Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3)

by Roxanne St Claire

  “I need that box,” Michelle said, her voice low and strained, through clenched teeth, looking like she’d snap at any second.

  “I have an idea,” Ari said, wishing she really did have one.

  “What?”

  “Let’s…go get it now.”

  Michelle’s eyes tapered with distrust. “I’m pretty sure a museum is locked at this hour.”

  “How hard can it be to break into a rickety old office?” The place was freakishly out in the open, as she recalled, with nothing but a single chain around the property. It would be quite easy to at least get to the land where the house and office were. When they broke in, surely an alarm would be tripped. Maybe the universe would look kindly on this effort and make it a silent alarm. Maybe.

  Michelle’s mouth turned down at the corner. “Why would you do that?”

  To live. “I told you, there’s stuff in the crate that’s important to me. Those shells and rocks are Native American tools, tools from…my people.”

  “Your people?”

  Yes, it was a stretch, but Ari had to think. “I’m Native American. And my grandmother was a shaman.” She added that partly to sound legit and partly because she prayed Grandma Good Bear’s spirit was protecting her right now.

  Michelle’s look said she wasn’t buying it. “I thought that was a thing you wrap around you in the cold.”

  Ari bit her lip, grateful her captor wasn’t a Mensa candidate. “No, that’s a shawl.”

  She looked embarrassed, closing her eyes.

  “A shaman is like a Native American doctor,” Ari said quickly, trying to make this murderess feel better about herself. Whatever it took to survive.

  “I thought that was a witch doctor.”

  “We don’t really call them that.” She gave a little smile. “Can we go up to Fort Myers Beach now?”

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Because you have the gun, Michelle.”

  The other woman breathed out slowly and nodded, as if the weight that came with that gun—and using it—pressed hard on her. “Go.” But she didn’t sit back or take that damn gun away from Ari’s head.

  Ari didn’t move. She had one more piece of her wild-ass plan, and she prayed Michelle was dumb enough to go along with it. “I don’t suppose you’d let me text someone.”

  Michelle sniffed. “No.” Okay, not that dumb.

  “If I don’t, he’s going to call the cops.”

  She shrugged. “They won’t go to some Indian museum.”

  “No, you’re right.” Ari squeezed the steering wheel and took a chance. “They’d probably go up to North Barefoot Bay to that property because he knows I’ve been there a lot, so if I’m missing, I’m sure that’s where he’d send the cops…to search…for me.”

  Michelle paled, silent.

  “Just give me the phone, and you can watch me text him,” Ari pushed. There had to be a way to clue Luke in. There had to be. Without saying, I’m on my way to Mound House with a gun to my head. Please save me. Maybe she could secretly tap 911.

  Very slowly, Michelle picked up the phone. “I’ll write it.”

  Damn. “Okay.” Which would mean she’d have to put down the gun, right? Would that give Ari a chance to run or fight?

  “What’s your password?”

  “It needs my fingerprint.” Big fat lie, but it worked. Michelle handed the phone to Ari, not willing to let go of the gun.

  “Let me see what you write,” she ordered.

  “Okay.” Ari’s hand was visibly shaking as she thumbed the Home button and brought the screen to life, finding the icon for texting.

  Instantly, she saw a string of texts from Luke, sucking in a quiet breath when the name Michelle showed up. How did he know?

  Ashley, of course. Ashley must have told him. Her head grew light with this small victory, and Ari stole a glance at Michelle, who was squinting hard at the screen. Oh, yes, she’d had reading glasses on when they met at GeoTech. God willing, she hadn’t been able to see her own name in Luke’s texts.

  “Come on, type!” Michelle insisted.

  “I’m thinking of something he’ll believe. If he doesn’t, you know, he’ll call 911.” And they’ll go looking in North Barefoot Bay. She left that unsaid, but it worked.

  Michelle nodded at the phone. “Make it fast.”

  “Okay.” Ari closed her eyes and imagined Mound House, the museum, and Dr. Marksman’s office. Could she use the word mound somehow? A combination of marks and man? Would Luke get that?

  “Hurry.”

  What else was up there? The underground exhibits and the Case House. Case House. Okay, it was something. Ari started typing.

  Sorry we had a fight.

  “Did you?” So Michelle could read that much.

  “Kind of.”

  “Keep going,” Michelle said.

  I’m staying at a girlfriend’s HOUSE.

  She looked up to see Michelle frowning, probably wondering why house was in all caps. She faked a sigh of frustration. “Damn tiny keyboard.”

  “That’s all you need to say.”

  “Oh, no.” Not nearly. “He’ll keep texting if I don’t tell him where I am.”

  “Then he’ll go to that house, and you won’t be there. You think I’m stupid?”

  Hoping you are. “Let me close off the texts for the night, then,” Ari said, her quivering finger hovering.

  Please don’t call. I wanted you to know in CASE—

  She let out another frustrated sigh, pretending the cap letters were a typo, then finished with you wondered.

  She turned the screen to Michelle, who squinted harder, then nodded, satisfied.

  “Send it.”

  She did, along with a heartfelt prayer that Luke McBain wasn’t only The One to love, but he’d also be The One to save her.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Luke marched right back into the Walkers’ house, striding toward Gussie.

  “I thought you went back to the resort.”

  He shoved his phone in front of her. “Does this seem right to you?”

  Frowning, Gussie read the texts. “Um, Ari does have friends other than the people in this house, but no one I would think she’d stay with and not tell me.”

  “What about the words?”

  “What about them?”

  Impatience and worry and a deep, foreboding sense that something was very wrong rocked through him. “Let me see your phone. I want to look at your text messages with her.”

  Still looking confused, Gussie pulled a cell phone from her skirt pocket, tapping it a few times. “Here are the last few texts we exchanged. Why?”

  He skimmed them, looking for random capital letters. Not a one. In fact, she texted with perfect punctuation and capitalization. But not this time.

  “House. Case.” He murmured the words. Had she gone up to the house in North Barefoot Bay to investigate the case? Or had she really accidentally typed those two words in capitals?

  “What was her mood like when she left you, Gussie?”

  She angled her head. “I told you, she was upset. She thought you really believed she’d reported the building project as a violation of that law. You hadn’t talked to her the whole day, and she was devastated.”

  “But Ashley said she was on her way here a while ago, and she stopped at the Super Min. And talked to someone named Michelle. Does she have a friend named Michelle?”

  Gussie shook her head. “I don’t know every single person she’s friends with, Luke, but I never heard her mention a Michelle. We had a bride recently named Michelle, but she was from out of town. Why don’t you just call Ari?”

  “I did,” he admitted. “She’s not answering.”

  Gussie took her phone back and tapped the screen. “She’ll answer me.” As she waited for Ari to pick up, Tom came into the house, walking up to Gussie and wrapping her in his tattoo-covered arms.

  “Hey,” they whispered to each other in that soft, secret, we’re-in-love
kind of voice.

  Tom and Luke greeted each other, but Luke’s attention was riveted on Gussie’s phone. “No answer?”

  “Voice mail.” She held up a finger. “Call me,” she said into the phone. “Luke’s freaking out. Now he’s got me worried. Where are you?”

  “What’s going on?” Tom asked, concerned.

  While Gussie brought Tom—and a few others who gathered, sensing there might be news about the murder—up to speed, Luke stared at Arielle’s text message again, willing it to tell him more than it did.

  “I’m going back up there,” he said.

  “Luke, she didn’t go to a crime scene in the dark. She’s not dumb. There’s nothing in that message that said she did.”

  “Still, she’s missing.”

  “She’s not answering her phone,” Gussie insisted. “She might have changed her mind and taken the wine back to the villa, and she’s in the bathtub drinking it right now. Check there first before going up to the property.”

  Gussie’s idea sounded plausible, but not in his gut. His gut was on fire. “Call this guy.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the deputy’s card he’d taken today. “Let him know we don’t know where she is. I’m going up there. You and Tom go check the villa.”

  Gussie took the card and dropped the fight. “Okay.”

  “Thanks.” Luke hustled back to his truck, climbing in and glancing at the phone as if he could will Arielle to return his calls. He almost texted her again with a question about the words HOUSE and CASE, but something stopped him.

  What was it?

  Intuition. Maybe she wasn’t the only one in this relationship who had it. Slowly blowing out a breath, he drove away, seeking out the back road that led to the far less populated section of the island.

  Gripping the wheel too hard, he rounded the gardens and drove past the small group of bungalows where some of the resort staff lived, searching the night as if he could actually find this woman he cared so much about.

  When did that happen? Not the minute they touched on the hill, he mused. It wasn’t instant love. It wasn’t even love…yet. But there was something. He’d felt it when they kissed in the closet, when they laughed over dinner, when they made out in the grass, and of course last night in the villa. He’d even felt it when they dragged that box up to Mound House and…and…and Case House.

  Case House. Holy shit. Case House! But why?

  He didn’t know, but he trusted his gut and turned the other way toward the mainland.

  * * *

  Ari was plumb out of grand plans. She drove in silence up Highway 41, skipping the scenic, slow route because she had a better chance of seeing a cop on this boring but busy highway. But none was out tonight.

  Michelle grew more anxious with each passing mile, her focus seeming to shift from the road and the plan to Ari.

  “How Indian are you?” she blurted out, breaking the quiet of the car.

  “We generally say ‘Native American’ now. And I’m actually only a quarter. My grandmother was a full-blooded Miwok, but she married an Irish guy, and my mom married another non-Native American.”

  “So, not very.” Still leaning into the front seat without her seat belt, Michelle tipped her head as if analyzing or, at the very least, judging Ari. “But I can see it, I guess. You’re pretty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No wonder that cute builder likes you. I could tell when you guys came to GeoTech,” she mused. “It was easy to give him the fake sample bag, because he was so wrapped up in you.”

  “The fake sample bag? That wasn’t a real core sample from the land? Why?”

  “Buying time.”

  Because she’d left a body buried on the hill? “What did you need time for?”

  “To get the…” She shook her head. “Never mind. Not important.”

  But it was important. “So we still don’t know if that land is an ancient burial ground.”

  Michelle gave her a sharp look, then a sarcastic snort, as if to say, Not ancient. But she gave nothing away. Ari’s only trump card was that Michelle didn’t know what Ari knew.

  “Hey!”

  Ari blinked, realizing she’d drifted into the other lane, her brain fried from the stress of that gun.

  “Please, can you put that thing down?” Ari said. “I’m with you on this. I want to go to this place, and I don’t want to die.”

  “Once I have the…thing I want.”

  “The gold? There isn’t that much,” Ari said. “I told you the archaeologist only found one bar.”

  Michelle closed her eyes for a second. “Just don’t talk about it. I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

  “Are you…in this alone?” Ari asked, ignoring the order not to talk because she could sense it helped calm Michelle. And a calm Michelle was a less dangerous Michelle.

  “I am now.”

  Since she’d shot Jim Purty, Ari thought. “A guy?” she ventured.

  “What else?”

  Ari nodded, snagging the opportunity to connect with her. “What’s his name?”

  She shook her head. “Not important. He’s gone.”

  Really gone, if Ari’s guess that it was Purty was right. And she was sure she was right, because the idea of death was emanating off this woman. Hopefully, not Ari’s death.

  “Did he…” Careful, Ari. “Does he know about the gold?”

  “He found some, and then we found…other stuff.” She gave her head a hard shake. “Honey, if you want a chance of surviving this, do not say another word or ask another question.”

  Ari could tell she meant it this time, so she stayed quiet, concentrating on the road and then the bridge that took them to Fort Myers Beach.

  “I’m not sure where to turn,” she told Michelle. “You have to put it into your GPS.”

  “I don’t have it. Use yours.” She gave Ari her cell phone to thumb with one hand, and the first thing Ari noticed was that she’d missed two calls from Gussie, after the earlier ones from Luke.

  But he hadn’t called again. So, either he didn’t get the text she’d sent, didn’t decipher the secret message, or didn’t care. No, that last one wasn’t an option. He cared, and he’d be there…she believed that. She didn’t know how or why, but that’s how faith worked.

  She found the GPS, and the address for the museum was still programmed in, giving them the directions immediately.

  The only sound in the car was the computerized woman on GPS, guiding them to a tiny finger of land that jutted into a waterway. When they reached the end of the street, Ari’s high beams bathed the entrance to the circular street that formed the perimeter of the small peninsula.

  Access was beyond easy. But then what?

  “Where is this office you were talking about?”

  “On the property. We obviously can’t drive in. We’ll have to climb over that chain and walk to the building.”

  Michelle looked around and made a gesture for her to back up. “Go to the street and park in one of the driveways. I don’t want some roving night guard to see your car here.” Which was exactly what Ari had been counting on. Crap.

  Ari did as she was told, pulling into the last driveway on the residential street that spilled right into the entrance of Mound House. That house was dark, and the driveway empty.

  Maybe the residents would wake up or come home and notice a strange car in the driveway and call the police. Hanging on to one more thin hope, Ari turned off the ignition and waited for the next demand.

  “Give me your keys.” Michelle held out her free hand and took the keys that Ari pulled from the ignition. Then she opened the back door, keeping that damn gun in Ari’s face. She stood far enough away that Ari couldn’t shove the door at her, get the keys, and run.

  “Lead the way,” Michelle ordered.

  And now the gun was jammed into Ari’s back.

  “I need light.” Ari slowed her step and pointed to the car she was loath to leave. “I can use my phone flashlight.” Maybe
she could lean into the backseat and send an emergency 911 call. “Let me get it.”

  “I have a flashlight on my phone,” Michelle said, killing that idea as fast as it came. She added a nudge with the gun, shutting up Ari and her ideas.

  They climbed a few steps up a rise to where a thick metal chain hung from white posts that probably encircled the entire property. Why bother, Ari thought dejectedly. Anyone could break in here.

  They trudged over grass, then found the paved path that led past the two-story Case House in the middle of the property.

  “Is it in there?” Michelle asked, nodding toward the structure.

  The truth was, the box wasn’t in there, and since the building was under a lot of reconstruction, it didn’t look like there was an alarm system, or Ari would have lied and said it was. Her best bet was the office.

  “No. It’s in a small building down around the other side,” she said. “Near the water.”

  As they walked, a plan formed. If she could get away fast enough, maybe she could find some shadowy place and hide. She’d been through the property and in the underground mound exhibit. She knew her way around this area, and Michelle didn’t.

  But could she get away without getting a bullet in the back?

  They arrived at the small wooden structure that served as the offices, that three-quarter moon she’d made love under last night offering plenty of light. Too much light to hope for a safe escape.

  “That doesn’t look too tough to break into,” Michelle said.

  Sadly, it did not. No flashing lights of an alarm system, no padlocks, no guard dogs. What the hell?

  Michelle pushed her around the building, toward the back, then closer to a window. Still holding the gun at Ari’s back, she guided them to the glass to peer into a darkened room. It was the conference area where Ari had met the first time with Dr. Marksman, empty but for a table and chairs.

  Silently, they moved to the next set of windows, which appeared to be a kitchen area. And, last, to the lab that lined the back wall.

  “Holy shit!” Michelle exclaimed. “There it is! You were telling the truth!”