“You think our lives will ever be normal again?” Sarah asked.
“They were never normal in the first place,” I said.
Sarah, with her wounded ankle, limped ahead of us while holding up the gas lantern we’d found in Vincent’s shed. I held Defoe by his feet and carried the gym bag strapped across my chest. Serena, walking backward, gripped the bungee cord in both hands.
I kept thinking Defoe would spring to life, tear away the sheets, and grab me by the throat. The tunnel would have been the right place for it. Sarah hadn’t been kidding: without functioning lights and air vents, it had all the charm of a tomb—which worked out nicely, since that’s what we were using it for. And to think Anthony and I used to sneak down here for our private rendezvous. Trying to remember that time was like watching an old movie starring two actors I’d never seen before.
“Where do we leave him?” Serena asked.
“I’m thinking the midway mark,” I said. “Unless the house gets raided with Vincent in it, no one will ever find him.”
We set Defoe’s corpse down, rested, picked it up again. Vincent’s tunnel must have been the driest spot in all of Florida, but my blouse was drenched and I couldn’t blink fast enough to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Serena suffered the way she’d always worked: in silence. It wasn’t until later that I saw the deep imprints across her swollen palms.
“All right,” I said, “this is far enough.”
We counted to three and let go. The thud resounded like concrete landing on concrete. We kept going and didn’t look back. Without a dead man weighing us down, we might have been walking on air.
At a little before midnight we pulled up to the security gates outside Vincent’s McCastle, me behind the wheel, Serena in the passenger seat, and Sarah nursing her bum ankle in the back. Not one of us had said a word during the drive.
“Hello?” I shouted into the little black box. “Anybody home?”
Two stocky guards hit Pause on their card game and came sauntering out of their little cabin to look us over. I didn’t recognize either of them.
“You sure we shouldn’t have brought the guns?” Serena asked.
“Listen to Annie Oakley,” I said. “You think we’d win a shoot-out with Vincent’s army?”
Huey and Dewey wore black slacks and navy-blue windbreakers with the initials V. C. stitched across the chest. They each carried a gun on one hip and what looked like a Playskool walkie-talkie on the other. The one sporting a knit cap leaned in while his cohort walked the periphery of the car.
“Good evening,” Knit Cap said. “You ladies lost or something?”
He looked more like a camp counselor than a first line of defense, but then the guys out front were mostly for show. Whatever they knew about Vincent’s business they’d read in the papers. Vincent kept the heavy hitters inside, circled around their master.
“Nope, we’re in the right place,” I said. “I’m Vincent’s niece. Or niece-in-law, if that’s a word. Anthony was my husband.”
He mumbled something about being sorry for my loss, then backed out of earshot and spoke into his handset. Meanwhile, his partner kept walking in circles around our car.
“We could take them,” Serena whispered. “I mean, if we had to.”
My onetime maid hadn’t just busted out of her shell: she’d shattered it. I only hoped she wouldn’t get us killed.
Knit Cap finished up his conversation and came padding back.
“Mr. Costello says he knows you, but not your friends. We’ll have to do a quick search if you want to go in. Your persons and your vehicle. Sorry about that, but it’s standard—”
“Oh, no worries.” I smiled. “We’re used to it.”
They frisked us, pored over the car’s interior, then spent a long time digging around inside the trunk.
“What’s this?” Knit Cap asked, holding up the gym bag. Of course he’d already discovered what was inside.
“A repayment,” I told him. “To Vincent. He’ll be very unhappy if any of it goes missing.”
“And this?” his partner asked. He’d found Sarah’s insulin kit.
“I’m diabetic,” she said.
Guard number two looked confused. I couldn’t tell if he’d never heard of diabetes before, or if he thought Sarah was lying, trying to smuggle heroin into Vincent’s mansion, which would have been a first.
“I’ll prove it to you,” she said. “I’m due a dose. It’s been a busy day. I forgot to inject myself, and I’m starting to feel a little woozy.”
She took the kit from him. He stepped back, as if maybe she was La Femme Nikita and would drive that needle into his neck. Up close, you could see he was just a kid. A kid who’d watched too many movies.
Sarah gave herself a fifteen-unit shot.
“Now watch closely,” she said. “If I nod off, feel free to shoot me.”
That seemed to satisfy him. Meanwhile, Sarah’s cheeks looked a little rosier than they had before.
At long last, we piled back into the car and waited for the gates to part.
“You ladies have a nice evening,” Knit Cap called, waving us through.
I steered the rental down yet another ridiculously long and meticulously landscaped Costello driveway, then parked under the very modern glass and steel porte cochere Vincent had stuck on the front of his Tudor mansion. A half dozen more men stood in line to greet us. These guys weren’t in uniform because they didn’t need to be: they were the real deal.
“You think they’re planning to kill us?” Serena asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “Vincent will want to talk to us first.”
“Talk, or torture?” Sarah asked.
The leader of our welcome party signaled for us to get out. His name was Nigel. He was Defoe’s cousin. I’d forgotten all about the family tie
