Claim the Crown

by Carla Neggers

  “I don’t know. Someone beat you up?”

  He grinned into the sun. “No: someone beat the shit out of me.”

  “But who? Why—”

  “Big blond jackass. He stopped by Saturday afternoon wanting the tiara and the choker—the infamous Balaton jewels—only he didn’t say that. I told him no, and we came to blows. Or, to be more accurate, I came to his blows.”

  “Oh, my God.” It came out ohmygod.

  “You know something about it? Damn.”

  She pulled her fingers apart so she could rub her forehead furiously, as if she had a massive headache. “I...I think I know the name of the man who attacked you. It’s Giles Smith. He’s on my father’s private security force...a professional at this sort of thing.”

  For the moment, David didn’t quibble over who was responsible for what injury; he let Sarah think the worst. If Barky hadn’t come along, Giles Smith might very well have broken David’s leg. “Your father sent one of his meats after me?”

  “I seriously doubt that,” she said quickly. “More likely Giles was acting on his own—or on behalf of J. Land Crockett.”

  David was confused. “What?”

  She waved a hand impatiently, trying to sort out this new information herself. “Crockett has spies everywhere in the organization. It’s his way of convincing himself he still exerts some control. Father says he doesn’t mind—he’s always so lenient when it comes to that old man.”

  “So he and your father get along?”

  “Father gets along with Crockett; Crockett doesn’t get along with anybody. My father has always had tremendous respect for Crockett, but I’ve never been convinced the respect is mutual. Andrew Balaton is certainly good enough to run Crockett Industries, but I get the feeling Crockett has always thought my father wasn’t good enough for Judith Land. In a way, I think he blames my father for Judith’s death. But during the last months of her life, my father didn’t even see her. And she hurt him terribly. He’s never recovered, not emotionally.”

  “He remarried, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly. A year after Judith’s death he met my mother and they were married almost immediately, but it was too soon. Their marriage lasted just long enough for her to become pregnant. By the time I was born, they were already divorced. My father has had many women since then and two more marriages, but there’ll never be another Judith Land. For better or worse, she was his one true love.”

  “So there’s tension between Crockett and your father over her.”

  “An underlying tension. Nothing that ever comes to the surface.”

  David batted a stone out of the grass with the rubber end of his crutch. It skidded onto the driveway. “Why would either of them have sent this Smith guy after the jewels?”

  She shook her head, thinking. “If they’re the Balaton jewels—although he insists they’re not—my father would want them for the same reasons I did: because they can’t possibly belong to you and your sister. They must have been stolen from Judith soon after the Christmas ball, and if Father knows something about it, he just doesn’t want it all coming out into the open. He’s a very private man, and he could have decided it wasn’t worth risking the publicity. And you’ve seen Giles. Father could have told him to make quiet inquiries, and he took it upon himself to break your leg.”

  David didn’t correct her. “And Crockett?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he knows something, too—or did something that he now wants or needs to cover up.”

  “Like what?”

  “I wish I knew, but your guess is as good as mine.”

  “How do you think the jewels got out of Hungary?”

  “Father has a lot of friends. Maybe one of them brought them out.”

  “But not him?”

  “No. He would have told me.”

  “But he didn’t give them to Judith?”

  “He says no.” She was getting breathless. “He says he doesn’t know where Judith got the tiara and the choker she wore that night.”

  “Judith?”

  “It’s possible she was approached by whoever smuggled the jewels out of Hungary and, not realizing they actually belonged to my father, bought them and wore them that night—as a surprise. Then the thief could have stolen them back. He would have known she was wearing them.”

  David thought of Barky: he was Hungarian, it seemed. Could he have stolen the Balaton jewels? Better that, he thought, than being KGB. Or was he both? KGB and a jewel thief? Hell. But why?

  “Or Crockett could have purchased them from the thief and given them to Judith,” Sarah suggested, becoming exasperated. “The possibilities are endless. Even if I’m wrong and they’re not the Balaton jewels, Judith definitely wore them that night and they definitely haven’t been seen in public since.”

  “Until Ashley hit the cover of You.”

  “Right.”

  “And now your father, my uncle, Crockett and God knows who else—” although I can make a few guesses, David thought guiltily “—are all either trying to get answers to what happened to the jewels thirty years ago or maybe even trying to cover up what happened. Interesting. And, as you say, the possibilities are endless.”

  “Maybe tonight we can lay all this out for my father and see what he says.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  But later that afternoon, Giles Smith showed up at the farm. He found Sarah and David in the kitchen, making applesauce on the cook stove. David would cut and core the apples at the kitchen table; Sarah would put them on the stove and strain them. They had one more peck to do before they left for New York.

  “Hey, Giles.” David held up his paring knife. “Come back to check your handiwork?”

  Giles shrugged his massive shoulders. “You weren’t very helpful.”

  “Dummy me.”

  “I have no quarrel with you.”

  Sarah laid the long-handled wooden spoon across the bubbling cast-iron kettle. “Giles, what do you want?”

  “Dinner’s been canceled,” Giles said, not wasting any time with preludes. “Daddy asked me to come by and tell his sweet little girl he’s been called away unexpectedly.”

  Reddening at his sarcasm, Sarah peeled off the big towel she’d knotted around her waist. “Where to?”

  “Maine.”

  “Crockett.”

  “We’re all at his beck and call, aren’t we? Even Daddy.” Giles grinned, looking even more apelike. “The plan is, I take you back to Houston.”

  “Whose plan?” Sarah demanded sharply.

  “Daddy Balaton, of course. He pays the bills. Says he wants to protect you from any ‘unpleasantness.’”

  She glared at him. “Such as turning you in to the police for assault?”

  “Now, Sarah. Your father just doesn’t want you getting yourself into any more trouble.”

  “So he’s banishing me to Houston. Don’t you think he’s overreacting? There’s no need to treat me like a two-year-old.” She slapped the towel down on the counter. “What if I say no?”

  Giles looked at her impassively. “Corporate jet’s ready and waiting. My orders are to get you on it—for your protection. And I don’t see anybody here in any condition to stop me, do you?”

  David grabbed his crutch and started to his feet.

  “David, don’t.” Sarah put a hand on his arm; she was composed. “It’s not worth another broken leg. I’ll go with Giles.”

  “Dammit, Sarah, you don’t even know if these orders came from your father,” David argued. “Or maybe he’s using you in some game of his own?”

  “He isn’t.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No.” She smiled sadly. “But I know my father.”

  She got her things together and left with Giles. David flopped back down at the table. He smelled the applesauce burning. The hell with it. He hobbled over to the stove to shove the pot off the heat and decided, come what may, he had to figure out some way to get to Maine.

&nb
sp; * * *

  The Crockett Industries Lear jet was waiting at Bradlee Field, and Sarah had to wonder at the red-carpet treatment. Was she being escorted to Houston to keep her out of trouble—or to keep her in the dark? Or both? What had happened? Why had her father changed his mind about meeting David? Why had he been called to Maine?

  She realized she had to know. She would be disobeying a direct order from her father, yet again risking his disappointment and condemnation, but she couldn’t be the silly, vulnerable creature he wanted her to be. She had never been and would never be. If nothing else, she thought, it was time her father acknowledged that his daughter had the same strength of will as he had. She could confront the truth. She didn’t need to be protected.

  “Why do you want to look at the dark side of life?” he would ask her. “You have no reason, no need, Sarah, to look at anything but sunshine and innocence.”

  Her dear father the romantic. He didn’t understand that she was no longer a child who believed life was a fairy tale, with good on one side, always the winners, and evil on the other side, always the losers. For God’s sake, she was mature enough to know the world wasn’t that simple. Didn’t he know that about her?

  But it wasn’t that she was fearless. As she had sat in sullen silence next to Giles on the drive to the airport, she had acknowledged just how desperately afraid she was. There was mounting evidence that her father had been lying to her about the Balaton jewels—and now wanted her to go away and not demand answers to all the difficult questions he knew she would ask. But she loved her father—totally and unconditionally. He was a good man, but not a perfect one. Who was?

  If there was an unpleasant episode in his past, she could face it because she believed in him. So why wouldn’t he let her? If only he believed in her.

  Giles climbed out of the car. “I’ll get your stuff out of the trunk.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Thank you, Giles.”

  He used the inside latch to pop open the trunk and circled around to the back of the car.

  That meant he’d left the keys in the ignition.

  Sarah scooted across the seat, knocked the transmission into drive and trod on the gas pedal. She could hear Giles swearing at her. But she didn’t look back.

  She sped out of the airport lot and onto Interstate 91 North. It would take time for Giles to rent another car and come after her. By then, she hoped she’d have enough of a head start.

  In just over an hour, she was back at the Wakefield farm. David and his friend Iggy, a plain-looking, tawny-haired man, were arguing in front of a black Ferrari.

  Iggy was fuming. “You can’t drive a Ferrari with a busted leg. I’ll drive you up to Maine.”

  If anything, Iggy’s language was more colorful than David’s. Sarah jumped out of Giles’s car. She was beaming. “How ’bout me? I can drive a Ferrari.”

  27

  Andrew Balaton arrived on Badger Rock Island from Bar Harbor via helicopter. He was met by Lillian Parker. As they walked together toward the house, she hurriedly, and reluctantly, told him about her visit with Ashley to Jude’s Paradise. “I think Crockett just wants to make a memorial out of the island,” she concluded. “That’s all.”

  “Lillian, Lillian. Do you think I’m a fool?” His tone was only mildly critical, and he took her hand and squeezed it gently, his smile one of encouragement.

  She looked away. “I’m just telling you what I know.”

  “And I appreciate it. But permit me to draw my own conclusions.”

  She tore her hand out of his and picked up her pace. It was so damn cold on this bloody island, she thought viciously. She had wrapped her hair in a brightly colored Hermes scarf and put on heavy socks, but the shivers wouldn’t abate. Nerves, she thought. But she was relieved she’d seen nothing of Mac Stevens.

  It annoyed her when Andrew treated her like a pouting teenager, but she realized that was his way with women—some even liked it. She didn’t; she never had. But she had always been remarkably tolerant where the former Count András Balaton was concerned. She owed him that much. She said quietly, “I’m just telling you what I know.”

  He gave her one of his cool aristocratic smiles. “You’ve always been rebellious and outspoken, Lillian. They’re qualities I admire in you.”

  “Andrew, do you know who the Wakefield twins are?”

  “Lillian, please. There are things even you don’t know.”

  And, stepping up his pace, he passed her on the path and finished the walk to the main house alone.

  * * *

  The large portrait of Judith Land was hung on a starkly white wall opposite paned double windows that looked out across a perennial garden and a rocky cliff. Beyond was the Atlantic Ocean, bluish green and still, fading into the swirling mist on the horizon. It was a view for a legend, a view for Judith Land.

  In the portrait, she was standing in a rose garden, her dark hair streaming down her back and shining in the sunlight She wore a simple white dress and strand of pearls. There was an air of gracefulness about her— in her fine slender hands, her long neck, in her liquid pose that the artist had captured.

  Ashley held her breath as she scrutinized the angles of the legendary face and the smile that was at once elegant, mischievous, cool, worldly. Judith Land had been so talented, and so very young.

  “There’s a portrait of Judith there. Look at it. Get to know her.”

  When she’d returned to Badger Rock Island, Ashley had soaked in a long hot bath and considered everything Lillian Parker had told her on Jude’s Paradise. She avoided drawing any conclusions; she simply wanted to be able to remember all that had been said. Then, unhurriedly, she had dressed for dinner in the gown she had brought of midnight blue silk and iridescent sequins and put up her hair. She wore no jewelry, nothing, not even earrings.

  Then she had poured herself a glass of white wine and found her way to the dining room, and to the portrait of Judith Land.

  At footsteps on the gleaming hardwood floor, she looked up, startled, but smiled when she saw Jeremy. His double-breasted suit emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and the slimness of his hips, and she could feel the air between them crackling with electricity. She thought of last night. And then she shook off the warmth of the memory and looked again to the portrait.

  With her glass, she gestured. “She certainly was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  “Very,” Jeremy said.

  “I should have been so beautiful at twenty-three.”

  He stood beside her; she liked the fresh tangy smell of him. “Weren’t you?”

  “God, no. For one thing, I didn’t have the money. For another, I didn’t have the bones—don’t, I should say. And her smile. Stunning, isn’t it?” Ashley laughed to herself. “I was working so hard when I was twenty-three, I don’t know if I ever had time to smile.”

  “What about her eyes?”

  “I didn’t wear much makeup when I was that age.”

  Jeremy was curiously silent.

  Ashley was having difficulty breathing. “And her eyes literally sparkle.”

  “So do yours,” he said softly.

  “Not like that And mine...mine are a different shade of blue.”

  Jeremy shifted beside her. “A brighter version of the same shade—a rather vivid, unusual shade of blue, I’d say.”

  Dark hair.

  Pale translucent skin.

  High cheekbones.

  A drop-dead smile.

  Bright vivid blue eyes.

  Ashley pivoted abruptly and left without a word, flying out the front door and out to the garden of perennials. Her heart was skidding, but she slackened her pace as she walked out to the cliff, where the wind was sharp and the waves battered the rocks. It was high tide. Turning to the west, she could see the peaks of Mt. Desert Island, dark and purplish against the glowing sunset. She was glad for the long sleeves and heavy silk of her dress, but still she was cold.

  Ashley didn’t pretend to be as beautiful as Judith Land
. Her features lacked any subtlety, her eyes were more direct, her smile was wider. But her coloring, her shape—they were the same as those of the woman in the stunning portrait.

  And the dates fit. And the facts—or the lies—about herself. And the jewels in the vaults of Piccard Cie. And the Liechtenstein trust.

  Everything fit.

  Judith Land was her mother. David’s mother. Their mother.

  It was a conclusion—a theory, a hypothesis, a fact— that had been hovering uneasily in the back of her mind since she had learned the last person seen wearing the tiara and the choker was Judith Land.

  Now another dimension to this ungodly mess could be added. There were already spies, traitors, torturers, liars and jewel thieves. Now there were kidnappers, too. Baby stealers.

  Barky.

  Ashley flung her wineglass off the cliff and watched it shatter against the rocks. Within seconds, a wave crashed and washed away the shards.

  “Don’t get maudlin,” she told herself. “There might be another explanation.”

  Of course there was: she was wrong. The similarities in shape and coloring between herself and Judith Land were a coincidence. A trick of the evening light and a mind that was too tired, too suspicious, too active. She didn’t yet have all the facts.

  Why in God’s name would Bartholomew Wakefield steal someone else’s children?

  He hadn’t.

  She turned back to the house, stumbling on the rough ground. It was seven o’clock; time for dinner.

  The dinner guests were gathered in the spacious living room: Jeremy, eyeing her closely; Lillian Parker, stunning in bittersweet red; a wiry, attractive middle-aged man in black tie; and an elderly man, tall and stooped, in a navy pin-striped suit that had to be forty years old.

  J. Land Crockett walked over to her as she came through the door. “Ashley Wakefield.”

  She nodded and sniffled. Coming from the cold wind inside to the relative warmth had made her nose begin to run. “Yes,” she said, “and you must be Mr. Crockett. Thank you for having me here. It’s a lovely island.”

  He reached into his suit coat pocket, withdrew a mound of crumpled white tissues and peeled one off, handing it to her. “Your nose is red.”