The inspector studied the document before folding it along with the check and slipped both into his jacket pocket. “I believe we’re done here.”
David turned toward the kitchen and called out to Remy. “Inspector Malone needs a ride back to his hotel.”
Remy washed his hands, collected the key to the rental car, and met the inspector at the kitchen door. “Doan eat before I get back.”
Sophia waved and smiled. “Arrivederci.”
The inspector nodded and left the house. Remy’s long legs ate up the asphalt as he rushed toward the driver’s door, pushing the key fob until the beep-beep of the car’s automated lock/alarm system announced its deactivation. He was buckled in and had the engine racing before the inspector had even closed his door.
“I can’t believe the inspector did that to his daughter,” Rick said. “Wait till Billie confronts him and see how he tries to wiggle out of it.”
“Let’s bring her back before he spends all the money.” Pete squeezed Sophia’s shoulders. “He must have pissed you off if you pulled your I-can’t-speak-English routine on him.”
“He made me mad,” Sophia said. “I should have said ‘Goodbye’ in English just to annoy him.”
Pete pulled her into his arms and kissed her. “You could star in Jack’s next play. You’re a natural.”
“I perfected my acting skills during my adventures. That’s when I learned how to obfuscate.”
“You mean how to lie.”
She smiled. “And quite well, don’t you think?”
“Hey, McBain, why’d you ask Remy to drive him instead of using the limo driver?” Kenzie asked.
“The inspector was so full of shit I didn’t want him in our limo, and Remy has a way of gathering information without sounding inquisitive. He’ll find out what the inspector intends to do with the money.”
“What’s your guess? Is he going to hire an investigator, or spend it all on his young wife?” Rick asked.
Kenzie jutted a hip, planted a hand on it, and grinned like she saw the whole young-wife-thing coming at her. “How come I’m not surprised? What an asshole. Guess that’s why Billie got the hell out of NYC. Makes sense now.”
“I’m not giving that asshole another thought,” Pete said. “He’s gone, and good riddance. I’m going out to start the grill. Soph, will you fix the pasta salad and bread? I’ll throw the steaks on as soon as Remy gets back.”
“I’ll get some beers and meet you outside.” Rick grabbed a half dozen bottles and carried them out to the BBQ island kitchen in the backyard under a pergola, complete with sink, refrigerator, and L-shape counter for barstool seating. They were on their second beers by the time Remy returned.
Rick handed him a beer. “I was starting to worry about you.”
“Some of the traffic lights went out during the storm and haven’t come back up yet.”
Pete tossed six thick T-bones on the grill. “What’d you learn from the inspector?”
Remy took Pete’s barstool. “He’s an asshat, but he is hiring a private detective to search for Billie. And he’s going home tonight because he promised his wife a shopping excursion on Fifth Avenue tomorrow.”
Anger pounded in Rick’s head as blood thumped in his neck. The inspector was worse than an asshat. Now Rick was even more determined to bring Billie home so she could confront her father. Loyalty ran deep in Rick’s character, and while Billie wasn’t part of the family, she was part of the Napa community that had become his home and had opened its arms to him. And that reminded him, he needed to send Cate another update to pass along to Billie’s staff.
While Pete grilled, Rick sent his update and responded to Cate’s half dozen text messages. By the time Rick answered all of Cate’s questions, Pete had cooked the steaks to the perfect temperature—rare.
Pete carried the tray into the house while Rick and Remy hauled the beer bottles to the recycle bin. The aroma of French bread straight from the oven tickled one side of Rick’s nose, and the sizzling steaks the other. Man, he was hungry. Stressing out stole his appetite, but a few beers brought it right back. He was ready to eat.
The ladies added the bread, pasta salad, sliced red, juicy tomatoes, and fresh cucumbers to the Lazy Susan in the middle of the Alderwood-topped table with a wrought iron base.
Sophia set a bottle of wine on the table. “The T-bones need a full-bodied red wine. We have a Cabernet Sauvignon, but I think this Syrah is a great one to pair with the steaks. Don’t you agree, Rick?” Sophia asked.
“The refined tannins and notes of hearty black fruits provide a contrast to the meatiness of the cut,” Rick said.
“Gag me,” Kenzie said. “You wine connoisseurs can be so obnoxious.”
“I’m president of a winery, and it’s taken years to understand the little bit I do know. Sophia’s the expert.”
“Yeah, just ask Thomas Jefferson,” Pete said before taking a long pull on the beer bottle.
“Ut-oh. Somebody’s a little touchy tonight,” Kenzie said.
“Nah,” Pete said. “I got the girl, remember?”
“Not a chance any of us would ever forget,” David said.
After dinner, they remained seated, talking about the kids, the upcoming Preakness and Belmont, and the July 4th activities at Mallory Plantation. Kenzie filled in the quiet moments with a joke or two.
In the middle of one of her punchlines, Sophia smacked her hands on the table and pushed to her feet. “I just remembered…” She darted into the den.
“Remembered what, Soph?” Pete cocked his head and watched her walk away, swaying her hips in a hypnotizing, side-to-side action.
Rick watched her too until Kenzie kicked his leg under the table. “That’s Pete’s wife you’re ogling.”
Pete chuckled. “He does it to you too.”
“Oh.” Kenzie flicked her wrist at Rick. “Well, as long as you’re not playing favorites, it’s okay.”
Sophia returned to the kitchen with her sketchpad, the jewelry box, and a small case. “It occurred to me that Old MacKlenna might have put a letter in this box too.”
“I should have thought to look,” David said.
“If it’s any consolation, it should have been the first thing on my mind when I heard there was another box.” Sophia removed a pair of tweezers and an X-ACTO knife from the case and had everyone’s attention while she opened the box and picked up the topaz. “It hasn’t aged well, has it? Look at the edges, how rough they are.”
“I noticed that,” Rick said. “Maybe it was a tight fit inside the torc.”
Sophia set the brooch aside and thumbed through her sketchbook. When she found what she was looking for, she turned the pad around for everyone to see a sketch of the torc. “Look. It has a slot similar to, if not exactly like the ones on the cave door.”
“Jesus,” Rick said. “So it’s interchangeable? Any brooch can go inside the torc, and the topaz can go in one of the slots around the door.”
“But none of the other brooches have roughed up edges,” Pete said.
“How old is the door?” Sophia asked.
“The Frasers built the castle in the early 1600s,” David said. “The door in the cave is probably much older. I’ve never had the wood door carbon dated, and if I did, there could be errors obtaining an apparent age by up to several hundred years. We wouldn’t learn much.”
“The castle was probably built over the cave to protect it,” Kenzie said.
“Then Elliott’s ancestors knew about the door and the brooches,” Rick said.
“When I snuck into the castle in 1944 and was held at gunpoint by Elliott’s grandfather, Auld Fraser, he said he’d never seen a brooch but knew of their existence.”
“So the Frasers weren’t Keepers,” Sophia said.
“Since Auld Fraser had never seen a brooch, I assume they weren’t.”
“In JL’s vision, the amethyst was broken during a battle. If it was originally in the torc, that would support David’s research about vict
ors destroying their defeated foes’ torcs.”
“This is beginning to sound like a sci-fi movie,” Kenzie said. “The Keeper puts on the torc, inserts the brooches into the twelve slots, speaks the magic words—or not—and the door to the past or future opens, allowing knowledge to flow in or out. We won’t know much more than that until we have five more brooches.”
“And the torc,” Sophia said. “David’s convinced now that it never left Scotland. Other than Inverness and Edinburgh, I haven’t seen much of the country or studied its art. So if I’ve seen the torc before, it’s got to be in a very famous painting.”
“Elizabeth Thompson, aka Lady Butler, painted Scotland Forever, a famous painting of the charge of the Royal Scots Greys,” David said.
“I know that painting, and I’m familiar with her work,” Sophia said. “Scotland Forever is an iconic representation of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. I’ll look at her paintings later.”
Sophia turned her attention back to the jewelry box. Using the X-ACTO knife, she cut along the top and side edges of the box’s lining, then slowly peeled back the velvet lining, revealing the edge of a piece of parchment. She glanced up, smiling. “We have another letter.” She exchanged the knife for a pair of tweezers and carefully pulled out the paper. “Looks just like mine.” She swiveled her arm and held the document in front of David. “Does it say the same thing?”
He took the tweezers from her and held the parchment up to read.
“I have gloves if you want to use them,” she said.
“If the gloves fit ye, they won’t fit me. I’ll use the tweezers for now.”
Kenzie spread out a clean napkin. “Put it here.”
“Mr. MacKlenna wrote in old Gaelic, Sophia. It’s hard to read. I have a scan of yer letter, so I’ll pull it up and compare the writing. Identifying the words that are different will be the easiest way to translate this.”
Sophia put the tweezers and knife back into her art kit. “Old MacKlenna probably put the same letter in each box. It’d be nice to know how many boxes there are, or were four hundred years ago, and how many have survived.”
“Unless we go back to 1625 and visit James MacKlenna, we’ll never know,” David said.
“Then maybe we should go,” Kenzie said.
“Man, that sounds like a fun trip.” Pete’s smirk moved the dial from sarcastic to cranky. “Not gonna happen.”
“But I’d go,” Sophia said. “Caravaggio was alive in the early 1600s. He’s on my wish list to commission a painting.”
“Wasn’t he in Italy?” David asked. “If we go back to the early 1600s, we’ll be in Scotland.”
“Let’s get the New Orleans adventure in the books first,” Rick said. “My brain can’t handle more than one at a time.”
David gingerly picked up the napkin holding the parchment and carried the letter into the den. “Give me a few minutes to enter the parchment into the system. Then I want to show ye what I’ve been working on.”
Kenzie followed him. “Give me a hint, McBain.”
“It’s a twenty-minute presentation about the battle.”
Remy stood and picked up his plate. “We should do the dishes first.”
“Pete and I will do them later,” David yelled over his shoulder.
Rick slapped his palm to his head and held it there, shaking it slightly. He didn’t dare look at Sophia. But then he cut his glance her way. Her eyes were laughing. He was tempted to stick out his tongue like a bratty kid, but he didn’t.
“What’s wrong, Rick?” Pete asked.
“Nothing.” Rick stomped off toward the den. “Have fun doing…the dishes.”
“You want a beer?” Pete asked.
“Sure. Bring me one.” Rick beat Remy to the recliner and kicked back in the chair. “Are you going to cast your presentation onto the TV?”
“That’s the plan.” David fiddled with his laptop until opening credits scrolled across the TV screen—Battle of New Orleans Animated Map by David McBain. “The historians I hired dictated the battle sequence into a computer program. I mixed the details with a graphic arts program and created this presentation. It’s a show-and-tell of what happened on January 8, 1815.”
They all sat glued to the TV. When the show ended, David said, “The presentation lasted twenty-five minutes. In that amount of time, the Americans had killed 285 British soldiers, wounded 1265, and taken 484 prisoners. The British killed only 13 Americans.”
“I can understand why so many were killed and injured,” Sophia said. “Whoever thought standing shoulder to shoulder in a wide-open field wearing red coats was the best way to fight a battle had to be out of their minds.”
“It was effective, Soph,” Pete said. “A large group shooting at the same time in the same direction assured mass casualties. And the weapons weren’t high-precision rifles. Soldiers had to march close enough to hit their targets.”
“As defenders,” Kenzie said, “Jackson’s men lined up four deep, one man to shoot and then return to the rear of the line to reload, while the second man stepped up and did the same and so on, to ensure a continuous front of fire.”
Sophia shivered. “Do you think we can go back and tell everyone the parties signed the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium on Christmas Eve? The war was over by the time they fought the battle in January.”
Pete smiled. “You can try, Soph, but I doubt anyone would believe you.”
Sophia kissed Pete. He placed a finger on her cheekbone and traced a path to her chin and down her neck before he kissed her back.
Rick would sell his last bullet for a kiss like that.
“I’ve had enough excitement for one day,” she said yawning. “David, thank you for the presentation. I have it all in my head now—red coats and all.”
“Are you going to bed?” Pete asked.
“I’m going to go soak in the tub.” She bobbed her eyebrows, and her eyes held him captive. “It’s a large tub.”
Pete shot to his feet and looked at David, then Rick. “I’ll put the dishes in the dishwasher. You clean up the rest, McBain. Before I go, is there anything else you want to go over tonight?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.” Rick pushed the chair to a reclining position and closed his eyes, but that kiss played on a loop in the back of his mind. Yep, he’d sell his last bullet. While he was fantasizing about a hot, wet kiss, his phone rang, and Connor’s name appeared on the screen. “Yo, bro. What’d you find? Wait. Hold on. I’ll put you on speaker.”
Sophia and Pete cuddled in the doorway. Her head dropped back while Pete nuzzled her neck. “Hm-hmm,” Sophia said.
“I’m sending pictures now,” Connor said. “You’ll be surprised at what I found.”
“Okay, just spill it,” Rick said. “We’ve had a long day.”
“She’s a big reader. She has all of your books in her bookcase, but the ones by her bed, in the bathroom, and next to her easy chair in the living room are all World War I Battles. And the battle with the most books and articles is the Battle of Verdun.”
“Holy shit,” Rick said.
Sophia straightened. “‘Vous ne les laisserez pas passer, mes camarades.’”
“‘Ye shall not let them pass, my comrades,’” Remy translated.
“What do ye know of the battle?” David asked Sophia.
“I’ve been all over France,” she said, “including the Verdun Memorial. Antoine Prost wrote, ‘Like Auschwitz, Verdun marks a transgression of the limits of the human condition.’ Have you been there?”
“I have. And no one in this family is traveling back to that battle.” He glared at Rick. “No one!”
Rick hopped out of the chair and followed David into the kitchen. “You can’t stop me from going.”
David grabbed the bottle of whisky, filled a shot glass, and tossed back the contents. “I can. And I will.”
Rick filled a tumbler too, gave the liquid a tentative swirl, and threw it back as a thousand insane questions bounced around his brain. What
was he going to do? Did he even have a choice? No. “I’m not going to abandon Billie.”
He and David straightened as if they were ready to throw down, right there, right then.
Horrified murmurs rippled through the room. Rick was so hot he thought steam would shoot out of his ears as his imagination tumbled out of control, cartwheeling between the past and present.
Someone must have dialed back the oxygen in the room, though, because he was having trouble breathing. If McBain knew what was going on inside his head, he’d have Rick strapped in the plane and returned to California…or maybe even Alaska…just to cool him off.
“No one is going back to 1916 France,” David said, rapping his knuckles on the countertop. “And if that’s not clear, let me put it this way. The brooches are under my control and none of them, including the topaz—”
Rick raised his fist, snarled, then snatched the topaz brooch off the table and gripped it in his hands like he was holding a grenade ready to pull the pin. His tunnel vision was in full force, and he struggled to put thoughts and words together. “You…you can’t stop me, McBain. The topaz brooch belongs to me. I paid fifty thousand dollars for it. I can do whatever I want.”
In a split second, catching him unaware, a hand clawed over his face and had him planted on the kitchen floor, twisting his arm until he released the brooch. Pain shot through his back and down his arm, and white-hot anger spilled off him.
“Damn! What the hell was that for?” He shot a glance behind him. “Kenzie! Shit. You didn’t have to take my face off.” Rick had seen Kenzie in Amazon mode once before when she stormed an airplane hangar to rescue the family after a drug cartel kidnapping. Damn. The woman was fierce, and her take-no-prisoners approach was legendary in US District Court.
The metallic taste of blood skimmed over Rick’s tongue from biting his lip when she took him down. He would never hit Kenzie or any woman, but he sure as hell wished he had something hard to punch. A cold tingle of apprehension shivered across his chest. This turn of events could upend the entire mission. He swallowed his fear, a trace of his anger, and tried to refocus.
The Topaz Brooch Page 18