Blue Sage (Anne Stuart's Greatest Hits Book 3) by Anne Stuart (23)

Megan Carey told herself she had no reason in the world to feel guilty. For the first time in her twenty-seven years, she was going to do something irresponsible, romantic and wonderful. She was taking off with nothing but a brand-new matched set of luggage, a one-way ticket to Europe and a wad of traveler’s checks that would choke a horse, not to mention enough unencumbered plastic to keep her going until she and she alone decided it was time to stop.

Her co-workers at Carey Enterprises were giving her a lavish send-off, out of keeping with her relatively few years on the job, but she was universally liked in the huge construction-and-development firm. The fact that she was the boss’s only child was a drawback rather than an incentive, but her friends in the executive offices were partying up a storm anyway, throwing her a bon voyage party worthy of a veteran of fifty years in the company. Meg accepted it with good cheer and gratitude, wishing she could just get rid of this nagging little feeling of guilt.

It wasn’t as if she were leaving her father in the lurch. She’d worked for the huge company founded by her grandfather since she was in high school, working during school vacations, doing every job imaginable as she learned the construction business from the bottom up. Not that Carey Enterprises was simply a construction company. Reese Carey had turned a run-of-the-mill organization into a multinational glamour business. He built mansions for millionaires, upscale office buildings, elite public buildings for wealthy municipalities. Carey Enterprises had a reputation for quality worth paying for, a reputation Meg viewed with justifiable pride, secure that she’d been partly responsible for it.

But she was tired of it. Tired of working every spare minute that wasn’t spent on schooling, tired of being so tied to her father that she had no life of her own. Tired of squashing down her embarrassing, undeniably romantic yearnings for a life of adventure. Now, finally, she was going to give in to those yearnings, toss the common sense that had ruled her life to the winds and take off.

Her father hadn’t taken her decision well but for once she was adamant. There wouldn’t be a better time to leave. Her father was about to remarry five years after being widowed, and his fiancée was a sensible, attractive woman who knew as much about the business as Meg did. Her father would be so busy with his new bride that he wouldn’t have time to miss her.

If only he hadn’t been looking so worried during the past few weeks. So preoccupied and slightly desperate. Whenever she’d asked him what was wrong, he’d only insisted he was going to miss her, but she didn’t think it was that simple, despite her immediate upsurge of guilt.

She’d even gone so far as to check the financial records of both the firm and her father’s private accounts, wondering whether he was on the brink of ruin and didn’t want to tell her. But both Carey Enterprises and Reese Carey himself were not only solvent, they were flush, with the real estate and building slowdown not seeming to affect them at all.

She accepted a glass of imported champagne from someone in the accounting department, accepted a kiss from one of her father’s secretaries and moved through the crowd. She was due to fly from New York in four days’ time. She was allowing two days to drive from their home in Chicago to the East Coast, another day to shop, and then her adventure would begin. But it wouldn’t start until she made one last-ditch effort to find out what was troubling her father.

He wasn’t anywhere in sight. He’d circulated through the chattering employees for a while, his usual bonhomie firmly in place, and then suddenly, he was gone. He could be anywhere in the elegant office building they’d constructed seven years ago from plans by the great Ethan Winslowe, but she had a pretty good idea where he’d be.

His office door on the deserted twentieth floor was ajar. She could see a pool of light beyond, and for a moment, she hesitated, wondering whether she’d be walking in on a romantic moment between Reese and Madeleine. But no, Madeleine had been deep in conversation with the comptroller. Her father would be alone, ready for one last father-daughter talk.

The thick rugs muffled her footsteps, even in the high heels she wore to add to her miserly five-foot-two height. She pushed the door open, a warm smile on her face, and then froze in horror.

Reese Carey was sitting in his leather desk chair, his back turned to her, staring into the Chicago night. He was holding a gun to his temple.

For a moment, Meg was paralyzed with panic. She wanted to scream, but she knew it might startle him into pulling the trigger. She held her breath for one heartbeat, for ten, then spoke very, very softly.

“Father?”

He whirled around in the chair, dropping the gun to the desk, and his usually red, cheery face was pale with strain. “Meg,” he said hoarsely.

She closed the door behind her, stepping into the walnut-paneled office. “What in God’s name is going on?” she said, fear making her usually warm voice strident. “Don’t fob me off with excuses anymore, I’m not buying them. What’s happening to you?”

For a moment he said nothing. Then he put his face in his hands, and his big shoulders heaved with sudden, noisy sobs. “I wouldn’t have done it, baby. I wouldn’t have done it to you. I would have waited.”

“Why were you going to kill yourself? Daddy, you’re not sick, are you?”

He raised his head then, and the tears streaming down his face looked strange, unreal to her. Her father, who laughed and joked and bullied his way through life, shouldn’t be crying. “I’m in trouble. Big, big trouble, and I can’t see any way out of it.”

“It can’t be financial. I checked our accounts when you started acting so oddly. We’ve got plenty of money, plenty of contracts, prospects…”

“Not for long. Not if Ethan Winslowe has his way.”

She sank down in the chair opposite him, a sudden foreboding making her cold inside. “What does Ethan Winslowe have to do with anything?”

“He’s out to destroy me,” Reese said, and for a moment, Meg almost laughed at the melodrama in his voice. Until she looked at the gun on the desk.

“Why would an architect want to destroy you? You’ve never even met him. The man’s a full-blown eccentric who never leaves his house. What would he have against you? You’ve built dozens of his designs, you’ve helped give him the reputation he enjoys. Why would he want to hurt you?”

Reese shrugged. “God, I don’t know. The man’s crazy, we all know that. As far as I know, no one’s even seen him. I’ve been told he’s multiply handicapped, kept alive by machines. Other people say he’s just agoraphobic. It doesn’t matter—the bottom line is he’s nuts and he’s out to get me.”

“You still haven’t told me why. He must have some reason. If he didn’t, how could he do you any harm? The man doesn’t even have a telephone in the back of beyond or wherever he lives.”

“Oak Grove,” Reese said. “And he could do it, have no doubt about that. He’s like a giant, evil spider spinning his web, and I’m well and truly trapped.”

Even with the gun in sight, this was getting too farfetched for Meg. “Why?” she said again with some asperity.

Her father considered for a moment, and he got that look in his eye that she knew far too well, the look that meant he was trying to figure out how much of the truth he had to tell. “You remember the Springfield Arts Center?”

“How could I forget? The collapse of that roof killed two workers and injured a score of others. We’re just lucky the investigation proved it wasn’t the company’s fault.”

“Yes, that’s what the investigation proved,” Reese said glumly.

“Supposedly it was Winslowe’s fault, wasn’t it? Was he fined or something?”

“They could never prove anything.”

“And Winslowe’s holding it against you? Five years later, he’s decided you railroaded him…?”

“No,” Reese said. “It just took him five years to find out that it really was my fault.”

Meg took a sharp breath. “How could it have been? You followed the blueprints, you knew what you were doing.”

“I was trying to cut costs. You’ve seen his plans—always the best of everything. A recluse like Winslowe has no sense of economy—he thinks money’s like water. I didn’t think those roof trusses needed to be that heavy gauge.”

“So you changed the specifications?” She didn’t want to hear this. The nightmare collapse of the arts center roof five years ago was something that none of them ever forgot. The one consolation had been that it hadn’t been their fault.

“Your mother had just died!” Reese cried. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. The business was going through a tough spell, and I thought we could come up with a little extra working cash if we just cut back on the reinforcements. I never thought it would have collapsed like that. If Winslowe only used normal design standards, it would have been fine.”

“But that’s what makes Winslowe so special, so sought after. He does things differently, and if you follow his specifications to the letter, it works. Father, how could you!” she cried.

“Don’t you start in on me! There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t regretted it, haven’t been eaten up with guilt. You know their families were well taken care of. You know nothing like that’s ever happened again.”

“But Ethan Winslowe found out.”

“I don’t know how he did. The man’s uncanny, sitting out there in the middle of nowhere. And now he’s going to destroy me.”

“Just calm down,” Meg said, more to herself than to her father, as her fingers gripped the sides of her chair. “Exactly what can he do?”

“He has proof, or so he says. He’s going to turn it over to the federal investigators next week unless I can come up with a reason why he shouldn’t.”

“That sounds like blackmail!”

“It wouldn’t be money he wants. The man has more than he’ll ever need. I don’t know what he wants from me. It’s hopeless, Meg. There’s no way out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said flatly. “You can’t be a coward at this point in your life. So you made a mistake. A terrible, tragic mistake. But you’ve suffered for it, you’ve done your best to make amends. Who the hell does he think he is to pass judgment on you?”

“I don’t imagine he’s quite sane.”

“There must be something we can do.”

She’d known her father for her twenty-seven years. She knew that slightly speculative expression he could get in his faded blue eyes as he weighed possibilities. “I’m supposed to present myself at his place in Oak Grove by Saturday. If he hasn’t heard from me, he’ll go ahead and destroy me.”

“Can’t you call him…?”

“He has no phone, remember?  He won’t answer my letters. And I know for damned sure that throwing myself on his mercy won’t do me a spit of good. He’s going to destroy me, Meg. There’s no way out. Unless…”

“Unless?” Here it comes, she thought.

“Unless you were to go in my place. The man isn’t thinking this through clearly. He doesn’t realize that he’s not just destroying a man, he’s destroying a family, a company, thousands of lives.”

“Hundreds,” Meg corrected with the ruthlessness she sometimes had to use to cut through her father’s high-flown emotion. “Let me get this straight. You want me to go out to Oak Grove and plead your case for you?”

“He won’t listen to me. All he wants is revenge. He’ll listen to you, Meg. He’d have to be blind not to.”

She took a deep breath.  “What makes you so sure he isn’t blind? Enough rumors have been spread about what kind of shape he’s in….”

“He couldn’t be blind. Not and design the buildings he’s designed. Will you do it, Meg? Will you save me?”

She’d been trapped, quite neatly, by a master. There was no alternative, not and live with herself. “My airplane tickets—”

“Are for Tuesday. You could drive out to Oak Grove, spend one night and drive back to an airport in time to make connections.”

“Why can’t I fly to Oak Grove?”

“Meg, you can barely find it on a map. The nearest airport is five hours away. You’d have to rent a car and––”

“You’ve already got this all figured out,” she said shrewdly.

Her father had the grace to flush. “I’ve been a desperate man, Meg. I’ve thought of every possibility. I’d never ask you—”

“You already have,” she pointed out.

“Will you do it?”

She didn’t even hesitate. She already knew she had no choice. “Of course,” she said, trying to keep the stiffness out of her voice. “But I’ll fly to the nearest airport and send my other stuff on to New York for my London flight. That is, if I can get tickets.”

“I’ve already made a reservation,”. He said sheepishly.  He got up from the desk, suddenly full of energy. “Let me go find the papers Winslowe sent. Oak Grove has to be the armpit of civilization, but I’ve got a fairly decent map…” His voice trailed off as he left the room.

Meg watched him go, her eyes narrowed at his sudden cheer. She’d seen him get what he wanted before, and she recognized all the signs. On impulse, she leaned over the desk and picked up the gun. Unloaded, of course, and her father knew guns well. The whole scene had been carefully staged for her benefit.

She ought to walk out and never come back. He’d managed to railroad her again, just as she was finally claiming her independence.

On the other hand, doing this one last thing for him would assuage her guilt. She would have earned her freedom if she talked Ethan Winslowe out of pressing charges. The man had to be reasonable, no matter how odd his reputation. She had a gift for negotiating, for making an opponent see the other side of matters, a gift her father had used often enough.

This time, she’d be using it for more than getting the best possible terms on a contract. This time, she was bargaining for her father’s livelihood and her own life. If Ethan Winslowe held to his revenge, there’d be no way she could leave Chicago. She’d need to stand by her father in his disgrace.

No, it was her life she’d be fighting for, too. Setting the gun back down on the desk, she leaned back in her chair. It was going to be a hell of a weekend.

Endless hours later, she was beyond stress, beyond worry, beyond regret. The late flight out of Chicago had been full of turbulence and grumpy flight attendants. She had had to change planes twice, each one getting a little smaller and a little choppier. By the time she arrived at a small municipal airport outside of Bennington, Tennessee, she was feeling jarred, achy and angry. And depressed, knowing she had a five-hour drive ahead of her.

Oak Grove was a tiny, faceless town that nestled somewhere between Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri. None of the states wanted to claim it, and it had the odd distinction of having belonged to all three in the last one hundred years. Currently, it belonged to Arkansas, but that probably wouldn’t last too long.

The only rental car was an aging Ford with no springs whatsoever. As Meg drove through the long, empty hours of early morning, she told herself things would look better when the sun rose. If it ever bothered to. There was a gloomy mist falling, and the late-spring weather seemed bleak, timeless. Somewhere beyond the side of the road, dogwoods must be blooming, azaleas and forsythia and tulips and daffodils. All she could see was gray.

The road narrowed as it climbed through twisty, dark hills. She was still more than fifty miles away when the road turned to gravel and the rain turned that gravel to mud. She was forced to slow down to something slightly faster than a crawl, and for a moment, she considered pulling off to the side of the road and trying to catch a little bit of sleep. She hadn’t seen another car in three hours—no one would be likely to be traveling this godforsaken road and find her sleeping.

But she couldn’t do it. She wanted to get to Oak Grove with a need that bordered on desperation. The sooner she faced Ethan Winslowe, whatever there was of him to face, the sooner she could get away, back to that horrible little airport with its horrible little plane. Her flight to Europe left New York in less than seventy-two hours—she was already cutting it close.

Besides, when it came right down to it, she was afraid. Afraid of facing Ethan Winslowe, afraid of what she’d find. Afraid that all her pleas, all her reasonable explanations were going to fall on deaf ears, either literally or figuratively. Afraid this midnight trip from hell was going to be a miserable, agonizing waste of time.

She almost missed the town of Oak Grove when she came to it. The gray mist had lessened somewhat, the sun was making a vain effort to poke through the thick clouds, and it was just past eleven in the morning. The gas gauge on the Ford was heading toward empty when she passed a cluster of buildings that suggested civilization was near at hand. She drove straight through, looking, but things rapidly became uninhabited again. There’d been a rusty gas pump near what seemed to be an abandoned store five miles back. She had no choice but to turn around.

This time, she saw the sign. Covered by weeds, rusted so that it was almost unreadable, the once-white sign said Oak Grove, Founded 1835. Underneath, someone had scratched something with a knife. Slowing the car, she peered at it. Lost, 1962, it said.

A tiny shiver of fear ran across her backbone as she pulled up next to the gas pump. She didn’t recognize the brand, and she could only hope there was even a trace of fuel in the old-fashioned pump. She sat there in her car, staring at the deserted street, and her hands came up to rub her chilled arms.

There was a church. Every speck of paint had peeled off, the front was a mass of weeds, but the windows were intact, and a sign listed services for almost every day of the week. Next to the church was a store with dingy, fly-specked windows full of old canned food and faded clothing. Oak Grove looked like a ghost town, she thought. The houses were dark and empty looking, the town deserted, eerie, a place no one in their right mind would want to live.

“Fill’er up?”

She screamed, thoroughly spooked. “Yes, please,” she said, pressing a hand to her racing heart. “I’m sorry, you startled me.”

“Yeah,” said the man. “I have a habit of doing that.”

A fitting resident of a ghost town, Meg thought. He was ageless, the man who’d materialized beside her window, moving with a slow gait that seemed more sullen than elderly. She glanced back at the town and for the first time realized that some of the blinds were being pulled back from the curtained windows. People were watching her.

“No credit cards,” the man said when he finished, appearing beside her just as abruptly. He watched with interest as she shuffled through her meager supply of cash. “You just passing through? We don’t get people in these parts very often.”

This sudden curiosity would have been disarming if Meg had been able to rid herself of the notion that he clearly wanted her gone. She handed him two twenty-dollar bills, waited while he laboriously counted the change, and then she flashed him her friendliest smile, the one guaranteed to melt Chicago bus drivers and postal workers everywhere. “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for someone.”

He remained unmoved. “That so?”

She didn’t let her smile falter. “A man by the name of Ethan Winslowe. He lives around here, doesn’t he?”

If the man had seemed distant and unfriendly before, he now seemed positively icy. “Winslowe don’t cotton much to visitors. You’d best keep on your way.”

“I’ve come to see him,” she said firmly. “I have an appointment.”

The old man narrowed his eyes. “He’s not going to want to see you. That man doesn’t see nobody, and nobody wants to see him. They say the last person that looked him in the eyes turned stone blind.”

Meg’s mouth dropped open. “I beg your pardon?”

“And then there’s old Mrs. MacInerny. She saw him one day when she was out walking and ain’t been right in the head since. He’s a son of the devil, he is, girly. No one’s rightly sure whether he’s real or not, whether he’s dead or alive. Some say he’s a phantom, haunting that crazy old place, but truth of the matter is no one wants to find out. You’d better get away from here before you run into anymore trouble.”

“I’m not going anywhere but to Winslowe’s house. I don’t believe in that kind of…”  She was about to say shit but suddenly thought better, “…nonsense.”

“Your funeral,” the old man announced with an air of gloomy satisfaction. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“You warned me, all right. You still haven’t told me how I can find him.”

“First left. Just keep driving—you’ll come to the old Meredith place sooner than you’ll ever want to.”

It was lack of sleep, Meg decided there and then. It was sheer exhaustion, not to mention tension, that was making this odd old man sound so sinister. “Meredith place?”

“His granddaddy’s. No one in their right mind would ever want to come back there to live, but then, Winslowe ain’t in his right mind. Everyone around here knows it.” And then the man disappeared back into the deserted-looking building, slamming the door shut behind him.

Just as well, she thought, starting up her car again. She might have been crazy enough to ask him another question. Considering the strange answers he’d already given her, she’d be better off waiting to see what she found at the end of her journey.

It took her half an hour to drive what couldn’t have been more than five miles. The road turned into a rutted swamp, one the old Ford could barely negotiate. She was so busy dealing with the driving conditions that she didn’t have any time to look ahead. When the road finally ended, she pulled to a stop, sitting there staring up in mingled awe and horror.