“If I’m not, someone else is. You should call the FBI right now and tell them everything. And I mean everything.”
“That’s not an option. Not yet. Malik knows things I have to know, and if I bring in the FBI now, I never will. I’ll be this fucked-up for the rest of my life. Is that what you want?”
His eyes bore into mine with startling intensity. “I want you alive, not dead.”
I nod slowly. “Sean Regan.”
“Is that your married boyfriend?”
“Yes, but that has nothing to do with anything. Sean is trained for this kind of thing. He can protect me, and I can trust him to keep quiet about this.”
Michael looks sad, but I can’t take time to deal with his emotions now.
“Can I still use your Expedition?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. I need to go to Malmaison before I leave for New Orleans.”
Michael reaches out and takes me by the shoulders. His grip is amazingly strong. “Do you promise to take Sean with you to meet Malik?”
Even as I make the promise, I know it’s a lie. But I don’t need Michael freaking out and calling the FBI about this meeting. He could give them the plate number of his Expedition, and I’d never even reach New Orleans.
“What’s at Malmaison?” he asks.
“I need some clothes.” Another lie. What I need from Malmaison is something that’s always been there in abundance.
A gun.
Chapter 40
Dawn has only just broken, but the ground floor of Malmaison is lit up as though for a royal court party. I saw the yellow dome of light as I jogged through the trees from Michael’s house in Brookwood, following the old trail I beat with my own feet so long ago. Pearlie’s lights are on, too.
My Audi is parked beside Pearlie’s Cadillac. Not far away stands a tall, white pickup truck like the ones used on the island-the kind that tried to run me over. Someone on the island must have found my car and brought it back. But if that’s the case, why doesn’t Grandpapa have the police scouring the countryside for me or my corpse? And why didn’t someone call my cell phone?
After circling around to the yellow-flooded front lawn, I stop and check the phone. The call log shows three calls from my grandfather’s number. With the phone set to vibrate only, I slept through them, and in my shock over the calls after I awakened, I failed to notice the misses. The last call probably came around the time I was having my nightmare. I press
Hearing the concern in my grandfather’s voice almost brings tears to my eyes. His next message says,
My skin is crawling. The voice that spoke to my unknown abductors was that of an avenging angel, deathly cold and crackling with violence, so certain of itself that nothing could stand against it. It’s the voice of the man who hunted down the escaped convicts on the island all those years ago.
On his third call, my grandfather left no message at all.
Looking up at the floodlit face of Malmaison, I’m more sure than ever that I don’t want to see anyone inside. Not Grandpapa. Not even Pearlie. That’s why I came on foot. If I pulled up in Michael’s Expedition, I’d be seen and questioned by everyone at home. My chances of discreetly getting a gun from my grandfather’s safe would be greatly reduced. But this way…
I trot to the far end of the mansion’s east wing, where there’s hardly any light. Most of these rooms are closed except during Spring Pilgrimage. I’ve known since the eighth grade that the lock on one window here can be slipped with a credit card. I used to sneak in this way to raid my grandfather’s liquor cabinet. Today I have no credit card-I left my purse in my car on the island-but Michael lent me an expired driver’s license to do the job. Judging by the picture on it, he was about seventy pounds heavier when the license was issued. I press the license steadily between the panels of the tall French windows. They part slightly, and the laminated license easily flips the lock.
As I climb through the heavy draperies, I smell the scent of mothballs. Most of the furniture in this wing is covered with white slip-covers. I feel as though I’m walking through a deserted museum. In the hallway, I smell bacon frying. I move quickly to my grandfather’s study, the room patterned after Napoleon’s library. The door is standing open, and the desk lamp is on, but the room is empty.
The gun safe is quite large, big enough to hold the architectural model he showed me the other day, plus his collection of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The combination lock is easy to open-it’s my birthday. Four clicks left, eight clicks right, seventy-three left, then turn the handle. I freeze once as I turn the dial, sure that I heard footsteps in the hall, but no one appears.
When I turn the handle, the heavy steel door opens.
The casino model is gone, but the guns are there. Five rifles, three shotguns, and several handguns lying in holsters on the floor of the safe. The scent of gun oil is strong, but there’s something else, too.
Burnt gunpowder.
One by one, I pull the rifles from their slots and sniff the barrels. The first two gleam in the light, their barrels clean. But the third has recently been fired. Holding the weapon in my hands, I turn it in the light. It’s a bolt-action Remington 700, scarred from use but well maintained. As I stare, my pulse begins to race. I killed a deer with this rifle when I was a girl. But that’s not why my heart is pounding.
I’m holding the rifle that killed my father.
As a child, I asked my grandfather several times to get rid of this gun, but he never did. He saw no reason to get rid of a “good gun” for “sentimental reasons.” Knowing what I know now about what he did with this rifle-or at least the story he told me-it surprises me that he would keep it. Was it a trophy, like the Weatherby he used to bring down his bull elk in Alaska? But more important, who fired it in the last couple of days?
I don’t have time to speculate.
Replacing the rifle, I grab an automatic pistol from the bottom of the safe. Nothing big or fancy, just a Walther PPK we used for target practice on the island. The black handgun looks wet and dangerous under the light. Ejecting the clip, I see that it’s fully loaded. I’d like some extra ammunition, but I don’t see any, and I don’t have time to look. Besides, if six rounds isn’t enough to get me out of whatever scrape I get into with Malik, another six probably wouldn’t save me either.
Closing the door to the safe, it strikes me as odd that a man would leave so many guns accessible to a teenage girl who he knew suffered from depression. Grandpapa even used my birthday for the combination, for God’s sake. What was he thinking? But then…Grandpapa never saw depression as an illness, only a weakness. Maybe he figured that if I wasn’t strong enough to resist the temptation to kill myself, I didn’t deserve to live.
Back in the hall, something stops me. Faint voices floating on the air. Grandpapa first. Then Pearlie. Maybe Billy Neal, though I’m not sure. Then a richer, warmer voice chimes in. It has a submissive tone, like the voice of a laborer in his employer’s house. The warm voice belongs to Henry, the black man who drove me across the bridge
