First Impressions

by Jude Deveraux

  “You wrote a book but you didn’t tell me?” he asked, staring at her in astonishment. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  “It’s never been a secret. I hope that by now the sales department has made every bookseller in America know I’ve written a book. Why didn’t your file tell you about my book?”

  “I don’t know but I’ll find out. I’ll—”

  “McBride!” Brad shouted into the phone. “Ask Eden about the riddle. The one carved inside the door.”

  “He wants to know—”

  “I can hear him,” she said, sitting up straighter. “The door is in the attic, and yes, I copied it exactly as it is. He hasn’t solved the riddle, has he?”

  “She wants to know if you’ve solved the riddle, and I want to know what riddle.”

  “It’s a mystery,” Eden said, leaning back against the pillows. “No one knows who wrote it or what it means. None of the Farringtons were very interested in it.”

  “What do you know, Granville?” Jared asked into the phone.

  “It’s a hunch, that’s all. I think Tyrrell Farrington wrote it, and I think it tells something about his dreadful paintings.”

  “Not dreadful,” Eden said, her head lolling to one side.

  “What do you think this riddle is about?” Jared asked. “Does it have anything to do with the kidnapping?”

  “Kidnapping?!” Brad shouted. “What kidnapping? Who’s been kidnapped?”

  “I can’t talk about that over the phone. Where are you?”

  “On the way back to Arundel. Is Eden all right?” Brad’s voice lowered. “Is it Melissa who’s been kidnapped?”

  “Yeah,” Jared said succinctly. “What is it that you know?”

  “If it’s what I think it is, I may know why Melissa was taken. I’m not sure, but there may be millions involved. McBride, I want you to take one of Tyrrell Farrington’s paintings off the wall, take it into the bathroom, and run water over it.”

  “Something’s under his painting?”

  “Maybe. I think it’s a strong possibility. Just do it, then let me know, will you? I should be there in about two hours. And, McBride, take care of Eden, will you? You don’t have kids, so you don’t know what it means—”

  Jared closed the phone before Brad could finish his sentence, and he was in the hall in two steps. Seconds later, he returned with one of Tyrrell’s paintings.

  “I want to see what you’re going to do,” Eden said, trying to get out of bed. Jared put an arm under hers and held the painting in the other. In her bathroom he sat her on the closed toilet and put the painting in the tub, then turned on the shower.

  In silence, Eden and Jared watched as the water hit the old painting. At first nothing happened, but then Tyrrell’s painting of the fields around Farrington Manor began to run. Underneath were oil colors of another painting.

  Jared turned off the shower water, picked up the painting, and used a towel to wipe off what was left of Tyrrell Farrington’s watercolors around the edges, then he handed it to Eden. “Recognize the signature?” he asked quietly.

  The pills inside Eden were still making her dizzy and drowsy, but she thought she could have been dead and still recognized the signature at the corner. “Van Gogh,” she whispered, looking up at Jared in disbelief.

  “Yeah, ol’ One Ear himself.”

  It was a picture of blue cornflowers in a field, the light swirling around the flowers. Beautiful and as bright and vibrant as the day it had been painted.

  Putting his arm around Eden, he helped her back to bed. She fell back onto the pillows and closed her eyes. “Tyrrell was in Paris at the time of the Impressionists. Their paintings were so unusual that they couldn’t sell them. But then, most of them just wanted to paint and didn’t care if they sold.”

  “Didn’t you say that Tyrrell’s family cut off his money?”

  “Yes.” She opened her eyes. “They cut down his allowance to try to force him to return home. Maybe all he could afford was used canvases.”

  “Used by the other painters? The Impressionists?” Jared shook his head in awe as he looked at the picture in his hands. “You think more of these pictures have other paintings under them?”

  “I don’t know,” Eden said, “but I do know that not one of them is worth my daughter’s life. How do I trade them for her?”

  “And for the man she met at the airport,” he said, his jaw clenched.

  “If he isn’t one of the people who took her,” Eden said. “Have you found out yet who he is?”

  When Jared didn’t answer right away, Eden sat up. Her head was beginning to clear somewhat. “You know who he is, don’t you?”

  “I wish we did know who had taken her,” Jared said softly.

  “That’s not what I asked. Who did Melissa meet at the airport?”

  “I don’t know,” Jared said, looking into her eyes.

  Eden knew he was lying, but she had come to trust him enough to know that there was a reason for the lie. Eden didn’t care who her daughter had gone to meet. It could be her daughter’s lover, the true father of her child; Eden didn’t care.

  Between Eden and Jared passed silent communication. He was lying; she knew it, but she trusted him.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Jared pulled Eden into his arms. “We’re moving heaven and earth to find your daughter now, but no one has yet contacted us with a ransom demand. Where is this door with the riddle on it?”

  “In the attic. There’s a little closet on the left, under the eaves. I think some trunks are in front of it, so it’ll be hard to find.”

  “I’ll be back in seconds. Don’t move,” Jared said.

  Eden closed her eyes. The drug inside her was lessening just enough that her fear was beginning to come to the surface. When her phone rang again, she grabbed it before the ring finished. “Yes?” she said quickly.

  “You know what I want, don’t you?” said a man’s muffled voice.

  “Yes. We just figured it out. Please don’t hurt my daughter. She’s going to have a baby. She’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve to—”

  “No one will be hurt if you follow my instructions. There’s a dirt road where Highway 580 crosses 45. It’s easy to miss, but it’s there. At the end of the road is an old house. Put the necklace in a paper bag and leave it inside the house. Do you think you can find the place?”

  “Yes,” Eden said, rubbing her eyes and trying to clear the confusion from her brain. Necklace? What was he talking about? The necklace was worthless. It was just glass. Or was it? Had McBride lied to her about that too?

  “Come alone,” said the voice on the phone. “Anyone comes with you and your kid gets killed. Understand me?”

  “Yes. When?” she asked quickly. She could hear Jared’s footsteps on the stairs. “When?”

  “At midnight tonight.”

  “Yes, I’ll be there,” she said, then snapped the phone shut just as Jared came into the room. He was carrying the little door with him.

  “Were you talking on the phone?”

  “I was trying to call Brad back to tell him what we found,” she said, “but he didn’t answer.”

  Jared nodded, then put the door on the bed. On the back of the door, the wood hardly faded since it had been in the dark for a couple hundred years, was a crudely carved four-line riddle.

  Eden’s head was clearing more with each second, but she didn’t want Jared to know that, so she struggled when she tried to sit up.

  “Tell me about this,” he said.

  “I found it when I was clearing up the attic, but Mrs. Farrington knew it was there. No one in the family knew who had written it or when. Mrs. Farrington said her father told her he thought it was put there when the house was built.” She looked at Jared. “No one in the family thought anything about it. There’s also a phrase written in Latin on a windowpane in one of the dormers. It says—”

  “One mystery at a time. What do you think this one means?”

  Eden didn�
�t have to read it, as she knew it by heart. “I don’t know. Ask Brad. He’s the one who figured it out.” Her mind was on her daughter and how she was going to slip away, alone, to deliver a worthless necklace to a kidnapper. And how was she going to sneak away from Jared to try to find Melissa?

  “I need to sleep,” she said in the most pathetic voice she could muster. She did need to sleep. She needed all the strength she could muster to face tonight.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “IWISH you’d let me go with you,” Brad said under his breath. “In a situation like this—”

  “It’s not a situation, it’s my daughter,” Eden said. “She’s been captive for nearly twenty-four hours now, and I need to get her out. If somebody wants that worthless old necklace, he can have it.”

  “You aren’t going to tell this person that it’s worthless, are you? He probably needs to think that he’s going to get the money to bail himself out of whatever problem he has in his life.”

  “No, of course not,” Eden said slowly, looking at his profile in the dark car. “Brad, you sound as though you know something.”

  “Of course not,” he said quickly as he swung the car onto the dirt road and turned off the headlights. The dashboard clock said 11:32. It hadn’t been easy to get Eden out of the house without McBride knowing, but they’d done it. When Eden had gone into a crying fit and McBride had given her a couple of pills to calm her, Brad thought Eden’s plan was off. But her fit had been faked to create a distraction. Eden had spit out the pills, and when Jared thought she was asleep, she’d sneaked down the tiny, secret stairs to the kitchen and out the back door. The front of the house had been full of FBI agents, all of them waiting for a phone to ring, but the back had been clear.

  As planned, Brad was waiting for her on the other side of the bridge.

  Earlier in the day, after he’d returned from being with Katlyn, he’d been filled with remorse. He shouldn’t have done that to Eden, he thought. But after he’d seen her in the mud with McBride, and after he’d seen the gifts of the little truck and gardening tools that he was sure McBride had bought for her, Brad had felt defeated. His pride and his ego had been cut in half. He knew he was considered the “prize catch” in Arundel, but when he’d at last found a woman he thought he might be able to share his life with, he was losing her. He needed something—someone—to make him feel like a man again.

  But Katlyn hadn’t made him feel good. Instead, she’d made him feel more alone than he had before he’d met Eden.

  It was only by chance that Katlyn had told him about the book Eden had written, and only by chance that Brad had seen the riddle for what it was. An ego trip of a bad painter, is what he thought at first. Who else in the Farrington family would write about “legends of me”? Once Brad realized who had written the riddle, all he’d thought about was the last line, but in the car on the way back to Arundel, he’d figured out the rest of the lines.

  By the time he reached Arundel, Brad had changed his mind about Tyrrell Farrington. If the young man had openly returned to Farrington Manor with a stack of Impressionist paintings, his domineering father would have burned them. Brad had an idea that Tyrrell had had the foresight to see that the paintings would someday be worth something. But how did he insure that they would stay in the family and survive generations of tastelessness? If his father didn’t destroy them, maybe the next generation would. How to save them?

  Brad thought that Tyrrell knew his family well. He certainly understood their vanity. They’d never destroy pictures of what was theirs. So Tyrrell had reluctantly returned to the family, but he’d devoted the rest of his life to covering the wonderful Impressionist paintings with bad watercolors of his family and their possessions. And he had been right: the family vanity had saved them. After all these years, the paintings were still intact and waiting for someone to solve the riddle he’d left behind, and to discover the paintings under the watercolors.

  Five by five and three by three. Quite simply, the size of the paintings. Worth more than gold and married to thee. Tyrrell had guessed that the paintings would someday be worth more than gold. He’d covered several of them with portraits of Farrington spouses. Ten times ten and legends of me. He left over a hundred paintings and knew—hoped—that the discovery of them would make a legend of him. Look not where thou canst find me. The easiest one: the real art had been painted over.

  Brad had wanted to tell Eden all that he’d figured out the second he saw her, but the kidnapping of her daughter had taken precedence over everything else. And worse was when Brad saw the way McBride looked at Eden. Her only thoughts were about her daughter, but McBride couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  They’ve been lovers, Brad thought, and wanted to hang himself from the nearest tree for getting jealous and running off to the comfort of a woman he’d never really liked. His only hope of winning Eden was that figuring out the riddle would pull her back to his side.

  When Brad first arrived at her house, he’d had to undergo a humiliating search by the FBI. McBride stood in the doorway, smirking, and enjoying Brad’s discomfort. And McBride had enjoyed telling Brad that Eden was asleep and would be for hours. “She’s been awake all night,” he said, not meeting Brad’s eyes.

  Two minutes later, Brad was in a room with two FBI agents and telling them what he’d figured out about the riddle. As a result, they were flying in a couple of men who were art preservationists and would know how to extract the paintings in a way less violent than with the blast of a shower.

  At four, Eden came downstairs. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she was inordinately quiet. She ate the food that was placed in front of her, but said nothing. She only nodded when she saw Brad, but she said nothing to him.

  But later, when she passed him, she slipped a note into his hand, then she went up the stairs, her feet heavy and her body bent. Brad excused himself to go to the restroom to read the note. She wrote that she’d been contacted by Melissa’s kidnapper, and she asked Brad to meet her at the far side of the bridge at eleven P.M. At the bottom, she’d drawn a map and written “deliver necklace here.” Brad knew he should turn the note over to McBride, but at the same time, he saw it as a second chance with Eden. She trusted him, and he wasn’t going to betray her trust. Before, when her daughter had arrived and Eden had needed him, when he should have stayed and fought for her, he’d abandoned her. He never wanted her to know how completely he’d abandoned her.

  He tore the note into tiny pieces, then flushed it. He wasn’t going to let Eden down a second time. He went home, emptied his gun cabinet, borrowed a couple of handguns from his cousin, then spent an hour hiding all of them inside his uncle’s Jeep. He wanted four-wheel drive if he was going to be on a dirt road. He used his CDs of the North Carolina survey maps to bring up the area on his computer, then studied the old roads surrounding the abandoned house. He went to visit his great-uncle in the nursing home, and asked him a thousand questions about the house at the end of the dirt road. His uncle knew everything about everyone around Arundel and had a photographic memory. By the time Brad left, he knew the history of the house back four generations. Best of all, he had the phone number of a man who’d grown up in the house and knew the layout of it well. After Brad talked to him, he was almost ready. He had just one more call to make.

  “Remi?” he said when his son-in-law answered. “I have something I want you to help me do. But I warn you that it could be dangerous.”

  “Anything,” Remi said.

  “I’m serious about the danger of this.”

  “Mr. Granville, I’m from Louisiana. We invented danger.”

  Brad rolled his eyes skyward. “Spare me,” he said. “If you think you can do this, then get over here right away.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Brad put down the phone and stood looking about him for a while. Inadvertently, in his hours of research about the abandoned house, he’d come across the name of someone. The name had come up twice, and as much as B
rad hated the idea, he thought he knew who was behind the kidnapping. All for a worthless necklace, he thought. And the irony was that the man had been alone inside Farrington Manor many times. He could have stolen the paintings at any time. Instead, he was risking everything for some colored glass.

  Brad shook his head to clear it, slipped a tiny handgun into his pocket, then looked at his watch. It was after eight. Not much time left before he was to meet Eden. He picked up his Bible, opened it at random, and began to read.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “PLEASE don’t try to stop me,” Eden said to Brad. “It’s something I have to do.” Beside her, in his car, she was clutching the paper bag containing the necklace so tightly that her nails had cut through the top of it. “If he wants this thing, he can have it. All I want is my daughter.”

  Brad looked at the dashboard clock. It was now fourteen minutes to midnight. “I think I should go in your place,” he said. “I brought a black sweatshirt. If I pull up the hood, I—”

  “No one would mistake you for me,” she said, looking at the bag in her hand. “You’ll stay here and wait for me? I don’t know what will happen after I leave the necklace. Do you think he’ll…?” She couldn’t finish her sentence.

  Brad put his hand on hers. “I think that once he gets the necklace he’ll leave town immediately. I think he probably has a car waiting close by, and he probably has his plane tickets and his suitcases with him. I think he’s already made arrangements to sell the necklace. Once he has the money in his hands, I think he plans to go to some country that has no extradition laws where he plans to spend the rest of his worthless life in a hut on a beach painting pictures that he thinks will make him the next Gauguin. I think he believes that his paintings will be so good that the world will forgive him for what he did to get the money to bankroll him.”

  Eden was looking at Brad with her mouth open. “What do you know?” she managed to gasp out.