by Dana Mentink
He gaped. And then he took her in his arms and planted a kiss on her temple. “I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“You’re right,” she said, heart pounding.
SIXTEEN
Luca still had his arms around Ava when Sue cleared her throat discreetly. He let Ava go, watching her eyes shift from looking at Sue over his shoulder to him. He could see the struggle there. She trusted Sue and Harold. She did not want to hide things from them.
He hoped she could read his expression. Your call.
In the end, she stuffed the bag back into her pocket, while Luca’s body still blocked Sue from seeing. How hard would it be if these people she loved turned out to be killers? He breathed a silent prayer that it would not come to that, and he and Ava joined the two in the kitchen where they sipped some flavorless tea.
Luca could hardly contain his eagerness to leave, to go and examine the contents. Instead, he forced himself to contribute to the discussion.
“The pipe that busted the window belongs in the garage,” Harold said.
“Well, don’t move it,” Sue advised. “The police might want to check for prints and such, or maybe I just watch too many crime shows on TV.”
“No, you’re right. It’s a good idea to leave it,” Ava said.
Sue sipped her tea. “You sound just like your father. Practical and pragmatic. How is he? Did the surgery go well?”
Ava was surprised that Sue knew the details of her father’s recent procedure. “Yes, it went fine. He’s recovering and we hired a nurse. I would have stayed, but he wanted me to move the sale forward.”
She looked stricken. “Don’t say that, Ava. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can turn things around here at Whisper. I know it.”
“Now you sound like Paul,” Harold said.
“There are worse things than a little optimism. Bruce just needs to recover and he’ll feel differently about selling.”
“The resort is in my name now, Sue,” Ava said gently. “I’ve got to make the best decision for me and Dad.”
Harold thunked his mug on the table. “She’s right. Bad luck is cumulative, like the snow. Couple of bum turns, like lean snow years and expensive repairs, and you get further and further into a hole. Pretty soon you can’t dig your way out.”
Bum turns, Luca thought, was an understatement. Marcia’s suicide on the heels of Bruce’s accident.
“So you agree we should sell?” Ava asked.
He shrugged. “Not my call, just seems poor sense to watch the money go down that hole with every passing year. I tried to tell Paul that. When he was poking around up in the gondola I told him it would take thousands to make that thing safe to use again, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg, of course.”
“I’m surprised Uncle Paul went up there at all,” Ava mused. “He’s...he was, terrified of heights.”
Harold continued as if he hadn’t heard. “There are runs to be maintained, the heating system is older than I am and people don’t want to stay in a run-down lodge.”
Sue took Ava’s hands, mouth tight. “I feel so bad about everything. I don’t want you to lose Whisper, too.”
Luca shifted. If he had known this piece of ground meant so much to Ava, would he have advised his father buy the property? But wouldn’t she rather the resort go to people she knew than strangers?
He looked at the determined lines of her profile. Maybe it was too hard to think about the Gage family taking over what her own had failed to hang on to. Pride was a tricky thing. He was not sure he would feel any differently in her place if it was his family that needed bailing out. Still, part of him was pained that she’d painted him as an opportunist.
Finally, they finished the seemingly endless discussion and Harold and Sue trundled off to bed. Luca and Ava waited until the house had quieted again and bundled up to head for the cabin where he was not surprised to find Stephanie awake interrogating Tate about the evening’s events.
Luca gave Mack Dog a pat and made sure the curtains were tightly closed before and he and Ava sat around the well-worn coffee table.
“New developments,” Luca said, as Ava poured the jewelry out of the plastic bag onto the table. He enjoyed the openmouthed stares of his sister and brother-in-law and the impressed looks they gave Ava when they heard how she’d had the presence of mind to pocket the gems.
“Excellent,” Stephanie said, reaching for the jewelry. She sorted it into piles first, three necklaces, a cameo pin, a few rings and the object that made them all squeeze closer, a brooch about the size of a half dollar with a fat pink pearl set in the middle.
His heart hammered. This was it, the treasure that would save Whisper and perhaps point them to Paul’s killer.
Stephanie fetched plastic gloves from the first aid kit and set to work examining the items. “It’s too dark in here, I’m going to move to the kitchen where the light is better.”
Luca followed close on her heels.
She shot him an exasperated look. “You’re crowding me. I’ll holler as soon as I’ve come to any conclusions.”
“But...”
“Go away, brother,” she said.
He huffed and returned to the family room, throwing himself down on the sofa next to Ava who he noticed looked just as anxious as he felt.
“What doesn’t make sense to me is why such a big box for a small bag of jewelry and a book? And the box under the trailer was pretty big, too.”
“What happened to the book?” Tate asked as Mack Dog came over and bumped against Tate’s leg in search of a friendly scratch.
“I forgot all about that,” Ava said. “It was gone when we got back to the basement. What was the title again, Luca?”
“Something about the history of the printing press.” He frowned. “What does that have to do with a priceless pearl?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Ava suggested. “It was in the materials Uncle Paul got in that storage unit. Coincidental.”
“Why hide it, then?” Tate stroked Mack Dog’s ears, and the dog subsided into a contented puddle at his feet.
“Good question.” Luca turned it over in his mind, interrupted when his sister called from the kitchen doorway.
“Well,” Stephanie said. “Maybe because the book was worth more than this jewelry.”
They stared at her.
She leaned on the jamb, a look of irritation on her face. “It’s costume jewelry. Nice stuff, but not anywhere near priceless.”
“Are you sure?” Ava asked.
Stephanie’s lips quirked. “Yes. The metal is actually gold-plated and the stones are manufactured.”
“The pearl?” Ava’s eyes still held the embers of hope.
“You can ask Goren for his opinion, but it doesn’t warm to the touch like a real pearl. It’s way too light and too round. Real pearls never have perfect shape or texture.”
Ava stood with a groan. “So why all this effort to hide things under his trailer and in the basement?”
“We’re missing something.” Luca knew it deep in his gut. He took out his phone and dialed Victor’s number.
“It’s after one o’clock in the morning,” Stephanie chided.
“The guy sleeps only four hours a night. I’m sure he’s gotten his beauty rest by now.” Indeed, Victor sounded completely alert when Luca put him on speaker phone.
“Did I wake you?”
“Haven’t gone to bed yet. I’ve been researching John Danson’s great-grandpa.”
Luca smiled. That was the brother he knew, the one who earned the nickname Sea Tiger, or barracuda, for his tenacity. Luca brought him up to speed on their find of the book and worthless jewelry. “So tell me you’ve got something that will enlighten us.”
“I’m not sure you�
��ll be happy about this info, but I think I can say without too much doubt that the Dansons did sell the Sunset Star.”
Luca felt his breath come out in a whoosh. “How can you be sure?”
“Because the family that bought it donated it to a museum along with an anecdotal history that proves it was the Sunset Star.”
The room fell into silence.
Ava closed her eyes. “So that’s that. There is no treasure to be found here. Whoever kidnapped my uncle was mistaken. He never had the Sunset Star in the first place.”
The look of defeat on her face twisted his gut. “Maybe not, but Paul found a treasure, something bigger than a pearl, so big he went to great lengths to hide it.”
She perked up. “Do you really think so?”
Did he? Or was he clutching at straws to give her hope? Was he letting the growing feelings he had for Ava mess with his logic?
Stephanie took up the threads. “Goren already told Paul the jewelry was fake.”
“But the kidnapper might not have known that.”
Stephanie twisted a strand of her dark hair. “The morning he met you at the slopes. He knew someone was after him, but he also knew that the jewelry wasn’t the big score. Then we consider the size of the box he hid, the one under the trailer and the trunk. Much too big for just a bag of jewelry. And the book. Printing presses. Victor, what do you know about early printing presses?” she called.
“Not a thing,” he said, “but I’ll be an expert in a couple of hours.”
“It can wait until morning,” she said with a smile. “Go to bed or Brooke will be worried about you.”
“In a bit,” he said, and they heard the tapping of a keyboard.
Stephanie said goodbye and Luca clicked off the phone.
“I hope you’re happy,” she said. “He won’t get to bed until morning.”
Luca laughed. “My bad. Maybe we should all stay up until morning and see what we can dig up.”
“Absolutely not,” Stephanie said. “Look at Ava. She’s exhausted.”
It had not escaped Luca that Ava’s eyes were shadowed and her shoulders slumped, but he’d always thought action was the best way to fend off fatigue and more importantly, a feeling of helplessness. Now that he looked closer, he knew his sister was right. Ava needed rest. He mentally chided himself when he realized it was morning.
Stephanie continued. “Because we’ve got some crazy person breaking windows in the main house, Ava is going to bunk with me upstairs and you two manly men can sleep down here with the dog. Turn off the lights and get some shut-eye.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Luca said. After Stephanie had gone, he laid down on the lumpy couch. “Your wife is one stubborn woman,” he said into the darkness.
“She learned it from her brothers,” Tate said.
There was one thing Stephanie was right about, Luca thought, as he tried to force his brain to turn off: Uncle Paul had found something big, something worth killing for.
* * *
Ava tried not to thrash around on the bed and disturb the peacefully sleeping Stephanie. She did fall into a troubled slumber for a few hours until she jerked awake, thoughts chasing each other through her head. She slipped from under the covers and went to the window, staring out into murky darkness, still hours away from sunup, as she thought about the bag of jewelry. Uncle Paul had been so convinced he’d found a treasure. She desperately did not want him to have risked his life for something worthless.
She remembered the glow in his eyes when he met her at Melody Lake.
“I come here to pray all the time and you used to, didn’t you, Ave?”
She hadn’t prayed much at all since her mother had breathed in the frigid water that snatched her life away. Long lonely years had followed, hauntingly quiet like snow falling in a silent wood.
Now there was another person gone, another soul whom she had clung to ripped away.
Ava listened to the wind whispering against the windows, startled by a realization. Even though her heart felt cleft in two by grief, mourning her lost uncle, she did not feel alone in that moment.
She wrapped her arms around herself. The feeling made no sense. Paul was dead. Her mother gone. Her father crippled and likely never to return to Whisper. There was no one here for her, yet she had the odd sense that she was not alone.
“...you used to, didn’t you, Ave?”
She’d prayed with her mother here as the seasons changed in all their splendor, prayed the few months after her death.
Don’t leave me alone, Father.
She pictured Luca, laughing, sprawled on the basement steps.
Could those prayers have been heard, she wondered? Had her desperate lonely cries risen into the exquisite mountain air, biding time until the Lord answered them?
The notion tantalized her for a moment, warming a place deep inside her soul until the coldness returned. Luca was a temporary distraction and what’s more, he was here to acquire Whisper, a fact he’d failed to mention. She felt an ache, deep down.
You are alone, Ava. There could be no comfort here in the place where she had lost so much. Luca would soon be gone and the silence of Whisper Mountain would return to smother her again.
SEVENTEEN
She prowled the room, picking up her phone to check the storm’s progress. When the weather cleared, the police would return and perhaps be able to figure out who had slashed Goren’s tires and broken the basement window. It all seemed so pointless, like acts of a rebellious teenager.
She was surprised to find a message on her phone from Sergeant Towers. Even though she’d been expecting the news, she felt a surge of nausea.
Uncle Paul’s body had been released.
She could put it off no longer. It was time to arrange for a final goodbye. It wouldn’t be fancy, Sue had helped her make some initial arrangements. A small memorial ceremony after a private funeral. Her father was too ill to come even if he wanted to. It would probably be only herself and Sue in attendance.
A pitifully small goodbye for a larger-than-life man. She still expected him to burst through the door at any moment, red cap on his head and a wild plan on his lips.
Her phone showed that it was nearly five, too late to go back to sleep and too early to expect anyone else to be up. She made up her mind to slip back to the lodge and search her uncle’s room. From there she could make phone calls to finalize the details of her uncle’s memorial service.
Quietly she left the bedroom and made her way to the kitchen.
The smell of garlic sizzling in butter greeted her.
She was startled to find Luca there, a towel thrown over his shoulder as he stirred the pan on the stove, adding red peppers before pouring beaten eggs over the contents.
He looked up when he heard her. “Sorry. Did I wake you? Tate could sleep through an air raid siren, so I figured my cooking wouldn’t annoy him.”
She shook her head, amused at the sight of this husky man working culinary magic. “What are you cooking?”
“Frittata.”
“That trumps my scrambled eggs.”
“Your eggs were great.” He tossed a handful of herbs and sprinkled it all with salt. “I went over to the main house and swiped stuff from the fridge.”
“You’re not up for one of Sue’s toast and tea breakfasts?”
He chuckled. “I’m a food snob, or so my sister will tell you. When I stay at my dad’s house, I annoy the cook endlessly by bullying my way into the kitchen and taking over. She’s threatened to quit before.”
Ava could not restrain a laugh as she watched him ease the frittata over after the bottom had cooked a bit.
She felt him looking at her. “Something wrong?”
“No, I just forgot the sound of your laugh. Kind of sweet and rolling. I r
emember hearing it when we used to come and ski here.” He looked back at the pan. “I used to listen for it when you were out showing the guests around. That’s how I’d find you.”
Her eyes widened. “Is that why you always seemed to join in my guided tours?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He tossed a handful of Swiss cheese over the top. “I prefer Bergenost cheese, but that’s just my inner snob talking.”
“Why?”
“Why the cheese?”
“No.” She swallowed. “Why did you come find me all those times?”
“Well, at first it was probably because of the most obvious shallow teen criterion.”
“What’s that?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“That you are gorgeous.”
Her cheeks flooded with heat. “Me?” she squeaked. “No, I guess I never have.”
He shrugged. “Maybe that was part of the other reason. You had this spirit about you, a sort of open genuineness is the best way I can say it.”
She dared not look at him. Her stomach was tumbling over itself. She had never heard anyone say such things. “I’m glad I seemed that way to you. That was a long time ago.”
“Hasn’t changed.” He shot her a look, eyes filled with warmth that tickled something deep down inside her.
She jerked. “I...I’m not the same person I was at sixteen.”
“Nobody is.” Luca slid a mug full of fragrant coffee in front of her. “You’re not supposed to be.”
She looked deep into his green gaze, wondering what she looked like to him. He saw something that she did not. It both thrilled and scared her. She drank a slug of coffee, burning her mouth in the process.
“So...I just figured I’d, um, go search Uncle Paul’s room.”
The expression on his face made her think he wanted to talk about an entirely different subject, but she plowed ahead anyway. “I don’t think anything’s hidden there, but it’s something to do while we’re stuck here. I need to make some phone calls to plan Uncle Paul’s service, but nothing is open this early, of course.”
