by Gigi Pandian
“This complicates things,” he said, throwing the pages onto the small wooden table so forcefully that they slid into my mug.
“How much do you know?”
“Apparently not nearly enough.”
I told him what I’d learned from Becca. How she’d convinced Rick Coronado to write her family’s story, knowing he was interested in the stolen statue, and then used him to avenge her father’s unsolved murder, before transferring to my university and getting close to me so she could watch Lane’s downfall.
“She used me to get to you,” I said.
It was my fault. They’d found Lane through me. Lane had tried to stay out of the media coverage that had followed our discoveries, leaving me to take full credit without him. But dammit, why had he taken two of the rubies? Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone?
I had to focus. I could go back to being mad at him later.
Lane wanted to stay hidden, so no one would look into his past. But his photograph had appeared a few times, leading to people in his past to find him.
“I see the gears in your head spinning, Jones,” Lane said softly. “You’re wondering how she knew it was me.”
“That part, I know.”
“You do?”
“She saw you with her father seven years ago. She was thirteen and had a crush on you.”
“But when I was in Paris with Marc for that job, I was dressed as his old college friend—the one he thought I resembled already. There’s nothing that should connect me to this. Yet she knew.”
“You’re not just paranoid that you have a distinctive face. If someone has feelings for you and they’re looking closely, they’ll see through your disguises. At least the subtle ones.”
“I’m sorry. For all of this.”
“Don’t be. It’s mostly my fault. I’m the one who let my ego get in the way, allowing her to fool me. She’s trying to prove you killed her father. Becca is the one behind everything that’s happening now, but she’s not the one who killed her father—she’s seeking revenge, but against the wrong person.”
Ending up in the spotlight was the worst part of saving lost treasures. I hadn’t asked for any of it. I blinked back tears.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered before turning away. But I didn’t get far. He pulled me into his arms. I rested my head on his chest. But only for a moment. I pulled away and looked up at him.
“We need to figure out who actually did kill Marc Durant and Rick Coronado,” I said. “Because otherwise, you…” I couldn’t finish the rest of the sentence. I couldn’t lose Lane.
“I couldn’t solve it seven years ago.”
“That’s before you met me.” I looked into his hazel eyes. Flecks of emerald green shone in the light. “I refuse to lose you. I’m going to solve this. I need you to start at the real beginning of this story.”
Chapter 31
“Marc Durant was the man who got me involved,” Lane said. “You’ve heard all about him.”
“The man you watched die seven years ago,” I said.
“Twice.”
“Wait, that really happened?”
“Almost exactly as it was told in the pages by Rick Coronado.”
I sat with my feet in front of the radiator, warming my cold toes. I’d gotten dressed in my own clothes but had kept Lane’s fuzzy wool socks. “The impossible murder in the Rick Coronado manuscript was real?”
“The key facts, but not the details. I wasn’t really an old university friend of Marc’s—Luc in the story. I wasn’t really much of a friend of his at all. Not at first. But I came to think of him as one in the short period of time we spent together. Stupid, on my part, though I don’t know that feeling otherwise would have changed anything.”
“You were so sure you wouldn’t be recognized not only because you looked different back then, but because they thought you were someone else. Someone French.”
Lane nodded. “Marc knew that one of his friends from university was away from his apartment traveling abroad, and it was a man who looked similar enough that I could disguise myself as him. It was a precaution only. Nobody was supposed to see me. Nothing was supposed to happen that night.”
“You’re skipping ahead.”
“Right.” Lane adjusted his glasses. “I’ll start with the beginning. Marc Durant. The heir to the Durant Tea Company fortunes. He was in his early thirties, and his father was about to retire as the head of the company.
“I’d met Marc more than a decade before, when I was a teenager forced to attend one of my father’s parties. Marc was in the same position, though a few years older than me. I was paraded around to speak with business associates in their native language, since my father knew how to take advantage of a manipulative ploy when he saw one. Marc’s father was much the same, already grooming him in the cutthroat business practices he and his father before him had used to grow their tea empire. When he hated business school, his father insisted Marc at least become a doctor, so he tried medical school and hated that even more. He couldn’t win.
“Marc and I slipped away with a bottle of Calvados and a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. He told me how he lived in a miserable old mansion with the ghost of his grandfather. I thought he was making up an entertaining story, fueled by alcohol and boredom. But the story is the same one in Rick Coronado’s manuscript, and the same one Marc told me again when we met up years later. How his grandfather was a brutal man, feared by his factory workers and family alike. When someone pushed him down the stairs of that mansion in 1950, everyone who was there that night claimed to have neither seen nor heard anything. Because his murder was unsolved, his spirit decided to stick around for vengeance. The painting that had once resembled the dead man’s own grandfather, who’d built the mansion before the wars, now morphed into looking like him. I laughed at the time, as we finished the bottle of Calvados and the last two cigarettes, and told Marc he should become a writer.
“He insisted it was all true, and that his family story had a tragic ending. His grandfather’s ghost killed his own wife on the anniversary of his death. Pushed down the stairs by an unseen hand.
“That creepy story ended our evening together. Marc and I didn’t keep in touch, but we met again at an auction here in Paris, more than seven years ago. His family was selling one of their pieces of art, one of Marc’s favorites, and he was there to say goodbye to it. I was there for other reasons, which aren’t relevant to this story. But what is relevant is that I wasn’t myself at the time. I was in disguise, as it were. A down-on-his-luck Frenchman from a noble family.”
“What exactly does that look like?” I asked, wriggling my toes for warmth.
“You’re cold.” Lane pulled a tartan blanket from a shelf under the bed.
“And you’re ignoring the question.”
“Moi?” He lifted his glasses onto his head and shrugged. The mannerism was small, yet that of a completely different person. A downtrodden wariness had replaced the confidence present a moment before.
“You scare me sometimes.”
He tilted his head and his glasses fell back into place. “I stayed away from Marc as much as I could, because no matter how good a disguise is, it’s never wise to put yourself in close contact with people you know. We were near each other only once during the evening, and there was indeed a flicker of confused familiarity, which I didn’t return, so we each went our separate ways. But watching Marc from afar, I saw that he was miserable, so after my business was done, I became myself again and bumped into him. We went out for a drink.
“He told me how his awful father was about to retire and hand him the business, which was struggling and needed an even more ruthless hand at the helm to save it. He’d told his father he wanted to sell the business and maybe even the house—why did the family need to pay upkeep on the drafty old haunted mansion? They had a museum’s worth of artwork i
n the house that could easily pay for his own daughter’s future several times over. But when Marc proposed this to his father, his father decided to sell only one piece of art—the one piece he knew Marc loved more than anything, but wasn’t worth much money. That’s what had been on auction that night. There was an ancient statue his great grandfather had brought back from India that was worth a fortune—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Cambodia. The statue is from Cambodia.”
Lane raised an eyebrow. “I read Rick’s manuscript. The Serpent King…Damn. A naga. I hadn’t studied as much Asian art then, but yes, it could have been Cambodian.”
“It is. But we’ll get to that later. Go on with your story.”
“There was a condition in the family trust that prevented the family from selling the statue. Marc didn’t know what he was going to do. He was a writer like his mother and a painter like his grandmother. Not a businessman. Especially not one like our fathers.
“Marc was living with his family in a tiny apartment in Paris, refusing his mother’s offer to live in the mansion with them, even though there was plenty of room. He didn’t want his father’s malice to infect his family. Or their superstition. His wife had left him and taken his beloved daughter. He wanted them back.”
“His daughter Rebecca.”
“Ever since the death of his grandmother on the anniversary of her husband’s unsolved murder, nobody had slept in the mansion on that December anniversary. They always cleared out and left for a hotel, so the ghost couldn’t kill anyone.
“You know the story of how I chose my initial profession. To get back at my father and his corrupt associates. Never stealing from anyone who couldn’t afford it. Especially fond of jobs where I could make someone like that suffer. It was my idea to steal the sculpture for Marc. I proposed it subtly at first, just mentioning how it was a ridiculous way to live, and couldn’t someone simply walk out of the house with the statue? He said there was an impenetrable lock. I joked that such things could be overcome.
“After I said that, I saw the flicker of recognition reignite in Marc’s eyes. ‘I knew I recognized you earlier tonight,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know it was you. I only knew it was someone from my past. You looked very much like an old university classmate of mine. I suspect there’s more to you than you’ve told me.’
“I didn’t say anything more then. But we exchanged contact information, and I looked into him. His story was exactly what he told me. I trusted him because of our similar fathers, and because we trust people we knew when we were young. He felt the same way. When he invited me to coffee, he made the next subtle move, letting me know his father was so miserly that he refused to put video surveillance security in the house.
“We understood each other then and dropped the pretense. I told him I knew exactly what needed to be done. It was a month before the anniversary of the earlier murders that had never been solved. The day that everyone cleared out of the house. That would be the night to steal the statue and several other valuable items kept in the library. As one of our several safety back-ups, I would disguise myself as his old friend from university—the one he’d mistaken me for at the auction. The man now lived only half the year in France, and we learned through social media that he’d be in a much warmer part of the world through winter. If Marc and I were caught, we could say we were old college friends who got drunk while reminiscing, decided to spend the night in a haunted house, and surprised an opportunistic burglar. It was a perfect plan. Until midnight…”
I blinked at him. “You aren’t telling me the ghost story is true, are you? A ghost who floats above the snow and can bring people back to life to kill them again?”
“I know what I saw, Jones. I watched as a ghost killed Marc Durant through a locked glass door, only to see him die again on the staircase that had claimed his ancestors before him.”
Chapter 32
Lane leapt up from the table. He paced the apartment, spinning a pencil (which I knew he wished was a cigarette) between his fingers. “God, I went over this so many times in my mind the year after it happened. But since I quit that life and began my art history PhD, I’ve forced it from my mind. It began to feel like a nightmare—horrifying, but a dream I’d long-since woken up from.”
“I’m sorry you have to relive it,” I said. “You can take a break,” I added, even though I didn’t mean it.
Lane smiled for the first time since he’d begun his story. “You don’t mean that. But thank you for saying it. It’s all right. I’ll tell you what I saw.” He paused and took a deep breath. “We’d entered the house though the back to avoid street cameras. The outer doors to the house had good security, but Marc had a key and knew the code into the house. It was the inner doors to the library he couldn’t breach himself. Military-grade glass with a lock like that of a safe. Through the library’s wide glass double-doors, the room’s treasures were on display for everyone to see as they ascended the grand staircase. His father was the only one who knew how to unlock the door, but he wanted everyone to see his riches inside the room.”
“Sounds like a charming fellow,” I murmured.
“You see why I empathized with Marc’s situation.”
“But don’t tell me you’re an expert safe cracker now. If I’ve stepped even further inside a Rick Coronado novel, I’m going to scream.”
Lane laughed. “No. A lock, yes. A safe, not a chance. But I’m a creative thinker.”
“The glass.”
“Exactly. Glass that’s meant to be unbreachable serves its purpose in the moment, but it’s no match for time. And we had time that night. The plan was to set off the alarm and force the door on our way out, so it wouldn’t look like an inside job. But we never got that far.
“After half an hour of work, I broke through the glass and got us into the library. The room was on the second floor, directly off the landing at the top of the grand staircase, with hallways to the left and right leading to bedrooms.
“I was supposed to follow him inside after making sure the house was indeed empty. But when I reached the outside of the room, the glass door flung itself shut. I could see Marc’s horrified face from inside the room. His hands flew to this throat. I ran to the door, but it was locked. As I shook the door handle, I watched as Marc’s face turned red. His hands remained on his throat. It looked like he was fighting with an invisible assailant. It yanked him upward, and his feet left the ground. But still, I couldn’t see who was strangling him.”
“The ghost,” I whispered.
“I didn’t know what to think at the time. Or rather, I didn’t have time to think at the time. I was watching my friend die before my eyes, and I was trapped on the other side. I grasped the door handle, but it didn’t give. I reached through the circular opening in the glass I’d cut to unlock the latch, but it was jammed. I knelt at the door and tried to force it open any way possible, but it didn’t give. Through the glass, my eyes locked on Marc’s. His hands were still on his throat, but now blood was pouring from his lips.”
I gasped and covered my mouth.
“He—” Lane’s voice broke. “He fell to the ground, and his hands fell limp at his side. His eyes stared at the ceiling, unblinking. I knew it was too late. He was already dead.”
Lane got himself a glass of water before continuing.
“As one of our precautions, I didn’t have my cell phone with me. Easier to pretend to be someone else when you don’t have your own phone or a suspicious burner phone. I ran downstairs to use the landline. I called for an ambulance but didn’t stay on the line with them. I ran through the house, looking for open windows or doors. There had to be someone else inside the house with us. Someone who’d killed him. I thought it might have been a rope around his neck, which I’d been too distracted to see, so as soon as I got off the phone I ran to the attic above the library. That was the only thing that made sense—someone pulling a
rope from above. But the attic was empty. It showed no signs of a hole where someone could lower a rope, and it was dusty. Nobody had been there. But while I was in the dusty attic, I heard the scream. It was his voice, Jones. I rushed back down and found the glass doors open—and Marc’s body was gone.
“I knew I’d seen him be strangled by an invisible force. But now he was gone. Banging at the front door startled me and drew my gaze to the stairs. That’s when I saw where Marc’s body had reappeared. He’d been flung down the stairs. His twisted body lay at the bottom of the staircase. For the second time that night, there was no question Marc Durant was dead.”
“You didn’t see him alive in between then?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see him, but I swear I heard him. The detail Rick Coronado added in his manuscript about the medical crew seeing him thrown down the stairs was fiction.”
Hadn’t I read something about witnesses in the initial reports seeing a ghost? I couldn’t place the recollection, though.
“I let the paramedics into the house,” Lane continued. “The police and a second ambulance arrived shortly afterward. They took me to the hospital for a gash I’d gotten on my arm when I tried to break through the glass to help Marc, and said they’d follow up with more questions after I received treatment. That was a conversation I knew couldn’t happen. So I called someone I knew could help.
“It was a strictly mercenary transaction. In exchange for a substantial amount of money, he asked no questions and provided me extra bandages for my arm, dropped me at a neutral location I requested, and left without looking back. I got back to my apartment without being seen.
“I had no idea what to do. My friend was dead. I was about to turn thirty. I’d had a good run getting back at unethical people like my father. But I was an adult. One who’d screwed up far beyond what I would have thought possible. Even though I had followed my self-imposed rules—no weapons and only stealing from people with questionable ethics who could afford it—someone was dead. It was time for me to take a good look at what I was doing with my life. So I called John.”
