by Linda Ladd
“No problem,” said Carson. “We’re already involved with this case. They’ll have to back off.”
After that, and once Novak was finally convinced their story was true, the three of them sat down together and waited in silence for the surgeons to come out and tell them that Mariah Murray was dead. That’s what Novak expected they would hear. Novak spent the time wondering how in the world he could have been so blind. Never would he have thought she was any kind of investigator or anything else that was that much aboveboard. Something criminal, maybe. Yeah, he would’ve believed that. No question.
When a doctor did come out, a long time later, he looked tired and pretty much wasted. He told them that she had survived the operation but was still in critical condition and would remain so for a long time to come. That she had six major stab wounds, a collapsed lung, and serious blood loss, among other things, but no severed major arteries, to which she owed her life. He ended by advising them to spend time down the hall in the chapel. That chances were she wouldn’t make it through the day, despite everything they’d repaired. He told them that once she had been stabilized in CCU and was breathing on her own and was out of the woods, they would put her in a private room. They didn’t expect that to happen any time soon, if ever. After the surgeon left, the FBI guys left, too, to report in and to try to get a bead on where Emma had escaped or been taken, and with whom.
First thing, though, they were going to go and get the kid out of Child Protective Services and bring him back to stay at the hospital with Novak. Novak had insisted on it and convinced them that’s what Mariah would want them to do. That kid had a tough enough time, as it was. He didn’t need to be placed in foster care. Novak had friends he could stay with, or maybe he could take Mariah and the kid home to Bonne Terre with him, if she managed to survive, at least until they located the kid’s relatives in Australia.
After that, Novak sat by himself and stared out the window and watched the nurses go by and glance sorrowfully in at him, and waited for the good news to show up. He pretended there wouldn’t be bad news. No way. Mariah was going to survive. Late that day they let him go into CCU and see her, but only for a few minutes every two hours. She was hooked up to every tube and monitor known to mankind, eyes taped shut, but she was breathing on her own now, which was a miracle in itself. Labored breaths, wheezing and hoarse and hard to listen to, but she was holding her own. That was the only thing he had to hold on to at the moment. He stood there beside the bed every time he went in and just stared down at her white face and slender body under the sheet and tried unsuccessfully to contain his rage that somebody had gotten by with that kind of cowardly attack. Anger that ballooned more with every passing hour.
Novak had been stupid and blind. He had been duped by Mariah and Emma both. He was not used to being messed with like that. It rarely happened. He did not like the way it felt. And Mariah? In intelligence work? That was just so hard for him to get his mind around. Mariah? Of all people? But the FBI had laid out her credentials in a pretty damn incontrovertible way. She had tried to tell him she was different than she had been when they were young, but this was one hell of a lot different. She had been working undercover at home and in Japan, too, he assumed, probably had lots of friends and colleagues in both places. But here, in America, in this country, Novak was all she had. The only one who could sit in that waiting room and wait for her to wake up.
* * *
Three days later, Mariah regained consciousness, came awake slowly while Novak was still sitting in a chair beside the bed. When she started moving around and groaning, he stood up and leaned down over her. After a few minutes and with some effort, she managed to focus her eyes on his face. When she recognized him, she raised her bandaged hand. He took it and held it between both of his own. She tried to pull him down closer.
“I’m sorry,” she got out somehow. “I messed up. They got away.”
“Shh, Mariah, don’t try to talk. Don’t worry about that. I’ve already been briefed by the FBI. I know everything now. You just need to get better.”
She sort of nodded her head and closed her eyes. She was still very weak, and she was already drifting down into her drugged sleep, but Novak had to know. He had to ask her. He leaned down, his mouth moving close to her ear. “Tell me who did this to you. Was it Emma? Did she stab you?”
Mariah opened her eyes and nodded. Her voice was hoarse, a bare whisper now. “She came up behind me . . .”
Mariah’s voice petered away and she lapsed back into sleep. Novak sat back down in the chair. Now he knew for sure. Emma was a cold-blooded killer. He had to get her. But he also knew it would be a hell of a long time before Mariah could ever return home to Sydney, not in this condition. There would be a long and painful recuperation period she would have to suffer through. But he could help with that. He could take her home with him to the bayou until she was better. She would be safe there. He could nurse her back to health and then put both her and Ryan on a plane headed back to Australia. He owed her that much. More than that. But once they were in the air, safely away from the States, then he was going after Emma Adamson. Now that he was certain she had been the one who attacked Mariah. Stabbed her over and over. With a goddamn steak knife. Attempted to murder the childhood friend who’d come to help her.
Oh, yeah, after he found Emma, then he was going to take her down. According to the FBI agents, Emma Adamson had hurt a lot of people, manipulated a lot of people, and killed a lot of people, all facts, at least according to their investigation. She had used Novak for a fool, and she had been crafty enough to do it by using her fragility to elicit his pity. But she was not going to get away with it this time. He didn’t pity her now. Novak was going to find her. And then he was going to end her.
Chapter Twenty-seven
They made it back to Bonne Terre seventeen days later when Mariah was finally cleared to travel. A medical helicopter flew her down to New Orleans where an ambulance was waiting to transport her all the rest of the way to Novak’s plantation. Novak and Ryan Adamson had left Atlanta the day before so they could be home and waiting when the ambulance showed up.
Their trip south in Novak’s truck had been made mostly in silence. Novak had concentrated on driving and the boy had sat still and stared mutely out the window. He often turned and looked behind them. Ryan was still scared to death—of his mother, of Novak, and of anybody else with whom he came into contact. He wouldn’t open up to anybody, not even the child psychologist the hospital had provided. Not even when Novak stopped at a McDonald’s restaurant on the way down and tried to joke around a bit and loosen the kid up. Ryan just sat across from him in the booth, utterly solemn, big eyes darting all around the restaurant and at the other customers, no doubt watching for his mother and the men who would be with her when she came back to get him. Novak couldn’t tell yet whether the boy wanted her to come for him or not.
The day Mariah finally arrived at the plantation, she still looked in pretty bad shape physically, but at least she was alive and alert and breathing and determined to recuperate. Miraculously, she appeared to be in high spirits. Two burly EMTs from Tulane University Hospital rolled her inside his house on a gurney, very careful with their patient and very polite to Novak. Novak had given things a lot of thought on the long drive home and had decided to turn the large butler’s pantry on the first floor into her sickroom. He had already converted it to use as his own sleeping quarters a few years back during a particularly bad hurricane season out on the Gulf. It would be no imposition. He usually slept on the Sweet Sarah, anyway. The only furniture the room contained was a twin bed, one small bedside table, and an ornately carved rocking chair that had been on a French ship that had sailed across the ocean with some grandmother of his, one with a multitude of greats before the grandmother part. The rocker probably dated somewhere around the 1850s.
The highly competent EMTs situated Mariah comfortably in her bed, made sure her multitude of stitches had held up on the way down and her
IVs were operating properly and her vital signs were in good shape. Then they took off in a crunch of shells and drove out his driveway, and Novak was left to play nursemaid to his injured sister-in-law and acting nanny to a murderous woman’s frightened young son. It had turned out to be a strange course of unexpected events, all right, and having a woman and child living inside his house again was going to be a bit disconcerting.
Surprisingly, he found that he didn’t mind hosting either one of them, not in the least. His ugly opinion of Mariah had experienced a transformation. A total about-face. After she’d gotten better, she’d told him herself what had happened and how it had happened. She had related the whole terrible attack in a low voice from her hospital bed. Mariah had shown some guts trying to fight off Emma’s shocking betrayal. Even while being brutally stabbed. She’d told him the first day she’d been lucid but still so very hurt. She told him how Emma had come up behind her with the steak knife. She told him that she thought she might have injured Emma in the fight, too, and that she hoped she had. She was as bitter as hell. Hell, Novak would’ve been bitter, too. He was bitter. And he was glad to hear the part about Emma’s injury. But it didn’t really matter. Emma was going down for what she did to Mariah, just as soon as Novak could find her.
After the ambulance disappeared into the Spanish moss–draped trees at the far edge of his lawn, Novak walked back inside the grand foyer and then headed back through the formal parlor to Mariah’s impromptu sickroom. He stood unnoticed in the doorway for several moments. Mariah was sitting propped up in bed against a bunch of snowy white pillows that he and Ryan had picked up on their way home at a Bed Bath & Beyond in Montgomery, Alabama. She looked over and saw him. She smiled.
Ryan was there with her, sitting in the ancient rocker, pushing it back and forth with one toe. He wasn’t smiling but he looked a bit more comfortable now about how things were turning out. He seemed to be a great little kid, despite what his life living with a psychopathic mom must have been like.
“I think I like it here,” Ryan suddenly said, turning to look at Novak. “A lot, maybe. Your house looks like those old plantations in my storybooks.”
Well, that was more than the kid had said to him in the last three weeks. “Back in the early days, they grew sugarcane out there in those fields behind the house. You’re gonna like my sailboat, too. It’s docked down on the bayou.”
“Really, you got your own boat?” When Novak nodded, Ryan jumped up. “Can I go outside and see it?”
“Sure, but don’t go all the way down to the boat. It’s too far. Stay close to the house where I can keep an eye on you, okay? I’ll take you down there later.”
“Okay.”
Novak watched the child run out through the parlor and then a moment later, the front door opened and slammed shut. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d heard the sound of a child running through the halls of Bonne Terre. It was unnerving. He felt himself starting to feel the inevitable sadness, remembering his own children, Kelly and Katie, and how they’d been taken from him. He looked back at Mariah. She had her eyes closed now. Despite the great improvement he’d seen in the last week or so, she still did not look or feel well. She wore no lipstick or eye makeup anymore, and to Novak that made her look better. Her skin had bleached out way too white from loss of blood, like some vampire on a TV program. Her body was still anemic, and she looked too thin and feeble and ill, despite the brave smile she put on whenever he came around.
The transfusions they’d given her had done a lot to save her life, but she was still very weak and her energy level remained low. When she opened her eyes again, she watched him without saying anything. Her green eyes looked huge and haunted and dark in the shuttered room. But she was alive and she was breathing on her own, and that was nothing less than miraculous. She could have bled completely out, lying all alone on that floor in that dark cabin with the door wide open to the cold rain.
A brief picture flashed through his mind, the way she had looked that night when he’d flipped on the light, down on the floor and swallowed up in a pool of her own blood. The stab wounds had looked horrendous, brutal enough to kill her any day. If they’d gone an inch deeper or if that bitch Emma had cut a critical artery or organ, she would have been dead long before he got there, dead within minutes. Mariah had been mind-bogglingly lucky to have survived, but then again, Mariah had always been lucky. He walked over and stood at the foot of her bed. “So, how are you feelin’ now? Really? The trip down take it out of you some?”
Mariah looked away from him. The plantation shutters on the windows were half opened and throwing slanted patterns of light and dark bars over the white sheets. Maybe he should open the windows and get some fresh air circulating. The house was still stuffy. Then she looked back at him.
“Really want to know how I feel, Will? I feel like a damn fool. Emma got me before I could react. Surprised me, even though I had begun to suspect she might not be as innocent as I’d first thought. But I didn’t want to believe she was a murderer. I didn’t want to confront her with who I really was, not until you got back with Ryan. I wanted her to stay calm and believe I had only come up there to help her escape.”
Mariah stopped, took a deep breath, already tired out by the conversation. “I was biding my time, Will, and that was the wrong thing to do with somebody like her. You know, she’s always had a bit of a cruel streak inside her, even when we were little kids. She never wanted to play with Sarah. Talked me into treating Sarah badly. It had to be her, and only her. All the time. Until she met a guy and moved on from me. But I never thought she could turn into this kind of monster. I never thought she would kill somebody in cold blood like she tried to do to me. An old friend.” Mariah stopped there, shivered inside the memory. “You should’ve seen the look she got in her eyes when she was stabbing me. Oh, God, they turned hard and murderous and crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never seen anybody look that way in my life, and I’ve dealt with some pretty bad guys.”
“She’s a monster, all right.”
After that, Novak and Mariah just looked at each other for a long moment. Didn’t say anything else. Mariah looked uneasy. Novak tried to reassure her. “I’m going after Emma, Mariah. She’s not going to get away with what she did to you. I’m gonna take her down and anybody else who’s with her.” He waited, expecting her to quote some kind of law-enforcement crap about fair trials and guilty until proven innocent. Like Claire Morgan had done on occasion. But Mariah didn’t.
“Well, good. All power to you. Wish I could go along.”
Novak considered her for a moment and then he pulled the rocking chair up close beside the bed. He picked up her hand. He looked down at the bandages as he spoke. The gauze was spotted red from a reopened cut. “I was wrong about you, Mariah. I’m sorry for the way I treated you when you showed up here. I was out of line.”
Mariah gave a soft laugh. “Oh, no, I deserved what you dished out. I did. And you were right to suspect me, you know. I was lying to you then, from the get-go, and ever since I pulled up at your front door. Guess I’m the one who should apologize. I misled you. The entire time. On purpose. I was ordered to do that, but please know that I didn’t like it. From the beginning, I told them that I didn’t think you’d fall for my story without being suspicious of my motives. And you didn’t.”
Novak nodded, and then he asked her the one question that he’d been mulling over in his head for days. “Why not just tell me the truth when you got here? I would’ve helped you. I might not have liked it, but I would have done it.”
“I didn’t think you would, not based on our past relationship. I needed somebody here in the U.S. who I knew I could trust to go up there with me, to stay close and have my back. And I was under very strict orders. It was a covert operation and I was to remain undercover to everybody but the assigned FBI agents. I couldn’t tell you. I just couldn’t. Not without jeopardizing my career.”
“You had two FBI guys backing you
up. Why come to me?”
Mariah hesitated, would not look at him, just stared down at her lap. “Okay, I’m just going to have to say it.” She stopped there again, very reluctant to say whatever was coming next. “It’s just that I wanted to see you again. It had been so long. I wanted to see how you were doing. Okay, there, I admitted it. Stupid, huh?” She laughed a little, but it sounded unsure and embarrassed. Her eyes were searching his face now. “But I also knew you could take care of yourself, and me, too, if I got myself into trouble. I remember that about you, and ASIO researched you thoroughly before I was allowed to approach you. My superiors were quite impressed with you.”
Mariah paused again, licked her dry lips, already getting weary. “Those two guys were also told to stand down by their SAC unless I was in imminent danger of being killed. It was only a courtesy to ASIO, with no promises made and deniability always intact.” She smiled again. Just a tiny curve of her lips. “That was only in case I went down hard and caused an international incident. Actually, they were more worried about your taking me down than the bad guys. They sensed we had some issues. You, more than me.”
“I understand that you had to do what you had to do. Right now, I’m working on getting you back home to Sydney as soon as possible. And Ryan, too. I’m looking for his paternal grandparents down there. No telling what Emma might do next. If she’s even interested in getting her kid back. He thinks she’s going to come get him. He told me this morning that she always comes and gets him. He’s scared of her.”
Mariah stiffened, looked fearful for an instant, but then tried to hide it. “Do you think she could find this place? As remote as it is?”
“It’s highly unlikely. So relax. You don’t need to be worrying about that right now. I’m here to stop her, if she tries anything. And she probably won’t risk it. She’ll be more interested in saving her own skin. She’s got accomplices helping her or she wouldn’t have gotten this far on her own. Probably some of Wilson’s men that she mesmerized and turned against him. She’s good at it.”
