by Karen Harper
“I agree. You know, as a detective, it’s been a while since I had a partner in a squad car. But I’ll leave you in it when I go up to Ralston’s house, so no one knows you’re on a ride along with me.”
“What if I can identify the kidnapper?”
“I don’t trust Jedi Brown or Ralston, not after that ‘Can I have his head?’ reaction to Larry Ralston’s drowning.”
“Yeah. I get it. Whatever you say.”
* * *
“Darcy remembered this!” Claire said as the three of them went closer to the dolphin’s water-filled prison.
“Pretty impressive,” Will whispered. “So, Larry Ralston caught a dolphin, and gave it to his brother to conduct experiments on its brain—right, Ralston?” he demanded. The man evidently refused to talk, even though his tape gag was still dangling from his chin instead of over his mouth.
“This must be a different dolphin from the one Larry got caught with,” Claire said. “It just gets worse and worse. Let’s get out of here, get the authorities. We have enough on this man now, and I’ve seen enough for a lifetime. What an awful place for Darcy to have been kept for all that time.”
“We’ll go soon,” Will said, his voice calm, strangely assuring. “I’ve sent this man’s bodyguard, Jedi Brown, on a fool’s errand, but he really is no fool. Eventually, he’ll come looking for our villain here.” He poked the gun into Ralston’s neck again for emphasis.
Again, Claire was terrified the gun might go off. Will had kept his finger on the trigger. Perhaps it was his way of tormenting Ralston since he had allowed Darcy to be so terrified.
“Back into the other room with the dewars and your precious canisters of liquid nitrogen,” Will ordered Ralston, and gave him a little push.
Finally, Ralston spoke. “You wouldn’t dare tamper with those bodies, or it will be mass murder.”
“They’re already dead!” Will cried as he slapped the strapping tape over the man’s mouth again.
With a glance back at the imprisoned dolphin—at least it would be returned to the sea as soon as she and Will reported all this—Claire followed the men down the hall again to the large holding room with the dewars. There, Will shoved Ralston into a chair and, grabbing the roll of black tape from his raincoat pocket, taped his wrists to the arms of a chair.
“This won’t take long, Claire,” Will promised, and proceeded to climb the short ladders next to each of the six dewars in the front row one at a time. She’d counted twelve of the hanging canisters of liquid nitrogen with several more farther back. Surely Will didn’t intend to shut them down so the bodies warmed and the people inside, well, “died”? Or was he adjusting the canisters above each so that he could ruin the frozen liquid, make it unusable?
Or did he intend to dump them on Ralston?
Their prisoner kept trying to struggle against his bonds and protest through his gag, but Will ignored that, however much it unsettled her.
“Will, let’s take him and go. The storm is only going to get worse, and it’s a ways back into town to the police. What if someone shows up?”
“The palm and thumbprint for entry in front is disabled, and I want it that way,” he called down to her. “You know, sadly, there’s a child in one of these dewars. Some poor, sad soul wanted to keep a loved one suspended to be reborn, someone who lost a child too early.”
Claire thought of Lexi and Trey, as well as Darcy’s Jilly and Drew. At least they were safe. But she had to get going, even if Will lingered. Whether his plan was really to turn Ralston in or dump liquid nitrogen on him first, she really wanted out of here.
“Will, what are you doing? Let’s go! We need to call the police, and I have to call Nick.”
“Justice first. Get ready to run and get away from him right now.”
Justice? Did he mean to punish Ralston with the cold of the liquid nitrogen? Surely not to kill him? Ralston had been a party to Darcy’s kidnapping, so he’d definitely go to prison. But Will seemed so overly emotionally invested in revenge here—why?
Will was up next to the sixth dewar, the one closest to Ralston. No matter what Will had said, she had already started to unwrap tape from the chair that held Ralston’s arms down so they could leave.
But she heard something—a single sound from the way they had just come. Surely the dolphin had not broken the glass, and those poor struggling butterflies trying to flap their wings could not make a sound like that. Had a staff member returned, or maybe a watchman who had come in a back door when the front one wouldn’t work?
“Will!” she screamed as the shadow of a man leaped across the floor in front of her.
She saw Jedi Brown, gun in hand—a long automatic—pointed right at her before he swung it upward at Will.
* * *
Watching from the police car, Nick saw a man he thought looked familiar—maybe from Larry Ralston’s memorial service—come to the door of Clint Ralston’s house when Ken rang the doorbell. It wasn’t Jedi Brown. Despite the rain and distance from the car in the driveway, the light was bright on the entryway. Nick could even see the security camera pointed downward. So where was Jedi Brown?
Ken went into the house, and the door closed. Feeling he might have made a mistake not to stick close to Ken, Nick fumed a moment, then pulled his phone out of his pocket and called Bronco’s number.
“Hey, boss. Find out anything? Find Claire?”
“Detective Jensen is following a lead, but it may go nowhere. So no word from Claire there?”
“Sorry, nothing. Maybe she’ll just walk in like Darcy.”
“I hope not—I mean, not with a lot of time gone and her mind screwed up. The house holding up okay in this wind?”
“We still got power, TV, everything. They say it’s coming here, boss. Tonight, real bad. I made Nita go to bed, even though the kids are still up, so Steve and me are taking care of them. Well, Nita did put Trey in bed first. Can’t believe I’m gonna be a dad in a couple weeks. So where are you?”
“Got to go. Detective Jensen is gesturing for me to go to him. Take care of everyone, especially Nita. I’ll call back when I can.”
It was reassuring, at least, to have everything still working at home and here, though he had no doubt the entire area might lose power. That’s how he felt—powerless.
He got out in the rain, slammed the door and ran for the lighted front porch.
“Nick,” Jensen said, gesturing to him, “I want you to take a look at the security camera video Jedi Brown called about. While he was away, Clint Ralston was abducted. And now Jedi’s not here, either.”
“It’s an epidemic, people disappearing,” Nick muttered. “So where did he go? That was a different guy at the door.”
“Jedi went out to check someplace he knew to look. This is James Parsons, the house butler, just came back from checking his own place and found his employer missing, then checked the cameras, as Jedi must have.”
Nick followed Ken into a room off the front hall where a small monitor mounted on the wall played back security video. Nick wiped water from his eyes and squinted at the grainy, rain-swept video the butler reversed and started over.
Nick’s head jerked as he saw Clint Ralston shuffling out the front door wrapped and taped like in some old Boris Karloff mummy movie. The man with him wore a raincoat with a hood, but he faced the camera once.
“It’s Will Warren, pretty sure,” Nick said, biting back a string of curse words. “But he had to have Claire with him, and she’s not there—not in the picture anywhere.”
“And,” Ken said, squinting at the video, too, “he doesn’t take Ralston down the driveway, or out in front where you’d think he has a car—maybe her in it. He shoves Ralston around the house, toward the back. You have any back door, backyard cameras?” he asked the butler.
“Yeah, but nothing there, Officer. I looked. Too stormy, too dark.”
“Damn,” Ken said.
Nick feared Jedi had set them up, stalled them, misled them. But for what?
And could Ralston have staged his own kidnapping to take the heat off himself? But no, he couldn’t be working with Will, but then what in hell was Will doing? And where was Claire? Nick could have beat the monitor apart with his bare fists.
“So where is your best guess Jedi would go looking for Mr. Ralston to check on your boss?” Ken asked the butler.
“I don’t know, Officer. Well, maybe at Onward, Mr. Ralston’s private business, a ways north of town.”
“Private business? Tell us where it is,” Ken ordered.
When he told them, they left the house in a hurry. “Onward to Onward,” Ken told Nick as they got in the squad car again. “Sit tight, because we’re closing in on something bad, but damned if I know what.”
* * *
Claire opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
“Get down! Get back!” Will shouted to her as Jedi raised his weapon toward him.
Claire knocked it so his shot went askew, then ducked behind the nearest dewar. Bullets pinged off the metal, off something.
Will must be all right so far, because he yelled, “Get back, Claire!”
Somehow he managed to open and tip two huge canisters of liquid nitrogen above. Yes, he must have planned to do that, anyway—to freeze or even kill Ralston.
Afraid of more flying bullets, she dropped to the ground and belly crawled behind the next dewar in case Jedi shot at her. But bullets pinged off somewhere above again, so he must’ve still been trying to hit Will.
And then she realized what Will was doing. A spiral of cold, white, curling air slid down to the floor behind her, maybe at Jedi’s position. And she knew liquid nitrogen not only made an unworldly mist but that it burned warm flesh.
Jedi was swearing and screaming at Will. He shot wildly toward his elevated position while crawling back away from the white fog. Had Jedi been hit? By Will’s bullets or his own?
“My eyes! My eyes!” Ralston kept screaming. “Let me loose!”
Claire imagined his trapped butterflies shouting that, the dolphin, too. She had not had time to completely free Ralston, but they didn’t need him disappearing into this thick mist.
She crawled farther toward the hallway, holding her breath with her eyes half-closed. Enough white mist swirled across the floor at least knee-high so she risked crawling on all fours instead of her stomach. As large as this room was, Will must have moved along the top of the dewars to tip more of the canisters because she was soon scrambling into an absolute icy whiteout, a blank wall.
Behind her, she heard a man cry out in pain. Will or Jedi?
The shooting stopped after two more quick bangs. No more pings off metal, no men’s voices. She feared for Will’s life. She got to her feet in the hall and tore toward the reception room, but should she cry out for Will, or would that give her location away to Jedi—and why the sudden silence? No, she should run so Jedi didn’t shoot her, too.
Some of the white, smoky stuff came creeping across the floor toward her. Yes, she told herself, she had to get out of here unless that front door was jammed. Since the phone system had been disabled, she’d walk the roads in this wind and driving rain until she found someone to get help.
But it was Will who staggered down the hall toward her with Jedi’s weapon hanging from one hand. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t bleeding.
“He got disoriented by the mist, bullet ricocheted off one of the dewars, hit him,” he gasped out. “Ralston’s still tied up in there, but Brown indirectly shot himself, I swear it.”
She recalled how Will had claimed he had not drowned Larry Ralston, that the man had fallen in the water. Too much protest to be innocent?
Because it suddenly hit her with stunning force: if Larry’s fall into the water and the net had been an accident, who had put the suicide note on his phone? Someone who wanted to keep clear of a murder charge?
By accident or intent, had Will actually killed Larry Ralston? And did he hope to eliminate Larry’s brother, Clint, now, so he would never figure that out, or because he blamed them both for harming Darcy?
Will gasped out, “Though that guard dog Jedi will go to jail for attempted murder on this night—if he survives—you can also blame him for defacing your backyard.” Struggling for breath, Will stood and leaned against the wall. “You see, he very kindly just admitted that inside to me when I dragged him away from the liquid nitrogen—and questioned him a bit Life is about little details as well as big ones, Claire. Again, I apologize for using that smart doll to spy on you, but all this was necessary.”
He surprised her by heaving Jedi’s gun down the hall when she thought he would keep it for evidence. It skidded heavily away on the wooden floor.
“Remember to tell the police where that is,” he said, his voice still raspy. “Lost my pistol in there when I jumped down in that white, cold—somewhere.”
“Will, we’re leaving, but your fingerprints are on Jedi’s gun and your own. You didn’t harm the bodies in the dewars, dumping all that liquid nitrogen, did you?” she demanded, helping him toward the front door.
“I’d planned to burn him with it, let him suffer—Ralston, not Jedi. Jedi’s leg’s shot up, if not more, and you didn’t free Ralston enough, so they are there for the picking when the police get here. I’ll let you stay to explain, but I have to be on my way—far from here. Claire,” he cried, throwing an arm over her shoulders to prop himself up, “time to tell the rest.”
She pulled him toward the front door in case Jedi or Ralston did manage to get out of that horrid room. The door opened from the inside, and they staggered out, but he would not budge farther. They stood under the sheltered entryway leaning against the wall as the rain thudded down around them and the winds ripped at their wet clothes and hair.
“Listen. Just listen—please,” he said, sucking in a big breath of outside air. “Not much time, one way or another. So—once upon a time, I fell in love with an introverted woman who loved to read, who loved stories to escape her own dilemma because her husband was gone a lot and had another woman in another town, a common-law wife.”
“You—you don’t mean my mother?”
“Yes, really, no fairy tale. Miranda had only recently learned about his other wife when she turned to me for help, for comfort.”
Claire was cold, shaking—but her entire body suddenly felt as frozen as those bodies inside. Suddenly, everything fit together, the jagged pieces of the puzzle.
Will was Darcy’s father.
32
“My—our mother?” Claire cried. She could not quite believe him, but certain memories—the signs—had been there.
“Yes, yes, I loved her. She had you, your father’s daughter, then. But from our union—our love—Darcy. God forgive me for not telling Darcy and you before, but I am Darcy’s father. And when your father learned of our love, it was the excuse he needed and wanted to leave your mother—for good. Well, I thought it was good, that I would make my fortune abroad, then return to the US and marry her, raise both of you with her.”
Claire stared at him. She had to get this straight, make herself believe and accept it all. “You are Darcy’s father, but not mine? But you left her, left them?”
“I had a deal to go to Japan to make a lot of money, importing and selling rare butterflies there, some legal, some not. I promised to come back, but she told me not to, since I wanted to go—it was my big chance to make money, so we’d be well-off. She—she was so doubly wounded in her head and heart that she turned against me and turned to her books even more. I should have realized that, if I left, her depression, her...loneliness and agoraphobia would isolate her even more—from me, too. As much as I loved books, for a while, I hated them because they were her crutch, her barrier from the world and then even from me. When I came back, I could not win her back, and she turned to her fantasy world and against me.”
“She buried herself in them, sometimes buried us in them, too. She never told me—never told Darcy—about you.”
�
��I figured that out later when I came back. She died shortly after I returned. I grieved, blamed myself for chances lost with Miranda and Darcy. Later Jilly was lost to me, Drew, too, of course. I wanted to tell Darcy everything, but I was afraid to, afraid she’d blame me for desertion the way both of you had your father—that is, the man Darcy thought was her father. So I did what I could, became close to Darcy, adored my grandchildren from afar, and then closer when you and Darcy brought your girls to story time.”
“I saw the way you looked at Jilly when we left the house. What about the painting?”
“It really is of my grandmother, but Darcy is her mirror image. Give her the painting, Claire. Tell her all this, that I love her and Jilly and always will—little Drew, too, of course, but he never liked story time or me, I could tell. I never had a chance to know him, to win him over, only see him, talk to him once or twice. But I can’t stay here now. So tell Darcy all this and let her decide if she wants to tell her children someday.”
“You did all this tracking down and ruining Ralston for her?”
He nodded wildly. “But it might not be understood by the authorities, or even by Darcy and Steve since he got snagged in all this. I did visit Larry Ralston to force some information from him, and now, with kidnapping Clint and Jedi bleeding in there, if either of them die, I may be culpable, but tell them that Steve did not kill Larry Ralston.” He handed her a letter. “That’s a signed confession to police. I fought with Ralston, and he fell in. I swear it was an accident, and I tried to save him... But it was too late. Then I panicked. I faked the suicide note on his phone. I never thought Steve would be blamed for his death—that I could’ve taken Jilly and Drew’s father away from them with my actions. I can’t bear to think I’ve hurt Darcy’s family like this.”
