High Tide

by Jude Deveraux

  “Why should I tell you anything?” Russell said petulantly. “Why should I—?”

  He didn’t say any more because someone hit him on the head with a little nylon backpack, and the gun went off, deafening everyone.

  Epilogue

  “Tell us again, Aunt Fiona,” the little boy said, looking up at her with big eyes filled with curiosity.

  “Yeah, tell us the part about the gun and the lions.”

  Fiona still wasn’t used to being called “aunt,” and she wasn’t used to having a family, at least not one the size of the Montgomerys and Taggerts.

  It was four months since that horrible day in the “golden cave,” as the Montgomery children called it.

  “Leave her alone,” Cale Taggert snapped as she juggled identical twin boys on her hips.

  Fiona was having trouble remembering names and who went with whom, but she knew that Cale was a famous mystery writer, and Fiona was dying to talk to her. She wanted to ask her where she got her ideas for her fabulous books.

  “It’s all right,” Fiona said, smiling. “I don’t mind.”

  Looking across the heads of the many people in the room, all of whom Ace swore were related to him, Fiona looked at the man she was to marry and smiled. Family was something that she’d always wanted, and it’s what she’d got, although not quite in the form that she meant to get it.

  “Go on,” the little boy urged.

  Fiona looked down at him and wondered who his parents were. There were so many children, and half of them seemed to be identical twins. In fact, there were so many twins that she wondered if maybe the baby she was carrying was actually two of them. She hadn’t told Ace yet, but she would tonight.

  She turned her attention back to the little boy. “Okay, let me see, where do I start?”

  “With the lions!”

  “No, tell us the story of Raffles,” said another child. “I want to hear all about the bad men and the one that was your brother.”

  Raffles was a hit TV show now, much to the chagrin of parents, who universally seemed to hate the characters and the morals, or lack of them, that were represented in the show. It hadn’t yet been revealed that the plump creature who lusted after the pretty young man was actually a woman.

  The Montgomery money had been able to keep the papers from finding out the whole truth about the murders, so the fact that Raffles had actually happened wasn’t known to the general public. And just before the show aired nationally, someone looked at Roy Hudson’s original script and saw the name “Raffles” in there and changed the name from Raphael. “It wasn’t a show to name after an angel,” someone was quoted as saying.

  Any profit that was made by the show that had been left to Ace and Fiona in Roy’s will was going to charity.

  And the lions that had been taken from the cave were already in the back room of a museum in Florida that was very near Kendrick Park. At the end of the second TV season of Raffles, it was to be revealed that the story was vaguely true and that the lions the despicable characters in the show had been searching for but never found were on display in the museum in a brand-new wing. The new wing was a re-creation of an ancient burial mound, with stone walls and steps down into a room where the lions stood alone. The money to build the room had been donated anonymously.

  In the new garden off the new wing of the museum was a gorgeous display of birds put on by neighboring Kendrick Park. And when the wing was opened, there was to go on sale a doll named Octavia, manufactured by the newly formed Burke Toy Company.

  On the board of directors of the toy company was Fiona’s mother, Suzie. “The good whore,” as Suzie said on that day when she stepped through the door and clunked “Russell” on the head with Lisa’s little backpack that she’d filled with rocks.

  His real name was Kurt Corbin (renamed for the story by Smokey after Kurt Russell, the boy who played Jaimie McPheeters on TV), and he was the product of a liaison between Smokey and an alcoholic prostitute named Lavender. Smokey had been sickened at the way his son had been raised by the woman, so when a second long-term liaison produced a little girl, Smokey was ruthless in taking her away from a woman he viewed as little better than Lavender.

  “I loved your father,” Suzie said. “Really loved him. But he …”

  It had taken Fiona a while to comprehend that she had a living parent, and it was still going to take time for her to forgive her father for keeping Suzie from her all her life.

  “He told me that he was turning you over to some rich relatives of his and that you’d have the best of everything,” Suzie said, sniffing from crying. “He talked about riding lessons and having your own pony. I didn’t know the truth until I read about you in the papers. And I thought that if you were a sociopath, then it was my fault. That’s why I wiped up the coffee with those papers. They told all about me but it was too soon for you to know.”

  Ace said that he only believed half of the story Suzie was telling, since it made her look perfect and Smokey the bad guy. “I don’t think we should inquire too closely into where she’s been these last years or with whom.”

  Fiona nodded in agreement. After all, Suzie had been living in a community that seemed to be riddled with people who didn’t want to be seen outside their little compound.

  But whatever Suzie was, wherever she had been, she had certainly come out the hero in the end. Through her underworld connections she had found out where Ace and Fiona were hiding and had sent them the message that said they’d find what they needed at the Blue Orchid. Neither Ace nor Fiona had asked her where she’d obtained the passports with the fake names.

  After Suzie had clobbered Kurt with Lisa’s backpack, Ace had wasted no time wrapping a belt around Kurt’s hands and making him immobile. He was no more tied than Lisa came pounding down the stairs demanding the return of her pack.

  Ace looked up from over Kurt’s unconscious body and said, “How did you find us?”

  “Him,” Lisa said with distaste as she pointed at Gibby.

  “Stole your map,” Gibby said cheerfully. “I figured you’d know where you were headed and wouldn’t realize it was missin’.”

  “I didn’t,” Ace said.

  It was Jeremy who was awestruck by the lions; he couldn’t take his hands off them. “It seems such a shame to put them in a museum,” he whispered as he caressed one of the four emerald eyes.

  “We could always melt them down and split the money,” Ace said loudly; then when Jeremy’s face lit up, Ace gave a snort of derision.

  As for Fiona, she turned her back on Jeremy without regret.

  Two hours later Ace’s cousin, Frank Taggert, had a helicopter there and took the lot of them out of the swamp. And later Frank turned an army of investigators loose on finding out the facts of what Kurt had done.

  Kurt hadn’t bothered to cover up his own trail because he thought that he was safe in his anonymity, so there were hotel records, phone records, and eyewitness accounts. Several people had seen Kurt with Roy Hudson, and most of the patrons of a seaside restaurant had seen Kurt and Eric together the night Roy had been killed. “But I didn’t think anything about it because the papers said that those two had killed him,” was the reply all the people gave.

  By the next morning, when Ace and Fiona faced the police and the press, they were followed by six lawyers armed with enough paper to flood the courtroom. And just to make sure that the judge understood what the three murders had really been about, Frank had one of the lions crated, moved, then reopened before the judge.

  In the end, “false arrest” was the verdict and Ace and Fiona were free to go.

  Of course Frank was being sued by three conservationist groups who said he’d violated “archaeological standards” or some such when he’d removed the lions from their “original” resting place. Frank hired some museum curators to tell how old the lions were and attest that they were originally from China.

  The last Fiona heard was that the Chinese government was about to sue for the re
turn of the lions or for billionaire Frank Taggert to pay for them. But Frank said not to worry, that the courts would take so long to decide who owned the lions that …

  “We’ll all be long dead,” Ace said.

  But Fiona was happy with the results of everything. In Suzie, she now had a blood relative, and she would soon have an enormous family by marriage. And the wedding had better be very soon because there was already a baby growing inside her. But, from the looks of the size of the families, no one was going to be shocked at her having a baby just seven or eight months after the wedding.

  “Happy?” Ace asked, coming to stand beside her and slipping his arm around her waist.

  “Very. But …”

  “But what?” he asked, a small frown betraying his concern.

  “I’d like to go home,” she said softly.

  “Oh.” His voice was flat. “Your apartment. Did the rent ever get paid on it? I thought Frank—”

  She put her fingertip to his lips. “Home to Florida.”

  Ace couldn’t have looked more shocked. “You hate the place. You hate the heat and the swamps and the—”

  “I know that you want to make it on your own and you don’t want to use your inherited money but do you think we could bulldoze that cabin of yours and build something like our house at the Blue Orchid? Something with air-conditioning and a swimming pool? And”—she hesitated, then lowered her voice—“and a nursery.”

  Ace looked away for a moment. They were surrounded by people, but at that moment they were alone on the planet. He looked back at her. “Yeah, I think I can do that. You … have any idea when the nursery should be finished?”

  “In about seven and a half months, I think.”

  He didn’t say anything as, again, he looked away from her, but she could see the big vein in his neck pounding.

  “ ‘Heron’ if he’s a boy and ‘Ibis’ if she’s a girl,” he said at last.

  “I was thinking more ‘Spoonbill’ and ‘Gnatcatcher.’ But only if they’re twins,” she shot back at him.

  At that Ace laughed so loudly that the whole room stopped and looked at him. But he just smiled, his fingers entwined around Fiona’s.