Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3)

by Roxanne St Claire

  The Rueckheim & Eckstein box with the Cracker Jack logo sat right on his desk, empty now, Ari supposed. So the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t come here yet, or if they had, they’d taken only the artifacts—and the gold bar—and ignored the box they came in. How would Michelle feel about that? Mad enough to fire a gun at Ari?

  “There’s probably nothing in that box now,” Ari said.

  “Oh, yes, there is, and we’re going to get it right now. The sliding glass door is open.”

  “It is?” Ari peered at the slider on the other side of the office and, sure enough, Dr. Marksman had been distracted or lazy enough to leave it open an inch. Damn it.

  They rounded the back of the building, walked right up to the sliding glass door, and opened it without so much as an alarm beep. Frustration welled up inside Ari, and she dug for another plan.

  Except there wasn’t one.

  Michelle made her slide open the door—cleverly leaving Ari’s fingerprints everywhere—and nudged her inside.

  “Open the box,” Michelle ordered, pulling out her cell phone and flicking on its flashlight.

  Ari touched the box and carefully lifted the lid. “It’s empty.”

  “Like hell it is.” Michelle came closer, peering over the top into the box. “That’s a false bottom.”

  It was? Ari reached in and tapped the wood, but it felt solid, not hollow at all. “Are you sure of that?”

  “Positive. We…I put it there.”

  She looked up at Michelle, the flashlight making the lines deeper all around the other woman’s eyes. “Why?”

  “To hide something.”

  “What?”

  Michelle’s smile was slow and wry. “You know, if I tell you, I’ll have to kill—”

  She froze at a sound. Outside. Footsteps.

  “In there.” She pushed Ari toward the open door of a small powder room. Ari hesitated, squinting into the darkness to see a figure moving, a flashlight cast down. He moved slowly, deliberately, like—

  Michelle saw him, too, shoving Ari into the room with her free hand and never once giving an inch with that damn gun. Without making a noise, Michelle shut the door and turned to face Ari, who actually had to bite her lip to keep from screaming the words that ricocheted around her head and heart.

  Was that Luke?

  “One word, one squeak, one breath, and you’re dead.”

  Ari blinked at her, having absolutely no doubt Michelle was telling the truth. “Why?”

  “Because I’ll kill you.”

  “But why? All of this for gold?” Did it really have that kind of power over people?

  “For freedom,” she mouthed, getting closer. “You know what it’s like to be under a man’s thumb, under his control, forced to…” She shook her head. “No, you don’t. But I do, and I found my ticket out, and I’m…shhh.”

  A heavy footstep near the slider made Michelle’s eyes flash with fear and determination. With the barrel still jabbing her in the back, Ari followed orders and stayed still and quiet.

  Except for her brain. Her thoughts were screaming to Luke, hollering for his attention, demanding he come in and save her.

  Another footfall, and then the glass door rattled as it slid wider.

  Come on, Luke. I’m here. You know it. You feel it.

  A footstep on the office floor confirmed he was in. He had to see the box. Check the bathroom, Luke.

  Silence.

  Seconds ticked by endlessly, into two or three long, miserable minutes, maybe more. Finally, Michelle backed away from the door and seemed to breathe for the first time.

  “All right,” she whispered. “Let’s do this.” She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the office, and suddenly sucked in a noisy hiss, followed by a dark curse.

  Ari looked past her, eyes fully adjusted to the darkness, and stared at the empty desk.

  The box was gone.

  “Someone’s gonna die,” Michelle ground out.

  Ari had a very bad feeling that someone might be her.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Luke spotted the Mazda and Arielle’s license plate from the corner of his eye. Why would she park in someone’s driveway? A hundred different scenarios played out in his mind, none of which made any sense.

  Could someone have taken her against her will? Did she have a late meeting with Marksman? Would she have come back to retrieve the artifacts, or the gold? Did it matter to her?

  Parking on the street, he stared at Arielle’s car and reached under his truck seat, grabbing his Glock. He hadn’t fired a gun since the bullet that had killed Cerisse and her father. On his next assignment, he’d never even taken his weapon out.

  And now, he almost didn’t trust himself. But he took it anyway, along with his flashlight and phone.

  He climbed out of the truck and strode to the little blue subcompact, shining a light inside. The first thing he saw was a cell phone that looked like Ari’s on the backseat floor and then a small brown handbag he recognized as hers on the passenger seat. She left her car without either one?

  He backed away from the vehicle, turning toward the darkened land at the end of the street. That fat, circular peninsula known as the Mound House museum was where the Case House was.

  Pointing the gun down, he headed toward the entrance of Mound House, jumping the metal chain fence and peering toward the acres of land.

  He turned off his flashlight and easily navigated without it. He’d been there once before, and that was all he needed to find his way. In fact, he closed his eyes periodically to hear better, but the only sounds were critters in trees, the occasional bird, and some crickets.

  And a splash.

  He stopped dead, turning to his left, recognizing the rhythmic sound of a paddle hitting water on his left. He was immediately transported to the Camopi River, the splat splat of a pirogue cutting through the water on a smuggling mission to or from the gold mines. The natives moved like silent night creatures, but a well-trained Legionnaire could hear that nearly imperceptible sound of moving water.

  Who was rowing down this canal this late at night?

  Someone moving fast, he decided, someone cutting the water with somewhat desperate strokes. Luke hunched down and headed toward the sound, off the path, around bushes to the water’s edge, checking out the deserted landscape. It wasn’t a likely place to take a late-night canoe ride.

  He followed the sound, staying behind a row of mangroves and pepper trees until he had to stop or possibly be spotted, waiting for the rower to appear in the thin moonlight. A man in a dark jacket paddled the boat, steering into a small landing and climbing out with the help of his oar.

  He was heavyset and fairly tall, but too far away for Luke to make out any features. The man left an old metal canoe and walked with purpose toward the Case House, a jacket with a hood blocking any chance of Luke getting a read on the guy’s face.

  Luke hung back in the bushes and watched the man, following at a safe distance.

  He passed the Case House and kept moving, headed toward the tiny office building where Luke and Arielle had taken her crate of seashells for examination.

  The man walked around the back, and Luke followed, watching him approach the sliding glass door, then he walked right in.

  He disappeared into the building, and Luke waited, peering around in the shadows, listening, trying to get close to a window without being seen.

  Was Arielle here? Why couldn’t she send him some telepathic message, damn it? What had she said she did to get her words from the universe? Close her eyes, block everything out, listen.

  But all he heard was the man’s footfalls as he left the same way he came in, and Luke backed into the shadows, weapon drawn, ready to do whatever needed to be done.

  The man carried a big box, running. No, not a box. The box. The Cracker Jack crate. It had to be empty by the way he moved. Luke had carted that box with its original contents, and it had weighed at least eighty pounds. The man moved with more purpose now
, following the same path he’d come, heading back to his canoe, carrying the container as if it held…gold.

  But that wasn’t possible. Surely no one left that single bar in there.

  He turned at another sound from the house and saw two figures coming out the back. Two women—and one was Arielle. He opened his mouth to shout, but suddenly she started running full speed toward the man with the box. The other woman held back, but Arielle was determined to get him, her dark hair flying as she ran silently over the grass.

  Not silently enough. The man turned, froze, and Arielle kept going straight at him. Every cell in Luke’s body went on alert as he watched the scene unfold in slow motion. The man lifting the box, Arielle reaching out her hands, and the woman by the house slowly walking toward them both.

  Arielle tried to seize the box from the man, but he yanked it away, and she leaped on him, both of them rolling to the ground.

  “You thief!” the man called. “You can’t have it!”

  Luke started toward the melee, but paused as he saw the woman coming toward them both, a gun in her hand. As that registered, so did her identity. Michelle.

  “Get him, Ari! Get the box!”

  She was in on this? Part of this? Betrayal, like bile, rose up, taking him right back to that same jungle again, to another moment when the woman he’d thought he could love—he’d thought he did love—proved him wrong.

  No, she wasn’t like Cerisse. Not even close. What he was seeing was simply…what he was seeing. And that wasn’t always all there was.

  “Get the box!” Michelle yelled.

  Arielle yanked the crate from the man’s hand, but he gave her a solid push and whipped around. “It’s mine!” he growled at her. “You’re a thief!”

  Behind them, Michelle took slow, measured steps, her hands raised to aim a gun. “Get the box, Ari.”

  Arielle looked over her shoulder, then back at the man. “Give me the box, or we’re both dead.” She was right. Michelle’s bullet could go right through Arielle and into the man. He’d seen it happen.

  Luke had to shoot Michelle.

  The man gave Arielle a vicious shove backward, pivoting to run toward the water. As he took off, his hood flew back, and Luke could see his face perfectly. He recognized the mason, Duane Dissick. Of course, a man who had access, time, and tools to look for gold he must have known was hidden somewhere.

  “Go get him!” Michelle ordered.

  Arielle stayed on the ground, shaking her head.

  “Get him. He has the map, the letters, everything. Everything we need to be rich and free.”

  That’s what Arielle wanted? Of course not, but…

  Still on the ground, she barely turned, fighting for breath. “You get him. I don’t care about any of that.”

  “Then you’re dead.”

  “No, you are.” Luke’s voice echoed through the night, shocking both of them.

  “What?”

  “Luke!”

  In an instant, Michelle dropped to the ground behind Arielle, her gun at Arielle’s head. “Go get that guy and that box, or I’ll put a bullet right through her brain.”

  “Please, Luke. Please.” The terror in her voice sliced right through him. “Do what she says. I don’t want to die. Please!”

  Wordlessly, a plan forming, he took off toward the water, in the same direction as the mason, slowing only when he was in the shadows, then slipping behind the office building to line up his shot. He didn’t give a shit about Duane Dissick, but he’d die before he let anything happen to Arielle.

  Leaning around the corner, he saw Michelle force Arielle to a stand, spin her around, and push her about a foot ahead, making her walk toward the water.

  Luke’s blood turned to ice as his posture mirrored hers. Lifting his gun. Finger on the trigger. Steady. If Michelle took five or six more steps, Luke could shoot her…and his bullet could go through her and right into Arielle.

  He had to shoot that pistol out of Michelle’s hands.

  Off by a millimeter, and Arielle would be dead. But this time…this time…he closed his eyes and believed what he couldn’t see. Then he fired.

  * * *

  The sound shocked her, like a cannon in her head. Ari threw her body to the ground, waiting for the agonizing pain of a bullet.

  “Arielle! Arielle!”

  That was Luke’s voice, coming from the darkness, desperate and ragged and drowned out by Michelle’s unearthly screams.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

  “You’re not hit!” Luke shouted, the words giving Ari the ability to stop holding every cell frozen in fear. She rolled over, seeing Luke running toward her.

  “I’m not hit,” she confirmed, more to assure herself than him.

  Michelle wasn’t shot either, but her screams got louder as she dropped to her knees and held out empty hands. Before Ari could blink, Luke scooped up her pistol with his other hand. He dropped next to Arielle, and she reached both her arms to him and squeezed him so hard she could have cracked a rib.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “For losing the map?” Michelle hollered. “He has the map, you idiots! Get him! He has it all! The maps, the letters from that Balls guy, everything! It’s in the crate!”

  “No worries,” Luke said, pulling out his phone. “I know who he is. The sheriff will get him, and we don’t give a crap about gold.”

  “Then what about all those bones and masks and thousand-year-old dead Indians buried on that land?”

  Ari gasped softly. “What?”

  “That hill is full of caves and graves and shit.”

  “A grave for Jim Purty,” Luke said dryly.

  Michelle choked. “What? He’s dead?” The utter horror in her voice told Ari that her instincts had been wrong. Michelle hadn’t killed the builder. “I thought he…I thought he…left me.”

  “We found his body on the hill this morning,” Ari said softly.

  “He’s dead?” She sobbed the word this time, folding in half. “Who killed him?”

  “I thought you did,” Ari said.

  “Me?” She covered her mouth with both hands. “I love him. Loved him.” Another sob racked her. “He didn’t leave me. He didn’t leave me!”

  “Luke, you know that was the mason who just ran off?” Ari asked.

  “I know, Duane Dissick.”

  Michelle shot up. “That bastard! He killed Jim! I know it. He figured everything out and knew we were looking for gold. He killed him.”

  Luke stood, glancing to the water.

  “You can’t let him get away, Luke,” Ari said. “He’s a murderer.”

  He didn’t answer, but handed Michelle’s gun to Arielle. “Can you handle this?”

  She gave him a look that she knew he understood as no, but took it anyway. “Get him, and I’ll call the sheriff. She’s not going to hurt me. I know it.”

  “If she does…”

  “I know what to do.” She elbowed him. “Go.”

  “I’ll be back.” He kissed her forehead, turned, and disappeared into the darkness. After a second, she heard the splash of one of the canoes left near the water’s edge and a paddle. Ari stood in the silence with a gun, a phone, and a weeping woman.

  Keeping her distance and the gun—purely the most foreign thing she’d ever held—on Michelle, she called the deputy on Luke’s contact list, told him where they were and why, and then settled down to wait.

  Michelle’s sobs had turned to shudders.

  “You really loved him.” It wasn’t a question, because Ari already knew the answer.

  “He wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. As soon as he came into our offices, I felt something. Like my whole chest would explode.”

  “He was The One for you,” Ari said softly.

  Michelle looked up. “Yeah. And now he’s dead.”

  She wanted to say there’d be another One, but Ari wasn’t at all sure that was true. One is, well, One. “Can you tell me about the bones and graves in the hil
l?”

  “Jim found stuff in the house,” she said, swiping at her running nose. “Letters from the guy who owned it, written to that baseball player.”

  “Cutter Valentine,” Ari supplied.

  She nodded. “He was supposed to find them when he took the house down. I guess Balls—that’s how he signed his letters, honestly, Uncle Balls—thought the builder would give the whole box of letters to Cutter. But he…” She looked sheepish. “He kept it all when he read about the gold.” She sighed hard. “And now he’s dead.”

  The universe had a way of working like that, Ari thought. But she didn’t have to tell Michelle. Her expression said she knew all about retribution.

  “How did Balls find the gold?”

  “His wife found it,” she said. “She was some kind of, you know, like you. A Native American. She found all those shells and stuff that you saw in that box, and then she found gold and jewels. Even found those pearls. But I hid them in the kitchen of the house, and that bastard Dissick must have found them.”

  And he used them to mark Jim Purty’s grave. “What about the maps?”

  “Oh, they’re in the bottom of that crate where Jim and I hid them.”

  “Didn’t you make copies?”

  “Jim did and put them in a safe-deposit box, but I don’t know where it is or who has a key. I don’t have any idea. I trusted him, and then I figured he ditched me—that he wanted the gold all to himself. I helped him fake the core sampling so it looked like there was nothing but shells in the mound. I helped him delay and delay the building. We wanted enough time to find the gold. Then he got fired.” She practically spat the word. “And now I know who told the owner that Jim was purposely delaying things.”

  “Duane Dissick.”

  “Of course. He figured it out, or maybe Jim brought him in and offered him a cut so he could help us find it. He said he might do that and I told him not to. Then he…disappeared. I thought he’d double-crossed me.”

  “How could you not find the gold if you had maps?”

  “They’re not in English, and the pictures are really hard to understand. We tried, and we thought we were following the map, but the gold was never where we thought it would be.”

  In the distance, Ari heard a siren and breathed easier. But where was Luke? No gunshot, no shouting, no nothing. Where was he?