an SS officer who spent time working at Belzec, Poland. The higher ups put him in charge of exterminations beginning in March 1942.”

  Garret got out his phone to search the Internet for more information. “The SS killed a half million Jews during the time that camp was open. Only seven laborers walked out of there alive before the Nazis dismantled it in 1943.” He looked out at the massive pile on the table. “Why wouldn’t you get rid of this stuff? Why keep it around?”

  “Who knows? Pride in what he’d done for the Führer,” Mitch noted, holding up a photograph of two young boys, arms outstretched in the Hitler salute. “But you’ve got to hand it to the fascist regime, they were anal retentive about their recordkeeping.”

  Raine bit her lip. “Just look at this, various ID cards in the same name, Mühlhauser, along with a slew of family pictures showing two young boys who look like twins to me, with a man dressed in his SS uniform.”

  “Apparently all this belongs to Dietrich’s family. There are passports using the Mühlhauser name and logbooks from U-boat 492. But I don’t see anything here that mentions the names Dietrich or Reiner.”

  “Which is why I suggested those names were likely made up and chosen by the two men after the war,” Anniston noted. “Mühlhauser was probably Dietrich’s family surname back in Germany. Once his father reached South America he created another ID, started using that. The Mühlhauser son eventually became Werner Dietrich.”

  “What I’d like to know is how Dietrich and Reiner knew each other. What’s their connection?” Jackson pondered.

  “The answer’s here somewhere,” Garret said. “Look around. This pile of stuff alone would certainly be enough to prove beyond a doubt Dietrich’s personal link to the Nazis and the role the father played at Belzec. Not a particularly proud moment for someone who had taken great lengths to distance his family’s history in order to make millions in business.”

  Raine picked up the photograph of the two young twins with their soldier father. “This must’ve been taken during the height of the war.” She flipped the picture over and read what was written on the back. “Someplace called Dinkelsbühl in 1944.” Raine kept staring at the picture. “Are you sure Reiner and Dietrich weren’t related? Could they be the brothers, the boys depicted in this photo?”

  Garret used his phone again for a search. “Dinkelsbühl is a town roughly five hundred and thirty kilometers south of Berlin, which equates to three hundred and thirty miles. Maybe that was Dietrich’s hometown. Maybe both men came from there.”

  Mitch exchanged long stares with his brothers then looked over at Anniston. “Is there any way to get your friend in the coroner’s office, Chuck, to send you a picture of the body found near Sugarloaf Key? If the man looks similar to Dietrich, then we’ve just figured out how Hugo Reiner came by all these documents.”

  He laid a hand on the scattered mess on the table. “This is from his family’s history. If the men shared a father, then maybe that’s why the mother finally took the trip to South America, in search of him. She wanted to see Werner, a long lost son, one last time before she died.”

  “But if Hugo and Dietrich had the same father, then why make up a story about U-boat 492?” Jackson pointed out. “Hugo’s father couldn’t have been both an SS colonel at Belzec, Poland, and a young lieutenant on a German sub.”

  Mitch scratched his chin. “Yeah, I agree that’s a problem. And it just means we need to use the diary to solve another level of the puzzle.”

  Raine brought over more coffee, refilled mugs. “There has to be a reason Walter Mühlhauser was given a ride on that sub. Not just any SS officer could simply take off for Brazil whenever he felt like it.”

  “Which means the connection had to be solid,” Mitch stated. “No one’s gonna take a risk like that for anyone who isn’t family or—”

  “A significant amount of money exchanges hands,” Raine finished.

  “Exactly. Now we just need the professor to get here and decipher what’s in that diary.”

  Chapter Eight - Justice

  Once everyone cleared out for the night, Mitch reached over to Raine, captured her hand in his, and brought her onto his lap. “I thought they’d never leave us alone.”

  She framed his face. “It’s been a very long day. We should get some sleep. After that walk through the cemetery, I don’t think I want you to leave me alone tonight.”

  “When will you know for sure?”

  For an answer, she touched her lips to his. “I’m sure.”

  With open mouths, they tasted each other, sampling all that arousal offered while it built to stirring need.

  Acting on that alone, he savored the taste of her, juicy like a mango, just peeled.

  She welcomed his mouth on hers as he ran his hands up and down her back. She drew him up and out of the chair and through the house to the bedroom. The entire way they were kicking out of their shoes, wrestling for position.

  “I want to rip your clothes off, but after what you’ve been through maybe we should wait. I know what you said earlier. But I won’t hold you to it unless you’re absolutely sure.”

  She stopped, held him at arm’s length. “Are you trying to back out now? After getting me all worked up you’ve changed your mind? You don’t want to be with me?”

  “My God, how could you say that, how could you think it? I want you more than I did when I was sixteen and that was a lot.”

  “Aww.” She shoved him back against the bedroom door. “That’s all I needed to know. Go ahead, tear my clothes off because I know exactly what you can do with those hands of yours, and that mouth.”

  With his teeth nipping at her throat, he echoed his skill set. “I remember all the things you like, detail by little detail.” Slipping off her top, he worked on releasing the catch to her bra and filled his hands with small, firm breasts.

  She dropped her head back, as his hands found their mark at the curve of her breast. His roaming mouth made her blood ignite. “Ahh. That’s a sweet way to a girl’s heart. Remembering what she likes from a dozen years ago. Not fair.”

  Stopping long enough to lay his hand over his chest, he declared, “You rip my heart out, Raine. You always have.”

  “I don’t mean to. On second thought, maybe I do.” She latched onto his face, ran her tongue to his throat. “This has to be better than that time we did it on my mom’s kitchen floor. Remember that?”

  “Hard floor, you on top, every minute. We had the house to ourselves for an entire weekend. As I recall your mother had taken Danny and your grandmother down to Ramrod Key.”

  “And your parents were out of town for your cousin’s wedding.”

  She established her ground, or tried to. But by the time he reached to peel off her shorts and toss them over his head, heat had taken over. Her eyes danced with need. “I hate to admit it but it’s been a long time for me, a really long time.”

  “Same here.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “You’re surprised at that? Why?”

  “More like shocked.”

  He rested his head on hers. “What is it you think I do? Steer my boat into port to get laid every time the urge hits me?”

  She rolled out a belly laugh. “You mean you don’t? Actually that’s exactly what I pictured you’d do.”

  Her burst of laughter warmed his heart. “You obviously don’t know the dedicated treasure hunter I’ve become.”

  She heaved off his T-shirt, ran her hands up his toned muscles. “I don’t remember these. You have a nice set of abs now.”

  “A working man puts on more muscle than a scrawny high school kid, which
is what I was the last time we did this,” he pointed out, his mouth lingering along her curves.

  She loosened the button on his jeans, slid her hands inside, watched as he shoved out of the pants.

  His hands journeyed down to her hips before he boosted her up off the floor.

  She threw her legs around his waist.

  “You’re still just a little bitty thing, hardly weigh a hundred pounds I bet.”

  “And you’re still six-two.” She ran her fingers over every inch of his massive shoulders. “You know I practice yoga these days. I’m a lot more limber than I used to be.”

  Naked, they sunk into the mattress as he planted little kisses along her throat. He glided his lips to a breast, beaded and budded, perfect for coaxing out to play.

  She quivered, little jolts dancing along her nerves, as his mouth tightened around a nipple.

  “Let me know if my weight is too heavy.”

  “Shut up, Mitch. I don’t remember you talking this much.”

  He scooted to the end of the bed, began to track her body beginning with her tiny feet. He trailed little kisses over her toes, up to her ankle, along the calf to the back of her knee. He licked along her thigh, skimming slowly, slowly, toward the center, ripe and pink for the taking.

  She rose up, her back in an arch. She threaded fervent fingers through his hair, tumbled into the lazy pleasure, spinning with red-hot heat. He kept building on sensations she’d forgotten existed, battering through to the edge like a hurricane wielding its force.

  Blind need had her bursting toward the white hot eye of the storm, under a long stream of swirling heat that spiraled on and on.

  Mitch pinned her to the mattress, thrusting through sizzling reds, plunging into aching, throbbing blues. Limbs tangled. Setting a rhythm, fast and hard, he wrapped her up, biting back his own need.

  Their slick bodies hammered out a familiar rhythm. Relentless pleasure stoked a fire within her. She called out his name. Like a melody it bounced off the walls and drew him in and up.