Moriah's Landing Bundle

by Amanda Stevens

  “Watch yourself with Manning. He’ll chew you up and spit you out,” Brody warned. “Trust me, you don’t want to get on that guy’s wrong side.”

  “Is that why you let him and Cassandra cheat?” Jonah asked.

  Brody blanched stark white. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, like a fish out of water.

  “Come on, Brody, why else would you let a woman in your game, let alone someone as flaky as that one?” Jonah had seen the way Cassandra was talking to Brody before she left. It was so unlike Brody to take that kind of abuse from anyone—let alone a woman. Cassandra and Brody. Jonah couldn’t imagine a more anomalous pair.

  Brody took a moment to compose himself. Either he was surprised that Jonah was aware of the cheating or he really hadn’t known. Either way, he was upset and trying damn hard not to show it. “Don’t let her getup fool you. That is one sharp woman. She plays cards better than most men I’ve known. Just not better than Manning. Neither of them would have to cheat.”

  “Maybe they don’t have to, but they do. She and Manning have a system where she tells him what everyone has by touching a different color bracelet.”

  Brody stared at him. “Bull. Do you think I wouldn’t know if someone was cheating in my own card game?”

  Jonah shrugged.

  Brody was visibly rattled. “Yeah, well, while you’re considering your options, here’s one you’d better reconsider. Stay away from Kat Ridgemont.”

  Jonah raised an eyebrow at him. “You aren’t serious? Have you seen the woman?”

  “She’s fine,” Brody agreed. “But being around her will definitely be dangerous to your health. Take my word for it.”

  Jonah felt his heart begin to pound. “How could hanging around her be dangerous?”

  Brody shook his head, finished his drink and went to the door. “Just consider yourself warned.” He waited there for Jonah to follow him so he could lock up. Jonah would have to come back for Cassandra’s glass later tonight. Getting in with these cheap locks would be a piece of cake.

  “So tell me,” Jonah said conversationally as they walked down the hall together, “what was Leslie Ridgemont like? I heard she was a wild woman.”

  Brody laughed and seemed to relax a little. “She was hell on wheels. She flirted with everyone who came into the diner—no matter how young or how old.” He smiled over at Jonah. “She taught me everything I know.”

  Jonah didn’t know whether to believe Brody or not. “Like hell. She wouldn’t take on a punk kid like you. Shoot, you couldn’t have been more than what? Fifteen? When she died?”

  Brody swore. “I was seventeen and big for my age.” He grinned as if in memory. “She liked me. Said I made her laugh.”

  “You’re making me laugh,” Jonah said. “She must not have been very choosy.”

  Brody stopped walking. He was so damn easy to get going. “I’ll have you know there were a hell of a lot of guys she flirted with, but most she wouldn’t even give the time of day to after working hours.”

  “Yeah? Name just one.”

  “Like…Marley Glasglow. She flirted with him all the time, had him practically crawling, and then she’d act like she didn’t even know who he was when she left the diner.” Brody started walking again. “Why do you think he hates women so much?”

  Marley Glasglow. He’d been fifteen the spring Leslie Ridgemont was murdered—and on the town green that night.

  “You don’t think Marley could have killed her?” Jonah asked ghoulishly. “You were there that night, right? You must have seen him.”

  Brody stiffened. “I thought I told you to forget about all that. Especially the daughter. You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t.” He pushed open the exit and started to take the stairs down into the darkness. “Oh, one more thing. I have an errand I need you to run for me tonight.”

  As Jonah watched Brody go a few minutes later, he realized his hands were shaking. Brody knew about the danger around Kat. Why was that? Hearing Brody warn him off only made it more real. And more vital that he warn Kat. If only he knew who the hell he was warning her about.

  IT WAS AFTER nine-thirty when the headlights of Kat’s car illuminated the sign up to the Manning estate: Private Road. No Trespassing. She turned down the narrow paved lane that cut a thin swath through the woods. Not even a glimmer of a moon or stars shone through the branches as the road wound its way up the hillside.

  The isolated, tree-choked mansion had always creeped her out. Gnarled and misshapen by the wind and weather, the trees seemed to stand guard around the massive house, as protective as trolls under a bridge, as malformed as Frankenstein’s monster.

  She knew that wasn’t all that was creeping her out. She’d made a call on her cell phone as she left Elizabeth’s to her source inside the FBI. What she’d heard about Jonah Ries was true. He had been ousted from the FBI and was still facing criminal charges. What was a man like that doing asking questions about her—and her mother’s murder?

  Her attention was drawn back to business as the twisted road straightened, the trees drawing back a little for Dr. Manning’s old mansion. A ten-foot-tall electric fence encircled it.

  She stopped at the hulking gate but didn’t even have time to press the intercom button before the gate swung open as if by magic. With more than her share of qualms, she drove through.

  She’d heard stories about Dr. Leland Manning since she was a girl. Along with the silly rumors that he was a vampire and got his blood from the fresh corpses he used for his research were tales of a secret society of mad scientists who did Frankenstein-like experiments in their laboratories around Moriah’s Landing. Dr. Manning, it was said, was the ringleader.

  Kat discounted rumors. But she realized as she parked in front of the haunted-looking house, this isolated place would be the perfect hideaway for a vampire. Or a leading mad scientist.

  As she opened her car door, she was struck by the quiet. In the woods around Moriah’s Landing, the spring night had been alive with the reassuring sound of insects and birds. Here, she heard nothing in the impenetrable stillness. Not even a hint of a breeze. The leaves on the trees hung lifeless. Not a breath of air stirred the spring night. No scent of the sea. No whisper of life. Just one small light burning inside the house.

  With her purse clutched next to her body—the Beretta and her cell phone tucked inside should she need either—she climbed out of her car. She was almost to the massive wooden door at the front of the structure when, like the gate, it swung open, startling her. She stared at an aging woman in a bad dress.

  “Ms. Ridgemont,” the woman said, her voice deep, her accent old-world European. “The doctor will see you in his study.” The woman didn’t wait, just turned on one of her blocky heels and started down a long dark hallway.

  Kat followed, surprised at the furnishings. She’d expected the inside to match the outside: dated furniture, thick musty drapes, foot-worn Oriental rugs, walls gloomy and dark with aging wood.

  It appeared Manning had gutted the house, then painted the interior a laboratory sterile white, filling it with chrome and sleek black modern furniture, all in stark contrast to the Munsters look of the outside.

  The matron had stopped a few feet ahead of her in front of an open doorway. “Dr. Manning,” she announced from the doorway. “Ms. Ridgemont.”

  “That will be all, Odette,” said a clipped, gruff male voice.

  Odette gave a slight bow then retreated to the back of the house. Kat stepped forward to peer into the study, relieved and surprised to find Dr. Manning in neither a long white lab coat or an all-black suit. An average-looking man in his fifties, the doctor stood before the small blaze burning in the marble fireplace wearing jeans, clogs and an Oxford button-down checked shirt.

  Relieved, Kat stepped into the room.

  Dr. Manning turned slowly. “Ms. Ridgemont.”

  Her relief was short-lived as she was struck by the intensity of his piercing dark gaze—and the stark whiteness
of his skin.

  He extended his hand. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  His touch startled her more than even his eyes. His hand could have been the flesh of a corpse it was so clammy and cold. He smiled as he enveloped her hand in his, giving her the impression it wasn’t the first time he’d seen that reaction to his touch.

  “You said on the phone that you wanted to hire me,” she said, hoping to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  He nodded, seeming amused. “Please have a seat.”

  She sat on the edge of the leather couch. It, too, felt cold and damp. He took a chair across from her, crossing his legs, fastidiously adjusting one pant leg before looking at her again.

  “My laboratory was broken into last night,” he said. “I’m convinced the perpetrators were youths who didn’t realize that they were destroying important research materials.” He took a breath as if winded. “Unfortunately, what they took I must have back.”

  “You’ve contacted the police?”

  He shook his head. “Let me be frank with you, Ms. Ridgemont. I’m not fond of the police. I was once young and…adventurous myself.”

  She couldn’t imagine this man ever being either.

  “I feel calling the police in on what was obviously just a prank would do these juveniles a disservice,” he continued. “I don’t wish for them to go to jail or to be punished. I’m sure by now they regret what they did.”

  She wouldn’t count on that, she thought as she pulled out her notebook and pen.

  “I just want my property returned,” he continued. “I believe you can use discretion in finding these youths for me and making them an offer.”

  She looked up, startled. “An offer?”

  He nodded solemnly. “I want you to offer them a reward for the return of my property, no questions asked. Does that make you uncomfortable?”

  She would never be comfortable around this man, especially with him reading her so easily. “You’re talking about rewarding criminal behavior.”

  “I’m talking about the expedient return of my property,” he corrected. “It provides me with no benefit to have these young people arrested. I don’t have the time or any interest in a trial. I don’t have that thirst for justice that you have. To me it’s just an unfortunate incident I hope to rectify with your help.”

  Pen poised, she asked, “What exactly was stolen?”

  “I prefer to keep that just between myself and the three young people who broke into my laboratory,” he said, making her look up again in surprise.

  “You saw them?” How else would he know that there were three, let alone that they were young? Her heart pounded at the thought of Emily being one of them. Is that why the doctor had “hired” her for this job? Because he knew that her half sister was involved?

  Dr. Manning rose. “If you would so kindly come with me.” He started out of the room and she followed, amazed that the room felt cold and drafty even with a fire going this late in May. But then the whole house felt as cold and impersonal as a morgue, she thought with a shiver.

  She trailed him down the hallway to the back of the house, where he picked up a flashlight. As he opened the outside door for her, she spotted another structure hidden behind the house and surrounded by yet another substantial electrified fence. His laboratory?

  She slowed her steps at the thought of actually going inside. As it turned out, she had nothing to fear. He didn’t head for the locked gate, but followed the fence around to the side where she could see a few broken limbs on the ground.

  “They climbed the tree and dropped to the other side of the fence, then broke in through the heating vent on the roof of the laboratory,” Dr. Manning explained.

  “This doesn’t sound like kids,” she had to tell him.

  “You will see that the ground was muddy from the fog,” he said, shining the beam of the flashlight under the thick branches of the tree nearest the fence.

  Kat followed the beam of light, agreeing with Dr. Manning’s assessment of how the thieves had gotten in based on the footprints under the tree.

  The doctor reached into his pocket and withdrew what appeared to be a garage-door opener, startling her for an instant into thinking it was a stun gun. He pressed a button and a large yellow yard light flashed on, blinding her.

  As she turned away from the sudden brightness, she caught movement in the shadows at the rear of the house. A young spry female in a dress sneaked along the side of the house to disappear into the darkness. Definitely not Odette, the housekeeper.

  “You will note the sizes of the prints,” Dr. Manning was saying, his back to the house, making her pretty sure he hadn’t seen the woman. “I would say two older boys and possibly a younger boy—or a girl.”

  Kat bent down to inspect the impressions in the once-muddy soil in the beam of the doctor’s flashlight. Three pairs of sneakers, two about size tens, she’d guess, the smaller print only slightly larger than her own size seven.

  The soles of the larger two prints had left a design in the mud. Both a popular brand of athletic shoes worn by teens. The smaller tracks had a distinct tread, but no telltale designer’s name left imprinted in the mud.

  Kat rose, thinking about Emily’s size eight cross trainers, and at the same time wondering about the woman she’d just seen watching them from the shadows of the house, wondering what size shoe she wore.

  “It must get lonely out here,” she said, glancing back at the house, seeing nothing in the shadows now.

  “Lonely?” He sounded as if he’d never heard the word before. “I have my work,” he said in that clipped, cold tone. “I have Odette. I have my wife.”

  In that order?

  He started back toward the house.

  “Is it possible that one of them might have been responsible for any of the prints near the tree?” she had to ask.

  He stopped so abruptly, she almost ran into him. “Neither Odette nor my wife wear sneakers. Those were sneaker tracks, were they not? The kind young people wear these days?”

  He must get MTV in his eerie house, she thought glibly.

  She nodded, looking for answers other than the obvious ones and unwilling to dismiss the woman she’d seen. If he didn’t know she sneaked around at night watching him, maybe he also didn’t know she wore athletic shoes when it suited her—or had reason to break into his lab in the middle of the night.

  “Also Odette wears a larger shoe size than those, and my wife takes a much smaller size,” Manning was saying, reading her thoughts again. “You are most welcome to inspect their feet if you don’t believe me. But then why would I go to the trouble of hiring you if I thought the theft was, as they say, an inside job?”

  He had a point. Also she didn’t care to inspect Odette’s feet, although she wouldn’t have minded meeting the woman who appeared to be the doctor’s much younger wife, if out of nothing more than curiosity.

  “What concerns me is how the thieves were able to steal your property and yet get back over both fences with the security you have here,” she told him.

  “Once inside the laboratory, they shut down the power to the fences and cut exit holes with the bolt cutters I keep in there.”

  She didn’t even want to contemplate why he kept bolt cutters in his lab. “Can I see the holes they—”

  “I repaired them at once for obvious security reasons.”

  Was he telling her the truth?

  “I have no reason to lie to you,” he said, reading her perfectly—and shaking her to the soles of her own shoes. He turned and headed back toward the house.

  She followed silently, disturbed by this man and confounded by why anyone would break into his lab. What had the trio taken? Something large enough they hadn’t been able to climb over a fence with it.

  Kat followed him back to his study, determined to pass on the case. Without a word, he pulled out a thick black checkbook from his desk drawer, opened it and picked up his pen.

  “Dr. Manning—”

>   “I’m sure you are busy with other cases, but if you can see your way clear to move this one to the top of your list—” he looked up “—I will compensate you liberally. Say, double your usual hourly rate and a generous bonus if you are successful?”

  “Do you know what my usual hourly fee is?” she asked, unnerved that he just might.

  He smiled. “It really doesn’t matter.”

  She watched him write something on the notepad by his phone, telling herself that money or no money she was walking away from this one. But she couldn’t walk away from the fact that the girl she’d seen in a red jacket running away from the freshly spray-painted bait-shop wall might be Emily. Just as the sneaker prints near Dr. Manning’s lab might be hers.

  Dr. Manning slid the notepad across the desk without even looking at her.

  “That is most generous,” she said, shocked at the amount. She pulled one of her contracts from her purse before she could change her mind. So the guy was creepy. A lot of her clients were weird. It was the nature of the private-eye business.

  He handed her a check for a full day’s work at the ridiculously high hourly wage he’d written on the pad, then he handed her the contract he’d filled in and signed in tight, neat handwriting. She noted he’d added the part about the bonus and had written in a figure—enough money to pay almost a semester of Emily’s tuition at an Ivy League college.

  She put both the check and the contract in her purse next to her Beretta, feeling as if she’d just made a deal with the devil.

  “I’ll be anxiously waiting to hear from you,” the doctor said, closing the checkbook with a snap. An instant later, Odette appeared at the door to walk Kat out.

  It wasn’t until she was in her car, the engine running, that Kat let herself glance back at the house. A curtain flicked aside in one of the backlit second-story windows. For just an instant, a young woman’s face peered out. Then the curtain dropped back into place, the room suddenly dark again. Manning’s wife?

  Kat hit the gas and drove toward the gate, convinced she could feel Dr. Manning’s piercing eyes boring into her the whole way. He’d read her so easily, how could he not know her suspicions about Emily’s involvement?