Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  She's still alive. It was the only thought that registered in Hal's mind as he barreled through the dark tunnel. When he finally emerged, the gunman was circling the car on his motorcycle, firing randomly through the windshield. He saw Hal, took one shot at his feet, then sped away.

  Hal memorized the license number of the motorcycle as he ran toward Emily. She was crouched on the floor of the Morris, her hands covering her face, screaming wildly.

  "Emily, he's gone. Emily!" He grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her. "It's Hal. Listen to me, Emily!"

  Gradually her screaming subsided, and Hal was able to pry her hands away from her face.

  "He was trying to kill me," she rasped hoarsely.

  Hal looked at the starred windshield. Four shots had been fired at nearly point-blank range, and not one of them had struck her. "No, he wasn't," Hal said. "That was just a scare tactic."

  "Well, it worked," she said as she unfolded herself out of the car.

  From the fairgrounds, several people were running toward the source of the gunshots. "Get back in," Hal said, "or we'll be stuck here for hours dealing with Constable Nubbit. I want to get to Candy with this."

  He started the engine. The car ran perfectly well, despite the apparent damage. He pressed on the network of fine white lines which was now the windscreen, and it gave way.

  They drove back to the village amid a sea of pebble-sized bits of glass, and went straight to the Scotland Yard van.

  "Damn it all, I knew it was a mistake letting you in on things," the inspector said. "You could have both been killed."

  "He wasn't trying to kill anyone," Hal explained. He told the story of his discovery in the Spook-O-Rama.

  "You're sure it was a painting of Arthur?"

  "Absolutely sure."

  "And he was dead, you say." Candy spoke quietly, so that Emily could not hear him.

  Hal tightened his lips.

  "If it's the same man I arrested four years ago, he's an artist as well as a killer," Candy said. "We've got to accept the possibility that—"

  "He wasn't drawing Arthur," Hal blurted.

  "I thought you said—"

  "The face was Arthur's. The rest of it was . . ." What? A memory of mine? A nightmare I've been having for the past year?

  "What is it?"

  Hal took a deep breath. "The chair, the ropes, the fire . . . that happened before, in another case I handled. The last case." He spoke in a monotone about the abduction and murder of Jeff Brown.

  "So you think Arthur's kidnappers know something about you," Candy said, trying not to let his voice betray the pity he felt for the ex-FBI man.

  "Could be."

  "Is it possible we've been hunting the wrong fox?" Candy asked. "Perhaps this Brown boy's kidnapper is involved?"

  "No," Hal said. "He's dead. Blew himself up with a grenade."

  "An associate of his, perhaps?"

  Hal shrugged.

  A mindreader. A man who's lived forever has the power to do anything on earth he likes.

  "I'll see if I can find anything," Candy said.

  "There isn't time. Saladin's going to come for the cup soon. And I haven't got it."

  "That won't matter," Candy said.

  Hal knew what he meant. If the kidnappers weren't stopped before the trade, Arthur would be killed, cup or no cup.

  "What about your reinforcements?" Hal asked.

  "Headquarters thinks it's better to work with the local authorities on this."

  Hal groaned in disbelief and dismay. "Are you kidding me? You're going to leave this operation to the likes of Constable Nubbit?"

  "They haven't left the country with the boy," Candy explained. "They haven't even left Dorset County, as far as we know. The locals know the area better than a team from London, and we can get more of them on short notice." He patted Hal's shoulder. "Don't worry. I'll be in charge, and you'll be with me. The bobbies will only be present as a show of manpower."

  "When are they coming?"

  "I'll send the signal when you get the final ransom note. They're prepared. We'll have fifty uniformed men around the site within twenty minutes."

  Hal sighed. "All right," he said begrudgingly.

  "Take the lady back to the inn," Candy said. "And tell her to stay there. The kidnappers may be trying to contact her."

  Hal nodded. "How soon will you have a make on the driver of the motorcycle?"

  "We've got it," Higgins whispered, pulling a sheet of paper out of the FAX machine. "When you gave it to us, I took the liberty of feeding it into the computer at headquarters immediately. It just came in. The fellow's name is Hafiz Chagla."

  "The name mean anything to you?"

  Chastain shrugged elaborately. "It's just a name," he said. "But I also asked the computer to cross-reference the name with any known personal data. That's coming through now."

  Hal and Candy waited as Higgins took the second sheet out of the machine. "Address, 22 Abelard Street, Wilson-on-Hamble," he read. "Occupation, electrician . . ." He looked at Chastain before continuing. "Maplebrook Hospital, Lymington."

  "I'll check out the address," Hal said.

  "You most certainly will not. If you'd like to help, you can do it in the municipal building."

  "Do what?"

  "Find out who owns the building at 22 Abelard Street."

  For the first time in two days, Hal felt some semblance of relief. Candy knew what he was doing.

  "On my way, Chief," Hal said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Wilson-on-Hamble, as it turned out, had no municipal building. In fact the tax collector, village clerk, and building inspector were all the same person—a seventy-year-old woman named Matilda Grimes who had lived in Wilson-on-Hamble all her life and ran the village's very modest affairs from a table in her parlor.

  When Hal found her, she was busy cooking some kind of gruel in her kitchen. She invited Hal to stay for lunch, but he declined, saying his business was urgent.

  "Urgent, you say? Then you'd better go fetch the books yourself. I can't let the rennet burn." She led the way into the short hallway between two bedrooms, both of which were adorned with dolls wearing voluminous crocheted dresses, and pulled down a rickety ladder from the ceiling. "They'd be up there, marked by year," she said.

  Hal thanked her and climbed up into the attic. They were all up there, deeds, tax records, every transaction recorded in the village since the early 1850s. He brought down as many as he could carry and prepared for a long session with the books, but Miss Grimes knew the place he was looking for.

  "Abelard Street? Oh, my, yes. That place has been turned over a dozen times in the past ten years. And never at any profit, from what I hear. It just passes from one to another." She poured the custard into little bowls and set them carefully inside a tiny cube of a refrigerator.

  "Has it gone to anyone you know?"

  She shook her head emphatically. "Foreigners, all of them. England's a Mecca for them, you know," she added in a conspiratorial whisper. "It's mostly London, of course, but they get in everywhere."

  "Who?"

  "Why, the Eastern fellows," she said primly.

  "Arabs?"

  She nodded, her lips pursed. "Now, I'm sure they're fine individuals, even if they are black. We don't have the sort of racial problems here that you do in America."

  "No, I'm sure you don't," Hal said, trying to be agreeable, even though he had difficulty adjusting to the idea of Arabs as black people.

  "But one does have to wonder about a place like Wilson-on-Hamble being sold over to foreign interests."

  "Who owns the house, Miss Grimes?"

  She put on a pair of glasses with outlandishly jutting rims and leafed expertly through the pages of one of the books. Hal almost laughed aloud. If a rock star wore those glasses, they would be the height of radical fashion.

  "Here we are. Mustafa Aziz."

  "Aziz?" Hal asked, disappointed. "Not Chagla?"

  "Chagla? Oh, no."

/>   "But I understand that a man named Hafiz Chagla lives there."

  "He might," Matilda said. "It's an apartment building."

  "Oh," Hal said.

  "This Aziz person just bought it six months ago."

  "Who from?"

  She flipped the page. "Vinod Abad," she said flatly. "See what I mean?"

  "I don't know. Who owned it before that?"

  She thumbed the page. "Oh, it lasted four years under this owner. Must have fallen in love with the place."

  "What was his name?"

  Matilda squinted at the page. "Laghouat," she pronounced with difficulty. "My, that's a strange one, even for them."

  "La Goo?"

  "Hamid Laghouat. I'm giving it the French pronunciation. There." She pointed it out in the registry.

  "Hamid Laghouat," Hal repeated, trying to remember why the name struck a chord. "Christ. The librarian," he said suddenly. Hamid Laghouat was the name of the man who had checked out the Urdu book for the sanitarium.

  "I do not much care for profanity, Mr . . ."

  "Woczniak," Hal said. "Sorry."

  "Woczniak? What kind of name is that?"

  "I don't know. My parents changed it. Do you have an address for this Laghouat?"

  She looked at him sourly, then bent over the page. "A postal box in London."

  "That figures," Hal said. "What other property does he own around here?"

  "Well, I'd have to look in another book for that." It was clear from her tone of voice that Miss Grimes did not wish to do that.

  "Please," Hal said, trying hard to be ingratiating. "It's very important. Police business."

  The old woman sniffed disdainfully but rummaged through the pile of books until she found what he wanted. "You're going to have to put all these back, you know."

  "I understand," Hal said.

  "Well, here's some property under that name. It adjoins the old amusement park."

  Hal closed his eyes. He had struck gold. "Are there any buildings on it?"

  "Yes, a residence . . . Oh, I know the one." She looked up from the book. "An eighteenth-century manor house. It was a lovely estate back when I was a girl. A couple from London owned it. Members of the nobility." She nodded approvingly. "They used it as a summer residence."

  "Does anybody live there now?"

  "Oh, my, I would doubt that very much. The Londoners stopped coming back in the forties, during the war. It's been empty since then."

  She found her place in the registry. "You see? It belonged to the same owner for forty-six years before this Laghouat fellow bought it. He's a librarian, you said?"

  "He was. In Bournemouth. I think he's gone now."

  "Odd. I never heard the name before. It would seem that anyone with enough money to buy all this property wouldn't be completely unknown in this area. But then, I don't know everyone."

  "But nearly everyone," Hal guessed.

  "Most, I imagine," she answered truthfully. "And what would he be doing working as a librarian?"

  "I doubt if he's the real owner."

  "Well, he's the legal owner," Miss Grimes said pedantically. "If your name's on the paper, the property's yours."

  And if old Hamid makes a move without Saladin's approval, he turns into a statue with an ax in it, Hal thought. "So the place is abandoned?"

  "Probably. You see, it's a very unusual piece of property because it has no road access. It was built back in the days when everyone went about in carriages. But when the house stood vacant for a long time, the road—well, a driveway is what you'd call it, but it's very long, nearly a mile—it just grew over. Now you can't even see it. Or the house itself, for all the weeds." She moved her glasses down onto the end of her nose. "If someone's living there, they don't take very good care of the grounds."

  "Can you show me on the map where the road used to be that led to the house?"

  She drew an imaginary line with her finger. "It was right here, right behind the amusement park, through these woods," she said. "Of course, the house was here long before the park. The land Heatherwood was built on used to belong to the estate."

  "Thank you, Miss Grimes," Hal said, getting up. "I'll put the books back now."

  "See that you make a decent job of it," she said, padding back into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Arthur awakened late. The big Victorian room was already warm and close with the summer heat. His eyes were crusted with matter, and his tongue felt too big for his mouth, the way it sometimes got when he was younger and had to take medicine for an ear infection.

  It had to be the drugs, he thought, stumbling toward the lavatory. The giant had injected him twice in one day. He ran the cold water in the sink over his head, then drank deeply from his cupped hands. It diminished his thirst somewhat, but the cotton-tongue feeling remained.

  When he was finished, he stood still, blinking, trying to steady himself. His stomach rumbled. It had been more than a day since he'd eaten anything. He remembered the big piece of chocolate cake the tall man had offered him, and his own stupidity in refusing it. A piece of cake wouldn't have hurt anything, he thought tearily, then realized that the drugs had thrown his emotions into a tailspin. Sometimes after taking the Seconal Emily gave him when he couldn't sleep, he would wake up on the verge of tears. This was the same thing, he reminded himself. Nothing to cry about. Nothing.

  Yet it was hard to stop himself. He was alone in this place with a man who had every intention of murdering him unless he got his hands on the cup.

  And the cup was gone. He had seen it vanish with his own eyes.

  Arthur felt his tears welling up. Why hadn't he left it in the apartment when he and Emily ran away from Chicago? They could have given it to the Katzenbaum Institute. They could have gone to the TV stations with the story. They could have let everyone know. If they had, Arthur wouldn't be here now.

  But who would have the cup?

  He dried his tears. Sooner or later, someone would use it. There would be a dying baby somewhere, or the president of some country who'd been shot, or a thousand earthquake victims. The cup would be a miracle. For a while. And then one country or another would claim it as its own. Or someone would steal it, and sell it to the highest bidder.

  Or keep it, and become something like the king of the world with it.

  The thought staggered him. What would happen if a person never got hurt, never got sick, never had a bruise or a skinned knee?

  Do you really know what it can do, Arthur? The tall man had asked him that. It healed wounds. You never got sick. You . . . what?

  You lived forever.

  He felt dizzy. He took another drink of water, then went back to the room where he'd spent the night.

  A tray of food was waiting for him: Hotcakes with syrup, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a glass of milk. Arthur devoured it like a starving wolf.

  "I'm glad to see you're eating," a deep voice behind him said.

  Arthur ran his tongue over his upper lip to wipe off his milk moustache. "Did you poison it?" he asked.

  The tall man laughed. "No. Did you sleep well?"

  "Who are you, really?" Arthur demanded.

  "I've told you. An old friend."

  "You're no friend of mine. What's your name?"

  "Saladin."

  "I've never heard of you."

  "Then you're uneducated, as well as rude."

  Arthur looked down at the empty tray. "Thank you for breakfast," he said.

  "That's better. Now come with me. I'd like to show you something."

  He took Arthur down several flights of stairs, past a bedroom wing, a corridor leading to a huge parlor, through a vast kitchen with three sinks, and down another flight into a large room paneled with fragrant cedar. The walls were covered with shelves and display cases, and within them were a bewildering array of artifacts, jewelry, clothing, and weapons.

  Arthur looked around, astonished. "What is this place? A museum?"

  "Of sorts," Saladin said.
"I rather think of it as a trophy room. I haven't seen it myself for some time. I don't usually live here, but this is the safest of my homes for these things."

  Everything was in perfect condition, the cases spotlessly clean. There were paintings, sculptures, even suits of armor in plain view, without ropes or other devices to keep away the curious.

  The boy could not resist. He rushed forward to look at a case that held four broadswords, propped up on easel-type displays. At eye level was a sword of polished steel with a bronze hilt carved into the likeness of a snake. "Where did you get this?" he asked.

  "How like you to choose the swords first." He opened the glass of the case. "That belonged to a Macedonian warrior king. His name was Alexander."

  Arthur looked at him sideways. "Alexander the Great?" he asked skeptically.

  Saladin nodded. "He was little more than a boy, really. He played the harp in secret, fearing that his men would jest about him. And he had a face as beautiful as a woman's."

  "Are you kidding me?" Arthur asked, knowing that he was, but still compelled by the casual ring of truth in the man's voice.

  "No," Saladin said softly. "I supplied horses to his army during his march across India. In the evenings we would often share a skin of wine, and speak of the wonders of the East. He was charmingly naive. The first time he met an Indian sultan, he nearly screamed with laughter. They dyed their beards green, you know, and rode elephants. Alexander found it all hilarious. I had to intercede for him to stop the sultan from attacking his troops."

  Arthur listened, fascinated. Then he frowned. "You're making fun of me," he said.

  Saladin smiled mildly and shook his head.

  "Alexander the Great lived three hundred years before time."

  "Before Christ, you mean."

  "That's right. You couldn't have been there."

  The tall man sighed. "But I was. And I was old then, older than the stones of the earth." He opened the case and took out the sword. "He gave me rubies for my horses," he said. "The man had no love of riches. It was the adventure he craved. And so when I left, I took his sword. It was part of his soul."