Scarlet Nights

by Jude Deveraux

  “If it’s that brother of yours and he makes you cry again, I’ll—”

  “It’s Sara.” Tess read the text and burst into tears.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Rams said as he snatched the little machine from his wife.

  “Good cry. Good news,” Tess sobbed. “Hormones.”

  “Yeah, I know. They’re six hundred times normal.” He was pushing buttons to bring up Sara’s message. “Damnation!” he muttered. “I’m going to have to talk to my cousin about sending porno over the airwaves.”

  Tess blew her nose. “You’re a prude. Give that back to me.”

  Grimacing, he handed her the phone.

  “I’m going to get Joce to tell me the details. Oh! But I wish we could go home.” Again, she looked at Sara’s text message.

  YOUR BROTHER PUT WHISKER BURNS ALL OVER MY BODY. DIDN’T MISS A SPOT. HE ASKED ME TO GO TO FORT LAUDERDALE TO LIVE WITH HIM. SARA.

  Sara spent over an hour with Joce, helping her memorize her lines for her role as a fortune-teller. Luke had ordered a copy of a fortune-telling book published in 1891 that explained how fortunes had been told for centuries by people without any psychic ability.

  “Okay,” Sara said, “let’s go over it again,” even though she knew Joce had it down pat.

  “To an unmarried woman, I say, ‘You are often lonely, but at the same time, you enjoy your time alone.’ To a married woman, I say, ‘You often feel that your husband doesn’t understand you.’” Joce glanced down again. “An older man gets, ‘You were once unfairly punished for a good deed you did someone.’” She looked at Sara. “Do you think that’s universal enough that every old man will think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me what you think after you’ve told a hundred fortunes.”

  Joce looked back at her cards. “Mike told me to tell every woman over thirty this one. ‘Something you’ve been planning for a long time is about to come true.’ And Luke saw on TV that if you say, ‘You are one person to the world and another one in private,’ everyone will agree with you.”

  “That’s true for me, what about you?”

  “Sure, of course. Don’t you think you should go make yourself pretty? It’s getting late. Will … will Greg be there?”

  “I don’t know. I know he’s been released, but Mike won’t tell me where he is, so I don’t know how long it’ll take him to get here. Mike wants me to be surprised when Greg shows up.”

  “A surprise is when you’re told you’re carrying two babies instead of one. Seeing a man who wants to kill you is your brakes failing on a mountain road. That is not what I’d term a ‘surprise.’” She paused. “Sara …”

  “I know. I can’t think about any of this or I’ll get scared. Mike will be there, and he’s going to talk to the Fraziers and …” She looked back at Joce. “It’ll be all right. You want to go over the cards again?”

  “No, I think I have it. Some of these things that are said to people make me sick.” She picked up a card. “The book said that older, unmarried women are the most likely to go to fortune-tellers because they’re desperate in their attempt to find a good man. It says the woman is frequently lonely and bitter, and the clue that this woman will pay for help is her use of sarcasm.”

  “Did they work hard to figure that one out?” Sara said, and they laughed.

  Waving, she left the room. As she reached the back door, she looked up and saw Mr. Lang’s old truck drive in, and the back looked to be full. “Uh, Joce,” she called. “I sort of volunteered the use of your kitchen to Mr. Lang and I said you’d chop things for him.”

  “You did what?!” Joce yelled, but Sara had already slipped out the door.

  25

  WHEN MIKE GOT in his car, he had every intention of going to Ellie’s to get dressed, but he kept thinking about Lang’s house. Earlier, while Sara and Lang had been rambling on about cookies, he was looking at the room with an eye to bringing it up to a livable code. But something hadn’t been right. He hadn’t seen anything wrong or out of place or even odd—but he’d felt it. Of course Lang was lying about most everything he’d said, but that seemed to be his MO. As far as Mike could tell, the old man didn’t seem to know how to tell the truth—or all of it, anyway. It was no wonder Lang thought Mike was his relative, Mike thought. They had a lot in common.

  Whatever Mike had seen that morning was still haunting him, so he was going back to the farm to have a closer look.

  As he pulled up next to the old house, he realized that it was because of Sara that he could make this impromptu visit. It had been her idea to replace Lang’s dogs, so the animals knew Mike. Had Lang adopted dogs on his own, Mike probably wouldn’t have been able to walk onto the property as easily. Also, Sara got rid of Lang for the afternoon. Poor Joce.

  It took Mike only twenty minutes inside the house to find what he was looking for. Electricity, he thought. Who could have imagined that electrical cords and lightbulbs would bring the downfall of criminals?

  When Mike found what so many people had been looking for, he was so jubilant he wanted to call Sara and tell her—but he couldn’t. It was better that she didn’t know what was going on. Instead, he called Luke. From the background noise, he was at the fairgrounds. “Are you busy?”

  “Everyone in this town is asking me to do so many things that I’m ready to take a pistol to them,” Luke said in exasperation. “The answer is no, I’m not busy at all.”

  “I need your help,” Mike said, “and I’ve solved the case.”

  “Did you find Mitzi or did you figure out what they want?”

  “I have what they’re after. Could you meet me at Merlin’s Farm with your truck ASAP?”

  “Ten minutes too long?”

  “Yeah. Cut it shorter.” He could hear Luke beginning to run as he held the phone to his ear. “If I call Sara’s mother, will she help me or lecture me about some damned skirt I’m supposed to put on?”

  “She’ll do whatever’s needed to protect her daughter. Want me to call her for you?”

  “Naw.” Mike could hear Luke starting his truck. “I now have a mother-in-law, and I think I should learn to deal with her.”

  “Good luck on that,” Luke said as he snapped his phone shut. Six minutes later, after Mike had called Ellie and said he couldn’t be there right now but to please not tell Sara, Luke skidded into the driveway of Merlin’s Farm. The dogs went crazy barking, but Mike told them to sit and stay, and they obeyed.

  “Let me show you what I found,” Mike said and led the way into the house to the treasure trove in the secret closet.

  A few minutes later he called Tess to find out the details about Sara’s rights of ownership of the paintings he’d found. She turned the phone over to Ramsey, for him to explain.

  Under the terms of her Aunt Lissie’s will, all the paintings were owned by Sara. “I leave all CAY’s paintings to my dear niece,” the will said. At the time the will was written, there’d been only one watercolor, the funny one with the purple ducks. But it was Ramsey’s father, Benjamin, who’d added the word “all” when he drew up the will. He’d said he wanted to be covered in case more showed up.

  “Since you now own the house,” Rams said to Mike, “there might be a case for you to sue her for ownership.” When Mike didn’t bother to reply to that, Ramsey laughed in an approving way. “You didn’t ask, but legally, the rest of the things in the closet belong to you.”

  “Everything will be given to the descendants of the owners,” Mike said quickly.

  “Good,” Rams said softly. “Let me know when it’s safe for us to go home. Tess and I miss everyone. And, by the way, I heard you and Sara are staying together. Congratulations.”

  Again, that old feeling of hating everyone knowing his business went through Mike, especially since he’d never met this man. “Thanks,” he managed to say.

  “And I guess you won’t be needing any financial help with restoring Merlin’s Farm.”

  Even though Rams said it in the to
ne of a joke, Mike frowned. He wouldn’t have accepted help, but he was now realizing that he’d married an heiress. And a rich woman could do better than a cop who hadn’t even gone to college. “No, I won’t need any help,” Mike said and clicked off.

  Two hours later, he and Luke drove away with the back of his pickup and Mike’s car filled. They went to the storage place where Mike had a unit. It didn’t take long to push his meager belongings to the back—Tess had rented him a big place in the hope that he’d fill it. The men began unloading the vehicles, and when they’d finished, they were both sweaty and dirty.

  “Cover for me with Sara, will you?” Mike asked. “She thinks I’m at her mother’s house. I have to make some calls so I can piece all this together.”

  “What about Vandlo?” Luke asked.

  “He won’t be here until tomorrow. I’m told every hour where he is, but when he does get here, he won’t find what he’s looking for.”

  “Except for Sara. I’m concerned that he’ll be very angry to find his plans destroyed.”

  “That’s an understatement, but I’m working to arrange it so he takes his rage out on me.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Luke asked.

  “Sara doesn’t know this, but tomorrow after she makes contact with Vandlo and tells him she married someone else, she’ll be put in a van and taken away. If Vandlo wants revenge, I’ll be the only one there.” Luke still looked skeptical. “You have to trust me. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I can assure you that Sara is very valuable to me.”

  “The whole town knows that. The gossip is that when you look at her—”

  “Leave me some pride,” Mike said as he pulled the door to the storage unit down and locked it. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I think you should get to the fair as soon as you can. On opening night about five hundred people show up, and I don’t like Sara being unprotected.”

  “She isn’t and she won’t be,” Mike said. After Luke drove away, Mike parked his car a mile from the storage place, stood under a tree, and started pushing buttons on his phone.

  Mike had always believed that there was a connection between his grandmother, Merlin’s Farm, and the Vandlos, but he’d never been able to see what it was. By finding what Mitzi was after, Mike now had an idea of how the alliance could have been made.

  He called the retirement home in Ohio where his grandmother had spent the last years of her life, where she’d died, and asked to speak to the head of nursing. He was put through right away. After he gave his credentials and told her some about the investigation, it didn’t take long to find the person he was seeking. The large nose made Mitzi easily identifiable. As Mike suspected, she’d worked there, using the assumed name of Hazel Smith, and the nurse was eager to talk about her.

  “I don’t want to speak ill of anyone, but Hazel was a horrible woman,” the nurse said. “After she left, the employees started swapping tales, and we found out what she’d done. She’d tell one person one thing and someone else another. While she was here, we had nothing but chaos. The problem was that none of us knew who was causing it. On the surface, Hazel seemed to be the most caring person we’d ever had here, and I was caught like everyone else was. Hazel came to me one day and said she’d seen my best nurse stealing from a patient who’d just died. She cried while she told me and I’m ashamed to say that I believed every word. Because of her, I fired an excellent caretaker.”

  “If it helps any,” Mike said, “the woman you know as Hazel Smith has made many people believe her. Would you tell me everything you can remember about the week or so just before my grandmother died?”

  “I guess you want to know about the night Prudence went hysterical.”

  “Yes.” Mike’s heart was beating hard. “Please tell me everything about that.” He couldn’t rush this, as he needed the woman to confide in him, so he had to let her talk at her own pace.

  “Well, first of all, Prudence wasn’t … I’m sorry to say this, Mr. Newland, but she wasn’t liked.”

  “Do you mean she cleared a room when she entered?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. She used to rather often tell us a story about having been raped. Perhaps you’ve heard it?”

  “Every week I had the misfortune of being near her, I had to listen to it. And with every retelling the violence and horror increased. By the end, I think she was saying that Alex McDowell had used a hammer to crush her legs.”

  “Yes, we found that too,” the nurse said. “But did you know that we have a resident therapist? Your grandmother loved to go to him, and I shouldn’t tell you this, but when her story changed each week, he did some investigating into old newspaper accounts of the incident. For one thing, the rape didn’t happen when she said it did. It was at night, not during the day, and she was returning from a party where she’d been drinking. Did you know that?”

  “No,” Mike said quietly. “I didn’t.” He was disgusted with himself that he’d never thought to look at old records. But then, his grandmother’s so-called rape was something he’d never wanted to hear another word about.

  “The psychiatrist thought it was possible that Pru was more than a little drunk when it happened, and that there was a possibility that she welcomed the young man. Later, when the man she said had attacked her wouldn’t marry her, and even denied that he’d so much as touched her … Well, the doctor thought that perhaps Pru had come to embellish the event so dramatically that maybe Mr. McDowell actually was innocent.”

  Mike knew the nurse’s words sounded true and he wanted to hear more, but now was not the time. “But that night when she went hysterical, did she say anything different?”

  “Yes, she did. On that night, nearly all the residents were in the living room watching TV, the same as always, when Pru started screaming. We never did succeed in teaching your grandmother that there were times when other people’s needs were just as important as hers.”

  Mike snorted. “A lesson no one could teach her. What was my grandmother shouting?”

  “That she’d seen the paintings they were showing on TV.”

  He knew that he and Luke had just moved those paintings from where they’d been stored at Merlin’s Farm. “What was the show?”

  “Lost Treasures. Do you watch it?”

  Mike’s life didn’t leave much time for TV, but it seemed pompous to say that. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “What’s it about?”

  “Valuable things that have disappeared. Our residents love it, and we watch it every Thursday night. In that episode, they showed some old paintings of tropical plants in Florida, and said they were very, very valuable. It’s hard to remember the details because five minutes after they came on the screen, Pru jumped up and started screeching at the top of her lungs.”

  “What exactly, as best as you can remember, did Grans say?”

  “Something about a boy … Bruce … Langley?”

  “Brewster Lang,” Mike said.

  “Yes! That’s it. I’m sorry to say this, but we’d had a lot of trouble with your grandmother snooping through people’s belongings. And she loved to spy on others. We had to be careful to lock every door.”

  “I know that well,” Mike said softly.

  “Yes, I imagine you would.” The nurse’s voice was sympathetic. “Anyway, Pru said that just before the rape she’d seen the paintings they were showing on TV in this boy’s house. She’d been looking in the windows—spying, but she didn’t say that—and saw him with the artwork spread all around. I think she said he saw her watching him. Is that possible?”

  Mike imagined the evening. His grandmother had been an angry young woman with too much booze inside her and she was looking through Lang’s windows. Spying was something that he knew she loved to do, and as a child he’d learned to keep his curtains closed and the doors bolted.

  That night, Lang had looked up, seen her watching him, and had probably followed her outside. Maybe Pru was trying to run away on her bicycle and maybe Lang threw
stones at the spokes. Or maybe she was so drunk she crashed. She’d always liked gin. As for Lang, he may have thought Pru had come to see him, as she often did. And it was possible that since it was night, he thought she had at last realized he was closer to being a man and not the boy she’d always thought he was.

  When her bike went down, Pru may have hit her head. That, mixed with the drink, would have made her fuzzy about reality. She saw a kilt such as Alex McDowell, the man she believed she loved, wore, and one thing led to another. She probably welcomed the man with enthusiasm.

  No wonder Lang celebrated that day every year, Mike thought, and he wondered how Lang felt when, later, Pru had demanded that Alex marry her.

  “Mr. Newland?” the nurse asked, “are you there?”

  “Yes. What happened after my grandmother went hysterical?”

  “We had to give her a sedative to get her to bed. That would have been the end of it if it hadn’t been for Hazel.”

  “My guess is that she was very interested in what my grandmother had said.”

  “Extremely. She had the late shift and everyone was talking about it. Hazel asked everyone what had caused Pru to go crazy. No detail was too small for her. She said a most curious thing, something that I’ve never forgotten.”

  “And what was that?”

  “She said that old people knew many secrets, and if they were old enough, they’d forget what was supposed to be kept secret.”

  “I think maybe you were being told the reason why Hazel was there,” Mike said, thinking that it might be why Mitzi had taken on a job at an upscale retirement home. When she’d fled, hundreds of police and Federal agents were searching for her, so she’d needed to lay low for a while. She must have been wary of restarting her usual scams on grieving women. After all, some of them had betrayed her.

  So Mitzi had taken a job at a retirement home full of patients with relatives who paid a lot for the care they received. Maybe Mitzi had only been looking for jewelry, but she’d hit a gold mine with Prudence Walker.

  “After that night, Hazel and Prudence were best friends,” the nurse said. “For over a week, Hazel neglected all our other residents to spend time with Pru. I should have stopped it but things were so quiet here that I didn’t. I still didn’t realize it was Hazel causing the turmoil. I thought the peace was due to Pru staying in her room, so I was glad to spare Hazel’s work for that calm.”