Carolina Isle

by Jude Deveraux

  David’s map was easy to follow. She kept the water on her right, and when she saw a huge tree with half of it burned away by lightning, she put the map away. The rock looked solid, but when she tiptoed along a ledge with her arms spread out, she found a cut that overlapped itself. As she slipped through the narrow opening, she saw why Nezbit kept himself so thin. Most adults couldn’t fit between the rocks, but Ariel, at just a hundred and five pounds, could.

  It was so dark inside the rock, she could see nothing. As she felt her way around, her heart was beating rapidly. A hidden place like this was a den snakes would love. When her hand touched an old-fashioned lantern, she sighed in relief. Next to it were matches. She knew how to light it—thanks to years of watching Little House on the Prairie.

  Holding the lantern aloft, she looked about the cave. It was tiny, about six feet by eight, with a stone floor and a roof that seemed to go up to infinity. Against the far wall was an old wooden fruit crate with things inside it. She put the lantern down and sat down by the crate.

  Inside the crate were what looked to be the contents of a safe. Inside a plastic bag were two old, mildewed passports of Ray and Alice Erickson, age fifty-five and fifty-six, ownership papers of a forty-eight-foot sailboat, and a last will and testament. Beside the packet of papers was a jewelry box, a big thing made of mahogany, with lots of little drawers and two handles on the side.

  Ariel lifted the lid, surprised it wasn’t locked, but then who else could find the place besides Fenny Nezbit? And David, Ariel thought.

  The jewelry chest was nearly empty, only two pairs of earrings inside, but the velvet lining showed the imprint of many other pieces of jewelry.

  Legends, myths and, ultimately, a murder, all caused by the contents of a woman’s jewelry chest.

  Leaning back against the wall, Ariel opened the last will and testament and read it. Ray and Alice Erickson left everything to their son and daughter, to be split equally between them. There was a codicil attached and it told everything. Two people had retired after years of running a successful jewelry store, sold everything they owned, and bought a sailboat. They apologized to their children for their seeming irrationality, but they were sick of working six days a week. They said they planned to take the best of the jewelry with them, as they had one last deal to make in Saudi Arabia.

  “They never made it,” Ariel whispered, folding the will and putting it back in the bag. It seemed that they’d wrecked their new sailboat and their treasure had been stolen and gradually sold by Fenny Nezbit.

  Ariel wondered if he’d killed Mr. and Mrs. Erickson. “No one will ever know,” she said aloud.

  She put the last two pairs of earrings in the bag with the papers and shoved it down the back of her trousers. As she took a step toward the opening, she heard a sound. She leaped the next few feet to the door and looked up. It was a rescue helicopter!

  Stepping to the edge, she waved her arms and the pilot saw her. He turned around and another man, the copilot, used a bullhorn to ask, “Are you injured?”

  “No!” Ariel yelled and shook her head, then she pointed to her right with both her arms. The injured people were that way.

  “We have all the others,” the man said through his horn. “Go to the ground and we’ll pick you up.”

  Ariel said, “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes” all the way down. She slipped once, then took a deep breath and went down more slowly.

  The helicopter landed and she ran to it, ducking against the wind of the blades. “Are you Ariel Weatherly?” the copilot asked and she yelled, “Yes!”

  She scrambled into the backseat. Part of her wanted to cry in relief and part of her felt elated. Exhilarated.

  The copilot turned to her and pointed down. On the ground below them was an ambulance. R.J. was standing by a police car, a twin on each side of him, each holding one of his hands. Four big North Carolina policemen were helping two handcuffed people into the cars: Larry Lassiter and Eula Nezbit. David, Sara, and Gideon were missing, but Ariel figured they were being treated for their injuries. She leaned back against the seat and smiled as King’s Isle was left in the background and they headed toward Arundel.

  She was going home.

  Epilogue

  “TO US!” R.J. SAID, RAISING HIS CHAMpagne glass high.

  The four of them were in the pub on King’s Isle, which was empty except for them. But then R.J. now owned the place so they could do what they wanted. It was over a year since they’d first arrived on King’s Isle and many things had changed since then.

  “To my brilliant wife,” R.J. said, looking at Sara with loving eyes. “And here’s to winning an Emmy.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said, lifting her glass of orange juice. She was six weeks pregnant.

  “And to mine,” David said, lifting his glass to Ariel. “Who would have known you could write?”

  “No one believed I could do anything,” Ariel said, “including me.”

  “Your script was brilliant,” Sara said, “and I thank you very much for it. I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I enjoyed every minute of working on our movie.”

  David again lifted his drink to Ariel. “To my wife, a woman I thought I knew but didn’t.”

  R.J. looked at Sara. “And to my wife, who never had an idea that I hired her because I loved her.”

  Ariel looked at R.J. “Thank you for taking my script to an agent.”

  “Wait a minute!” David said. “I was the one who read it and I was the one who took it to R.J.”

  “And I was the one who took it from him,” Sara said.

  “And changed it,” Ariel said.

  “Tweaked it,” Sara answered.

  Four weeks after they’d left King’s Isle, Ariel found out she was pregnant with David’s baby. A wedding was rushed through, but thanks to her mother’s years of planning, it was not going to be a small affair. Between Southern society and R.J.’s contacts, it would be the wedding of the year. Three days before the wedding, Sara asked if Ariel would mind very much making it a double. A gown was bought, more champagne purchased, and there was a wedding that Arundel wouldn’t soon forget.

  For the next eight months, Ariel was hovered over by her mother and David and his mother. Bored, Ariel began to write about what happened to them on King’s Isle. Somehow, the story seemed to gradually evolve into a script. She ordered a book on script writing, followed the format as best she could, and put their adventure onto paper.

  She loved dramatizing how Lassiter and Fenny had quarreled, then the lawyer had shot Fenny through the head. It had been Eula who’d helped him carry the body up Phyllis’s creaking stairs, hiding it in the bathtub. “Let those fancy folk from Arundel take the blame,” Eula had said.

  “Except the kid that wrote the paper,” Lassiter had said. After he and Fenny had pulled their usual trick of having the rich tourists arrested, Lassiter had found David Tredwell’s prizewinning essay and realized the boy had seen Fenny slipping into where his treasure was hidden.

  For years, Fenny had dangled his treasure—“an endless horde,” he’d said it was—in front of everyone, but no one had been able to find it. The night R.J. had been arrested, Fenny, drunk as always, had nearly fallen on the targets, and Lassiter, fed up, had told him that someone else knew where the treasure was. Lassiter had only half believed it, but he liked, for once, having the upper hand. When Lassiter quoted some of the essay, Fenny had gone berserk. He ran to his truck, pulled out a pistol from under the seat, and threatened to kill Lassiter. That’s when the attorney realized that maybe the kid’s essay was true. There was a scuffle, the gun went off, and Fenny lay dead. Lassiter would have gone to the police, but Eula raised up from where she’d been sleeping in the back of the truck. She’d heard it all. Larry Lassiter had been nervous, afraid, but Eula was as cool as ice. She was thrilled to get rid of a husband she’d hated. She came up with a plan instantly. They carried Fenny’s body up Phyllis’s stairs, dumped the body in the tub, and hid in the dark living r
oom while Phyllis opened the door to her paying guests.

  Eula and Lassiter ran outside and waited for the screams and chaos that would soon come. Lassiter stood at the edge of the woods and smoked one cigarette after another, but no screams came.

  In the wee hours, the four city slickers carried what looked to be two bodies outside.

  “They think they’re clever,” Eula said when the two couples separated. “But I’ll get them. I’ll wait two days, then I’ll start worryin’ about what’s happened to my beloved husband.” She turned to Lassiter. “You find the gold. Do whatever you have to, but find that gold.”

  But their plan had backfired, and Eula and Lassiter were taken away in handcuffs. Fenny’s body had been retrieved from the freezer by the coroner. Later, R.J. had had to do a lot of talking to explain why Phyllis Vancurren’s hair was on the body, even though she was innocent. She had been exonerated.

  When Ariel finished the script, she was shy about showing it to David. In the end, she’d shown it first to her mother. “David and I will live in this house with you, but the regime will change,” Ariel had said when she returned. She had at last come to understand how much her mother loved her. Her mother’s fear had been that if Ariel didn’t marry someone from Arundel, she might leave and live somewhere else.

  Not that Ariel’s mother softened overnight, but she did learn that she could no longer bully her daughter into submission. As Ariel told David, “When you’ve found a dead body in a bathtub, it puts your mother’s bad temper into perspective.”

  So her mother read the script first. “It’s not to my taste,” she said, “but I would imagine some people would like it.”

  That was the highest praise Ariel had ever received from her mother. The next day she showed the script to David, who loved it, and he took it to R.J. Sara saw it before R.J. could read it. She finished it that night and told R.J. that if he had to buy a studio, she wanted him to have it made into a movie and she wanted to play both Ariel and herself.

  R.J. didn’t have to buy anything. He read the script, then sent it to an L.A. agent and Lifetime TV bought it immediately. By the time the movie was ready to start filming, R.J. and Charley Dunkirk had bought most of King’s Isle, so the shooting was done there. During the filming, Sara’d been so upset when she was lowered into the cave again that R.J. had ordered she be given oxygen.

  Now, in the pub, Sara raised her glass of juice. “To brilliant beginnings.”

  She was referring to the way Ariel had started her script, with the story David had told her while he was in the hospital. The TV movie started with an eleven-year-old boy in a camp run by two marijuana-smoking hippies. There was no dialogue, only sixties-era music as the boy left camp and explored the island. When he saw a skinny little man with big ears slipping in and out of the rocks, David followed him. The camera showed David hiding and waiting, then when the funny-looking man left, David slipped between the rocks and saw the cave. That was before Fenny’s thirty-second birthday, so the cave was empty. The scene changed to show a young David in school, trying to come up with a story about what he did that summer. He remembered the cave and the skinny man with the big ears and wrote about it. The last scene was the story being awarded a prize and his proud mother posting the essay on the Internet.

  After the opening, the credits came on and the first scene showed a spoiled, overdressed, overly made-up Ariel haughtily demanding that her sweet, overworked cousin exchange places with her. Ariel hadn’t written the script to make herself seem a snob, nor had she portrayed Sara as such a dumpling of virtue—but, as Sara said, she’d “tweaked” it. Defending herself, Sara said she’d made Ariel into a reverse Pygmalion. “You mean I went from upper class to your class?” Ariel said, making Sara laugh. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her feeling of being an outsider. She’d been welcomed with open arms in Arundel, and at last she felt she belonged somewhere.

  There had been one argument, which Sara won. Right after the rescue, in a fit of giddy relief that they were safe, the cousins had laughed and cried—and told each other their stories. Ariel had told Sara about tearing apart her nightgown, then later tearing apart David’s trouser leg. Sara thought they were good scenes and had added them to the script. An argument ensued, but the scene stayed.

  On the night the movie aired on TV, R.J. put up a screen the size of a barn in front of the courthouse on King’s Isle, then invited the whole town. When Ariel—played by Sara and seen from the collarbone up—tore open her nightgown and said, “I am a woman,” the cheers could be heard to Arundel. Ariel was so embarrassed she would have slid under her chair if R.J. and David hadn’t each grabbed an arm and kept her upright.

  The crowd again cheered when Larry Lassiter and Eula Nezbit were hauled off in handcuffs, but when Judge Proctor was later arrested, the townspeople set off fireworks. Neither David nor R.J. knew the fireworks had been planned, so they laughed and cheered with the others.

  After the Lifetime movie, R.J. announced that his own private movie studio had made a short film that he’d like to show them. Some people groaned because the barbeque was ready and a band was warming up.

  Ariel and David looked at each other. Sara smiled knowingly.

  What came on the huge screen was a black-and-white film that had been crafted to look like a 1930s silent movie. It even rolled a few times. With no dialogue and the movement choppy and awkward, there was Gideon being reunited with his grandparents. When R.J. had seen the beautiful, unique house the Nezbits were living in, he’d remembered seeing something like it at an art show he’d attended in New York when he was still in college. After the ordeal on King’s Isle, R.J. found the name of the architect, then contacted his parents. They said they didn’t know what had become of their son. After a breakup with his girlfriend, he’d said he wanted time alone and that he didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to do. That was the last they ever heard of him. R.J. figured that was when the young man had stayed on King’s Isle and built that house. His name was James Gideon.

  No one knew what happened to him, but through DNA testing he was found to be Gideon’s father. As yet, they didn’t know who his mother was.

  The film showed R.J. surrounded by books, as though deep in research. Of course the truth was it had taken him one ten-minute call to an old girlfriend to find out the name of the artist whose show they’d seen together so long ago.

  The next scene was Gideon with his grandparents. He was great in front of the camera, alternately pantomiming great laughter, then huge tears. When R.J. handed Gideon a big book that said “Princeton” on it, the young man feigned more tears, then picked R.J. up. R.J. pantomimed loss of dignity so well that everyone laughed. By that time, there wasn’t a person on the island who hadn’t had some dealing with R.J. in purchase negotiations, so they knew him.

  Next into the picture were the twins. R.J.’d had a big sign put on a derelict brick building that read COUNTY ORPHANAGE. A woman dressed like a Victorian matron was taking the screaming twins—who were great hams—from Sara. She was crying, pushing them away, then on her knees talking to them. The dialogue card said, “You will be fine. I’m sure they will love you very much.” Sara stood up, then cried on R.J.’s shoulder dramatically, while the twins were pulled, screaming, toward the orphanage. R.J. held Sara at arm’s length, and the dialogue card said, “No one can love them as much as we do. Let’s buy them.” When Sara kicked him in the shin, the audience howled with laughter. The card said, “Sorry. Let’s adopt them.”

  The last scene was in color, a series of snapshots of Thanksgiving and Christmas. One picture was of David and Ariel with their new baby, Miss Pommy looking on in adoration. In her mind, she’d won. Another photo showed R.J. with Bertie on his shoulders, and Sara holding Beatrice. Gideon was with his grandparents at an absurdly long table, with masses of food before them. Sara, R.J., David and Ariel, and all the others were there.

  The scene changed to motion and everyone at the table looked at the came
ra and raised a glass in a toast. “To King’s Isle,” they shouted.

  The roar from the residents of King’s Isle was deafening. When the film ended, they got up and started dancing before the band began to play.

  That was a month ago and now, R.J. and Sara, Ariel and David raised their glasses and said, “To us.”

  Atria Books

  Proudly Presents

  First Impressions

  Jude Deveraux

  Available in Hardcover from Atria Books

  Turn the page for a preview of

  First Impressions.…

  Prologue

  THE MOMENT HE SAW THE SMIRK ON Bill’s face, Jared knew he was going to be given a job he wouldn’t like. So what did a man have to do to finally be able to choose his own assignments? he thought for the thousandth time. Get shot? Naw, he’d done that three times. How about getting kidnapped? That had happened twice. Hey! How about being home so seldom that his wife leaves him for some other guy, a used car salesman who is now the father of their three kids? Nope. That had happened too. So how about getting too old for the field? Too late. At forty-nine, Jared felt that he’d reached that age about six years ago.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Bill said, holding his office door open for Jared to enter.

  Groaning, Jared put on a pronounced limp as he hobbled toward the chair opposite Bill’s overloaded desk, WILLIAM TEASDALE on a plaque in front. Sticking his leg out stiffly in front of him, he ostentatiously rubbed his knee, as though he were in great pain.

  “You can cut it out,” Bill said as he sat down behind his desk. “I have no sympathy for you, and even if I did, I couldn’t let you out of this one.” He picked up a folder, then looked across the top of it at Jared. “Most agents are glad to get out in the field. Why not you?”

  Jared leaned back in his chair. “Where should I begin? With pain? I was in the hospital for three weeks after the last job. And life. I like living. And then there’s—”