by Kay Hooper
“Your father—”
“He’s calmed down. Jon talked to him. Did you just guess I’d be here at Ian’s?”
“It made sense,” Jackie said dryly. “Besides, I called your house this morning and Jon told me where you were. He also said you’d gotten some kind of warning that today wouldn’t exactly be a good day. Is Ian with you?”
The warning, Michele thought. That was it. Steve had said he was going to express the original of that enigmatic message, and he would have found a carrier that would deliver it even on a Sunday; the guard at her office building would have it by now. Something about that message had bothered her, and she wanted to see the original.
“Michele?”
“What? Oh—no, he and Jon are both at the Stuarts’ building. There’s something I have to do. Jackie, can I call you later?”
“But, Michele, this warning—”
“I’ll call you later. Bye, Jackie.”
She took time only to jot a quick note for Ian on the chance that he returned before she did, then grabbed her purse and coat and hurriedly left the apartment. She couldn’t have said why it seemed so important for her to see the message; she only knew that the tune in her head was louder and more emphatic.
Traffic was light, and her cab driver was more than willing to wait while she went inside her office building. The express delivery had been made, and she carried the flat envelope back out to the taxi.
“Where to, ma’am?”
She gave him Ian’s address automatically, occupied with opening the envelope. As she gazed at the single sheet of unlined paper in her lap, her first realization was that Steve had taken no notice of the way the message was written. Block printing, he’d said, and it was; but the sentences had been arranged with care and precision, one to each line, with clear breaks after the first two and second two lines.
She had copied the sentences as Steve had read them aloud, never realizing that how the message looked was even more important than what it said. But some part of her mind had sensed a pattern even so, and now she could see it clearly.
I must warn them
Tell her this immediately.
It is vital that she know
Sunday is dangerous
Story I told you was false
Unable to tell you truth
The buyer is no stranger
Three devices, not one
Only they can stop him
Next days critical
For a long, cold moment, what she saw made no sense. But then everything came together in her mind. She knew what had nagged at her, knew why she had awakened this morning with the title of a poem on her lips; her subconscious had been prodding her, because it had been there all along. The answer.
Unsteadily, she told the driver she’d changed her mind, and gave him the address of the Stuarts’ building. While he uncomplainingly changed direction, she stared down at the warning in her lap. Now that she saw it, the hidden warning stood out clearly. The first letter of each line spelled out a simple message: IT IS SUTTON.
—
There were no men downstairs in the lobby. No evidence of security. Michele knew that wasn’t right, Ian wouldn’t have reduced security. She hurried across the lobby, sparing only a glance for the single elevator standing open; it would have been quicker, but she took the stairs.
The tenth floor, Ian had said the damage was on the tenth floor, so that’s where they’d be. It took an eternity to climb the stairs, and with every step her fear grew. He couldn’t have gotten here already, surely? Not from Jackie’s. But perhaps he hadn’t been with her, perhaps he’d only called her and said something casual like, “Find out from Michele where Ian and Jon are, I’d like to talk to them about better security.”
And Jackie, poor Jackie, wouldn’t have thought twice about the request. She’d been Cole’s pipeline for months, feeding him information without ever realizing that was what he was after, more than willing to talk about the bitter hatred of the feud because she’d been raised on all the stories. She’d told him about Ian and Michele, their meeting on Martinique. Michele knew now why Jackie’s attitude had changed so suddenly on the island; because she had called her lover, and Cole had convinced her that her friend needed someone on her side. The last thing he’d wanted was a rift between the two women—even with the chance of a dangerously strong tie forming between Michele and Ian.
Michele reached the tenth floor at last and, breathless, pushed open the heavy fire door.
They were all there. Ian, Jon, and Brandon Stuart were standing in a loose group just a few feet away across from the elevators. Before Michele could realize they weren’t alone, a strong hand grabbed her arm and flung her into the group.
Ian caught her before she could fall, and pulled her into the shelter of his arm so that she was standing between him and Jon. And even though she would have chosen to be with him no matter what happened, the anguish in his eyes as he drew her close to his side made her heart ache.
“It’s a pity everyone isn’t here,” Cole said conversationally. He was holding a wicked black automatic in one hand, and it was obvious he knew how to handle guns. He looked at Michele, and the easy, charming smile quirked his lips. “Didn’t happen to bring Pop along, did you?”
Michele thought she had never seen anything as empty as his eyes. His gray eyes, she realized. He must have worn tinted contact lenses until now. A strange, but familiar face, eyes veiled against you. It made so much sense now.
“So you’ve guessed Charles Logan is your father?” Jon asked in an even tone.
Cole laughed, his empty eyes flicking to Michele again. “Once I saw her, it was fairly obvious. I look more like her brother than you do. Not that it matters, really. I don’t care which side of the feud spawned me.”
“Then why destroy us?” Brandon asked quietly.
“You destroyed my mother,” Cole told him in the same eerily conversational tone. “Both of you. When she found out she was pregnant, you threw her out, because you thought I wasn’t yours. And Logan wasn’t about to take her back after that, even though she loved him, too. He didn’t give a damn whose kid she was carrying. She told me. She told me how both of you called her those ugly names.”
Cole’s expressionless face quivered for an instant, raw hatred flashing hotly in his eyes. The emotion was like the dank air of a tomb; something shut up in darkness and silence for too long. “And she told me—I should have had a real name instead of one she had to make up. She told me we’d get even one day. She found a book about the feud, and we read it together. We made plans. It was poetic justice that the feud should destroy you both.”
“But it won’t,” Michele said softly. “You’re going to do that.”
“That’s your fault,” Cole snapped. “It would have worked perfectly if only you’d believed what you should have. I thought you understood the feud.” He nodded toward Ian. “You should have hated him when I made it look like he’d hurt your brother. Why didn’t you hate him?” It was almost a plea.
Michele felt so cold she could hardly keep her teeth from chattering. He was insane, lost somewhere totally beyond their reach.
“Why?” Cole repeated the question, though this time it was in a voice crackling with hostility.
She held her voice steady with an effort. “Because I love him.”
Abruptly calm again, Cole said chidingly, “That was a stupid mistake. Now you’ll have to die with him.” He stepped back, carefully moving around the roped-off area in front of the ruined elevators. “I have this last elevator all ready for you. I’ll send the car to the top of the building, and then the charges I’ve set there will snap the cable.” Holding the gun trained steadily on them, he pressed the button to summon the functional express car.
“You won’t get away with this,” Brandon told him harshly.
“Oh, I think I will,” Cole replied with a smile. “This time, I’ve planted careful evidence. Everyone will believe that Charles Logan is responsible. I
’ve thought it out, and I think that’s best. I’ll be able to watch him suffer while people say he killed his children as well as his enemies. One day, if I think he’s suffered enough, I’ll kill him, too.”
From the corner of her eye, Michele saw Ian and Jon exchange quick glances, and she knew that neither of them would walk meekly into the elevator. Ian’s arm tightened around her, and she realized he was getting ready to push her aside in the instant before he leaped toward Cole.
She was frozen, unable to move or make a sound.
The prosaic ding of the arriving elevator car didn’t distract Cole’s attention from them, but as the doors opened a furious voice succeeded all too well.
“What the hell is this all about?” Charles Logan demanded wrathfully, stepping out of the car. His fierce gray eyes swept the paralyzed group a few feet in front of him, almost jerking away when they encountered the sight of his daughter in the shelter of Ian Stuart’s embrace.
He saw Cole then, and in the eternal moment that they looked at each other face-to-face for the first time, it was obvious that Charles Logan recognized this man as his son. The expression in his eyes was pain and regret—and acceptance.
For a long time afterward, Michele wondered if, in the end, that was the one thing Cole was unable to bear. Because if there was any sanity left in him, it must have been the most bitter blow of all that after the long years of hatred, he looked into his father’s eyes for the first time—and knew without a doubt that he could have claimed his birthright.
Cole let out a hoarse cry and stumbled back, the hand not holding the gun lifting as if to ward off some horror. Maybe he forgot about the gaping elevator doors his own handiwork had left jammed open. Or maybe he just lost his balance.
Ian and Jon tried to reach him, but they were too late.
—
It took hours to explain what was necessary to the police, hours of questions and statements. A past buried for too long had to be exhumed and minutely examined even as Cole’s body was extricated from the bottom of the elevator shaft and carried away in a coroner’s wagon and a bomb was safely defused. The security men, told to leave the building by Brandon Stuart after Cole had forced him to give the order, returned, a bit sheepish that they hadn’t realized the order was made under duress.
The police were, to put it mildly, upset to find that sabotage had gone on for several weeks without being reported, and they had a number of harsh things to say about the matter. But the Logan/Stuart feud was as real—if incomprehensible—to them as it was to the principals, and so they were less severe than they might have been.
Or their almost unwilling compassion might have sprung from a different source. The feud had caused a death for the first time in more than a century, and though the result of that was never alluded to, it was obvious that the haunting final battle had ended that war forever.
Michele knew that. She sat close beside Ian in the lounge where the police had taken their statements, and though it hurt her to see her father’s face, she couldn’t stop looking at him. As the entire sordid story had been pieced together in this quiet room, she had watched those fierce eyes lose their fire and that strong face slacken and go gray. It had taken a series of near-tragedies and one final one to bring home to Charles Logan the devastation of hate, and it wasn’t a lesson he could ignore.
He had fathered a child thirty-five years ago, but his worst sin hadn’t been disclaiming that fact; he was just as responsible for the seeds of hate as those of life.
The feud was over, but the cost had been terrible. There was no way of knowing what Cole might have been, and though Michele couldn’t grieve for the man who had fallen to his death, she was saddened by the waste of his life.
And then there was Jackie.
“Somebody has to tell her,” Michele said to Jon when the police finally began putting away their notebooks.
Her brother looked at her for a long moment, then said simply, “I don’t know if I can.”
Michele understood his reluctance. Of them all, Jackie had been the innocent pawn, ruthlessly used and sacrificed. She had been taught to hate, her mind filled with tales of treachery and worse, then she had lost her heart to a man who had set out to seduce her for his own mad purpose.
Jon knew only too well how Jackie would feel when she discovered the truth about Cole. And he knew there was every chance she would never forgive him for his part in what had happened to her; if she had never been taught to hate, she might never have been a tool for Cole to use.
“I don’t know if I can,” Jon repeated.
“You have to,” Michele told him gently.
He knew that, too. “Yes. I’ll…take Dad home and then go to her.”
Brandon Stuart, who had been listening to them in silence, said to Jon, “You go ahead. I’ll take Charles home. He shouldn’t be alone.”
The shocks of the day had had a numbing effect, and Michele felt only faint surprise as she looked at Ian’s father. “You?”
He smiled just a little. “Why not? We’re going to have to make peace or risk losing our children—and grandchildren. We might as well start now.” He rose and went over to Charles Logan, who watched his approach with grim eyes.
Michele almost held her breath; she could feel both Ian and Jon waiting with just as much tension. And it was somehow ironic that the first words spoken by the two old warriors directly to each other in more than three decades were both prosaic and completely in character.
“If you came in the Mercedes,” Brandon Stuart said, “you can drive us.”
Charles Logan got slowly to his feet, still frowning. Irritably, he said, “I’ll be damned if I will. My car’s never had a Stuart in it.”
“There is,” Brandon said, “a first time for everything. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“I’ll buy my own,” Charles muttered, but he was moving with the other man toward the hallway.
The two policemen still in the room stared after them as if they couldn’t quite believe their eyes.
—
Hours later, curled up beside Ian on his couch, Michele was still finding it hard to believe. “Just…walked out together,” she murmured. “Two nice men going for coffee.”
Proving that he understood what shock could do to people, Ian mused, “Think they’ll still be speaking to each other at our wedding?”
“They’re both numb, I think. That’s bound to wear off eventually. But…after today, I can believe in almost anything.”
They hadn’t talked much about Cole, not because either had forgotten the final sight—and sound—of him, but because it was still too much with them to be discussed. Michele had explained her sudden arrival at the building, showing Ian the original of the warning and telling him about the other realizations she’d had. First had been her nagging awareness that it was unlikely their enemy could have known she had gotten involved with Ian on Martinique; so busy stirring things up in Atlanta, how could he have known? Unless, she had realized, he was in touch with the only “friend” on the island—Jackie.
The “Lady of Shalott” her subconscious had prodded her with that morning had been perfectly clear once she had made the proper connection. It hadn’t been the poem itself, but a few words of a single line that had floated around in her mind.
“Which words?” Ian had asked.
“ ‘The mirror cracked.’ I must have been thinking of a reflection that wasn’t quite right. I’d thought before that Cole looked familiar, but I didn’t know who he reminded me of.”
“I knew when he popped out of nowhere waving that gun,” Ian had admitted. “But at the party Friday night, all I knew was that something bothered me about the four of you standing together.”
Michele didn’t like to think about the frightening moments before Cole’s death, but she couldn’t help but wonder about her father’s timely arrival.
“Did you hear what Dad told the police about why he’d come to the building?”
“He
said he’d gotten a call warning him that you and Jon were in danger,” Ian remembered.
After a thoughtful moment, Michele said, “We’ve had a lot of helpful warnings, haven’t we? Almost as if somebody was watching over us.”
“Like you said, after today, I’d be willing to believe in almost anything. All I know for sure is that I love you, Michele Logan.”
Glorying in the one certainty that had never wavered despite the odds against it, she murmured, “I love you, too, Ian Stuart.” And gave herself up to the wonder of that.
Epilogue
Snow fell on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t totally unheard of in the Deep South, but it was certainly unusual enough to merit considerable comment. And though Northerners inured to harsh winters would have considered the scant few inches of white stuff no more than a minor inconvenience, snowplows were rare birds in Atlanta, and the city had come to a virtual standstill.
Michele loved it.
She thought it was apt that after meeting Ian on a hot island paradise and then struggling with him to preserve their love through weeks of cold rain and sleet, they should be married while an uncommon snowfall blanketed the ground outside the tiny church they had chosen. Apt and curiously symbolic of the starkly different stages of their relationship: the tropical heat of passion, the cold rain of worry and anguish, the soft snowfall of peace and contentment.
Michele felt that peace, and it grew even stronger to merge with an almost overwhelming wave of love as Ian slipped his arms around her from behind and rested his chin on top of her head.
“You’re very quiet, wife,” he murmured.
She smiled, still gazing out the window of their bedroom at the falling snow. “I was just thinking how confused some of the newspapers seemed to be. They didn’t know whether to headline the first Christmas Eve snow in ages, or the first wedding ever between a Logan and a Stuart.”
The last couple of weeks had been decidedly hectic, not the least because Charles Logan’s (reluctant but resigned) announcement of his daughter’s engagement to Ian Stuart had created more than a nine-days’ wonder.