“Where is the dossier, Janet?” Mina spoke in a clipped manner and her face looked narrower. She seemed like a different woman from the charmingly eccentric one he’d known.
Janet swallowed. “Upstairs. Behind the dresser in the spare bedroom.”
“Go get it,” Mina said. “If you delay, your friend will die. And if I hear you pick up a telephone, I will shoot your mother first.”
“I don’t know if she can move the bureau by herself,” Felice said.
“What she hid by herself, she can fetch by herself.”
Ashen-faced, Janet went up the steps and disappeared from view. Overhead, Wick heard a scraping noise, heavy breathing and then another scrape.
Harvey was watching Mina from the corner of his eye. He must be planning something. But she had moved far enough away that the policeman couldn’t reach her.
One of us has to do something.
From upstairs, Janet called, “I can’t find it! It isn’t here!” There was an edge of panic to her voice.
“Do not joke with me!” Mina’s face tightened with rage. She really was a different person, Wick thought.
“I’m not—oh, there it is! Thank God!” Janet said. “It slipped.”
Footsteps thumped, and Janet appeared at the top of the stairs. She was holding an envelope that looked too small to contain a sheaf of papers.
“That is all?” Mina said tightly. “That envelope?”
“It’s a computer disk.” The blond woman was trembling.
Once Mina got her hands on that envelope, they were as good as dead. He tried to signal Janet with his expression. Run! Throw it away! Do anything!
They made eye contact. Her response was confusion and then dawning horror. It must finally have struck her that Mina had no intention of letting them walk out of this house alive.
“Give it to me or I shoot your friend!”
“Here,” Janet said, and tossed the envelope down the stairs.
Instinctively, Mina grabbed for it. In that split second of distraction, Linda dropped to the floor and Wick hurled himself across the room, straight at Mina.
The barrel of her gun came up, and he was pelting toward her so fast he couldn’t stop. The world exploded in a blinding flash of pain, and then it went black.
“I THINK he’s coming around,” Linda said. “Wick? Honey, are you all right?”
She was bending over him. The light made a halo around her dark hair, and for a minute Wick thought they must both be dead.
But then why did his head hurt so much? Slowly, he realized he was lying on a gurney, listening to the rattle and yammer of a hospital emergency room.
His tongue felt thick, and his initial attempt to speak ended in a glug. But Linda hadn’t missed the fact that his eyes were open.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked, and spread five of them.
“One and a half,” he rasped.
She chuckled. He registered the delightful fact that she was fine, and that somehow they’d gotten out of the cabin without being murdered.
What about the others? And how had he managed to escape death when he’d been shot in the head at pointblank range?
Harvey appeared in Wick’s line of sight. The policeman’s bandage had grown significantly larger, but he appeared otherwise unharmed.
“We’ll need to get a statement as soon as he’s able to talk,” the captain said.
“Oh, Harvey, give the man a break!” It was Janet, right behind him.
“He’ll also need to give his version of what happened the night Yuri shot me,” Harvey said. “It’s still my word against your great-uncle’s.”
“Aren’t you contaminating the witness, just by being here?” Janet teased. “Come on, Harve. My mom’s waiting to give you a hug.”
They vanished from the narrow space that Wick could see from where he lay. Linda leaned down again, her blue eyes brimming with affection as she stroked a lock of hair from his forehead.
He wished he knew how serious his injuries were. He couldn’t risk dying without telling her the whole truth.
“I see now…when we got married…you chose me over everyone, but I couldn’t believe…” Despite his wooden jaw, he pressed on. “I think I…was so afraid…of being abandoned…that I was afraid to admit…how much I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She bit her lip, and he realized she was crying.
A nurse stopped to check the bandage on Wick’s temple. “Feeling better?”
“Better than what?” he said.
“Well enough to make jokes, I see.” She adjusted an intravenous tube in his arm, which he hadn’t realized was there. “The doctor wants to hold you for observation, so I’ll see if there’s a room ready. You’re a very lucky man.”
“I know that,” he said as she turned away.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?” Linda said.
“Okay.” He felt sleepy, and it didn’t seem as important as it should have, but he did want to know. “What happened?”
“Harvey had another gun in a shoulder holster,” she said. “Mina should have spotted it, but I guess she was too busy keeping track of the bunch of us.”
“Harvey shot Mina?”
Linda nodded. “Just as she fired at you. That’s why the bullet grazed your scalp instead of going through your head.”
“Is she—” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Maybe it was due to the fuzziness in his brain, but more likely it was because a part of him still envisioned Mina as the friend she’d seemed to be.
“That’s the ironic part,” Linda said. “Harvey couldn’t shoot very well, in his position. The bullet didn’t hit her anywhere vital. Apparently, it scared her so badly her heart gave out.”
He grimaced. “She killed three people, just to get the dossier. So she could sell it, I guess. All for nothing.”
“I don’t think she did it just for the money.” Linda was rubbing his shoulders, her touch light and soothing. “Mostly she wanted revenge. She was Yuri’s mistress, and he sent her to prison to die.”
“Nice guy,” Wick said.
“The Litvonian government is filing for his extradition,” she said. “It was on the radio. He’s charged with embezzlement and crimes against humanity.”
“So he’s going back to Litvonia?”
“Not right away,” she said. “First, the district attorney plans to charge him with attempted murder on a police officer.”
“So Yuri loses everything—his money and his freedom,” Wick murmured.
“And his family. They want nothing more to do with him.” Linda stretched, then got a startled look. “Ow!”
“You’re hurt?” Alarmed, he tried to sit up, but the room swam and he had to fall back.
“No. The baby kicked me.” She smiled. “I guess it’s reminding us that life goes on.”
“Thank goodness.” He touched her stomach gently, only now beginning to grasp that they were safe, all three of them.
Chapter Eighteen
Over the next few days, Linda and Wick repeated the story of that whirlwind week so many times to friends and reporters that she began to feel she was relating events that had happened to someone else.
With the fascination by the news media, the adventure soon took on mythic proportions. Inland seemed to be adopting a new legend, about a brave man and woman who brought down a deadly international assassin.
Harvey didn’t get the credit he deserved, in Linda’s opinion. But the captain didn’t seem to mind, now that Janet had forgiven him for shooting Yuri.
To complicate matters, Linda and Wick now owned the Lyme Company, which was under investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It took a lot of persuading to get the probe dropped.
Gradually, they and the police pieced together most of Mina’s story. The woman turned out to be one of the most feared, and best disguised, assassins in Europe.
After escaping from prison, she’d followed Yuri’s trail to Inland and set
herself to recovering the dossier. She had avoided confronting Yuri directly, maybe from fear of his private arsenal or to avoid the risk of being spotted and returned to Litvonia. But a more chilling possibility occurred to Linda.
She believed Mina wanted to strip Yuri of everything and everyone he cared about, rather than to kill him. To that end, she must have intended to slay Janet and leave Yuri to grieve.
Also, Mina must have known he wouldn’t keep his top-secret information in his own home. In view of Granville’s role in helping smuggle Yuri into the country, he must have seemed a likely conspirator.
It must have been Mina who had conducted the initial break-in attempt at the Lyme Company. When she wasn’t able to get through, she’d invented a pretext and hired Sarah to retrieve the files.
Sarah had succeeded, all right. But Mina had been in too great a hurry to cover her tracks. She might have feared Wick was spying for Granville, or maybe she simply hadn’t wanted any witnesses. On her way to meet Sarah, she’d driven him off the bridge.
She had probably intended to kill Sarah, as well, Wick speculated, but the detective had never shown up at the rendezvous point to meet Mina.
In fact, once she realized how dangerous the material was, Sarah hadn’t wanted to give the files to her client for fear of putting “John Doe,” or rather, Jane Doe, at risk. That was a bitter twist, wasn’t it? Linda thought.
That night’s exertions, and the frustration of not getting the files, must have aggravated Mina’s heart condition. She’d been out of commission for several months, long enough for the trail to grow cold.
But since she had rented a house near Janet’s, she was able to watch Linda. She must have suspected by then that, since Wick’s body had never been found, he was alive and in hiding.
After the kidnapping, Mina had followed Wick until she identified the building where Sarah lived. Then, perhaps realizing the police would be coming to question her as a witness, she’d returned home.
Meeting Linda might have been a stroke of luck. Or it was possible Mina had discovered the Ryans’ cabin and was keeping the area under surveillance. In any case, Mina had decided to use Linda and Wick rather than eliminating them.
With Linda’s help, she’d broken into Granville’s safe. The list of names had nothing to do with the dossier, but Mina couldn’t know that until she broke the code. So, later that night, she must have gone back to look for it in Granville’s computer.
Either he surprised her there, or she surprised him. When Avery walked in, he, too, fell victim.
It was hard to reconcile the image of a cold-blooded killer with the friend who had helped Linda and Wick. In the end, Linda had to accept that the affable personality she’d known as Mina had existed only as a device.
A MONTH BEFORE the baby was due, Linda found herself back at Janet’s house. They were both dressing for a wedding again, but this time it was Janet who would walk down the aisle.
The windows were open to an unexpectedly cool September day. Janet radiated joy in her gown of textured white silk, V-necked in front and tied with a flat bow in the back.
Felice finished fixing the veil on her daughter’s head and checked her own blue mother-of-the-bride dress in the mirror. “You look wonderful,” Linda said.
“And you! Radiant!” returned the tall woman.
Stealing a glance in the mirror, Linda thought she looked a bit puffy in her rose-colored maternity dress. But her hair had finally thickened, as Janet had foretold, and today it had even consented to curl beneath a circlet of flowers.
Mostly she noticed the bulge at her midsection, a promise of the child that was to come. An ultrasound had revealed it to be a boy, for whom she and Wick had chosen the name Avery.
“The limo!” Felice peered out the front window. “It’s come!”
“Where’s my bouquet?” Janet surveyed the room frantically.
“Right here.” Linda handed it over.
They rode through a crisp early-fall day. At the church, Melissa Ryan was waiting to usher them in through a side door.
Since Mina’s death, Linda’s parents had admitted they’d been wrong about Wick. The four of them had begun to grow closer.
When she peeked into the sanctuary, Linda saw that the guests were already seated. At least half the police department was there; it wasn’t often that two of their own got married.
Felice and Melissa went to take their seats, leaving the young women alone. “I couldn’t say this to my mother, but I wish Uncle Yuri could be here,” Janet said. “I feel sorry for him. He’s missing everything.”
“On the other hand, he did try to kill Harvey,” Linda said.
“You can kind of understand the mistake.” Janet fiddled with her veil. “I mean, I suppose Harvey’s background would look suspicious, if you were paranoid. But he’s a good guy. The best.”
“Almost the best,” Linda corrected with a grin.
“Depends on one’s point of view.”
Armand Capek stuck his head in the door. “They’re starting the processional. Everybody ready?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be,” Janet told her father.
Linda went first down the aisle, holding her small bouquet of pink and white carnations. Ahead of her, Harvey waited beside the minister.
But it was Wick, standing next to Harvey, who drew Linda’s attention. Like the captain, he stood straight and tall in his tuxedo. Only the old scar on his cheek and the new one on his forehead testified to his injuries.
She could feel his eyes on her even before she met his gaze, but she wasn’t prepared for the glow that suffused his face. Whatever demons from the past had once held his feelings captive, they had finally been exorcised.
A shaft of sunlight hit the stained-glass windows behind the altar, bathing the scene in gold and ruby brilliance. She heard a murmur of appreciation from the guests.
As she took her place across from Wick, Linda knew that in their hearts, she and Wick stood again as bride and groom, and this time they were starting over without reservation or shadow.
They had come home at last, together.
eISBN 978-14592-6851-7
AND THE BRIDE VANISHES
Copyright © 1997 by Jackie Hyman
All rights reserved Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Harlequin Enterprises Limited. 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Printed in U.S.A.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Excerpt
About The Author
Other Books By
Coast Of Characters
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Copyright
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And The Bride Vanishes Page 21
