Duplicate Daughter

by Alice Sharpe

  “I got hit on the head,” Nick said, rubbing the crown of his head. “Thankfully, I was wearing my hat.”

  “I thought he shot you,” Katie cried, helping him stand. “Was it the man your father called Carson?”

  “I think so,” Nick said. “He was limping and there was a bloodstained cloth wrapped around his thigh.”

  “Good.”

  “He looked into her eyes and added, “What are you doing here? You promised me you wouldn’t come alone.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I had a feeling.”

  “So you charged in here—”

  “And saved you. Yes.”

  “You didn’t save me.”

  “Of course I did. He heard the sound of my snowmobile—”

  “No, he heard me trying to get in the front door.”

  “Whatever. Tell me what happened.”

  Taking off his knit hat and rubbing his head, he said, “I came in through the back and heard someone ransacking the living room. I went back out the way I’d come and snuck around to the front. I just had my hand on the doorknob when the door flew open. The guy was ready for me. He leveled his gun. I knocked it out of his hand as he fired. He hit me with the butt and the next thing I knew you were here and he got away.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t stick around long enough to kill you?”

  “Maybe he didn’t find what he was looking for,” Nick said, pulling his hat back on. “Maybe he’s hoping I’ll have better luck finding whatever it is we’re all looking for and then he can bop me on the head again and steal it. Did you notice the condition of the house?”

  “I was focused on the open door,” she admitted. “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” He gestured toward the still-open front door. “Take a look.”

  She walked back into the living room and stood for a moment absorbing things.

  “You’ve been searched,” she said.

  “Big time.”

  The room had been turned upside down. Every cushion slit open, every drawer overturned, photographic equipment and computer smashed. All of Nick’s late wife’s paintings had been torn from the walls, some slashed, most wrenched from their frames. Photos of Lily had been stripped from the walls, the logs stacked on the hearth thrown to the floor, the little door on the hearth wide-open, rugs rolled, books plucked from their shelves, CDs and DVDs, lying outside their crushed cases. The room, in utter chaos, was so cold their breath condensed.

  “Oh, Nick. I’m sorry. I guess we’re too late,” Katie said.

  Nick picked up the photo of Patricia and Lily and propped it back on the mantel. “I don’t think Carson found what he wanted,” he said. “He was making a hell of a lot of noise when I came in the back door. He wasn’t done yet. He must have heard me. Help me check the rest of the house. I know he hadn’t reached the kitchen yet.”

  They searched the other rooms and met back in the living room. “Nothing,” Katie said.

  “And so much in here. Makes you think that he somehow knew whatever he wanted was in this room.”

  They both looked at the devastation.

  “Try prying the rocks from the fireplace,” Katie said. “It would have to be a pretty tight fit, but maybe what we’re looking for is a small bag of emeralds.” As Nick found a screwdriver and started chipping away at the cement grout between the rocks, Katie shifted through some of the debris.

  “Some of this just seems destructive for its own sake,” she said. “The CDs and DVDs for instance. Why would anyone open every single case and dump out the contents? That was time-consuming and—”

  “I bet we’re looking for a disk of some kind,” Nick interrupted.

  “That makes sense. Some kind of information on a disk. Any luck with the fireplace?”

  “Not so far. Tell me what else you remember my father mumbling about.”

  “Okay, let’s see. Lily. Patricia. Emeralds. Cooking. Ledges. The fireplace. I can’t think of anything else.” She stared at the wood door. “What about that little door? Could he have hidden something inside there?”

  He shook his head. “It leads to the wood supply. I’ve filled and emptied it dozens of times since my father was here.”

  “Have you ever taken a flashlight and examined up inside like on the ceiling?” she persisted.

  He took his flashlight. Head and shoulders disappearing inside the small wood storage unit, he flashed the light all around the space as Katie peered over his shoulder. The small area was low on wood so the corners were easily visible. There was no handy little hiding spot. “Where does that door lead?” she insisted, pointing at a small door on the opposite wall.

  “To the wood supply. It’s a locked shed because of its access to the house. Give it up, Katie.”

  “Okay, I was wrong,” Katie said, moving to Patricia’s paintings as Nick closed the wooden door and went back to prying rocks. She stacked the paintings, careful to avoid the broken glass, trying to protect the paper. It looked to her like most of them could be reframed and saved. She found no hiding spot for a disk but tears flooded Katie’s eyes as she thought of the legacy Nick’s wife had left for her daughter.

  And how some stranger had tried to destroy it.

  Nick was suddenly at her elbow, pressing a tissue into her hands. “Leave them,” he said.

  “But it’s her legacy—”

  “Her legacy is Lily’s goofy sense of humor. Lily’s trusting nature, her hair and her chin. Patricia’s legacy can’t be destroyed this easily.”

  Katie wiped her eyes. For the first time since meeting Nick, she felt a tinge of jealousy—for a dead woman. Nick’s wife had accomplished a lot in her life, cut short though it was. “How old was Patricia when she died?”

  Nick sighed deeply. Looking around his destroyed house, he said, “Twenty-eight. See that picture? That’s the last one I have of her and Lily. It was taken the summer my father visited. Two weeks before…before she died.”

  “It’s a beautiful frame.”

  “Yes. My father took the photo and had it framed. I’ve loved it despite—”

  Nick stopped talking as he stared at the photo. When he started stepping over the mess to make his way to it, Katie followed. He’d picked it up by the time she got there and was turning it over in his hands. The glass front was cracked, but the frame had held together very well.

  Katie said, “You don’t think—”

  “I don’t know.” Nick slid the levers that held the glass and photo in place, sliding out the cardboard backing and the photo itself so that all that was left was the cracked glass and the frame.

  “The cardboard backing is kind of thick,” Katie said. They took everything into the kitchen and set it on the table. The light was better in this room.

  “Look at the edging around the cardboard,” Katie said. “What if it isn’t edging but a means of holding two separate pieces together?”

  “With a disk hidden inside,” Nick said. He produced a pocketknife and carefully slit the edge of the cardboard lining. With a gentle shake, an unlabeled CD fell onto the table.

  Their success had happened so quickly that for a moment neither could believe it.

  “I was sure it was emeralds,” Katie said.

  “Maybe it is,” Nick commented as he slid the disk into his pocket. “But we’re running out of time and the computer is trashed. Let’s get back to the airstrip. My father has some explaining to do.”

  THE EARLY TWILIGHT hours approached as Nick opened the hangar door and parked the snowmobile outside, ready to give Kitty a ride back to her house. They’d seen no sign of Carson.

  Anxious to see if his father had rallied under Kitty’s care, Nick was still chagrined he’d not thought of getting Kitty involved earlier on. His conscious mind offered as reasonable excuses the unknown gunman, the cut telephone wires, the impossibility of leaving the house until their headlong flight to get his father away from Frostbite. To get Lily away, to get Katie away, and Helen. All decent explanations for such an obvious o
versight.

  But were there deeper reasons he didn’t want to face?

  Did it matter?

  Bill was still feverish but he had a touch more color in his face. Kitty, a woman somewhere in her early sixties with silky white hair and blue eyes that never missed a thing, had taken expert care of the wound and delivered the proper pain medication. Kitty wouldn’t accept a penny for her help, but Nick knew her house was always in need of some kind of maintenance. In a small and relatively secluded town like Frostbite, a lot of business was conducted on the barter system.

  Nick gave Kitty a ride on the snowmobile, and stayed long enough for her to scold him for dillydallying around while the wounded man deteriorated. With dire threats delivered in her no-nonsense manner, she ordered him to get the man to a doctor posthaste before the infection spread.

  She didn’t ask who the stranger was or how he came to be shot or why they’d asked her to take notes of anything he mumbled. She didn’t ask who Katie was or why Katie and Nick were both armed or what had happened to Lily. Nick thought her one of the least curious and most dependable people he’d ever met. And she reported his father hadn’t said a single intelligible word.

  He got back to the hangar in time to see the first snowflakes of a new storm approaching. In record-breaking time, he got the plane out of the hangar and onto the runway, refueled and checked out and ready to go. He didn’t mention to Katie that the red-and-white plane was gone.

  Katie stayed inside the plane with his father, bathing his forehead, listening for him to say something that would help.

  “We’re flying off into the wild blue yonder,” Nick said, once the plane left the ground, “and besides knowing we have to get my father to Doc, I don’t have the slightest idea what to do next.”

  Katie was leaning over the seat, her face close to his so she could hear him. How she managed to smell so good after the hours they’d spent traveling back and forth was a wonder to him.

  She kissed his cheek and said, “You’ll figure something out.” Then she was gone, back to the rear of the plane, back to attend to his father, and he was left with a tingling sensation on his cheek that seemed to rattle what was left of his brain.

  An hour later, after a brief conversation with Doc over the plane radio, Nick landed in an abandoned field next to Doc’s house. Like many people who lived in remote areas, Doc had his own plane, and Nick rolled to a stop close by.

  As Nick cut the engine, lights flashed on in an outbuilding. Nick slid into the back of the plane and opened the side door.

  “Where am I?” his old man said, apparently rallying at the influx of cold air. His pupils were dilated, his expression blank.

  “Somewhere safe,” Katie said.

  “Go back,” he said. “Back to Nick’s house.”

  Encouraged to hear his old man sounding more or less lucid, Nick dug the disk out of his pocket. “Been there and done that. We found it.”

  Bill zeroed in on the disk. “Thank the Lord,” he mumbled.

  “Quick, before we have to leave you here for medical help, answer a few questions.”

  “No police. No doctors—”

  “Nothing official, not yet. Try to tell us something that will help find Katie’s mother. Frankly, if you won’t or can’t, we’ll have no option but to contact the police. We can’t fly around forever.”

  “Yes, yes, okay,” his father said, apparently sensing the urgency behind Nick’s words. “How long—”

  “You were shot less than twenty-four hours ago. How long have they had Caroline?”

  He seemed to be searching his mind, adding and subtracting time. “Four days,” he said at last, catching a sob in his throat. Even Nick was moved to a few pangs of pity for the guy. Katie looked ready to explode with emotion.

  “Okay. What’s on the disk?”

  “Money. My life’s savings.”

  “How much?”

  “Over a million,” he gasped, shivering now. Katie took off her coat and spread it over his father. She trembled from head to toe and Nick handed her a blanket. “It’s in an account in the Bahamas,” his father continued. “The information, it’s on the disk.”

  “Where did you get that kind of money?”

  His father closed his eyes and Nick swore under his breath. Looking up, he could see more lights coming from the outbuilding. Doc had said he’d bring his ATV out to the plane to collect Nick’s father. Time was running short.

  “You stole it, didn’t you?” Nick said.

  It took a moment for his father to utter one word. “Embezzled.”

  “Damn you!” Nick shouted, whirling out of control. His father had embezzled money and brought it, more or less, to his house, jeopardizing his family? He would gladly have throttled him in that instant, damn the consequences.

  “Why did you bring it to my house?” he demanded. “What made you think I’d have let you through the front door if I’d known you were a thief? For God’s sake, just who did you embezzle it from?”

  Katie said, “Nick—”

  He turned on her. “He’s been an out-of-work alcoholic for half his life, Katie.” Turning back to his father, he added, “Who’d hire you? Come on, we don’t have much time. Stop making me pull every piece of information out of you.”

  “Maybe if you stopped shouting at him, he’d give you answers,” Katie said.

  Nick swallowed deeply. She had a point. He said, “Carson followed you to my house?”

  Bill looked away as he nodded.

  Suspicion flooded Nick. The old man was hiding something. Probably the fact that he’d allowed himself to be brought here by Carson instead of refusing to talk and thereby protecting Nick and Lily. The man was a coward, but that wasn’t news. Nick said, “Why did he shoot you before you collected the money?”

  “I…I got away. I guess he figured he didn’t need me to reclaim the money.”

  “So it’s his money? It belongs to Carson?”

  “No,” his father said, still mincing words.

  Anger came back in a flash. Nick stalked away from the plane, too upset to think clearly.

  The next thing he knew, Katie, huddled in her blanket, was at his side. “You have to keep your temper,” she said softly.

  He stared down at her upturned face. Though it was dark, he knew her features and could easily imagine the expression of concern she currently wore. He said, “I’m trying. He’s still beating around the bush, keeping little secrets. For God’s sake, the man is half-dead and he still can’t just tell the truth.”

  She took his arm and led him back to the plane, talking quickly as they moved. “Listen,” she said. “I had a father who lived a life of lies, too. Addictions, sneaking around, all of it. He never told anyone any more than he thought they needed to know. Habits like that die hard, Nick.”

  He stared at the ATV lights drawing nearer and said, “I guess. Listen, you take the lead, you talk with him.”

  “But you’re his son—”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one who dispenses booze and advice in equal measure, remember? He knows I hate him. You talk to him.”

  She nodded. A moment later, they’d both climbed aboard. She immediately knelt by his dad and resumed bathing his brow. “Bill?” she crooned.

  His old man’s eyes flashed open immediately.

  “Bill, you must love my mother. You just married her. My sister said she is head-over-heels for you.”

  He didn’t answer, but she sure had his attention.

  “Nick can save her,” she continued. “I don’t know how. But Nick does. He can fix anything.”

  Nick half smiled at Katie’s flattering words. He hoped she was right.

  Staring into Katie’s eyes, his father started talking again, his voice slurred, his words spaced far apart. The two small headlights of Doc’s ATV bobbed over the light covering of snow outside, getting closer.

  “I was an…accountant,” his father mumbled.

  People trusted him with their money? Nick shook
his head. Unbelievable. Katie seemed to sense what he was thinking and he caught her glowering at him. She said, “Go on.”

  “I…my boss was…was laundering money.” Bill’s eyes kind of glazed over as he added, “So much money.”

  Nick heard himself snarl. “So you stole it.”

  “It wasn’t theirs…either,” Bill said, and focusing on Katie, added, “He was into…other things…worse things. It…it got to me. Had to…had to do…something.”

  “What did you do?” she coaxed.

  “I knew someone…in…in the justice department. I was willing…I wanted…to turn state’s evidence. Give back the money. All I wanted was…safety…protection…another chance…”

  “And did they offer it?” Katie asked.

  “Made me a…deal. Strapped wires on me…told me what to say. More evidence, new identity. Never had a chance. One of the cops…tried to kill me. He was in on it! I ran away but…nowhere to go. Knew Nick was in Alaska and I thought maybe…maybe if I gave him the money, he’d…he’d forgive me.”

  Bill was still addressing his comments to Katie. Nick clenched his jaw. So his old man had thought he could buy his way back into his only son’s life?

  “But you didn’t give it to him,” Katie said.

  “He wouldn’t talk to me,” Bill said, and suddenly, though still halting, his voice took on a new strength. “Patricia, though…such a sweet girl. I hid the money away in the Bahamas…put the information on a disk. I taped the disk inside the photo I took of Patricia and Lily. Good, solid frame. I was going to tell…Nick but…no time. Patricia…died…I ran…I ran…couldn’t face Nick.”

  Nick closed his eyes and counted to ten as his father droned on, his voice growing increasingly anxious. “I wrote Nick…I tried…cop’s name is Carson.”

  As Katie gasped, Nick said, “The man who shot you? The one who tried to blow us up? He’s a cop?”

  “Cop gone bad. He followed me here… He won’t stop until he kills me…me and maybe you…we’re all in danger.” He licked his lips and his expression grew horrified. “My God, where’s Lily?”

  “It’s okay, she’s safe,” Katie said. “But I don’t understand. I thought you told Nick that Carson didn’t take my mother. If not him—”