by Amanda Quick
While I sit here drinking rotgut coffee and trying to land another job.
Willa opened her purse and took out her wallet. She had just enough money for a train ticket to Burning Cove. When you were down on your luck, you turned to family. They had to take you in.
Chapter 9
His name was Eugene Fenwick. He was sitting at a lunch counter in a farm town in California, hunched over a plate of meat loaf and lima beans, when he saw the front-page story. He lost interest in the killer robot when he got to the end of the piece and saw the name of the woman with whom he had been obsessed for months: Amalie Vaughn. The flyer who had murdered Marcus.
The Flying Princess was only about four hundred miles away, living in a fancy coastal town while he was sweating in the hot sun of the northern portion of California’s Central Valley, picking crops and doing odd jobs.
For a couple of minutes the rage threatened to overwhelm him. He almost gagged on the meat loaf. He forced himself to swallow and take a couple of deep breaths. Gradually the mad fury subsided.
He had joined a circus when he was a kid, working as a roustabout until he learned how to rig the trapeze and high wire acts. He’d considered himself a pretty good rigger until he met Marcus Harding.
Marcus had possessed an instinctive feel for calculating loads, counterbalances, and tension. He could figure out the best anchor points. He knew how to make the pretty aerialists and the handsome catchers fly and he knew how to make the high wire performers seemingly walk on air. Harding had movie-star looks and a build like Johnny Weissmuller. He had no trouble getting the beautiful flyers into bed. It was just a game to him.
But Marcus had been crazy for thrills. Crazy in other ways, as well. He’d had another name at one time and been a catcher in a trapeze act, but after he’d dropped a flyer, no one would work with him.
He had changed his name to Harding and started drifting, following the trains that took the circuses, carnivals, and aerialists to towns across the country. Like Eugene, he got by picking up rigging and roustabout work wherever he could get it.
Once, when the two of them were sharing a bottle of cheap whiskey, Marcus had confided that he’d deliberately let the pretty flyer slip out of his grasp. It had been an impulse, he said. But the look of shock on the flyer’s face as she realized she was going to fall had excited him like nothing else he’d ever experienced.
What made it even more thrilling, he said, was that he had been having an affair with her. Watching her fall had been a thousand times better than the sex.
The flyer had survived because there had been a net but Marcus told Eugene that he’d often wondered what it would be like to drop an aerialist who was working without a net. The problem was that it meant he would have to work without a net, as well. He no longer wanted to take that kind of risk.
Eugene had started to think about all the pretty flyers who had refused to sleep with him, and he, too, began to wonder what it would be like to watch one fall all the way to the ground.
He’d also started drinking, and his rigging had gotten sloppy.
One afternoon on a hot summer day in a small midwestern town, a flyer he had hung went down. She had landed safely in the net but the boss had figured out fast that she had fallen because of a failure in the rigging. Eugene and Marcus were both fired.
Broke, they had ridden the rails across the country to the West Coast where no one knew them. Throughout the journey Eugene had remembered the exhilaration that had come over him when he’d watched the flyer go down. If there had been no net, she would have died.
“She would have looked like a broken doll,” he’d said to Marcus.
Marcus had laughed. “Yeah. A broken doll.”
As the train racketed toward the West Coast they had begun to plan a new game, a way to get the thrills that were to be had watching flyers go down. They knew that they would have to be careful. Rumors and gossip traveled fast in the circus world. They had to make sure that they were never suspected of the disasters.
The new game had gone well for a while. Three flyers had fallen to their deaths and no one had ever suspected Eugene and Marcus.
Then came Abbotsville. Everything went wrong. It was Marcus who had died. The Flying Princess had lived.
Now that bitch was living in a town where Hollywood celebrities vacationed.
And here he was, stuck in Lodi.
Not for long.
Chapter 10
The muffled scream jolted Amalie out of the falling dream. Hazel’s shriek ended in an abrupt manner that was more terrifying than the fearful cry. There was a heavy thud overhead.
Amalie found herself out of bed and on her feet before she fully comprehended what had awakened her. Heart pounding, she reached into the bedside drawer and took out the pistol that she kept there.
She crossed the room on bare feet and stopped at the door. One hand on the knob, she paused to listen. The villa felt unnaturally silent, as if it was holding its breath.
A floorboard creaked overhead.
The nerve-icing sound sent another thrill of fear through her. She recognized that particular creak. The board that had groaned was just outside Hazel’s room.
A freezing fog of panic threatened to overwhelm her senses. She remembered her father’s words.
Fear gives you strength. You use that strength to fly.
She opened the door, trying not to make any noise, but she almost stopped breathing altogether when the old hinges squeaked. There was no way to know if the intruder on the floor above had heard the telltale sound.
She glided out into the hall. She no longer trained daily, so she was not as strong as she had been when she was performing, but she still possessed the sense of balance and the intuitive awareness of the space around her that had been her birthright as the offspring of a family of aerialists and high wire walkers. She had been trained to walk a tightrope stretched a few inches above the ground soon after she had learned to toddle. She had begun her career as a professional flyer when she was in her early teens. Tonight her bare feet made no sound on the carpet.
Earlier, on her way upstairs to bed, she had made certain that the wall sconce on each staircase landing was illuminated. It was a ritual that she went through faithfully every night, not just for the safety of the guests—with Pickwell dead, there were no guests in residence—but because six months earlier she had learned that monsters lurked in the darkness.
The light that marked the second-floor landing still glowed but the floor above was drenched in shadows. A whisper of night air wafted down, icing the back of her neck. Somewhere upstairs a door or a window was open.
She ascended slowly, gun in hand. She was careful to avoid the places on the treads she knew might creak or groan. The draft of cool night air got stronger as she went up the steps.
When she reached Hazel’s floor she stopped on the landing and listened.
Nothing.
She reached out and flipped the light switch. The sconce did not illuminate. Either the bulb had burned out or the intruder had unscrewed it.
“I have a gun,” she shouted.
The words echoed through the mansion.
The entrances to several guest rooms lined the corridor on both sides. There was enough moonlight at the far end of the hall to reveal that the French doors that opened onto a balcony stood ajar.
There was no way to know if the intruder was still in the house. It would be foolish to go from door to door in an effort to find out.
She was torn between the need to find Hazel and common sense, which urged her to run downstairs and call the police.
Movement at the end of the hall startled her so badly she almost pulled the trigger in a reflexive action.
She whirled around in time to see a figure rushing toward the balcony doors.
Rage splashed through Amalie, acid-hot. It burned throug
h fear and common sense alike. She had enough nightmares as it was—nightmares crafted by a real monster. Damned if she would let some two-bit burglar invade her new life and her dreams.
Gun clutched in both hands, she raced down the hallway toward the open French doors. As she watched, the fleeing figure vaulted over the balcony railing and disappeared.
She slammed to a halt on the balcony and looked down, searching the moon-splashed gardens.
A shadowy figure bolted from the cover of an orange tree and ran through the gardens, heading toward the gate at the rear of the villa.
She pulled the trigger again and again. The shoots boomed in the night. But she knew that she was too far away and the target was moving too fast. If she actually did manage to hit the intruder, it would be by sheer luck.
The running figure, evidently unscathed, disappeared around the corner of the villa.
Not my lucky night, Amalie thought.
She realized she was still peering down into the darkness. In the heat of the moment, she had been oblivious, but now that the fury was dissipating reality returned, and with it her new fear of heights. True, she was only on the third floor of the big house, but it was a long way down to the ground. A fall from that height could easily break a person’s neck. The Hollywood psychic had died jumping off the roof.
The darkness down below started to blur into a mesmerizing dreamlike scene from one of her nightmares.
With a gasp, she turned away from the view. She paused briefly when her hand brushed across something on the railing. She did not need a flashlight to know that she had just found the knotted rope the intruder had used to descend into the garden.
She had to get to Hazel.
She ran back down the hall. In the shadows she saw Hazel’s crumpled form on the carpet. She reached inside the room and found the light switch. The glow spilled through the doorway, revealing the blood that matted Hazel’s gray hair.
“Hazel,” Amalie whispered.
She crouched and felt for a pulse with shaking fingers. Relief surged through her when she realized that Hazel was still alive.
Hazel’s eyes fluttered. She groaned.
Amalie hurried downstairs to call the police and an ambulance.
She waited until after Hazel was on her way to the hospital and the police had departed before she picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Burning Cove Hotel.
“Matthias Jones, please,” she said.
Chapter 11
The project had gone off the rails.
Once upon a time he had been a spy, a very good one. His instincts were still quite keen and they were telling him that he should walk away. In his experience, once things started to go wrong with one of his meticulously orchestrated plans, they rarely got back on track. A smart agent knew when to fold a hand and leave the table. He was nothing if not smart. He was a survivor.
But this project was different. This wasn’t about money—well, not entirely. It was about revenge. And that, he discovered, made it a lot harder to abandon.
Privately he thought of himself as Mr. Smith. He’d had a lot of other names over the years, including the one he’d been given at birth, but none of those names had seemed real for a very long time. It was his work under the code name Smith that had defined him, so he stuck with that identity, at least in his own mind.
Losing any sense of attachment to his original name was one of the side effects of living in the shadows for so many years, first as a patriotic spy for his country and now as a freelancer. He changed identities the way some men changed clothes. The skills required to stay alive in his world were not unlike those required of a successful actor. You had to be able to bury your old identity in order to adopt a new one.
He sat behind the wheel of the nondescript Ford and watched the front door of the run-down auto court cabin. The intruder had disappeared inside a short time ago.
Smith lit a cigarette and contemplated the intriguing events that he had just witnessed. He had been standing in the shadows just outside the high walls that surrounded the Hidden Beach Inn, trying to decide if it was worth taking the chance of breaking into the mansion to try to locate and search Pickwell’s room, when he’d seen the intruder arrive. The would-be burglar had broken the lock on the wrought iron gate at the rear of the big house and entered the premises via the conservatory door.
The problem with searching Pickwell’s room was locating it. The villa was a large mansion with three full floors of rooms. Yet the burglar had shown no hesitation about entering the villa.
Perhaps he knew exactly where he was going, or maybe not. Regardless, he had bungled the job and succeeded in awakening someone who had a gun. Sloppy work.
The intruder had descended from one of the upper floors using a rope. Smith had to admit he had been impressed with the speed and agility of the getaway. When it came to the escape routine, the guy looked like a professional cat burglar.
The intruder had fled through the garden as the shots rang out. Once clear of the grounds, he had jumped behind the wheel of an aging sedan parked at the side of the road.
Noisy departures and junkyard vehicles were not part of a pro’s repertoire. So what the hell was going on here?
Curious, Smith had ditched his own plans for the evening, climbed into his well-tuned but very nondescript Ford, and followed the intruder to the run-down auto court.
Now he sat quietly, smoking and going through possibilities.
The obvious explanation was that the intruder was an ambitious but rather inept burglar. A beginner in the profession, perhaps. Everyone had to start somewhere.
But Smith was not a fan of coincidences. It struck him as exceedingly unlikely that a common thief had decided to rob the Hidden Beach Inn on the night after Pickwell’s murder. Cat burglars were usually after expensive jewelry and fat wallets. Currently there were no guests in residence at the inn, let alone wealthy ones.
If the intruder was not a run-of-the-mill burglar, that left a more problematic possibility. The man who had been chased out of the inn’s gardens tonight could well be a competitor.
Smith knew he had only himself to blame for his current situation. His big mistake had been underestimating Pickwell. It had never occurred to him that the crazy, paranoid inventor would try a double cross. If there were, indeed, others after the cipher machine now, then things had, indeed, gotten complicated.
What was done was done. The best way to deal with the competition was to eliminate it. But first it would be a good idea to get some information.
Smith put out the cigarette and reached across the seat to pick up the gun and the mask.
He got out of the Ford and sorted through his extensive repertoire of accents as he walked toward the door of the cabin. He decided to go with Cary Grant. Everyone who went to the movies recognized that elegant transatlantic voice. And it just so happened that he and the actor shared a similar sense of style and the same taste in clothes—except for the mask, of course.
He adjusted the mask and stopped in the shadows near the door of the cabin. He was forced to take a moment to suppress the rage that threatened to overwhelm him. If this were any other project he would have walked away by now.
But this was not any other project. This was vengeance. During the Great War and in the years immediately afterward he had risked his life time and again for the elite bastards in Washington who ran the top secret intelligence agency known as the Curtain. In the end he had been tossed aside like so much trash. And then, just to add insult to injury, his spymaster—the man who had recruited him—had tried to kill him. So much for trust and loyalty. So much for gratitude.
He had tried to make the fool understand that after the war the country needed skilled spies more than ever. Anyone with half a brain could see that Europe was a powder keg that would soon blow again. Russia was enduring waves of violence and instability. And n
o one really understood what was going on in the Far East. If ever there was a time to put the best intelligence agents into the field, it was now. Instead, funding for the various agencies—and admittedly, there were several—had been severely cut back.
The Ivy League gang that operated the levers of power had concluded that if spies were once again required, they would be recruited from the established East Coast families, men who had graduated from the best schools. One could only trust a true gentleman, born and bred, after all. The agents in the next war—and war was coming—would probably come from Yale.
At the start of the Ares project the desire for a truly fitting act of vengeance had been a Siren’s call. Now it was an obsession.
Chapter 12
“What makes you think that the intruder might have been heading for Pickwell’s room?” Matthias asked.
Amalie widened her eyes. “Gosh, I don’t know, Mr. Jones. Maybe I leaped to that crazy conclusion because after Pickwell died last night you demanded a tour of that room. You went through Dr. Pickwell’s belongings. When you left, you hinted that other people might show up wanting to do the same thing. When I woke up to find an intruder in my home, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to take a look at Pickwell’s room, too.”
Matthias winced. “Okay, it was a logical assumption. Tell me exactly what happened.”
They were standing at the foot of the villa’s grand staircase. As far as he could tell, every light in the place was on.
He had been in bed when he’d been awakened by Amalie’s phone call but he had not been asleep. He never slept well when he was working an investigation, and that went double for this case.
Amalie had delivered the news of the intruder in short, terse phrases and then hung up. He had thrown on some clothes, climbed behind the wheel of the Packard convertible, fired up the powerful engine, and driven to the mansion on Ocean View Lane at a high rate of speed. It was nearly three in the morning. The streets of Burning Cove were empty.