Red After Dark: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 13)

by Elise Noble

  The funeral would be next Monday. Open casket, which freaked me out a bit because we just didn’t do that in England. In the absence of other offers, Alaric had agreed that I should stay until after Irvine’s cremation to support Harriet while he saw to the return of Red After Dark. Although the senator had a small life insurance policy, it would take a while for the money to come through, and Harriet needed cash now more than ever. Hopefully by the time I had to leave, the reward would have been paid and she’d be able to hire an extra pair of hands to help on the farm.

  I worried in case the owners or the FBI thought Alaric had stolen the painting himself, but he assured me it wouldn’t be a problem. No matter, if it came to it, I’d come clean about my part in the whole affair no matter what it cost me. I owed him that much.

  “Everything’s arranged,” he announced, leaning back from his laptop. “I’ll leave for Boston tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you flying?”

  “No, driving. Stéphane says you can borrow the truck if you need to go anywhere here.”

  “Isn’t it a long way by road?”

  “I’ll break it into two—here to Richmond tomorrow, Richmond to Boston on Friday. Emmy said I can use the guest house, and I need to drop their luggage off anyway. And the dog.”

  Apparently, Black had grudgingly agreed to them keeping Barkley. Not that he had an awful lot of choice in the matter—the pooch had made her feelings quite clear by falling asleep on his feet every evening in the rental property. Speaking of which, with everyone else having unexpectedly returned to Virginia, we couldn’t justify shelling out for a four-bedroom house for two people. Hence we’d packed everything up and decamped to Lone Oak Farm. Not only was it cheaper, I liked seeing the horses from my bedroom window when I woke up. When this episode was over, we’d look at finding a new place for the rest of the summer so Rune could come and stay. Alaric and I had to go to England for my sister’s wedding on the sixteenth and of course pay a visit to Chaucer, then we’d pick up Rune and fly back to the US after that.

  Dammit, I’d look for a new house, not we. That was my job, not Alaric’s, even if he did seem to be acting more like a friend than a boss at the moment.

  The phone rang again.

  “Lone Oak Farm.”

  “Is this Bethany Stafferton?”

  Stafford-Lyons, but it was close enough.

  “Yes, speaking.” The man sounded young, friendly, with none of the dripping sympathy I’d been accepting since the news got out. Nearly every caller had been a woman. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “Joel Schumacher.”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “HiCam Videography?”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  Was he one of the people who’d been on holiday? I scrabbled for a pen and paper. And my list with all the scribbles. Where had I left it?

  “Looking for this?” Alaric whispered.

  I nodded gratefully. Schumacher… HiCam… There he was. I’d called him near the beginning and left a voicemail.

  “Mr. Schumacher—”

  “Joel.”

  “Joel, thank you so much for getting back to me. We’re trying to track down the person who recorded an announcement by Irvine Carnes several weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  The lies were coming much more easily now, and I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or disappointed in myself.

  “Harriet Carnes—Irvine’s daughter—she knew somebody had visited to film her father, but he wasn’t able to tell her who, and she’s concerned in case there’s money owing. So she asked me to make some calls to check.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that. He paid up front.”

  “Mr. Carnes?”

  “No, his assistant.”

  Huh? “Stéphane?”

  “Nah, the other one. Edwin. Strange guy—he wouldn’t do a wire transfer, insisted on mailing an envelope full of cash.”

  Edwin? Weird. The artist who painted Red After Dark was called Edwin. A coincidence?

  “Mr. Carnes doesn’t have another assistant,” I blurted before I realised I shouldn’t have said that. Think, Beth! “Uh, perhaps Edwin’s part of his old senatorial staff. I wonder if we should be reimbursing him instead? Do you know what he looked like?”

  “Never met him in person.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got his surname? Or a phone number?”

  “Edwin told me I shouldn’t talk about the job with anyone. But you’re family, right?”

  “I work for Harriet. Perhaps I could get her to call you? It’s just that she’s a little upset after her father’s death.”

  “Saw that on the news. He was a nice old guy, a bit tense but, you know, friendly. Anyhow, Edwin didn’t give a surname. And he always called me. Blocked his number too, except for the last time. I guess he forgot. Are government people always like that?”

  “In my experience, they can be a bit cagey.”

  Especially when it came to their mistresses, if my father’s friends were anything to go by. Most of them had at least two phones, and some had two names as well—one for their wife and one for their bit on the side.

  “Yeah, so I wrote the number somewhere. A piece of paper… Someone probably paid Edwin though. He seemed pretty organised.” Muffled scratching was followed by a wail. “Eh, my kid’s crying. If I find the number, I’ll call you back, okay?”

  The impatient part of me wanted to demand he keep looking right now, but I couldn’t afford to alienate what could be our best lead.

  “I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Wait, here it is.” He reeled off a number, and I wrote it down. “I’m sorry about Mr. Carnes.”

  “I’ll pass on your condolences.”

  Wow. My heart was going three hundred miles an hour when I hung up. Had I just managed to get a lead on the people who stole Emerald?

  CHAPTER 35 - EMMY

  SKY’S PERFORMANCE WAS improving. Rapidly. Staying ahead of her on runs was no longer a breeze, and I didn’t have to hold back so much in fight practice. On Saturday, I’d challenged her to a race to the centre chimney of Riverley Hall, climbing up the outside of the building, and she’d damn near beaten me.

  Rafael wasn’t a bad teacher, or so it seemed. His methods may have been a little unorthodox, but they worked. No carrots or sticks; he preferred the psychological approach. Every time Sky asked a question, he came back with more questions until she worked out the answer for herself.

  Yesterday, I’d seen them lying out on the back lawn. When I asked Sky later what they’d been doing, she said they were visualising the climb up the building so that next time she could do it better. Picture every move, every handhold, and then see yourself at the top. Did it work? Well, when I watched her having another go, she’d certainly seemed fast, and that was borne out by our race. When Black was teaching me to climb, he’d made me stand at the bottom of the cliff, building, whatever and work out the best route up. Rafael’s method made Sky exercise her memory at the same time. Two birds with one stone and all that. Not bad.

  But today, Sky’s burgeoning perceptiveness wasn’t doing me any favours.

  “You’ve done well this morning. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Go into town or something?”

  “Rafael said he’d run through sniper practice with me this afternoon. Carmen cancelled at the last minute.”

  Carmen had cancelled because I’d surprised her, Nate, and their son, Josh, with a trip to a children’s science fair in Florida. Josh loved gadgets, just like his father. I’d also sent Toby to visit his sister in Idaho, encouraged Bradley to go shopping in LA, and given Mrs. Fairfax the day off. The grounds team didn’t work on Mondays. Dustin, my horse’s groom, rarely spoke to Black—he was a man of few words—and an emergency evacuation drill at Blackwood HQ had got rid of everyone else except for the roving security patrol and the guards at the gates. They were familiar enoug
h with my shenanigans that a bit of fancy flying and somebody jumping out of an aeroplane wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

  But Sky and Rafael… They were another problem.

  “Sky, that wasn’t a request. If it helps, think of it as an exercise. You’ve got to come up with a convincing enough story to get Rafael away from this place without arousing his suspicions.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  I stayed quiet, and I was both pleased and resigned when she put two and two together and made sixty-three. Yup, Sky was smart.

  “Is this about our conversation last Sunday?” She nodded, almost to herself. “The whole estate’s quiet as a grave. Everybody’s gone, and you’ve been grumpy as fuck all week. It is. You want to test shit out, don’t you?”

  “Once again, you’ve proven why I was right to hire you. About Rafael…?”

  “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do it because I like Alaric and for some unknown reason I like you.”

  “Thank you.” Then I changed the subject to an easier one. “How’s Lenny?”

  “Yeah, he’s doing good. Says that hospital you put him in is more like a hotel. It’s even got satellite telly and a dinner menu.”

  At the price I was paying, I’d expect nothing less, but at least he was recovering from his past indiscretions.

  “Bet he’s charming all the nurses too.”

  “And a woman called Julie?”

  Ice formed around my heart. Damn Sky and her intuition. My mother was firmly off limits. I didn’t even want to think about that bitch, let alone talk about her.

  “Don’t fucking go there.”

  Sky must have heard the barely controlled animosity in my voice because she offered a hesitant smile.

  “I’ll get Rafael to drive me into Richmond. Tell him I need new boots or something.”

  “Do me a favour—get him to stay and have dinner with you as well.”

  My earlier hopes of letting Emerald fade into darkness had been scuppered when Beth came up with a new lead. A phone number. I was beginning to suspect that Alaric was right and Emerald was cursed because she’d sure screwed up both of our lives from the moment she came into them.

  I’d had Mack run the number, and surprise, surprise, it came back as unregistered. A burner phone. But she’d been able to access the call history, and over the past two months, it had been used seven times. Four times to call our videographer, once to call a Chinese restaurant in Norfolk, again to call an automated banking service, and finally to call a feed store in the small town of Penngrove, just south of Chesapeake. Two connections to the same area—Norfolk and Chesapeake weren’t all that far apart—and the call to the feed store interested me. It had lasted four minutes. Nobody called a feed store for that long unless they were interested in buying animal feed, and if they were buying animal feed, it stood to reason that they had animals nearby. Had we found the mysterious Edwin’s hidey-hole? Nobody thought it was a coincidence that the fixer shared a forename with the dude who’d painted Red After Dark, and who was up to his eyeballs in dodgy art?

  Dyson.

  I’d agreed to travel to Penngrove with Alaric when he was set to go. Maybe it would lead to something and maybe it wouldn’t, but we had to try. Black was gonna be pissed about me taking off, but if today’s parachute experiment went the way I feared it would, he had no right to feel upset.

  “Are you ready?” Ana asked.

  “Nope.”

  But Sam was. He’d checked and repacked his parachutes in the ballroom at Riverley Hall, put on his jumpsuit and helmet, and strapped a camera to his chest to record what he said was possibly the dumbest thing he’d ever done.

  The plan called for Ana to sit in my bedroom at Little Riverley while I flew Sam overhead in the Pitts Special I kept in a hangar beside our grass airstrip. I rarely used the little plane. I’d bought it years ago for aerobatics, but life was all work and no play at the moment. We’d make several passes, going higher each time, and when Ana told me over the radio that she could no longer hear the noise from the engine, Sam would jump.

  Of course, skydiving from a Pitts Special was a challenge in itself. To prepare, we’d consulted YouTube, which suggested the best approach was for Sam to hang onto the framework by the top wing while I inverted, then drop away. That way, he wouldn’t strike the tail. I was beginning to understand his “dumbest thing I’ve ever done” comment now.

  Fortunately, Sam was an experienced skydiver. He threw himself out of planes on the weekends for fun, a concept I struggled to understand. Sure, I jumped out of planes too, but only when it was absolutely necessary.

  After a final briefing beside the plane, Ana hefted her and Sam’s daughter, Tabby, onto her hip and headed for the house. The lack of a babysitter meant we were training her young. I strapped myself into the pilot’s seat, and Sam climbed into the back.

  Was it too late to drive to the airport instead? A last-minute break in New South Wales seemed remarkably appealing.

  An hour later, it was all over—the experiment, the jump, and quite possibly my marriage. Sam had landed on the very edge of the guest house roof and cracked his shin on a stupid weathervane—another of Bradley’s additions—but he’d still hit the target. I’d deactivated the rooftop sensors, and it had only taken three minutes after landing for him to descend into the guest house basement and hobble through the tunnel to Little Riverley. None of the cameras or the other sensors caught his entrance. We’d found out how the pay-off could have been stolen, but the question was, did it go down that way?

  Finding out for sure would be our next challenge. After Sam had taken Tabby back home and the plane was tucked safely back in its hangar, I slumped onto the couch in my living room with Ana and poured myself a large gin and tonic. Fuck knows I needed it.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking of becoming an alcoholic.”

  She took my glass, opened the window, and poured the contents into a bush outside.

  “Nyet.”

  “Well, do you have a better idea?”

  “We need to either prove or disprove our theory.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. How?”

  “You said Black used a friend of his as an alibi. Pale? We should talk to him.”

  I laughed and laughed and then I laughed some more. “Not even you could persuade Pale to talk. He’s part of Black’s posse, not mine. He, Black, and Nate will always cover for each other.”

  Pale looked like a beach bum, but if you fell for the act and crossed him, you’d soon find out the error of your ways. I hadn’t worked a job with him before, but Black and I had joined him for a morning of surfing a year or two ago in California, and we were hanging out on the beach—which made Black twitchy because he hated doing nothing—when some perma-tanned prick in budgie smugglers with muscles bigger than his brain accused Pale of ogling his girlfriend. Probably that was true, but there was no need to start a fight over it. First, we ignored him, but the asshole wanted to look like a big deal in front of the bunch of ladies lying out nearby, so he shoved Pale. Big mistake. Black and Pale both caught the guy under the chin with synchronised uppercuts and knocked him out cold. Then Pale turned around and asked if any of the girls wanted to go out for dinner. A perky blonde young enough to be his daughter gave him her number because under the Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts, he still kept in shape and he had one of those faces that only got better with age. And Black was happy because Pale went home to take a shower so we didn’t have to sit on the beach anymore.

  “If we can’t crack Pale, there’s only one option left,” Ana told me.

  “I know.”

  Fuck, I knew. And I hated it.

  I hated it because I’d have to confront the man I loved. I’d have to look him in the eye and ask him if he’d lied to me. Would he tell the truth or lie again? If he lied, it was over. I only hoped that after eighteen years of knowing him, I could tell the difference.

  CHAPTER 36 - EMMY

  WORK NE
VER STOPPED, and no matter how much I longed to curl up under my duvet and hide from the world, I still had to go to the office for a late meeting. Some government guy wanted me to do a job. I wanted to sit at home in yoga pants and eat ice cream, so I quoted him an outrageous fee and he bloody agreed to it. See? My life was jinxed.

  I finally got around to checking my messages and found one from Sky, asking if she could come home yet. She’d sent it at eight p.m. last night. Shit. I fired off a quick apology, deleted a text offering me free casino chips, then ignored everything else. Finally, I headed for the gym at headquarters. Punching something would help.

  By the time I got home, Black was already there, complete with takeout from Claude’s, Richmond’s best French restaurant. Usually, that was a cause for celebration, but my appetite had deserted me.

  “Dinner?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry right now.”

  He closed the distance behind me and dug his thumbs into the knot of tension in my shoulders. Mmm. That felt good. I closed my eyes for a second, enjoying one last moment of bliss.

  “How about we take a swim instead?”

  In our own home, swimming didn’t tend to involve clothing and usually led to other things. But I couldn’t afford to get sidetracked, not tonight.

  “I thought we could watch a movie.”

  “A movie? Sure.”

  I headed for the movie theatre before I chickened out, but Black caught my hand.

  “Don’t you want to change first?”

  I looked down at myself. Okay, so a tailored pinstripe dress and stilettos weren’t exactly typical moviegoing attire, but it was now or never. No distractions.

  “I’m fine in this.”

  “Okay.” His tone said he wasn’t convinced. “Do you want snacks? A drink?”

  A bottle of wine would be nice, but I’d promised Ana I’d be good. Her spare bedroom was ready and waiting in case I needed to get away from home tonight. She’d taken Sam to the hospital to get his shin X-rayed because it had swollen up and gone a horrible purple colour—once again proving that this whole fucking nightmare was cursed—but she’d be back later.