“I asked your son for a loan to help with Ma’s medical bills, and he laughed in my face. So I went to the bank for a loan and wanted to use my pension fund as collateral. That’s when I was tipped off that it was worthless. I got to thinking five million was a fair price for all I’d done for you over the years, the loyalty, fixing the books…but your tight bastard of a son wouldn’t cough up.”
Morgan Senior gave a snarl of anger, which tapered off into a groan as he clutched his chest. Ket stepped forward, instinctively responding to his father’s obvious distress. But the older man waved him away, fury evident on his face as he raised the gun he held and pulled the trigger. The bullet took Alfred in the chest, knocking him sideways and toppling him and the chair to the floor.
The room was enveloped in shocked silence, punctuated by Morgan’s gasping breaths. His face turned deep puce as he understood what his son had done, that his scheming had set in motion a chain of events that might leave his grandson dead.... He was beyond reason now, his gun aimed at Ket.
Ket’s face drained of color as he backed away, his head swinging from side to side in denial, just as his secretary rushed into the room.
“I heard shots and…” Andrew blanched as he took in the tableau. “What’s going on…? Oh, my God!” A sharp look from Ket silenced him.
“Do you mean to tell me…?” Morgan’s voice was deadly quiet. “Do you mean to tell me you had a ransom note and didn’t tell me, didn’t make any effort to pay it? You’d have let my grandson die?”
Ket gave a mirthless smile. “You’ve just killed the man who kidnapped him. You’re the reason the kid will die! He’ll probably starve to death.”
Morgan and Ket stared at each other, neither looking away even when the door was kicked open and Ben rushed in, his gun drawn, followed by Kathryn. Outside, sirens wailed in the distance.
“Drop your weapon, Morgan!” Ben demanded, taking in the prone, bound figure of Alfred and the gun in Morgan’s hand. Kathryn gasped and ran across the room to kneel beside the bookkeeper.
Morgan lowered the gun. “That man kidnapped my grandson, Sheriff Asher. If you’d been doing your job…”
“He’s not your grandson!” Kathryn cried, tears streaming down her face. “Alex is my son and—”
She didn’t get to finish her sentence as Morgan aimed at her and pulled the trigger. Fire burned through her arm and the panelling behind her splintered as the bullet missed its target. Morgan raised the gun again and Andrew threw himself at Kathryn, knocking her to the floor. The gun barked and blood bloomed on the front of his shirt.
“Oh, dear Lord, Andrew.” Kathryn screamed. She knelt beside him and pressed her hand over his wound in a futile effort to staunch the bleeding. “You saved my life,” she sobbed.
“Go save your son, Kathryn,” Andrew murmured on gasping breaths. “Ket and I have taken too much away from you all ready.”
“Not your fault. Remember, you said we both wanted what we couldn’t have.”
Andrew’s breathing was ragged and he reached out one pleading hand toward Ket. The movement galvanised Ket out of the shock that had paralysed him. He pushed Kathryn aside and gathered Andrew up in his arms.
His face turned deathly pale as he took in the man’s wounds, and he wailed in anguish. “No! Andrew, you can’t die.” He cradled his lover in his arms.
“Put the gun down, Morgan!” Ben raised his weapon, edging around the room to drop on one knee beside Kathryn. His heart thudded as he saw the first bullet had grazed her; blood was dripping from her wounded arm and mingling with Andrew’s on the deep pile carpet.
“I’m okay, thanks to Andrew.”
Andrew groaned and coughed up a great gout of blood. His hand rose to grasp Ket’s tightly as a spasm of pain shot through him.
Ket let out a wild sob of heartbreak as his lover drew a final breath. Grief contorted his handsome features into a mask of hatred as he turned to face his father. “She’s right. Alex isn’t my son. I married the bitch because she was pregnant with another man’s child and the ultrasound said it was a boy. I thought it would get you off my back, always going on about wanting an heir!”
Morgan surged to his feet, dropping the gun on the desk as he rose. “You’re lying,” he screamed.
“No, he’s not,” Kathryn got slowly to her feet, leaning on Ben’s arm. “Ket never loved me. Andrew is the one Ket loved. He never wanted me, just a child to appease you. Your attitudes, the way you never let Ket be who he was, twisted him into the evil he became.”
Ben stepped forward, his gun leveled at Morgan, but he was too late. With a last kiss to his lover’s cheek, Ket sprang forward, scooped up his father’s gun, and raised it his temple. “You have no heir, Father. The Morgans end here!”
“Son, don’t…”
The shot was deafening in the room. The bullet tore away the back of Ket’s head in his final vengeance against his father. Kathryn screamed and buried her face in Ben’s shirt while Ketler Morgan, Senior, his eyes fixed on his dead son, grasped his chest, his face reflecting pain and despair.
Seconds later, he crumpled to the floor.
****
It was only a short distance to the old shoe factory, but it felt like the longest journey of Kathryn’s life. She was glad she could lean on Ben’s strength as they roared through the streets, lights flashing and siren blazing. Ben had tied a hurried tourniquet of cloth torn from his shirt to staunch the bleeding in her arm. She urged him to hurry, leaning forward in her seat as if she could make the car move faster by sheer willpower.
Morris had whispered to her that Alex was hidden in the shoe factory, but death had taken him before he could tell her where. As they drove, she flicked worried glances at Ben, questions raging through her mind. Had he heard what Ket had said about why he married her? Did he believe now that Alex was his son?
When his warm hand clasped hers, she had her answer.
They arrived back in the shoe factory parking with a screech of brakes, followed by a line of police cruisers with lights and sirens splitting the night. Their headlights illuminated an elderly man standing by the factory door, a flashlight in his hand.
Kathryn ran to meet him. “Dad! What are you doing here?”
Fitz hugged his daughter. “I called the station, trying to find you, and Tess said Ben had called for backup to go to the shoe factory to look for Alex. I know this factory like the back of my hand after working here for years. Thought I could make a difference with the search.”
“Yes, sir, we sure could use you!” Ben replied. He gathered the officers together and explained the situation. Then, following Ben and Fitz’s lead, the uniformed men, entered the factory and spread out in search of a frightened young boy.
Ben returned to Kathryn’s side, surprising her by wrapping his arms around her and kissing her. “Stay here, Kathryn. We’ll find him,” he promised, setting off to join the search.
“Oh, no, I’m coming with you. You’re not leaving me behind again!” She grabbed his hand. The understanding look he gave her spoke volumes.
Even with all the factory lights turned on, shadows lurked in the corners of the rooms and in the stairwells as determined officers searched. Their calls of “Alex! Alex!” bounced hollowly around the huge, empty space.
“I bet the boy’s hidden in the basement,” Fitz said. “There are small, closed rooms down there. Hardly anyone goes down because the stairs aren’t safe.”
“Can you show me?” Ben asked, and Fitz nodded eagerly. Reaching the rickety stairs that plunged downward into darkness at an alarming angle, Kathryn reluctantly agreed that with her wounded arm she would be more of a liability than a help.
“Please stay here. We’ll be faster if I’m not worrying about you,” Ben told her, kissing her forehead. “I promise, if Alex is down there, I’ll bring him back to you.”
****
The stairs led down into a deep, dark cellar smelling of mold and damp and rotting leather. Their flashlights barely pene
trated the gloom in front of them and made monsters out of anonymous rusting pieces of machinery that reared up from corners as they passed. They faced a long corridor lined with closed doors. Many had locks so rusty it appeared they hadn’t been opened in years, but Ben and Jesse Rigg methodically checked each room even though they had to kick the doors open. “I hope Morris hasn’t led us on a wild goose chase as his parting revenge,” Ben said through gritted teeth as yet another room proved empty of life.
Fitz stopped abruptly, his raised finger calling for silence. “I heard something…something like a cry. There, I didn’t imagine it!”
Once more calling out Alex’s name the three men surged toward the sound, pausing only to listen again for the faint cry that seemed to come from different directions in the maze of cellar walls.
Ben’s heart sped up as he noted a door with a shiny new padlock. “Alex!” he called and an answering cry, stronger now, came to them from beyond that door. He threw himself at the door but the bolt lock held.
A quick call on Jesse’s radio brought Officer Roy Webb wielding bolt cutters. Moments later, they were in the filthy, dank room. The four men froze in shock at the sight of the small boy who cowered there. His face was filthy and tear-stained and he clasped a shard of broken glass defensively in bloodied hands.
Tears of relief and fury came to Ben’s eyes as he saw the child’s hands were torn and bleeding in his courageous attempt to cut the rope that bound him to the bedframe.
Roy used his pen knife to slash the rope and Ben scooped the sobbing little boy up into his arms. “You’ve been a really brave boy, Alex. Your mommy’s waiting for you upstairs.”
He had to fight back tears as he held the small, shivering body, knowing finally that this brave scrap of humanity was his own flesh and blood. “Let’s go find your mom, son.”
He’d never forget the look of joy and love on Kathryn’s face when she reached out to wrap her arms around her child.
Their son.
Chapter Eighteen
It was weeks before Kathryn was able to bring herself to enter the Morgan Mausoleum again, time taken up with meetings with government officials who had relentlessly questioned her and examined all the Morgan assets, including several different sets of books which led them directly to organized crime gangs. As a result, a spate of arrests of major crime figures was about to be announced.
Much of the Morgan empire, including the bank and the shoe factory, were confiscated by the government for back taxes and other penalties and would be auctioned off to recoup some of the money the Morgans had failed to declare. The house was the only thing left to Kathryn as Ket’s widow and heir. She told them she didn’t even want that, but the government agent had just shrugged and left the papers he’d brought with him on the table in Fitz’s cottage.
She’d suffered nightmares about returning to the house where she’d experienced such unhappiness in a story that had such a bloody and violent ending.
Ben finally persuaded her to go and put those ghosts to rest. She couldn’t stop herself from shivering as she entered the house, even with his strong arm around her. To her surprise, everything had been cleaned and polished. No trace of the horrors that had happened there was left behind.
They were joined by a smiling Fitz and a blushing Cynthia who were ready to put the final postscript on the Morgan story. “We want to rent the house from you,” Fitz said. “That is, if you’re agreeable. Cynthia and me, we want to turn it into a bed and breakfast. There’s always a terrible need for good lodging in Lobster Cove. With my brawn and Cynthia’s brains, and her excellent cooking, I think we can make a go of it.”
She’d never seen her father so focussed and happy, and she knew it was more than a business venture when Cynthia shyly slipped her arm through Fitz’s. “How can I refuse an offer like that?”
Now the Morgan Mausoleum would finally become a home that would welcome visitors and family alike.
****
Ben’s supervisor in the FBI forensic accounting department called Ben to congratulate him on his work in breaking the money laundering and drug dealing cartel in which the Morgans had been such important participants.
“Take a few days off, you’re owed vacation time,” he had added.
So, finally clear of the last vestiges of the investigation, it was time to once again leave Lobster Cove. Ben revved the clutch of the motorcycle, enjoying the strident roar of the well-tuned engine. He wasn’t riding this time, but loading the vehicle up onto a trailer. The guttural roar of the machine sent a flock of gulls skyward, abandoning their wait for scraps from the hotel restaurant with outraged squawks.
He paused and looked out across the town, down to where the lobster boats bobbed on the tide and tourists queued to take whale-watching cruises under the warm sun.
The last time he’d left Lobster Cove, he hadn’t been able to get away fast enough. This leaving was tinged with sadness, especially when some of the good friends he’d made came out to say goodbye—Tess, Jesse, Roy, retired Sheriff Amos Lawton and his wife, Officer Jack Medley, Maggie and all the diner staff, Fitz and Cynthia, and Sheriff Lynn Lawton, newly returned and glowing from her honeymoon. They were the same people who’d stood by himself and Kathryn as they’d spoken wedding vows in front of a judge just a week earlier. The quiet ceremony had seemed in keeping with the events of the last few weeks, a declaration of their love and commitment to each other no matter what the future held.
Now these same people were gathered to say goodbye and wish the newlyweds well as they embarked on a new life together. Their goodbyes made him think that maybe they’d be back in town one day.
Kathryn stood watching as her new husband loaded the motorcycle onto a trailer. Their son, Alex, laughed with delight as he straddled the saddle, his still bandaged hands barely able to reach the handlebars. Some of Ben’s feeling about leaving Lobster Cove had communicated to her and tears ran down her cheeks.
But this time there was no anxiety about whether he’d come back to her. She was coming with Ben and Alex to start a new life together as a family. The crowd of well-wishers cheered as he kissed her thoroughly before helping her and Alex up into the passenger seats of his Jeep.
A word about the author...
Glenys O’Connell writes romantic suspense and comedy. Her interest in crime & criminal psychology began when covering the crime beat as a journalist for a large daily newspaper. She took a degree in psychology and qualified as a counselor—but writing is her first love and she says romantic suspense satisfies her cravings for both romance and crime! She is also the author of two books on mental health issues, several children’s books, and is an award winning playwright. She was born in Lancashire, England, and has lived and worked in the UK, Ireland, and currently in rural Ontario, Canada.
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