“Of course.”
He opened the paper and smoothed it out on the table. Colleen stared at it. There were no words in any language on MacHowell’s paper. There was simply a shield with a beautiful medieval coat of arms.
She stared at MacHowell, baffled. “What is it?”
“A coat of arms.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Of what?”
“Vienna.”
“Vienna! The diamonds are in Vienna?”
MacHowell shook his head. “No. At least I don’t think so. Tyrell resented me the most. I was the other Ally, and I became a bit of a hero, while he was to lose his life. He sent me this, I believe, because it’s really the most obvious. He was finally caught and arrested by the MPs in Austria. It stands to reason that the diamonds would be there.”
“Perhaps. General…” The words came from over Colleen’s shoulder, and she quickly turned around. Bret was leaning against the wall at the foot of the stairway, watching them both coolly, and she wondered how long he had been there. He started toward them as he continued. “When you see the pieces of the puzzle that we have, they will make more sense to you than they do to us.”
He dropped the copies of the pieces Colleen had carried in her luggage on the table. Colleen stared at them, then looked furiously up into his eyes. In her absence he must have thoroughly rummaged through her things.
MacHowell didn’t seem to notice the renewal of the hostilities between them. He spread out the other sheets. “The mountains, yes. A ski lift. Earth Is the Mother. Yes, this all makes sense. They are buried somewhere in the Austrian mountains near a ski lift. Most probably near Salzburg, I would say. N’Oubliez Pas. This means nothing to me. Do Not Forget? No, no, I do not know what this means.”
He looked up at Bret. “Sorry. I can tell you no more than that. And again, I am sorry. I do not care if the diamonds are ever found or not. They are nothing but misery. They are best forgotten.”
“General,” Bret hunched down by the table, his tone quiet and persuasive, “they cannot be forgotten. This is no longer a mystery from forty years ago; it’s a mystery of the present. A man was murdered—cruelly, viciously murdered—not forty years ago, but now. And it was assuredly over those diamonds. Others are in danger because of them. Tyrell’s granddaughter. Colleen. Myself. Even you, General MacHowell.”
MacHowell carefully trimmed the ash off his cigar, staring down at his shaking fingers all the while. “I’m an old man, McAllistair. I cannot matter much.”
“All life matters,” Bret said simply. “Rudy Holfer must also be an old man, yet not so old that he cannot kill or hire killers. He has to be alive and looking for the diamonds. We have to find either him or the diamonds, MacHowell. We owe it to Rutger and we owe it to Tyrell. To ourselves, to our own lives. There is no going back.”
MacHowell looked up at Bret, his green eyes troubled. He sighed. “Yes, yes. I suppose. So what do we do now?”
“Two things,” Bret said.
“And what, pray tell, are they?” Colleen asked a bit caustically.
Bret shot her a dry glance, pulled up a chair and straddled it backward. He spoke to MacHowell. “I think Ben and I should take a look around this evening for our friend Eli and try to find who hired him. Rudy Holfer is obviously somewhere in the vicinity. If we fail to find him, we head for Austria.”
“If we head for Austria,” Colleen snapped, “we’re leading Holfer straight to the diamonds.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Bret returned, pouring himself a cup of tea and taking a huge bite out of one of the pies. “How can we lead him there when we don’t really know where we’re going? And we’ll split up. I know a guy with the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. Bill Dwyer. I think I’ll contact him first, then make travel arrangements. You, Carly and I will go somewhere in Lower Austria. MacHowell and Sandy can start off in the Tirol region. Dwyer can see that they’re protected.”
“And what about us?” Colleen demanded.
“Oh, us, too, of course.”
Colleen threw up her hands. “And what is all this going to prove?”
“I’m not sure,” Bret admitted. “But Holfer can’t follow both parties. We’ll travel separately and spend a few days apart, then meet somewhere outside of Salzburg.”
“And?”
“And hope that something brilliant comes to one of us.”
Colleen didn’t get a chance to reply. Carly spoke up from the bottom of the stairway. “What’s this? Where are we going?”
He approached the table, and Bret began to show him the maps and explain. Colleen noticed that Sandy, still pale and wan, was also in the courtyard, and that Ben, yawning away, had followed Carly down the stairs. Bret backed away from the table to explain it to them.
Ben cleared his throat. “Where am I going?”
“What?” Bret muttered, a little surprised. “Ben, you’ve been great. But you’re not involved in this.”
Ben sat down stubbornly and buttered a pastry. “You will need me to help find Eli, yes? I have a passport. I have travel papers. I have been in this!” He raised his dark eyes to Bret. “Mr. McAllistair, please! I can be your driver. I am the best driver in the world! I can speak a little of almost everything. I can—”
“He can come with us!”
Everyone turned, startled, as Sandy spoke up at last. She looked at Bret accusingly. “If we’re going to split up, Ben can come with us. That way there will be three of us, too.” She paused, swallowing. “I never thought that we would split up. Please, let Ben come. The general is old. I’m terrified.”
Bret threw up his hands. “You’re in, Ben.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he wagged a playful finger. “So eat quickly, will you? I want to take a trek back into town to visit the police and find out what we can about our friend Eli’s acquaintances.”
Smiling happily, Ben dug into his food. Colleen moved away from the table to give the others room. Still thoroughly irritated that Bret had gone through her things without a word to her, she asked him coldly, “How soon are we leaving?”
He arched a brow at her tone. “For where?”
“For the police station, to find Eli.”
“You’re not going.”
“But I—”
“For once in your life, Colleen, make things easy! Please stay here.”
“I’m the one—”
“Who’s in the greatest danger. If we’re worried to death about you every second, how the hell are we going to find Eli?”
She opened her mouth to argue that since she was the one who had been attacked, she had more right than anyone to be involved, but before she could speak, she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. It was Carly.
“He’s right, Colleen.”
Colleen closed her mouth and nodded, inwardly admitting that she was ready simply to fight Bret on anything because he’d searched her luggage. But that was a private issue; she could bring it up later—and she would. It seemed that every time she came close to him, she paid dearly.
She stared down at her feet while Carly gave her a paternal hug. As she stared at the ground, she began to frown. Sandy’s delicate beige sandals were damp and gritty.
She looked up at the woman and interrupted someone’s conversation. “Sandy, your feet are all wet.”
Sandy flushed. Colleen thought she looked exceptionally beautiful. Tired and wan seemed to become elegant and feminine on her. “I wanted to see the mountains,” she told Colleen. “I needed some air. But,” she shrugged miserably, “I walked outside and…panicked. I came back in. I would love to walk and look around….”
Bret laughed pleasantly. He strode over to Sandy and took her hand with a little squeeze. “I can remedy that. Come on, I’ll take you for a walk while Carly and Ben finish eating.”
Sandy looked at Bret with gratitude and something like awe and rapture. The two of them walked away.
Colleen sat at the table again, smiled radiantly at the general and lit a cigarette, thinking that the flame she produced w
ith the lighter was no hotter than the one shooting through her. She was jealous, damn it.
She wanted to scratch Bret’s eyes out and throw Sandy in the dirt and roll her around.
How could she be so insane? she asked herself bleakly. She kept needing him, wanting him, loving him and he was a free agent in every way that mattered. Hadn’t she been the one to file the divorce papers?
“There’s one thing that bothers me.”
“Pardon?” Colleen realized that she hadn’t been paying any attention to James MacHowell, though he had assumed that she was.
“Holfer,” he murmured.
“What about Holfer?” Carly asked, pulling up the chair across from Colleen and helping himself to tea.
MacHowell shook his head sadly. “I just wouldn’t have thought it of him. Killing Rutger like that…”
“I don’t think Rudy Holfer killed Rutger in person. I think he paid for the assassination,” Colleen said. Really, what was the matter with her? This was serious, sad, vital, and all she could seem to think about was Bret. With anger, with jealousy, with the heartache that constantly reminded her that she had never stopped loving him.
“I still don’t see it.” The general struck a match and held it to his cigar. “It’s been over forty years since I’ve seen him, but…”
“He had just been switched to the SS,” Carly reminded MacHowell.
“But he didn’t want it. Don’t you see? That’s one of the reasons he was ready to go for the diamonds. When we went into the basement of that church in France to get them, he told me quite disdainfully that he considered the so-called glorious corps to which he was being transferred to be nothing more than a group of cowardly vultures. He was a fighting man, a soldier of the field. Not a murderer.”
“But really, MacHowell, you barely knew him,” Carly said.
MacHowell shrugged. “That’s true. Still…” He shrugged again. “I suppose that none of us ever knows the other fellow completely, do we?”
He sipped his tea as the group fell silent. Carly and Ben ate quietly, leaving MacHowell and Colleen to their own thoughts.
No, we never really know one another, do we? Colleen mused sadly. For all that she had loved Bret, loved him and lived with him, he was constantly surprising her. Hurting her, angering her and then touching her again. Never letting her forget that she did love him. Even if she didn’t know him completely, didn’t fully understand him.
And then there was Sandy.
Oh, damn them both! she decided in anguish. Then she tried to convince herself that she was being ridiculous, that the two of them had done nothing but go for a walk.
She sighed softly and decided on more tea. She was going to try very hard to act as if she hadn’t noticed. To tell him he had no right to go through her luggage, but nothing more. She was not going to act jealous, since it would only amuse him.
She wasn’t going to have a damned bit of control over what she said to him in the long run, she admitted sheepishly. And she was going to be nervous and miserable until she did get a chance to be alone with him and tell him exactly how she felt.
“Do you?”
“I’m sorry. Do I what?”
“Play chess?” MacHowell asked her.
“Oh, yes.”
“Good! We’ll have something to keep our minds occupied.”
Nothing will occupy my mind but Bret, Colleen thought.
Yet something else did come to her while she sat across the chessboard from MacHowell.
His place really was magnificent. Fabulous in every way, very, very expensive. What if he was right about Holfer? If Holfer could not be a murderer? What if General James MacHowell was capable of incredible deception?
Then it was quite likely that they were being hosted by the murderer himself.
And that was not a comfortable thought at all.
CHAPTER 10
Bret must have come in very late. Colleen had fallen asleep waiting for him, and she hadn’t even awakened when he’d entered the room and crawled in beside her. But as she lazily opened her eyes, aware that it was sometime around dawn, she knew that she was curled with her back to his side. A little startled, she swung around to look at him.
He was awake, wide-awake, his fingers laced behind his head, his gray gaze staring ahead at nothing. He didn’t look at Colleen; he just spoke. “Eli is dead.”
Colleen gasped. “Dead!”
“The police found him at about midnight, at the bottom of a well.”
“How?” Colleen whispered.
“Throat slit.”
“Oh…” she murmured, feeling ill and clutching the sheets around her.
Bret swung his legs off the bed, ran his fingers through his hair, then shot her an assessing glance. “Don’t, Colleen. Don’t waste any sympathy on him. He would have sold his own kids for a profit. You live like that, you’re bound to get caught.”
Colleen nodded. It wasn’t that she was feeling sympathetic; the man had been willing to sell her to certain death. It was just so frightening. Rutger and now Eli. Someone was playing for very high stakes. But weren’t the diamonds just that?
“You okay?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Good.” He rose and reached to the floor for his jeans. He’d been sleeping in his white shorts; for some reason she smiled a little, remembering that he hated fancy-colored underwear. She’d once bought him a pair with little hearts on them for Valentine’s Day; he’d stared at them and laughed and sworn he’d never wear them. He never had.
“I’m going to go down and get some coffee. Do you want me to bring you some?”
“Please.”
He disappeared out the door. Colleen crawled groggily out of bed and hurriedly shed the oversize T-shirt she’d slept in. She dressed in slacks and a cotton shirt and waited. He’d seemed distant. Cordial, but distant. She felt a little numb herself.
Half an hour later Bret still hadn’t returned to the room. She’d straightened the bed and the bath, then cleared a little table by the window so they could sit there and drink their coffee. Still he didn’t arrive. She was about to go downstairs herself when the door opened at last and Bret, barefoot and bare chested, reentered the room carrying a silver tray holding a coffeepot and delicate cups.
He must have realized how long he had been by the expression on her face. “Sorry,” he told her. “Sandy was downstairs, and she needed a little soothing.”
“Sandy needed soothing?” Colleen echoed sweetly. “And of course you were right there.”
She collected the tray from him and set it on the table, poured herself a cup, then took a sip while she casually pulled out a chair and sat down.
Bret hadn’t moved. He watched her, then came slowly across the room, poured his own coffee and took a seat across from her. Colleen pretended to study the sun rising over the mountains outside the window. He lit a cigarette and asked with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, “Do I detect a faint note of sarcasm?”
“Sarcasm?” She stared straight at him, eyes innocently wide. “Certainly not. Poor Sandy. We must take care of her at all times, above all else.”
Bret leaned closer to her, a little annoyed. “She didn’t have to come here, you know. She came because she was horrified that she might have been the cause of some injury to you.”
“Ummm,” Colleen murmured noncommittally.
Bret began to laugh. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”
“Certainly not,” she said pleasantly. “Why on earth would I be?” She pushed back her chair and stood to stare out the window from closer range. “Why should Sandy bother me? I have no idea where you’ve been for months—or who you’ve been with.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?” Bret asked quietly.
She searched desperately for an answer, then started with a gasp when his arms suddenly came around her and he whispered in her ear, “Does it?”
For a moment she was tempted to clutch the arms that held her, to tell him yes, it bo
thered her terribly. That she had lain awake for nights, eaten alive inside while she tortured herself with visions of him with someone else.
She didn’t say any of it. She spun away from him and returned to the table, where she refilled her coffee cup. “Bret, a few weeks from now you’ll be legally free as a bird. You’ll be able to pursue whatever female takes your fancy, though God alone knows who that might be!”
“Oh? I thought I had rather decent taste in women.” He was behind her again, ruffling her hair so provocatively that she was certain he was going to remind her that he had married her.
He didn’t. He took his seat in front of her again and smiled pleasantly. “Sandy is beautiful.”
“Yes, I suppose she is. Except, of course, that you have to be into the nervous, skinny, cringing type.”
Bret laughed. “Ummm. And I suppose Jerry is God’s gift to single women?”
Colleen ignored the taunt and shook her head sadly. “I really don’t see her for you. No hips. She just doesn’t look like the Earth Mother type.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen marvelously thin women with hordes of children.”
“You’re having a horde?”
“One or two. Possibly three.”
“At once? That’s a litter.”
“You are jealous.”
“I’m not!”
He raised an eyebrow and coolly lit another cigarette, a smile tugging at his lips. “Ah, well, I’ll have my litter. And what will you do? Call Rent a Grandchild when you’re finally too old to go story hopping?”
She returned his cool smile. “No, I’ll invent them. I’ll tap them out on the word processor from my wheelchair.”
His smile faded suddenly. “It’s a pity, Colleen, that you won’t let anyone get close to you. I think it was your parents. They died and left you when you were young and vulnerable. Maybe it’s not a conscious thing, but I think you live with this fear that if you really care about someone, they’ll go away, and you’ll be devastated. You’d rather throw them out first yourself. Throw away everything.”
She tried to maintain her own smile. “You’re wrong, Bret. I’m very interested in loving someone. Someone who isn’t more interested in the world at large than his own home. I never threw a thing away. You did.”
Double Entendre Page 17