Chapter Eight
EDEN awoke to the horror of someone’s hand pressed firmly over her mouth. Her first impulse was to lash out, but a face and a warm breath were near her ear. “It’s me, and please don’t hurt me again,” came the unmistakable voice of Jared McBride. “I’m still bleeding from the last time. There are people downstairs. If I take my hand away, will you be quiet?”
Eyes wide, Eden nodded. It was too dark to see his face, but McBride’s tone of voice told her this wasn’t serious. She first thought, What is he up to now? Slowly, he moved his hand away from her mouth, as though he didn’t want to move. He was very close to her, leaning over her so that he was practically in bed with her. She rolled away from him and reached for the telephone by her bed, but Jared stopped her. Silently, he pointed to the cell phone in a case on his belt, letting her know it would be better to use that. He motioned to the door, gesturing that they should get out as soon as possible. As far as she could tell, he meant for her to leave the room as she was, which meant running off with this man who she didn’t trust while wearing only her nightgown. She was glad that she’d been in too much of a hurry to put her clothes away the night before when she’d dressed to meet Brad. Draped across the end of the bed were her jeans, a sweater, and a T-shirt. She stuck her feet into her running shoes as she grabbed her clothes, then tiptoed out of the room behind McBride.
Since Eden had seen or heard nothing and had only McBride’s word that anyone was in the house, Eden couldn’t feel very cautious. In fact, she felt nothing but annoyance. What time was it anyway? She was glad to see that last night she’d been too tired to remove her watch. The house was dark, but the watch had a little button on the side that she pushed, and it lit up the dial. Ten minutes until five A.M.
McBride was crouching down like a character in an Xbox game and moving stealthily along the chair rail. Eden gave a yawn, then a shiver. Her nightgown had been fine under the covers, but now she was getting cold. She hugged her clothes to her and thought about stopping to put them on.
“Are you sure—?” she began, but McBride cut her off. In an instant, he had grabbed her and put his hand over her mouth to keep her from talking. What she wanted to say was a very sarcastic “I see that you recovered well.” But she said nothing. Last night she’d seen that the wounds she’d given him were bleeding. And he’d held his arm that was still in a sling as though it hurt him very much. She’d felt so sorry for him that she’d been tempted to spoon-feed him again.
But right now, he had one arm around her waist and the other around her head with his hand over her mouth. So where was his sling? Why wasn’t he limping? If he was lying about his injuries, just as he’d lied about everything else, then he was probably lying about someone being in her house. She lifted her foot with the intention of slamming it down on his instep. Her plan was to run for the phone while he held his foot in pain. She figured she could punch the buttons for 911 before he could get to her.
But in the next moment she heard whispered voices from downstairs and became rigid with fear. McBride was still holding her, but Eden was no longer fighting him. He said one quiet word: “Cellar.”
She nodded, and he dropped his hand from her mouth. At the end of the wide corridor upstairs was a door to what looked like a closet. It was true that there were brooms and mops in there, but behind them was a little door that opened to reveal an old staircase that was so narrow it was dangerous. It had been the fate of the poor overworked servants in centuries past to have to use those stairs, rather than the wide stairs in the front of the house.
As Eden pushed aside the handles of half a dozen old mops and a vacuum cleaner that was probably in use in 1910, she felt anger run through her. McBride had searched her house enough that he knew about the stairs down to the kitchen, which led to the other staircase down into the old cellar. Even when she’d lived here before, the narrow stairs to the kitchen had not been used. And only Eden had used the cellar. Mrs. Farrington had been accidentally locked in the cellar when she was nine, so she’d refused to ever go down there again. She’d wanted to fill the thing up with sand. But it seemed that Snooping McBride knew where the cellar was.
There was no light in the narrow staircase, so Eden went first and felt her way along the wall. Behind her, she heard McBride readjust the mops and brooms, then carefully close the little door. Eden had to repress a yelp when her face ran into a thick cobweb, a cobweb that made her realize that if McBride had seen the old staircase, he hadn’t been down it. Gingerly, she felt each step before putting her foot on it. She didn’t know if the staircase had been restored or was still made of rotting wood, as it had been when she lived there.
At the bottom of the stairs, McBride touched her shoulder, letting her know that he wanted to go first into the kitchen. When she stepped back into the tiny space, of necessity his body pressed against hers. She held the clothes over her arm tightly between them. Cautiously, he opened the door. Eden was relieved that the hinges didn’t squeak.
McBride stepped out into the dark kitchen and looked around. For a moment he disappeared from sight, then he came back. Putting his finger to his lips, he motioned for her to follow him.
When Eden stepped into the kitchen, she gasped. Outside a security light shone through the curtainless windows and showed her that her clean, tidy kitchen had been ransacked. Doors and drawers were open, canisters of food had been overturned. Through the window in the kitchen door she could see what looked to be a flashlight moving about on the screened porch. To her right, through the dining room, she could see the glare of another flashlight, and she could hear things being moved. There were at least two of them, and they were quietly shifting things around. She heard what sounded to be a sofa cushion hitting the floor.
Why aren’t they afraid of waking me? she wondered. She glanced up at McBride to see that he was frowning so hard that the furrows between his eyebrows were an inch deep. He didn’t like what was going on, and she had an idea that if she weren’t with him he’d confront the people in her house. In a gun battle? she wondered.
He pointed to the door that led into the pantry. It was a small room between the dining room and the kitchen. Inside was a trapdoor in the floor that led down into the cellar. Rarely did people see that trapdoor, as it was usually covered with boxes of cans. But Eden hadn’t bought enough food to fill the kitchen cabinets, much less the pantry. As she reached for the ring that was flush with the floor, McBride caught her hand. She looked at him and he shook his head no.
When he reached for a bottle of cooking oil, Eden nodded and took it from him. Feeling her way along the dark floor, she felt for the rusty old hinges, then uncapped the oil and poured it on the tired old metal. Setting the bottle down, she turned to him and nodded, then he picked up the ring and lifted the door into the cellar. He wanted to go first, but Eden pushed him away. She knew the stairs better than he did. There were ten of them, and they had been replaced just before she left—which meant that they were now “only” twenty-plus years old.
Taking a deep breath, she started down the stairs, cautiously putting her foot down before she applied her full weight. They held. When she reached the bottom, she turned to McBride, who was right behind her. He’d lowered the door above their heads.
Eden felt along the damp walls of soft old bricks and tried not to shiver when she touched the dirty shelves. When she’d lived there she’d kept the cellar clean because she’d used it for what it had been built for: storing produce from the garden. She’d wrapped up green tomatoes, apples, potatoes, and carrots, and had kept them in the cellar for months. And even though one wall looked as though it had been rebuilt, the room was full of the nests of insects and rodents. Bath, she thought. When I get out of this I want a long, hot bath.
Finally, she found what she was looking for: candles and matches. Because of the dampness of the cellar, the matches were always kept in a tight metal box. Now she hoped that they’d kept dry for all these years. Holding her breath, she opened the box, withdrew a little box of matches, pulled one out, then struck it. It burst into a very welcome flame, and Eden lit three fat white candles. By the time this was done, McBride had his cell phone open.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t call your sheriff,” he whispered, looking at her in the candlelight. “I think my people should handle this one,” he said.
Eden started to say something but didn’t. Instead, she watched him. She had no way of knowing what was going on, but she knew that something was making him very angry. He wasn’t frightened, and didn’t seem to be looking for a way to get them out of the house, which she thought was odd. Instead, he was calling “his” people. All things considered, she decided that Jared McBride knew a great deal more about what was going on upstairs than he was telling her.
Just as she heard his phone ring on the other end, they heard footsteps above their heads. In an instant, he had closed his phone and Eden had extinguished the candles. She could see nothing in the darkness, but she felt McBride’s strong arm as he pushed her into a corner of the room while he stood at the foot of the stairs. She heard quiet noises from him, as though he’d bent and picked up something from the floor. She wondered what it was. Something he could use for a weapon if the men came down the stairs?
She heard footsteps over their heads, and when she heard voices she listened so hard her ears hurt, but all she heard was that one of them said something about a “jolly good time.” They’re English, she thought.
When the men moved away, Eden felt the full thrust of her fear. Who were these people? What did they want? Were they just more aggressive jewelry hunters? Twice while she’d lived with Mrs. Farrington they’d awakened on Saturday mornings to find people digging in the gardens, looking for those blasted jewels. Both times Mrs. Farrington had fired a shotgun over their heads, and they’d run away cursing her.
But why would they be here now? she wondered. What always triggered the jewel hunters was the publication of a new book that included the story of the stolen necklace. But there’d been no new book published recently. There was the Internet, though, and the Farrington story was always there for treasure seekers to find.
When she heard the unmistakable sound of the lock on the door overhead being latched, Eden drew in her breath sharply. They were locked inside the cellar!
She looked across the blackness and tried to see McBride. Why wasn’t he upset that they’d just been locked in a cellar? But she heard nothing from him. He was silent. Eden was sure that she heard laughter as the people upstairs moved away.
McBride said nothing until there was no sound from upstairs, then he opened his cell phone and pushed a few buttons. In the silence, Eden heard the ringing on the other end, but he put the phone to his ear so she couldn’t hear what was said and by whom. “Come get us,” he said into the phone. “Now. We’re in a room off the kitchen. Look on the floor for a door. We’re locked in.”
He held the phone open so she could use the light from it to relight the candles, and when they were lit, she looked at him. He didn’t seem as angry as he had been, but maybe he was good at concealing it. “Turn ’round,” she said to him, and he turned to face the wall while Eden pulled on her jeans, T-shirt, and sweater. She wished she had socks, as her feet were cold.
“Someone should be here in about an hour,” he said softly, his back to her, then he held out his phone. “You could call someone else if you want. The sheriff or Granville.”
As she dressed, Eden thought about what he was saying. No, she didn’t want to call either of them. For all that she’d known him for years, the sheriff had a big mouth, and that deputy of his, Clint, would be sure to tell everyone in town what had happened. “Found her locked inside with that guy she beat up,” she could hear Clint saying. “If you ask me, there’s somethin’ goin’ on with those two.” No, Eden didn’t want Brad to hear that.
“Okay,” she said, “you can turn around.”
Leaning against the wall, his long legs out before him, he crossed his arms over his chest. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I’m part of a spy ring, remember? I have information to give to the enemy, and they came to get it. By the way, who is the enemy now? It’s not still Russia, is it?”
McBride seemed unperturbed by her sarcasm. He moved away from the wall and picked up a big quart jar full of pickled beets.
“I wouldn’t eat them if I were you. They’re over twenty years old, and they’ll probably explode if you open them.”
“Do you mean that you canned them?”
“Not exactly rocket science.”
He said nothing, just kept looking at the jar in wonder. “I never met a woman who could make pickles. That is what they are, aren’t they?”
Eden squinted at him. “Why do I get the impression that you’re glad that the two of us are locked in here together? I can’t imagine that you did it for some sex-thing, so what is it that you want?”
He kept looking at the jar of beets, but Eden could see a tiny smile play at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know who those men up there are. I heard them and I got you out. I knew about the cellar, but I didn’t know about that skinny staircase. That thing is a danger! I almost got stuck twice.”
She didn’t stop staring at him or lose her train of thought. He was just too relaxed about all this for her taste. “What do you want? And how can I believe that you didn’t send those men into the house?” She had the satisfaction of seeing him blink rapidly three times.
“I truly believe that the information I want is inside your head, not hidden away inside your house, so why should I send ransackers?”
“Does that mean that you’ve already been through every inch of my house and know there’s nothing to find?”
“More or less,” he said, putting the jar back on the shelf and giving her a crooked grin. “But I didn’t get to see all that I wanted to because I was attacked by a wildcat.”
“I see that you recovered well enough. Where’s your sling?”
He didn’t answer but went to the side wall and pulled four boxes out onto the floor. They were boxes full of big canning jars, and when stacked on top of one another, they made uncomfortable seats. He took one and motioned to Eden to take the other. After she’d moved her two boxes to the opposite wall, far away from him, she sat down.
“I don’t know any spy and I have no idea why your spy would be interested in me,” she said in the tone of a person who knew that a long night was coming. She wasn’t sure if he’d set this up or not, but she had her suspicions. It wouldn’t surprise her to be told that help would arrive only after she’d told him what he wanted to know—which she’d do in an instant if she only knew what it was. “Did you check out whether or not he was writing a book?”
“We’re looking into it now. Are you warm enough?” He listened for a moment but could hear nothing.
“It’s silent down here,” Eden said. “You can’t hear anything except what’s going on on top of you. If I was going to be down here for more than fifteen minutes I had to get someone to watch my daughter. I wouldn’t be able to hear her clearly, even if she was just in the dining room. Maybe you should call again. Are you sure they’re sending someone for us?”
He looked at his watch. “It’s only been ten minutes. You have somewhere you need to be?”
“Since you’ve listened in on my every conversation, you know that I’m meeting Brad at ten.”
“Brad? The lawyer? Braddon Granville? Who names their kid Braddon?”
“I have no intention of explaining Arundel baby-naming policies to you. If we make chitchat you’re never going to find out what you want to know. If you have questions to ask me, then do it.”
“I would if I knew where to start. I was hoping that if I showed you Applegate’s photo you’d say, ‘Oh, that’s so and so,’ and the mystery would be solved. Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?”
“As I told you, I don’t remember if I have seen him. I could have met him, yes, but then I’m an editor, so I meet thousands of people. When I go to writers’ conferences I meet hundreds of people—quickly. He could have been in one of those three-minute sessions where an author presents his ideas to me. I really don’t remember him.”
Jared looked at his shoe tips for a moment. “What you’re saying makes sense, and maybe that’s all this is about. Maybe the whole mystery is that Applegate was about to turn in a manuscript that told everything about everybody. You would have remembered a manuscript about a spy, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, and I would have turned it over to a nonfiction editor.”
“Maybe you haven’t come across the book yet.” There was hope in Jared’s voice.
“Maybe you should contact my publishing house and—” She broke off at a loud noise that came from upstairs.
Jared was on his feet in an instant, looking up at the ceiling of the cellar. In the next moment, they heard another noise, then silence.
Eden was standing beside him. “I hope they aren’t destroying the house, and I really hope they didn’t knock over the big secretary in the hall.”
“Those were shots,” he said, frowning. He ran up the stairs and tried the door. Locked. For a moment he looked as though he was studying the door, then he went back down. He opened his cell phone again and made another call. This time Eden realized that he was talking to a message machine. Again, he was calm, just saying that they were ready to get out.
“Nobody home?” she said, sitting back down. “That gives me great confidence in the FBI. Aren’t they supposed to always be on the alert? How come you don’t have a firearm on you?”
“I figured you’d find it and use it on me,” Jared said absently. He seemed to be thinking hard about something. “Is there any reason other than whatever the spy wanted you for that people would be ransacking your house?”
Eden gave a sigh. “Those blasted jewels!”
“Jewels?” Jared asked as he sat back down, then said, “Oh, yeah. In the book. You know, I didn’t have time last night to read that, so why don’t you tell me about it?”
“You don’t think that spy was searching for those jewels, do you?”
“I have no idea. Could have been. We’ve always thought that maybe he swallowed your name to keep you from being thought to be part of his professional life.” He leaned his head back against the damp wall. “So tell me about the jewels.”
“How about if I tell you the truth?”
“I’d like that.”
“I thought you would. It’s been my experience that liars love to hear the truth from others.”
Again, Jared gave a one-sided smile. “You have me pegged exactly. I took on this job of risking my life for my country just to have the opportunity to lie. It’s what I live for.”
Eden had to smile. “Okay, so maybe there is some truth in your story, but…Anyway, the jewels. You see, I’m cursed with knowing the truth through Mrs. Farrington, so I know there are no jewels to be found. How much do you want to know? From the beginning or just the facts, ma’am.”
Jared looked at his watch again. “We have lots of time, so entertain me.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Tell me every word of the story. Maybe there’s something in there that could help me figure this thing out.”
Eden couldn’t resist saying “Once upon a time” and smiling. Except for genocide and murder and revenge, it was a great story. Or maybe because of those things it was a great story. She started to tell a cut-and-dried version about what had happened to the necklace, but then she thought, Why not tell all of it? She’d written the entire story in her fictionalized version of the Farrington family, and she’d even told the truth, as revealed by Mrs. Farrington, of what happened at the end. She sincerely hoped that her telling of the family secret wouldn’t cause any of the Farringtons to come back from the dead and haunt her.
“It was a necklace made for a French duchess,” Eden began. “A stunningly beautiful necklace of three sapphires, each one the size of a quail’s egg and surrounded by diamonds. It was said that the duchess’s rich old husband bought the necklace for her, but she wore it—and nothing else—to bed with her lover. Her lover was the head gardener, and it was said that the son the old duke loved so much was actually the gardener’s child.”
Taking a breath, Eden leaned back against the wall. McBride still had his eyes closed, but she could tell that he was listening intently, and he was enjoying the story.
She continued. “A young Farrington son, on his Grand Tour, was traveling through the French countryside when the French Revolution broke out. By chance, he was staying in a small village on the very night when the villagers decided they’d had enough of the debauchery and greed of the old duke and were going to end it all. I don’t know what the duke had done to make the villagers hate him so. There was something about a young boy in the village, but I don’t know the details,” Eden said. “And if Mrs. Farrington did, she didn’t tell me, and I certainly didn’t ask. I do know that they set the duke’s great manor house on fire. As the villagers were celebrating his death, one of them paid a visit to the outhouse, and that’s where he found the duke hiding.
“Of course they murdered the duke, then they went in search of his wife, who, I was told, was as bad as he was. But she had dressed as a peasant woman, so she escaped. She knew that a young, rich American man was staying in the village, so she went to him. Under her dirty clothes she was wearing all her jewels, which I was told were so many that she could hardly stand up under the weight of them.
“For all that the duchess was very beautiful and the young Farrington wasn’t handsome at all, he was quite clever. The duchess offered him a pearl necklace if he’d get her out of the country, but he held out for the prize of her collection, the sapphire and diamond necklace. Since she was in no position to bargain, she agreed. He hid her under the seat of his carriage to get her to the coast, then he stowed her away in a trunk as they crossed the Channel. I can’t imagine how horrible the trip must have been for the poor woman!
“When they reached England, she gave him the necklace, and they parted company. Unfortunately, no one knows what happened to the duchess after that, and since there’s no record of her name, I couldn’t research her. The young Farrington man went home to Arundel with the necklace sewn inside his coat. A few years later, when he got married, he had the necklace delivered to his bride an hour before the wedding, and that was the first time anyone in his family saw it.
“Mrs. Farrington told me that the necklace became what was most important in their family. They were called the Farrington Sapphires, and they would be taken out to be worn by the mistress of Farrington Manor only three times a year. People would come from miles around just to see them. The family developed traditions about who could wear the sapphires, and when. Each Farrington daughter could wear them on her wedding day, but only if the family approved of her husband. First cousins could wear the necklace once in her lifetime, but second cousins never. On and on it went. Mrs. Farrington said that it got to the point of being ludicrous, and many fights and long-standing feuds came about over that necklace.
“It stayed in the family until the late 1800s, and that’s when the lies and the mystery began.”
Pausing, Eden took a moment to get her breath. McBride was still listening intently. Smiling, she continued. “Mrs. Farrington told me that her great-grandfather, Minton, was a man cursed with bad luck. If he bought a racehorse, it broke a leg the next day. If he bought timberland, there would be a hurricane that turned all the trees into toothpicks. If he bought land for cotton, it would flood. Whatever the poor man planted, died. Mrs. Farrington said that if he’d just left things alone, he would have been fine financially, but he wanted to prove to his relatives that he could do as well as they had, so he tried to expand.
“I was told that the real reason he worked so hard to be a success was that he had a beautiful wife and that he was trying to win her love. But since he was as awkward and as socially inept as he was homely, he couldn’t do it. It was said that she had married him for the Farrington Sapphires and that it broke his heart and his spirit because he knew that’s what she truly loved.
“Now here’s where the secret comes in. Because the poor man failed in everything, in the end he had to do the unthinkable and sell the necklace in order to pay the bills to keep Farrington Manor running. When he returned from the trip to New York, where he’d secretly sold the necklace, he found the safe open and empty, and his wife dead on the floor. She’d been strangled. That same day, a handsome young man who’d worked for the Farringtons for years—a notorious womanizer—was found dead in the swamp. Everyone said that he’d stolen the necklace, been interrupted by the wife, so he’d killed her, then he’d run off into the swamp, where he’d been bitten by a poisonous snake. When the necklace wasn’t found on him, it was decided that he’d hidden it somewhere on the plantation, and that’s how the story of the missing necklace got started. The story has been printed in a hundred books, and it’s caused many years of problems with people searching for the Farrington Sapphires.”
Jared opened his eyes and leaned forward. “The Farrington man either killed the wife or her lover or both.”
“You’ve seen and done too many bad things,” Eden said primly. “Unfortunately, though, you’re right. On his deathbed, Minton Farrington told his eldest son the truth of what had happened. It seems that Minton had overheard his wife and her lover plotting to steal the necklace and run away together. Mrs. Farrington said that this was what made her great-grandfather want to get rid of the necklace. He decided that the sapphires were cursed and that his bad luck was caused by them, so he took the necklace to New York and sold it.
“When Minton returned to Farrington Manor, it was late at night, and there was his wife, dead on the library floor, the safe standing open and empty. He figured she’d been murdered by her lover when they discovered that the necklace was gone. Minton immediately got on a horse, took his two best hunting dogs, and went after her lover. He found the man the next day, hiding in a cabin in the swamp. Minton said he held a shotgun on the man and made him back up. What the man didn’t see, but Minton did, was the big snake sunning itself on a rock. After his wife’s lover was dead, Minton went back to Farrington Manor. By this time, his wife’s body had been discovered, and in the confusion, people thought Minton was just returning from his trip, so the truth of what he’d done wasn’t suspected.
“Minton never told anyone that he’d sold the jewels because he was afraid that people would figure out the truth about his wife. He’d rather it was said that she’d been killed during a robbery than that she’d been planning to run off with her lover. When the legend of the missing sapphires started, he didn’t contradict it. In fact, he pretended to look for the necklace, even offering a reward.
“About six months after his wife’s death, Minton met a plain-faced young woman who was said to adore him, and they got married and produced four healthy children. It was only on his deathbed that he told his eldest son the truth. The son told his eldest son, until it came down to Mrs. Farrington, who was an only child. As for Minton Farrington, he was glad he’d sold the necklace, because after it was gone, his luck changed. It seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, and when he died, the plantation was in the best shape that it had been in a century.
“And that’s the end of the story,” Eden said, rubbing her arms against the cold of the cellar. The candles were burning down, and she didn’t see any more on the shelves. It wouldn’t be long before they were in darkness.
“Great story,” Jared said. “But I don’t see any connection to Applegate. Jewels would be too hard to fence. He’d have to cut them.”
“Pardon me, but I think you missed the point of the story. The jewels were sold, not stolen. By now they’ve been disassembled and sold to movie stars with big lips and artificial breasts. No one knows they were ever called the Farrington Sapphires, and certainly no one knows that they once belonged to an unfaithful French duchess.”
“Hmmm,” Jared said.
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
He put his elbows on his knees and looked at her. “It means that there are so many holes in that story that I don’t know where to begin. Do you think that man overheard his wife and the gardener plotting to steal his family’s pride and joy and run away together, and all he did was take the necklace to a pawnbroker? Do you want me to believe that he didn’t want revenge? What was he planning to do when he got back from selling the necklace? Continue living with the woman? Give the gardener things to plant? You showed me that Minton was a man of revenge when you told me that he went after the gardener, held a gun on him, then watched him back into a deadly poisonous snake. You even said that ‘after his wife’s lover was dead’ this Minton character went back to his house. What does that mean? That he stood there and watched the man die? If he did, don’t you think he did it for his own enjoyment? And when Minton got back to his house he let people think that he’d just returned from his trip. Don’t you think that there were men in the stables who knew that he’d jumped on a horse in the wee hours and gone off with a couple of dogs and a firearm or two? Did Minton bribe them or shoot them so they wouldn’t tell his secret? I think your story tells the character of this man Minton very well. I think he killed both his wife and her lover. I think it’s probable that the story of the trip to New York was just to give him an alibi, and I doubt if he went at all.”
Eden sat there blinking at him. Every word he’d said made sense, but she’d never looked at the story as he was doing. “What about the jewels?”
“From your story, I agree that the first wife, the beautiful one, married the ugly man for the jewels. But then he probably married her for her beauty, so they had a bargain. I think what probably sent ol’ Minton into a rage was that his wife broke their agreement. He knew she was having an affair. He was lord and master of the place, so he’d know what was going on. I think what sent him over the edge was that she thought she could leave him and take the jewels. That was a total breaking of their agreement. I think he strangled his adulterous wife, then killed her lover in a clever way, and wisely told the people the jewels had been stolen. With the jewels gone, a lot of the anger in the family was taken away, and he’d never again have to risk some woman marrying him for the sapphires. As for his bad luck, if he had a wife who hated him and was diddling the gardener, he was probably so stressed out that he couldn’t make a decent decision. He took that accursed necklace out of the public’s eye, found himself a faithful wife, had some kids, and he could think again, so his luck changed. That he committed two murders probably never bothered him any more than walking out of a bad land deal.”
“Oh,” Eden said, blinking. “Have you ever thought of writing? I think you could come up with some great plots.”
“I’ve seen too much,” he said. “I tend to think only the worst of people. They—” He broke off as he reached for his cell phone, which was vibrating. Opening the phone, he smiled. “Bill, where—” Jared paused. “Tell me that again slowly,” he said, looking away from Eden. After a couple of minutes, Jared said, “Then who the hell are the men upstairs if they aren’t ours?” As he said that, he glanced at Eden quickly. “Yeah, she’s down here with me. Yeah, send some men. I think the guys upstairs are gone, but they knew this house well enough to know where the cellar door is, and they’ve locked us in. No, don’t worry about it. I can shoot the lock off and get out.” Again, he looked at Eden briefly. “Yeah, but go ahead and send them. Plain-clothes. This town gossips about everything.”
Closing the telephone, he looked at Eden as though preparing himself for a lecture.
She was calm. “Let me get this straight. I want my facts to be very clear. You staged all this just to get me alone so you could ask me what I know? But then you’ve already asked me that and know that I know nothing. But still, you thought maybe I was lying, so you dragged me out of bed in my nightgown, and put on an elaborate charade about bad men being in the house. All the while you thought they were your own men—who you had arranged to be here—but now you’ve found out that the men up there really are bad guys. And, oh, yes, all along you’ve had a concealed weapon that you could have used to get us out of here.”
Jared seemed to consider what she’d said. “You’re pretty much right. But I hate to use firearms around civilians. Too often they panic and get in the way and get themselves shot.”
“How considerate of you,” Eden said nicely. “May I ask what the man on the telephone said?”
Jared ducked his head for a moment. “His son was hit in the head by a golf ball last night, so he’s been in the hospital with his kid, and he forgot to send the men I requested. His son’s doing fine, though.”
“How nice. So who are the men who were tearing up my house?”
“I have no idea. You want to get out of here? It’s getting a bit chilly. Besides, I’m hungry.”
If there had been an instrument of destruction nearby, Eden would have used it on Jared McBride. As it was, all she could do was try to control her anger enough to keep herself from throwing jars of pickled beets at him. She took a deep, calming breath. “Mr. McBride, I would like for you to get me out of here this minute. I too am cold and hungry, and I have an appointment”—she looked at her watch—“in one hour and forty-six and a half minutes. I plan to make that appointment in spite of all that you’re trying to do to stop me.”
“You’re still planning to meet with Granville?” he asked, but she didn’t answer him.
Bending, Jared lifted his trouser leg and pulled a small pistol out of a holster strapped to his ankle. “Get in the corner and cover your ears,” he said, and Eden did what he told her to. In the next minute, Jared shot the lock on the door in the ceiling, then pushed the door up. Eden shoved past him and into the pantry. She was so angry that she couldn’t look at him.
Once she was in the kitchen, she blinked in the bright daylight and glanced around the room. The kitchen looked much worse in the daylight than it had at night. Someone had dumped out the freshly filled flour bin onto the floor, then walked in it. Flour was everywhere, including the countertops. It looked as though someone had climbed onto the counter and walked around. Eden looked up and saw that someone had cut a three-foot-square hole in the ceiling. So they could see into that part of the attic? she wondered.
Behind her she felt rather than saw or heard McBride. “Your agency is going to pay for this,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Good luck on getting that,” Jared said amiably, seeming to be unperturbed by what he saw. “Stay here,” he said, then, with his gun drawn, headed toward the dining room.
Eden stormed past him, into the main hall, and nearly burst into tears. The big secretary was on its face, and the top ornamentation had broken off. She stood there for a few moments, fighting back tears, then she took off running to look at what had been done to the rest of the house. The living room was the biggest mess. The furniture had been overturned and the cushions on the couch cut. The pictures on the walls, painted by a Farrington ancestor who had no talent whatever, were in a heap by the fireplace. Had they been about to burn them? Why? To save their delicate sensibilities?
Jared came up behind her and put his gun away. There were no other people in the house and he knew it. When he put his hand on her shoulder, she jerked away from him and turned to go back into the hall. There was a powder room behind the main stairs. It had once been part of the master bedroom, but the big pecan tree outside had taken over the space. Rather than cut down the glorious tree, a Farrington had reduced the size of the bedroom so much that when the house had been plumbed, the room was made into a half bath. It was a smallish bedroom but an enormous powder room. In here, too, the ceiling had been cut and there were footprints on the counter of the sink.
“I’ll get forensics in here,” Jared said from behind her.
She whirled on him. “And what will they tell you? That some criminals did this to my house? That will be news, won’t it?”
“I don’t know why you’re angry at me,” he said as he followed her out of the room. “These weren’t my men.”
“Not through any intent of yours!”
“That’s true, I did try to…” He straightened his shoulders. “To keep you from throwing me out, I tried to make you see the seriousness of this situation. I didn’t tell you this, but an agent was murdered here in Arundel just before you arrived.”
At that she turned and looked back at him, her hands into fists, her eyes narrow with anger. “Now that’s news! An FBI agent got killed. Isn’t that what happens to you guys? Isn’t the whole idea that you’re supposed to fight trouble? So one of them was down here, in a small town, snooping around, no doubt asking a lot of questions about people’s private business and he—”
“She.”
“Oh,” Eden said. “A woman.”
“Go on. What were you going to say?”
“How did it happen?”
“Hit-and-run.”
Eden gave a sigh. “A hit-and-run could have been an accident. She wasn’t necessarily murdered.” Her anger was returning. “And as for this today, did any of you think that those men were after you?”
He didn’t answer her, and she didn’t expect him to. She threw open the door to her bedroom and saw that it was exactly as she’d left it. Apparently, no one had been inside. The fact that no one had tried to find anything in her bedroom made her more sure that whoever had done this today had been after McBride, not her. With every minute that went by, she was more sure that his spy, this man Appleby or whatever his name was, had probably wanted her to publish his tell-all book, and, as McBride had said, maybe he’d not wanted the FBI to find out about it, so he’d tried to destroy Eden’s name. Maybe he was afraid that the FBI would block the publication of his book. He, like everyone else who wrote, wanted that greatest of achievements: immortality, a book that lived forever.
Eden thought that after her meeting with Brad, she’d call her publishing house and see if any reader had read a book written by a man who’d been a spy. Or maybe he’d done what Eden had with the Farrington data and fictionalized his story. She glanced at the blue boxes stacked in the corner of her bedroom. Four of the manuscripts were by unknown authors. Eden was to read them and give a report. If the book was good, it would be given to an editor who had an in-house office to be read again, and perhaps published. If the book was no good, it would be sent back to the author with a polite thankyou. For all Eden knew—because she’d had no time to work—Applegate’s book could be in that stack. Maybe the men who’d vandalized her house were looking for the manuscript but hadn’t found it. But that made no sense, as the boxes were in plain sight.
Turning, she faced McBride. “As you can see, no one has searched my room. That’s because they have no interest in me. If you look in your room, you’ll probably find it’s been torn apart. Now, Mr. McBride, I’m going to take a shower, then I’m going to meet a man I’m beginning to like a great deal. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll—”
She wasn’t prepared for Jared’s lightning-fast movement. She had the door half closed when his arm reached out, grabbed her, and pulled her out of the room. He half threw her behind the door. “What—?” she began but didn’t finish her sentence because McBride nearly leaped into her bedroom. Was someone hiding in there? She put her hand to her throat and her heart raced. When she heard no sound from him, her heart calmed down and she tiptoed around the door. McBride was standing in her room, staring at her bed. The covers had been thrown back, but as far as she could see, there was nothing unusual. Straightening, she walked into the room. “There’s no one here,” she said.
Jared held out his arm to keep her from getting any closer to the bed. “Go down to the end of the hall,” he said quietly and calmly, “and get a broom. No, get two of them, then come back here. Don’t make any noise and move slowly.”
She wanted to ask questions, wanted to make him explain himself, but then she saw her bedcovers move. Something was alive and under the covers! She backed out of the room slowly, then ran down the hall to the closet that held the brooms and the stairs down. The door was open, and two brooms and an old mop were halfway out, but, as far as she could tell, no one but the two of them had been down the stairs. It was so unusual for a staircase to lead out of a broom closet that the intruders hadn’t checked.
Grabbing two brooms with sturdy handles, she went back to the bedroom. McBride hadn’t moved. In the middle of the bed was the head of a snake. It seemed to be warm and cozy under Eden’s covers and in no hurry to leave. It was staring up at McBride as though it wanted to say hello.
Without looking at her, Jared reached out his hand for the brooms. “Would you please go to that far window, open it, then go downstairs?” he said in a quiet, even voice.
Eden walked slowly toward the window, her back against the armoire that was against the wall. The snake turned to look at her, but it didn’t otherwise move. It seemed to have chosen McBride as its prey, and Eden was of little interest. At the window, she had to push upward hard. The wood in the windows had been replaced as was necessary to keep them from rotting, but they were still over two hundred years old—and they were a pain in the neck to work. More than once, years ago, Eden had looked at the ads for Pella and Andersen windows with longing.
Finally, the window was up. There were no weights inside it so it wouldn’t stay up. She grabbed one of the blue boxes on the floor and stuck it in the window—she hoped it was the spy’s manuscript. Once the window was open, she made her way back to the door, keeping against the wall and the furniture. As far as she could tell, McBride hadn’t taken his eyes off the snake. They seemed to be hypnotized by each other.
Eden left the room but stayed just outside the door and watched. As though he were a snake charmer, McBride used a broom in his left hand to attract the snake’s attention. With his right, he eased the second broom down under the snake’s body, which had begun to emerge from under the warmth of the covers. It took time and patience, but soon he had the broom handle under the snake. When Jared lifted, the snake wrapped itself around the handle, and Jared quickly walked toward the open window. It was only a few steps but it seemed to take an hour. In one quick movement, he reached the window, then he dropped the enormous snake outside.
Relieved, Eden opened the door and started back into her bedroom, but McBride put his hand up to stop her. “Let me check the place out,” he said, then began a slow, systematic search of her bedroom, then her bath.
He found a little copperhead inside the big armoire at the foot of her bed. It liked the warmth of the TV set and had curled up under it. Eden would never have seen it until she was bitten as she reached for something inside the cabinet. Under her bed, inside her gardening shoes, was a red-bellied moccasin. In her bathroom, behind a stack of towels in a cupboard, was a cottonmouth.
She stood at the door, growing weaker every time McBride pulled another poisonous snake out of her room. She figured a sack full of them had been released in her bedroom, then the door closed. She watched as he turned over chairs, stripped the bed, lifted the mattress and springs. He climbed on a chair and looked on top of the armoire, and on top of the mirror over the dresser. He lay down on the floor on his back and scooted under her bed, looking over every inch of it with a flashlight.
When he was sure that her room was clean, they went to his bedroom and he began to search it. There were no snakes in his room. Only in Eden’s.
At last, she sat down on the old chest in the hallway and sighed. “Someone wants me dead.”
“It would look that way,” he said quietly, looking at her in speculation. “You and I have to figure out what you know or who you know. We have to—”
Everything that was happening to her was so out of everyday life, that she couldn’t really deal with it. If she thought about what was happening now, she’d start thinking about what happened to her when she was just a girl, and that would lead to thinking about Mrs. Farrington’s son. No, it was better to try to keep her life as normal as possible. She looked at her watch, then jumped up and started running for the stairs. “I have to meet Brad!”
“Ms. Palmer,” Jared called out, running down the stairs after her. “You can’t go anywhere. It’s too dangerous. Eden! Wait!”
She paid no attention to him. As she ran through the hall downstairs, she grabbed her handbag and her car keys and kept running toward her car.
“I have to search your car. You can not go! Do you hear me?”
Eden unlocked her car door, then stood by it for a second. “Mr. McBride, I am forty-five years old and I’ve had to deal with loser men all my life. Now, at last, I think I may have possibly found a winner. If you think that the FBI, a bunch of murderers, and a few poisonous snakes are going to deter me, then all I can say is that you don’t know anything about women.”
Jared barely made it into the passenger seat before she spun out of the driveway and headed into Arundel.