by Jean Thomas
It was late afternoon when Will drove back to Georgetown. He was more than just worried by now. He was alarmed. Something was not right. Something was very wrong.
Should he go to the cops? No, not yet. Casey. If he could find Casey...
He remembered his friend was staying in a rental cottage on the beach. What was the name of the place? Fair Winds. Yeah, that was it.
Pulling over to the side of the road, he activated the GPS and learned that Fair Winds was on the shore road on the other side of Georgetown. It was rush hour, making the city a bitch to navigate.
The sun was sinking beyond the highlands as he crawled through the traffic on the busy harbor front. He was stopped at a traffic light when he spotted him on one of the docks, coming off a battered fishing trawler. Tall, broad-shouldered and even at this distance the unmistakable good looks that had drawn the interest of more than one woman when he and his friend had visited the bars. Casey.
* * *
Brenna had dozed on the four-poster. When she woke up, darkness was closing in outside. She couldn’t read her watch. How long had she been kept here? There was a lamp on the bedside table.
Fumbling for the switch, she turned it on. That was when she heard a key turning in the lock of the hall door. The scraping sound of it had her immediately alert. Sitting up, she swung her legs to the floor, her gaze cutting to the door.
It was pushed open, bumping against the wall on her side. Brenna waited for someone to appear in the doorway, but a moment elapsed before a thin, short young man, probably still in his teens, glided into the room bearing a tray with covered dishes on it.
* * *
Apparently, Brenna thought wryly, I’m about to be fed. Maybe the proverbial last meal of the condemned.
The young man barely glanced at her. He was more concerned about locating somewhere to rest the tray. Finding it on the flat surface of a scarred desk beneath one of the windows, he crossed the room, placed the tray there and began to uncover the dishes.
Brenna wasn’t interested in the menu. Her attention was riveted on the open door and the sudden realization that the boy couldn’t be very intelligent. Otherwise...
He went and left the key in the lock.
It was an opportunity not to be missed.
Her server was silently indicating her waiting food, inviting her to eat. Brenna replaced her shoes, got to her feet, and addressed him.
“I want to wash my hands. I need a fresh towel in the bathroom. The one there is very soiled. Can you please get me one?”
He looked at her blankly. It was obvious he didn’t understand English. Maybe he’d been hired to work here for that reason, because what he didn’t understand he couldn’t gossip about. Brenna pointed to the bathroom, pantomiming the act of drying her hands on a towel. He was slow in reacting, but she finally got what she was trying for when he went into the bathroom to check out the situation for himself.
Brenna bolted to the door, slammed it behind her as she made a swift exit into the corridor outside and relocked it. She was removing the key and placing it on a chair when she caught the muffled sound of fists pounding on the other side of the thick door.
Poor little guy. She hated to leave him like this, imagining the trouble he was going to be in when they learned the prisoner had not only tricked him but he’d gone and let her escape. At least he had something to eat until then.
That was as much concern as she had to spare for the young man. She had to worry about herself now. Getting out of a single room was one thing. Getting out of a whole house and away from a fenced estate before she was discovered was entirely, maybe impossibly, something else.
She could hear Casey’s deep, mellow voice telling her: You’re on your own now, Rembrandt. Show me what you’re made of for both of us. Get going.
Chapter 17
“Being dead,” Casey said.
Will stared at him, his only reaction a mystified “Huh?”
“You asked me what I was doing on an old fishing trawler, and I’m telling you. I was being dead, and for now I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Casey, what’s going on? And where the hell is my sister?”
They were seated in Will’s rental car parked at the side of the street across from the dock where the sports writer had discovered Casey coming off the trawler. For a quick moment he considered Will in the gathering darkness.
Time was vital, but he could use Will to help him find and rescue Brenna. For that, Will would need to know the essentials.
“All right,” Casey said, “but I’m going to make this quick, so listen and don’t ask questions.”
There was just enough light from the lamps on the dock when he was finished with his abbreviated version of the story that he was able to register the shocked expression on Will’s narrow face.
No point in discussing it. Other priorities waited.
“Your turn,” Casey urged him. “And don’t waste seconds telling me.”
Will made his account a short one, starting with what had impelled him to fly down to St. Sebastian.
“All right,” Casey said when he was done, “what you’ve told me is useful. Unless the housekeeper or the construction superintendent was lying to you, always a possibility, we can eliminate those choices. They weren’t likely places for Bradley to hold Brenna anyway.”
“Don’t you think it’s time we went to the police?”
“Absolutely not. Bradley controls this island, and if the cops learned I was alive, they’d consider me a fugitive from justice and pop me into a cell.”
“Then where do we look for my sister?”
“I think I know. I think I knew hours ago on the trawler. There’s only one logical place. An old, remote plantation called White Rose. Let’s move. I’ll give you directions along the way.”
Casey wouldn’t let himself believe Brenna wasn’t there and unhurt. Anything else was unthinkable.
* * *
Brenna knew that if she went to the right, it would take her to the grand staircase and the entrance hall below. That would be the most direct route to the front door. On the other hand, brightly lit as she remembered it was, it carried the risk of her being sighted and apprehended.
She chose the other direction, thinking there must be a back staircase in a house this size. She was right. It was located at the far end of the corridor, a plain, ordinary flight that would have been used by the house servants when the plantation was active.
Brenna descended cautiously, not just to keep herself from being caught but also because the stairway was so poorly lighted it was a safety issue.
She paused at the bottom of the flight, hanging back in the shadows to look and listen. She had glimpsed no one since escaping from the bedroom where she’d been held, heard nothing.
There was no sound down here either, no voices to be overheard. And no sign of any movement.
The closed stairway emerged on another corridor, a broad one. The same corridor off which the library Marcus was using as an office was situated? She couldn’t be sure of that. In any case, it was deserted. Well, she’d made it this far.
But it wasn’t anything to celebrate. Not until she was out of the house, and even then...
Half expecting a shout of discovery and the pounding steps of pursuit behind her, Brenna went to the left and crept along the wide hallway. Wherever she was, it felt like the far rear of the mansion.
There had to be a back exit. Probably more than one.
The corridor turned here, and she turned with it. At the end of this shorter passage was a closed, double door. What was a door of this distinction doing along here in what ought to be strictly the service region of the house?
Brenna’s hand closed on one of the brass latches, resting there, hesitating to open the door. Why? Was she afraid an evil something would leap out at her?
Anything was possible in this creepy old place. Including her overactive imagination.
Impatient with herself, unwilling to be the c
oward Casey would have fought for her not to be, she depressed the latch and pressed the door back. What waited for her on the other side was totally unexpected.
For a few seconds there was total blackness inside. Then, with a startling suddenness, the area was blasted with bright light. After her initial surprise, she concluded that opening the door must have tripped an electronic signal that activated the lights.
Had it been a large kitchen bathed in light, or the backyard she’d have welcomed, she would have understood and accepted it. It was neither one. What she found herself slowly walking into was a vast hall.
On the side walls were tall windows, tightly shuttered on the outside to prevent anyone from looking in. Ornately framed pier glasses hung between the sealed windows, and from the scrolled ceiling high above her were suspended massive crystal chandeliers. It was an imposing hall, and it didn’t take a whole lot of Brenna’s imagination this time for her to understand it had been built as a ballroom.
There must have been some magnificent parties here long ago with the whirling dancers reflected in the long mirrors. Not anymore. The spacious hall served in another capacity now.
Although the chandeliers were dark, modern fixtures above gleaming counters provided the white light. Spread along those counters were all forms of apparatuses, most of it unknown to Brenna but some of it just familiar enough for her to realize this was a laboratory.
The same laboratory, she was ready to believe, where the formula introduced into Freedom’s water supply had been engineered. This, then, was the secret of White Rose, the reason why Marcus Bradley had acquired a remote plantation and fenced it off from the world. All to protect a laboratory that must remain hidden.
Brenna knew she should be on her way out of here, but she was compelled to linger just long enough to investigate a series of enormous glass jars ranged along shelves against the far wall. It wasn’t until she approached those jars that she began to understand what they contained floating in a clear liquid that was probably formalin.
Art had been her only interest in college, but majoring in it had required that she study anatomy. It had been just science back then, learning both the exterior and the interior of the human body in order to accurately replicate it in your chosen medium.
But this wasn’t science. This was a collection of what Brenna regarded as profane souvenirs, a kind of chamber of horrors bottled by a twisted mind to be on display. What other purpose could they possibly serve?
It was the anatomy classes years ago that enabled her now, as she went along the row of jars, to identify various parts of the female human body. Portions of women who had once been alive.
Their bodies desecrated.
Brenna retreated, backing slowly away from what angered and sickened her. Not just the jars but her own greedy curiosity that had cost her to waste minutes. Precious minutes that should have been used in escaping this place in order for her to let the world outside know what was happening here.
She owed that to the women whose lives had been sacrificed for the sake of heinous experimentation. And she owed it to Casey who had died to save her.
It was when she turned to run that Brenna saw on one of the lab counters what she hadn’t noticed until now. The hot, blue flame of a Bunsen burner.
The realization of its presence shocked her. Because, being left lit as it was, meant that someone had been working here. Surely only minutes ago. And when he returned, as he must any second now, he would discover her.
* * *
“Stop!” Casey barked. “Pull over to the other side of the street and park there under that banyan tree.”
Although he had to be puzzled by the order, Will did as he was told, risking a collision by racing across the traffic and coming to rest beneath the banyan tree. Its crown was so broad and thick Casey figured the rental wasn’t likely to be spotted here, particularly after dark like this.
It was a different matter on the other side of the street. Because that was the area of the waterfront where the freighters loaded and unloaded their cargoes, it was well lighted.
It was those lights that had made it possible for Casey to discover an activity in progress that had triggered his memory on two levels as they’d been crawling by in the rental.
“Why are we wasting time stopped here?” Will wanted to know. “What’s got you so interested?”
“See that truck over there with its open bed in back being loaded with steel drums?”
“Yeah? So what?”
“I saw this same thing happening here once before. It didn’t mean anything to me then. It does now. With all I’ve learned since then, I’m ready to swear those drums contain chemicals bound for White Rose Plantation.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“See that guy directing the loading? The one with the ponytail and all the tattoos? He works for Bradley. He’s one of the three goons who chased Brenna and me down.”
“All right, but why does this matter now?”
“Because you and I are going to be on board that truck when it pulls out of the loading yard.”
“What!”
“No, I’m not crazy. I have a good reason for my intention. Driving out there to the plantation in the rental here seemed the only option at the time, only I knew it would present a problem when we got there.”
“Like?”
Casey explained how the entire property was framed by a high-security fence. And how the gates to the drive were kept closed and locked. They would have to leave the car where it wouldn’t be discovered, scale the fence and work their way up to the mansion without being seen. All actions that would require time they couldn’t afford if Brenna’s life was in imminent jeopardy.
“But if we’re out of sight on that truck when it arrives, we sail right through the gates and up to the house.”
“Sold,” Will agreed. “One thing, though. How do we climb aboard that truck without being detected?”
“Yeah.” Casey searched the street in both directions before settling on a plan. “See the van parked a little way down from the loading gate on the other side? We take cover behind it, and when Ponytail is busy turning out of the yard into the street, we move.”
They took care after leaving the rental to cross the street at a spot directly opposite the van, where the light was so poor there was little chance of them being noticed from the loading yard.
Once safely concealed behind the van, Casey’s only concern was that the owner of the vehicle would arrive and challenge them. Either that or drive off, exposing their presence. Thankfully, neither one occurred.
Nor did they experience any difficulty when Ponytail, finally behind the wheel of the truck, was nothing but occupied looking both ways for a break in the traffic at the exit of the yard. Seizing the opportunity, Casey and Will rushed out from their cover behind the van. Hauling themselves into the bed of the truck, with Casey making an effort to ease the stress on his wounded arm, they crouched down out of sight among the drums.
They were rolling along the shore highway when an observant Will wondered, “I noticed back where there was light that all of these drums are marked in big letters with the word Brennbar. You have any idea what that means?”
Casey’s overseas assignments had required that he be familiar with some of the major foreign languages. “Yeah, Brennbar is German. It means flammable. And with the size of those letters, I’d say the indication is that what the drums contain is highly flammable.”
* * *
There seemed to be no exit from the mansion by way of what had once been its ballroom. Brenna’s only choice was to flee back along the route she had come. There had to be some way out of the house other than the front entrance. She just needed to find it before they learned she was on the loose.
Too late.
Brenna was stopped before she even began. The double door through which she had entered the ballroom was already ajar. Three figures came through the opening. Marcus led the trio, Karl with his wh
ite-blond hair and stoic, Nordic face followed, and a third man she didn’t know brought up the rear.
Brenna stiffened, refusing to show any fear as they surrounded her on three sides, cutting off any possible escape. Marcus was smiling in that despicable way of his as he considered her.
“Our bird seems to have gotten out of her cage, gentlemen. Karl, you should have known better than to send that stupid boy up with her tray. She obviously took advantage of poor Joseph. Well, no serious loss now that we have her back. Let’s keep it that way, Karl.”
Marcus jerked his head in the direction of the double door.
The obedient Karl went to stand in the opening, blocking it off with his solid body.
Looking pleased with the situation, Marcus spoke to her, friend to friend. “Now that you found the laboratory, you deserve to have a tour of it. Oh, but then I imagine you couldn’t wait for that, could you? Would I be wrong in thinking you already had a good look around, saw the state-of-the-art equipment, the computers and, of course, the fascinating specimens in the jars?”
Every word out of his mouth was a mocking one intended to humiliate her. But she’d be damned if she ever let him see it affect her that way.
He didn’t wait for her response, probably realizing he wasn’t going to get one. Instead, looking suddenly remorseful, he addressed the third man. “What’s wrong with me? I’m being rude, forgetting my manners. Let me correct that. Doctor, let me present our guest, Brenna Coleman.”
The little man in the white lab coat and thick glasses nodded to her by way of acknowledgment.
“Brenna, this is Dr. Milosz. You need to be impressed by him. He’s a brilliant chemist. He created the marvelous formula we hired him to engineer for us here in this laboratory. Doctor, why don’t you give her a brief description of how you achieved that?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
Brenna detected a slight European accent. Considering his name, maybe Polish. There was something else she observed at the corner of his thin mouth. He had a nervous tic.
“If you will step this way...”
With Marcus crowding in behind her, she had no choice but to follow the doctor to one of his work stations where he pointed out various chemicals on the shelves. His explanation of what components he’d blended and repeatedly tested before he achieved success was wasted on her.