Claim the Crown

by Carla Neggers

  “No.” It was Balaton.

  Barky ignored him, waving to Ashley.

  “Stop it! She can get me the rest of the jewels—”

  Barky ran out onto the airstrip, but Balaton grabbed him and jerked him back, heaving him to the pavement. The farmer fought, heedless of the gun. But Balaton didn’t pull the trigger. Instead he slammed the butt of the gun down on the side of Barky’s head. He groaned, rolling over, but it wasn’t worse than any of the thousand kinds of pain he’d had inflicted on him over the years. Once, a long time ago, he had been a victim of the senseless tortures of this man who now pretended to be a rich and polished executive. The physical pain Barky could tolerate. It was the mental anguish that had nearly driven him over the edge of sanity.

  As he lay on the runway, he heard the engine of the Cessna as it came lower, and then felt the vibrations beneath him when it landed. He would will himself to move. He had to. This time, he couldn’t permit Balaton to kill those he, Barky, loved in order to save himself.

  But the pain seared through him as he tried to roll up onto all fours. And Balaton laughed. “You’ve set me up beautifully, my friend,” he sneered. “All this can be blamed on you.”

  With a loud snort, the corporate executive kicked Barky in the head.

  * * *

  “Barky!” Ashley screamed as she jumped out of the plane. She had watched in horror as Balaton had kicked Barky in the head. Now he was lying facedown near the fuel pump, and Balaton was moving toward her. She had left the drenched, battered satchel inside the plane. She had brought them along only in case worse came to worst. Apparently it had. But having the contents of the satchel couldn’t save Balaton now. She had to make him see that. She was looking down at her uncle. “Is he alive?”

  “For now.” And the president and CEO of Crockett Industries pointed his monstrous gun at her. “I want the jewels, Miss Wakefield.”

  She had never dealt with guns before. “You can have them.” Her voice quavered. And why not? She was terrified. “But they won’t help you.”

  “Get them. Now! Or I will kill your damn Barky.”

  Then he was alive. Fighting to retain her self-control, Ashley gestured behind her, toward the plane. “They’re in the cockpit. And...and killing Barky won’t change anything. It can’t help you. Please, Mr. Balaton. You haven’t murdered anyone yet. Mac Stevens is still alive—and David. There’s no reason this can’t end now.”

  Despite the cold, Balaton was perspiring heavily, and Ashley found no comfort in his deteriorating self-possession. She guessed he was at least as terrified as she was, although he had the gun. She could almost feel his fear. Perhaps if she could reassure him, she thought, they had a chance.

  “This will end,” he said. “Believe me, it will end. The jewels. Miss Wakefield.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. But they won’t stop the truth from coming out. Even killing everyone on this island won’t stop that.”

  “What do you mean?” he demanded, lunging toward her.

  Involuntarily, she took a step backward. He seemed to like that; his mouth curled with satisfaction as she twisted her hands together. Did he want her to be terrified? Or soothing? Or in control of herself, if not him? She wished she knew.

  Now she could only tell the truth. “You never intended the Balaton jewels to leave Hungary, did you? You couldn’t have. It was too dangerous. You see, Mr. Balaton, it’s known that the Balaton jewels were stolen from Balaton Castle the night Countess Balaton and her children were slaughtered at the end of World War II.”

  The gun wavered. “No!”

  It was a strangled sob more than a cry, but Ashley knew she had struck a nerve: he didn’t expect her to know the story of the Balaton jewels. “It was another atrocity during an era of atrocities, but the Balaton jewels—they’re the link to that night. And you have them, which means you must have been there.”

  “Lies—all of it.”

  And yet he seemed mesmerized by her words, which she was choosing carefully, hoping to get him to follow her logic. “Early in the war, young András Balaton—the real András Balaton—left Hungary to fight with the Resistance. You befriended his family. Your real name is József Major. You came from the same village as the Balatons.”

  “József Major is an identity I assumed in order to pass information to the Americans.”

  “No,” she said in a soothing voice, “it’s not. You befriended the Balatons and you betrayed them and they were shot—and you stole the Balaton jewels.”

  “Lies!”

  Ashley tried to ignore the raw fear in the pit of her stomach. How far did she dare push him? He seemed weakened by her words, but if she went too far... She couldn’t think about consequences now. “Mr. Balaton, I’m sure those were difficult years, and impossible for Americans like myself to understand. But the truth will come out. You see, the Balaton jewels have been examined and photographed in detail by an expert in New York; his report is in the hands of my attorney.”

  Balaton shut his eyes and sobbed, but the gun remained pointed at Ashley.

  “Also,” she went on, not challenging him, but speaking reasonably, as if they were merely arguing about the weather, “I have two photographs from the 1940s. One shows a young József Major—you—with a group of his comrades. All, including you, are wearing the uniform of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross. The other photograph—both were sent by a Hungarian historian in charge of restoring Balaton Castle, by the way—is the only known photograph of Count Istvan Balaton and his eldest child, András. That András is clearly not you.”

  Balaton shuddered against her accusations. “No... stop. It’s not true. I’m president of a Fortune 500 company.”

  The bluster, the arrogance were gone, but Ashley felt no twinge of sympathy: he still had the gun. “You know the rest, don’t you?” Her voice was deadly quiet. “The real András Balaton became the orült szerzetes, the mad monk, after his family was murdered... and then a farmer, Bartholomew Wakefield, the man who raised my brother and me.”

  Balaton’s eyes were barely focused. “He tried to destroy me.”

  “I can hardly blame him. Even if you kill him—and me—the photographs will be released and the story of the Balaton jewels told. And the others will talk. Mac Stevens, Lillian Parker, Jeremy Carruthers, my brother. You can’t kill us all to save yourself.”

  “Can’t I?” He rallied, giving a raw, pathetic smile. “It would all be blamed on your Bartholomew Wakefield.”

  “I doubt that. In any case, the Coast Guard will be here any second. You won’t be able to escape. Why exacerbate your situation?”

  The man who for thirty years had pretended to be an aristocrat, a count, shut his eyes against the rationality of her words. Ashley didn’t dare move. She knew she had him...hoped, prayed.

  Then a golden-haired woman was jumping from the shadows of the trees along the edge of the runway. Tears streamed down her face as she staggered toward Balaton. “It’s not true,” she sobbed, tearing at her hair. “Tell me it’s not true...Daddy!”

  Sarah Balaton, Ashley thought, sagging. Had she heard everything?

  “Sarah...” Balaton mouthed his daughter’s name and looked at her. He swallowed, visibly pained. “This...this has nothing to do with you.”

  Her face was blotched from crying. “It has everything to do with me. Oh, Daddy, tell me what she says isn’t true. I won’t believe it if you tell me....”

  Ashley knew that feeling all too well. If she had been presented with the kind of incontrovertible proof she had against the president of Crockett Industries, would she have believed Barky capable of such heinous crimes? But it was an unfair question: Barky wasn’t capable of those things. Balaton was. Somewhere, sometime, in some small way, he had to have indicated that to his daughter.

  “My Sarah,” he choked out. “I love you.”

  He was crying, too, and in his despair he lowered his gun. Ashley thought he’d given up the struggle, but she couldn’t take that
chance. She lunged forward.

  At the same time, the prone figure on the ground leaped up, and together she and Barky knocked down the broken, dispirited man and took away his gun. They watched him roll over in the mud and cry uncontrollably, calling his daughter’s name.

  Sarah Balaton knelt beside him, but although he was her father, she didn’t touch him. She stared at him as if he were a creature she had never seen before and didn’t understand.

  Breathing heavily, bruised and shaken, Barky leaned against Ashley for support. “Forty years I have waited for this moment,” he said.

  “I know.” Suddenly she became aware of the hot tears on her own cheeks.

  Barky looked down at the man who had been responsible for the murder of the Countess Balaton and her children—his mother and his brother and sisters.

  “It’s over,” Ashley said.

  “Yes. And I feel no satisfaction.”

  36

  MacGregor Stevens breathed in the warm mist on the terrace, and welcomed the light scent of his wife’s flowers. He’d been through hell, and he was glad to be back to this heaven. Elaine came out with a tray of lemonade, and she smiled at him so sweetly. And, not for the first time since he’d been transferred home from the Maine hospital, he felt himself brimming with emotion as he marveled at the miracle of her. She had every right to be done with him; he’d told her that. But she had said, “Haven’t you suffered enough already, my darling?”

  No, he thought, not by a long shot.

  “You’re thinking about them, aren’t you?” She handed him a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade and sat on the chair near him, always near him. “Ashley and David.”

  He smiled at her and wished this weakness and melancholy would just disappear. He couldn’t maintain a smile, even one directed at this wonderful woman, to whom he’d finally told everything, from the beginning, when, in Vienna, he’d fallen madly, passionately, stupidly in love with Judith Land. “I never knew she was pregnant,” he said now, again. “It was my fault; I should have known.”

  His wife leaned over and grasped his thin wrist. He’d lost so much weight during the past weeks. “Everything can’t be your fault, Mac. For heaven’s sake, you’re human. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Judith had plenty of opportunities to call you and tell you she was pregnant. Even after the babies were born, she could have asked you for help.”

  “She didn’t know where I was.”

  “She could have found out.”

  He looked out across the terrace, to the Pacific Ocean, lost in the mist. “I never tried contacting her. It’s possible she died thinking I was already dead... that she was joining me.”

  “Mac,” Elaine said sharply, “she died trying to make a life for herself and her babies. No matter what she and Andrew Balaton came to, she did marry the man. She wasn’t a goddess, Mac. She made mistakes. So did you. You were young and in circumstances beyond your depth. You did your best to do what was right. Now stop punishing yourself. If you’d known about Ashley and David, you’d have gone and fetched them, and we would have raised them.”

  He nodded slowly, trying to accept the wisdom of her words, and to ease his own stubborn guilt. She could forgive him for never having told her about his brief, wild love affair with a legend. But could he forgive himself for not having pursued the truth sooner? For not knowing, for the love of God, that he had children? Twins!

  “Mac.” Elaine still had her hand on his wrist, and now she massaged it tenderly, her eyes so warm, so filled with love and sympathy. Would he have forgiven her? Yes—my God, I couldn’t live without her.

  “Mac, Ashley and David should have the chance to know their father, and their brother and sister.”

  He leaned forward, sinking his head into her shoulder, and he wanted to stay there forever. He thought of Ashley, bright eyed and a wise ass, and David, dark eyed and physical, both of them brave, sturdy, kind. He could thank Bartholomew Wakefield for that. András Balaton. God, how could he expect them to want to know him?

  “I just don’t know if they’ll want that chance, Elaine.”

  * * *

  Jeremy Carruthers had worked furiously to catch up. He brought home work at night and weekends, earning both kudos and consternation from his father. Now, as he stood at his window looking out across the mist-enshrouded city, he could see Ashley’s smile, hear her laugh, feel her soft skin under his hands. He wanted her so much.

  And then he saw her face, gaunt and stricken as she had waited for word from the doctors about her uncle and her brother. She couldn’t talk to him or look at him, he who had accused her uncle, believed in his own colleague and nearly destroyed her faith in herself. Don’t be an ass! You both knew where your loyalties lay, and you fell in love, anyway. Had they? Or had it been just a passing fling, two people who’d needed to be reminded of their humanity, their ability to love and be loved.

  Susie’s shrieks came to him, again and again. “You’ll do anything to make her want you. You’re going to be the one obsessed. And she’s going to tell you to take a hike.”

  “Enjoy your revenge, sweet Susie,” he said to the mist.

  Ashley, of course, hadn’t been that vicious. She had simply said, “I just need some time...distance.”

  How could he blame her? How could he ask her to give anything? Even now, weeks later, he felt his chest constrict as he choked back the emotion, the passion, the love. How he wanted to see her.

  If only she had said, “I want to be with you, Jeremy. I want to sort all this out with you, not away from you.”

  But she hadn’t.

  Now, with every day that passed, he wondered if they were drawing further, and irrevocably, apart.

  * * *

  On a blustery Friday afternoon the week before Christmas, Ashley and David brought a Christmas tree in from the woods. His cast finally off, David still walked with a slight limp, but that would go away in time. Otherwise, he was healthy and overflowing with energy. In her bright red parka, Ashley was the same—on the outside. On the inside, she wasn’t sure about anything. Least of all herself. And yet in so many ways she knew herself better now than she ever had.

  She had stayed in Maine, at an inn, eschewing J. Land Crockett’s offer to stay with him on Badger Rock, and waited until both David and Barky were released from the hospital. Neither had enjoyed being cooped up and eating institutional food, and both had made their stays as short as possible. David had suffered primarily from hypothermia and an infection in his leg; Barky had been badly bruised and had a concussion from having been pistol-whipped and kicked.

  J. Land Crockett had visited every day. He never mentioned being their grandfather, never was anything but gruffly polite, and he got his pictures in the papers by trying to chase off a reporter with his walking stick. Ashley had made a wry comment about remembering his lesson on dealing with the media, and to her immeasurable surprise, he’d laughed.

  She wondered how long it had been since the reclusive billionaire had laughed.

  The walking stick, he had reminded her, was needed because of her “ornery uncle,” who had knocked the old man over the head to keep him from getting himself killed. Ashley had told him she was familiar with Barky’s methods. Nevertheless, the billionaire and the farmer had become fast friends, and they sat together in the hospital, exchanging stories.

  Ashley, meanwhile, had gone about assembling the facts. She had them all, except for one.

  “Why did Judith Land go to the ranch the day she died?” she asked Barky bluntly.

  He sighed and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Judith arranged to meet him, against my advice; I had no idea what she was doing or I would have stopped her. But she never believed me when I told her the measure of treachery her husband was capable of. She thought she could talk sense into him—and, I suspect, blackmail him with the Balaton jewels. She didn’t know what they meant, only that her husband wanted them a great deal and had been horrified the night she’d worn them to the Christmas ball in Vienna.
When she left him, she had taken the jewels.”

  “Did you know that?” Ashley asked.

  “No, of course not. If I had, I would have thrown them into the sea and prayed they never saw the light again.”

  “Balaton—Major, I mean—must have been desperate when he realized the jewels were missing.”

  Barky had nodded grimly. “That was another reason he was so anxious to find her. He had to have the jewels. I’m sure she was trying to barter them for her freedom when the horse trampled her. Until you returned from Switzerland in 1982 ready to accuse me of being a jewel thief, I had always believed József Major had gotten the jewels that day. I bided my time, hoping against all hope that the jewels would remain in their safe-deposit box forever.”

  “Sometimes I wish they had.”

  “No. It’s better the truth is known.”

  “All those years, Major must have been terrified that one day the jewels would surface...and then they did, in the worst possible way.” She winced, thinking of herself on the cover of You. “And he saw your picture and must have known what was happening.”

  “Not entirely. He had never met me until I came to him in Los Angeles. He knew me neither as András Balaton nor orült szerzetes.”

  “So he was willing to believe you were KGB and would help him—and then David and I started meddling.” She smiled. “But it’s just as well, you know. You’d probably have gotten yourself arrested as an enemy spy.”

  He looked away. “I wouldn’t have cared.”

  “Self-sacrifice doesn’t suit you, Barky. What about Mac Stevens? Did you know he was the father?” She couldn’t say “my” father.

  “No. I thought József Major was your father. And I loved you, anyway.”

  Now the leaves had all fallen, and there was a dusting of snow, vivid against the high blue sky. The days of early autumn seemed so long ago, and yet fresh, unfinished. Every weekend, Ashley came home to work the farm with her brother. The physical labor helped with the demons, the confusion, the memories.