by J. R. Ward
Edward was in jail for the murder of their dreadful father. Gin was in a hate-filled marriage for money. And Max had come home after several years of being unreachable, a bearded, tattooed shadow of the frat boy he had once been, who despised everyone, including his own family--to the point where he was staying in one of the staff cottages down at the back of the property because he refused to be under Easterly's roof.
Maybe Max had come up here to the big house for...God only knew what. A cup of sugar. Bottle of bourbon. Perhaps to steal some silverware?
But how could he have gotten into the gardens? How could anybody? Two sides of the acres of flowers and lawn were protected by that brick wall, which was twelve feet high and had barbed wire on the top and two padlocked gates. The third side was even more difficult to get through: His father had converted the old stables into a state-of-the-art business center, from which the Bradford Bourbon Company had been run for the last couple of years. God knew you weren't getting through that facility, not unless you had a pass card or the codes--
From over on the right, a figure darted down the allee of blooming crab apple trees.
Gotcha, Lane thought as his heart kicked into high gear. Shifting his position forward, his bare feet were silent over the flagstones as he rushed across the terrace and took cover behind an urn big enough to take a bath in.
It was definitely a man. Those shoulders were too broad to be a woman's.
And the bastard was coming this way.
Lane leveled his gun at his target, holding the weapon steady with two hands as he straight-armed the autoloader. As he kept himself perfectly motionless, he waited for the trespasser to funnel down that pathway and come up this set of side steps.
He waited...
...and waited...
...and thought of his extremely estranged, soon-to-be ex-wife, Chantal. Maybe this was a private detective sent by her, coming to get some dirt on the financial scandal at the BBC, some information on how bad the bankruptcy was, some angle that she could use against him as they ground their non-existent relationship into dust.
Or perhaps Edward had broken out of jail and was coming home.
Doubtful on that one.
The trespasser made a last turn and then was coming right for Lane. But his head was down, a baseball cap pulled low.
Lane kept tight until he was absolutely sure he could hit the chest. Then he squeezed the trigger halfway, the red laser sight slicing through the night and forming a little dancing spot right where the guy's heart was.
Lane spoke up, loud and clear. "I really don't care if I kill you."
The man stopped so quick, his feet skipped on the brick. And those hands popped up like whoever it was had mattress springs in their armpits.
Lane frowned as he finally saw the face. "What are you doing out here?"
Washington County Jail, Downtown Charlemont
Moonlight entered the jail cell through a barred window, the shaft of creamy light getting sliced into five sections before it tripped on the lip of a stainless-steel sink and fell in a sprawl to the concrete floor. Outside, the night was humid, which accounted for the murky quality of the illumination. Inside the cell, it was no-season-whatsoever, the walls and floor and heavy solid door painted in shades of incarceration gray, the air stale and smelling of metal and disinfectant.
Edward Bradford Baldwine sat all the way back on the bunk, the more mangled of his two legs cocked at the strange angle that provided a modicum of relief, the thin mattress offering little to no padding under the bones of his withered lower body.
This was not the first time he had been held in custody, but at least now it was not against his will. He had volunteered himself for this; he had confessed to the murder of his father and thus placed himself in this lockdown. He was also not the only prisoner, in contrast to his previous experience, the sounds of snoring, coughing, and the occasional moan reaching his ears in spite of that reinforced door.
A muffled thump and corresponding echo made him think of his thoroughbred breeding farm, the Red & Black. All of these men in their single compartments were like his mares in their stalls--restless, churning, even at night. Perhaps especially after dark.
Pushing his palms into the mattress, he relieved the pressure points on his seat for as long as he could. Too soon, he was forced to resettle himself, his upper body no stronger than his lower was, the background chatter of physical discomfort something he had grown well familiar with.
As he glanced around the cell, with its concrete block walls and its polished concrete floor, that stainless-steel sink and toilet, the barred and chicken-wired window, he thought of Easterly's splendor. The basement of his family's mansion was kitted out with greater luxury than these lodgings, especially that wine cellar, which was like an English study that had fallen through the floor above and landed on the bedrock of the hill.
For no particular reason--well, other than the obvious one, which was that he had nothing better to do and no chance of sleeping--he thought of a story he had read years ago, about a young boy who had grown up in a cardboard box. In fact, hadn't there been a TV show about a character who'd been similarly tortured...
Wait, what had he been going on about?
His mind, doughy and sluggish, tried to catch the tail of the cognition.
Oh...right. The kid in the cardboard box. So the boy had actually been fairly un-traumatized when he'd been rescued. It wasn't until he'd discovered that other kids hadn't been subjected to that kind of abuse that he'd gotten upset.
Moral of the story? When you were being raised in a given environment, and that was all you ever knew, the lack of comparison and contrast meant the oddities of your existence were invisible and unknowable. Life in his family and at Easterly had been utterly normal to him. He'd assumed that everyone lived on an estate with seventy people working on it. That Rolls-Royces were just cars. That presidents and dignitaries and folks on TV and in movies coming to your parents' parties was merely an as-you-do.
The fact that the vast majority of people at Charlemont Country Day and then the University of Virginia had been of similar social and financial stature had not challenged his bias. And after his graduation? His perspective hadn't evolved because he'd been so distracted trying to get up to speed in the family business.
He'd also taken for granted that everybody was hated by their father.
Of course, his two brothers and his sister hadn't been despised as much as he had been, but sufficient animus had been shown toward them as well that his construct and conclusions had remained unchallenged. And the beatings and the cold condemnations had come only behind closed doors. So when he had been out and about and seeing fathers acting in a civil way around their offspring? He'd just assumed that it was for show, a privacy curtain's worth of social subterfuge drawn in place to hide the far darker reality.
As it was in the Bradford household.
The eye opening had finally come after he had progressed up the management levels at the BBC to a position where he discovered his father wasn't just a shitty sire but also a poor businessman. And then he'd made the mistake of confronting William Baldwine.
Two months later, Edward had gone down to South America on a routine matter and been kidnapped. His father had refused to pay the ransom, and as a result, things had been done to Edward. Partially because his captors had been frustrated, partially because they had been bored.
But mostly because his father had told them to kill him.
That was when he decided that William was in fact an evil man who had done bad things all of his life and hurt many, many people, in many, many different ways in the process.
Fortunately for Edward, an unexpected rescuer had materialized in the jungle, and Edward had been first airlifted to a U.S. Army base and then eventually returned home to U.S. soil, landing here in Charlemont like a battered package that had gotten mauled and delayed while going through customs.
As memories of re-learning how to walk and go up sta
irs and feed and clean himself threatened to break down the door to Edward's mental castle, he reflected on how much he missed his alcohol.
On a night like tonight, when all he had was insomnia and his cannibalistic brain for company? He would have killed for a blackout.
In the aftermath of his initial, more medically intensive period of recovery, liquor had been the sustainer for him as he was weaned off the opiates. Then, as further days and nights had dragged on, the numbness and the relief he reliably enjoyed thanks to liquor, those little floating vacations on the good ship Lolli-booze, became the only respite from his mind and his body. Quitting that cirrhotic hobby had been necessary, though.
As soon as it had become clear that he was headed to prison, he knew he'd needed to detox and the first seventy-two hours had been hell. Actually, things were still hard, and not just because of his psychological crutch being gone. He felt even more weak in his body, and though the trembling in his hands and feet was improving, the shaking was not yet over its torment of his fine motor skills and sense of balance.
Glancing down at his loose orange prison pants, he remembered his old life, his former body, his previous mind. He had been so whole back then, preparing himself to take over the Bradford Bourbon Company after his father retired, making strategic business decisions, blowing off steam playing racquetball and tennis.
Like the kid in the cardboard box, it had never dawned on him that there was another kind of life waiting for him. A different existence. A change coming around the corner that would take him to a new consciousness.
Unlike the boy in the box, however, his life had gotten worse, at least by nearly all objective measurements. And that was even before his actions had put him in here with a toilet that had nothing to offer but a cold rim to take a seat on.
The good news, though, was that everyone he cared about was going to be all right now. His youngest brother, Lane, had taken over the BBC and was going to run the bourbon business appropriately. Their mother, Little V.E., was so addled by age and medication that she would live out her remaining days, perhaps at Easterly, perhaps not, blissfully unaware of the change in the family's social standings. Gin, his sister, was married to a man of great means whom she could manipulate at will to her ends, and his other brother, Max? Well, the black sheep of the family would stay what he had always been, a drifter content to live outside of Charlemont, a ghost haunting a legacy he neither valued nor cared about sustaining.
And as for himself? Perhaps when he was transferred out of this county holding pen to a proper prison, they would have some physical therapy that could help him. He might get another master's. Reconnect with his love of English literature. Learn to make license plates.
It wasn't a life to look forward to, but he was used to hopelessness.
And more importantly, sometimes the only solace one had was to do the right thing. Even if it required great sacrifice, there was peace to be had in knowing that loved ones were finally safe from a nightmare.
Like his father.
In fact, Edward decided, the reality that no one mourned William Baldwine seemed a defense enough to the murder charge. Damn shame that it was not a legally recognized justification--
The footsteps that approached were heavy and purposeful, and for a moment, the present shattered apart, the past rising up like a monster out of the swamp of his consciousness, his brain no longer clear on whether he was in the jungle bound with rough rope, about to be beaten again...or if he were in the judicial system of his city of birth--
A loud clanking at his door sent his blood pressure through the roof, his heart pounding, sweat breaking out under his arms and across his face. Frozen by fear, his fingers clawed into the pad beneath him, his broken body trembling so violently, his teeth clapped together.
The sheriff's deputy who opened the door made the confusion worse instead of better.
"Ramsey?" Edward said in a thin voice.
The African-American man in the tan and gold sheriff's uniform was enormous, with shoulders so wide they filled the jambs, and legs planted as if they were bolted into the floor. With a shaved head, and a jaw that strongly suggested argument was a waste of time, Mitchell Ramsey was a force of nature with a badge--and this was the second time he had come to Edward in the night.
In fact, the only reason Edward was alive was because the deputy had gone into the jungle looking for him. As a former Army Ranger, Ramsey had had both the survival skills and the contacts down at the equator to get the job done--he also routinely played the role of "fixer" for issues within wealthy families in Charlemont, so the rescue was in his wheelhouse.
If you needed a bodyguard, an enforcer, a P.I., or someone to interface with law enforcement, Ramsey was on the short list of people to call. Discreet, unflappable, and a trained killer, he dealt with the dicey nicely, as the saying went.
"You got a visitor, my man," the deputy said in his deep Southern voice.
It took some time for the words to process, the fear-scramble in Edward's mind causing him to lose traction on his command of the English language.
"Come on." Ramsey indicated the way out. "We got to go now."
Edward blinked as his emotions threatened to overspill his chest and come out on his face through his tear ducts. But he could not allow himself to drown in PTSD. This was the present. There was no one coming with a bat to break his legs. There were no knives about to dig into his skin. Nobody was going to punch him until he vomited blood down his arm and his head lolled off the top of his spine.
Ramsey came forward and offered his bear claw of a palm. "I'll help you."
Edward looked up into those dark eyes and spoke the exact same words he had two years before: "I don't think I can stand up."
For a moment, Ramsey, too, seemed caught by what they had shared in South America, his lids closing briefly, that great chest expanding and contracting as he appeared to try to steady himself with a deep breath.
Evidently, even former Army Rangers had memories they didn't care to revisit. "I gotchu. C'mon."
Ramsey helped him off the bunk and then waited as Edward's legs took their own damn time to unknot, the hours he'd spent in a sit having turned his deformed, badly healed muscles into stone. When he was finally ready to ambulate, the hobbling was humiliating, especially next to the deputy's incredible strength, but at least as he limped out of his cell and onto the parapet, a clarity came, reality reasserting itself through the morass of his trauma.
As their footsteps clanked across the metal weave to the stairs, Edward looked over the railing at the common area below. Everything was clean, but the steel tables and benches were hard worn, the orange paint jobs faded where games of cards had been played and prisoners had slid on and off. There was no debris anywhere, no magazines or books, no articles of clothing left behind, no wrappers from candy bars or empty soda cans. Then again, anything could be a weapon under the right circumstances, and nothing was expected to be respected.
Edward was halfway down the stairs when he stopped, his higher reasoning finally kicking in. "I don't want to see anyone."
Ramsey just gave him a nudge and shook his head. "Yes, you do."
"No, I--"
"This is not a choice, Edward."
Edward looked away, everything clicking into place. "Do not believe them. This is much ado about nothing--"
"Let's keep walking, my man--"
"I already met with the psychiatrist this afternoon. I told him there was nothing to worry about."
"FYI, you are not the one qualified to make an assessment as to your mental state."
"I know whether or not I'm suicidal."
"Do you?" Ramsey's stare was direct. "You were found with a shank--"
"I told them. I picked the thing up in the mess hall and was going to turn it in--"
Ramsey grabbed Edward's forearm, pulled it out, and yanked up the sleeve of his prison uniform. "You used it here. And that is the problem."
Edward attempted to get his limb
back, but the deputy wasn't having any of that until he was good and ready to let go. And in the bright fluorescent lights, the raw wound at his wrist seemed like a scream.
"Look, do us both a favor, my man, and come with me now."
Ramsey shifted his hand to Edward's elbow and gave a nudge that was so insistent, it was clear the deputy was prepared to pull a fireman's hold on the situation if he had to.
"I'm not suicidal," Edward muttered as he re-gripped the rail and resumed his awkward, shuffling descent in his prison-issue slippers. "And whoever it is, I do not want to see them...."
--
Out on Easterly's terrace, Lane immediately lowered the muzzle of his gun, the brilliant red laser sight sweeping free of the man's chest and then disappearing as the trigger was fully released.
"I could have shot you! What the hell?"
Gary McAdams, the head groundsman, removed his cap and held it with both his work-worn hands. "I'm sorry, Mr. Lane."
In the moonlight, the man's wrinkled, perma-tanned face had grooves so deep, they were like tire tracks in mud, and as he smoothed his flyaway hair, his apology was everywhere in the jerky movements.
"Dint mean to disturb nobody's sleep."
Lane went to tuck the gun into the small of his back--and then realized he only had boxers on. "No, you're welcome anywhere on the estate. I just don't want to put a hole in you."
"That there pool filtration system in the pump house been shorting out. I ordered the part, but then remembered I dint turn the damn thing off. Came here through the back gate and shut it down. When I got out, I noticed that." The man pointed to the back of the house. "Middle gas lantern's out. I was worried it was leakin' and was fixin' to turn off the feed."
Sure enough, there was a black hole in the lineup of those old-fashioned brass fixtures, like a row of teeth with an incisor missing.
Closing his eyes, Lane shook his head. "You're too damn good to us."
With a grunt, Gary shuffled up the stone steps and put his hat back on. "House and grounds like this, she's an old lady. Something's always gonna be wrong. Gotta stay on top of 'er."
Will we even be able to keep this place, Lane thought as he followed along.
