Framed For Love

by Rachel Ann Nunes

  Cassi was cold, but she wasn’t going to admit it. “I’m fine,” she said. “I got wet at the lake earlier. I fell in.”

  “Well, we’re here. I didn’t want to wake you before. You were sleeping so well. Here’s my phone. Why don’t you call?”

  Cassi peered into the dark. She saw a Texaco station, and across the busy road she spied a university.

  “Actually, this isn’t Provo. It’s kind of on the edge of Orem,” Joe said. “But from where you tell me your folks live, this is just as close as any other place right off the freeway.”

  “Thanks, Joe. I really appreciate the ride.” She tried to shove a fifty-dollar bill into his hand.

  He pushed it back. “Heck, no. I don’t want your money. It was nice having company.”

  “Even sleeping company?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. Snoring beats rock music any day.”

  “You’re a really nice guy,” Cassi said. “You know that?”

  “Well, I’m just your average Joe.” He laughed at his joke. “Now, aren’t you going to call?”

  “Actually, I’m getting hungry. I think I’d just as soon go into that Texaco station and get something to eat while I wait for my brother. I’ll call from there.” What she really didn’t want was her brother’s number recorded on Joe’s phone. Just a precaution.

  “Well, if you’re sure.”

  “I am. Thanks again. I hope everything goes well with your wife.”

  “I just talked to her, and she’s not in labor yet, so I think I’ll make it for the delivery. Not like the last time.”

  “Good.” Cassi pushed open the door and slid down from the cab, tightly clutching the tapestry case with the manila envelope inside.

  She waved good-bye to Joe and went to the pay phone. Inside the zipper pocket of the tapestry case, she fished for the change she had received from the grocery store. With shaking hands, she looked up the number of a taxicab. She was relieved to find one available.

  Within half an hour, she arrived at Robert’s. Her sister-in-law, Jarelyn, opened the door. “Cassi, what are you doing here? And what on earth happened to your hair?”

  Just then Robert came in from the kitchen, dressed in a gray bathrobe with burgundy trim. He rushed over to her and swept her up into a bear hug.

  “Robbie,” she said. “I—”

  “Are you all right?” he asked before she could continue. “I’ve been so worried since your call this morning. I tried to call you back. I called your house, too. Where were you? And when I got home from work a few hours ago, Mom said someone had called her and said something about you being missing. I didn’t believe her, so I called your house again, and then the gallery. No one knew where you were. Mom couldn’t reach you, either. She’s frantic. What’s going on?”

  “Is the wedding off?” Jarelyn asked, her face concerned.

  Cassi felt her legs buckling under her. “Do you have anything I can eat? I haven’t eaten since noon. It’s been a pretty long day.”

  She told her story between bites of leftover tuna casserole, thinking it was the best meal she’d eaten since Jared had last cooked for her. The expressions on her brother and sister-in-law’s faces turned from astonishment to disbelief and then from disbelief to horror.

  “Let’s see this envelope,” Robert said grimly.

  Cassi pulled it out. “It’s just got a bunch of art objects with addresses beside them. But some of it is in French and another language. I don’t know what. Many of those look like addresses too, but here and there you can see full paragraphs of text. Only I don’t know what it means.”

  “I have a neighbor whose daughter speaks French,” Robert said. “Brionney. In fact, she recently got back from spending all summer in France. Her brother lives there now. Married a French girl.”

  “I’ll bet Brionney could read it easily,” Jarelyn said. “But it’s a little late to be banging on their door. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  Robert nodded. “Yes, it’ll have to be tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ll go down to the precinct and see what I can find out.”

  Jarelyn touched Cassi’s shoulder. “You look like you could use a bath and a bed. You can sleep in our room since Robert will be gone. The sheets are fresh, and the baby’s teething so I’ve been spending much of the night in his room anyway. Come on now.”

  Cassi felt relieved to leave the decisions to them, and she let Jarelyn and Robert lead her down the hall to the master bedroom. “I knew coming here was the right thing to do,” she said. Tears gathered in her eyes for the first time since Linden had been shot. For a moment, she sensed the maelstrom of emotions beneath her protective numbness. The intensity frightened her, and she stumbled.

  Her brother caught her from behind. “I think a bath can wait,” he said. “But I’d like to take a look at your knee.”

  They put her into bed, and Robert tenderly re-bandaged her knee while Jarelyn brought her hot chocolate. “Cassi, you never change,” Robert told her. “Big brother always has to bandage you up.”

  Cassi gave a weak laugh. “You do not, silly. Not since I fell off my bike when I was seven. What was it, about twenty-two years ago?”

  The hot chocolate made Cassi sleepy. She didn’t realize until the pain stopped that the wound in her knee had been throbbing. Robert must have used an analgesic cream.

  He smoothed her forehead and kissed her once on the cheek. “You sleep. I’ll be back soon.” He walked toward the door and flipped off the light.

  Jarelyn followed him. “I’d better call your mom,” Cassi heard her say. “She’ll want to know Cassi’s safe, and she’ll need to cancel her flight reservations for tomorrow. We all will.”

  Cassi remembered that the whole family had been planning to attend her wedding in San Diego. Now there would be no wedding, only a lot of phoning to do.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered as Jarelyn returned to the bed with an extra pillow for her knee.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. What’s important is that we find Jared. And you can do nothing about that right now. Just get some rest and leave it to Robert.”

  While Jarelyn rubbed her back, Cassi fell asleep. She dreamed she was in the car again as it sank into the water, but this time Jared was with her. She managed to get out, but when she turned to see Jared, he was gone.

  * * *

  FRED RUBBED THE SLEEP FROM his tired eyes as the report came in at dinner. “Her car went into the lake,” he told Justin. “There is no sign of her or of the men in the white car who our agents believe were some of Big Tommy’s thugs.”

  “Are they sure it was the same car the man at the gas station saw her driving?” Justin asked.

  “It’s the same make and color. I had them run the license plate. Get this, it’s not registered or listed to anybody real. Whoever owns it has connections—or enough money to buy just about anything.”

  “Holbrooke?” Justin asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Any chance at all?”

  “You mean that Cassi got out of the car alive?” Fred shrugged. “We don’t know. No one at the restaurant or in the woods has seen anyone matching her description. Or at the roadblock. They’re checking every car. Big Tommy’s goons might have caught up to her.”

  “She’s smart, though,” Justin said. “Maybe she did make it.”

  “We’ll have to wait and see. What about on your end? Who died in Laranda Garrettson’s place?”

  Justin grimaced. “One of the workers, apparently. But there had to be outside help. Garrettson couldn’t have done it herself—not paralyzed from the waist down, she couldn’t.”

  “Any ideas who helped her?”

  “Landine?”

  Fred shook his head. “No way. I talked to the guy myself after she was shot. He’s completely crazy about Cassi Mason. He ran from the hospital to look for her, and I had to track him down. He wouldn’t have helped Garrettson for anything, not after what she put them through.”

  “I guess we’
re not much further along than we were this morning.”

  “Maybe putting Laranda’s face on the news tonight will spark something.”

  “Maybe.” Justin cocked his head. “Are they dragging the lake to see if they can find Cassi?”

  Fred nodded wearily.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CASSI WAS IN JARED’S DREAMS—the sweet smell of her long hair, the feel of her warm arms around him. He awoke, longing to hold her. What was today? Friday? Tomorrow they were supposed to be married. How he wished he could be with her, to take courage from seeing her face. To kiss her soft lips.

  The guards opened the door, and instinctively Jared jumped to his feet, still fully dressed from the day before. Through the hazy window he could see a beginning of light, but it was still very early.

  “We’re leaving now,” a guard grunted.

  “Without breakfast?” Trent quipped.

  The change of plans worried Jared. “I thought we weren’t going until afternoon,” he said.

  For an answer, the guards clipped a set of handcuffs on each of their wrists. Blindfolds followed. They were led unceremoniously through the house and thrust into a car which almost immediately roared to life. Jared felt glad that his hands had been shackled in front instead of behind his back, so at least he could sit comfortably. Next to him, Jared could feel the warmth of Trent’s arm. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were alone in the back seat. He leaned over until he felt Trent’s cheek and whispered, “It’s a good sign, the blindfolds. It’s so we can’t tell where we’ve been after they release us.”

  Trent murmured in agreement.

  Jared had no way to tell how much time passed, but it seemed as though they drove for nearly an hour. When strong hands finally pulled them from the car, Jared thought about making a run for it, but the point of a gun in his back changed his mind. He was forced up a set of metal stairs.

  An airplane, he thought. Must be a private jet.

  He was led into the plane and settled in a seat. Someone snapped on his safety belt as the whine of the engines began. It wasn’t until after the plane left the ground that a guard removed his blindfold. He glanced quickly around the large cabin. Besides the guards, he and Trent were alone, but through an open door, he could see another cabin and the gleam of a silver chair. Laranda.

  She was talking with someone Jared couldn’t see. Their voices rose and fell, but the noise from the engines obscured their dialogue. Jared thought he recognized the decisive voice of the man who had questioned him on that first night. Who was he? Big Tommy? Jared had to know. He unclipped his safety belt with his hands, which were still cuffed together on his lap. Then he rose to his feet.

  “Sit down,” the largest guard barked.

  “I need to use the john,” Jared said. “You didn’t give us a chance this morning.”

  The man looked toward the back of the plane opposite from where Jared wanted to go. There was nothing for it but to cause a distraction.

  Jared tripped forward, twisting slightly as he fell heavily to the carpeted floor. “Humph,” he grunted. The guard crossed the space between them in three steps, putting himself between Jared and the door. His iron-like hands dug into him. “You think I’m stupid?” he snapped. “Man, you got a big death wish, don’t you? I should let you see him. Then how long do you think you’d live?”

  He dragged Jared to his feet and pushed him into his chair, this time fastening one of the handcuffs to an iron ring on the arm of the seat. Jared stared at the worn piece of iron, wondering how many victims they had transferred since the rings had been installed. The guard repeated the process with Trent and returned to his seat on the other side of the cabin.

  Trent waited until the guards’ attention was elsewhere before he leaned over and asked, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “What’d you see?”

  Jared didn’t know if he should tell Trent the truth. The man he’d glimpsed with Laranda was not the Big Tommy the FBI had shown him in pictures months ago, but a much younger, more virile man. In the picture, Big Tommy had been obese and bearded; this man was fit and clean-shaven. He was more than respectable. Could this be the true Big Tommy, or was he a client? Jared prayed it was a client. If he was the real Big Tommy, Jared was in big trouble. He knew he would be able to identify the man in an instant.

  “A big guy, that’s all,” he said to Trent. “I don’t know.”

  Trent didn’t reply. He contemplated the guards with a frown and a vacant stare.

  Jared looked out the window into the blankness of puffy white clouds. Underneath the plane, the miles were passing, every minute taking him farther away from Cassi. He was beginning to wonder if he would ever see her again.

  * * *

  EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, FRED DROVE up to the remote ranch house outside San Diego. He motioned his men to circle around the back and wait for his signal. After a late-night television broadcast of Laranda’s face the day before, a man had called from a nearby farmhouse claiming to have seen a woman resembling Laranda driving up the road leading to this house.

  Fred reminded himself that the farmer had been far away from the car, and he hadn’t seen any wheelchair. It could be another dead end. But for Linden’s sake, he had to try.

  Linden was still fighting for his life in the hospital. The officers on duty reported that Renae and her baby had visited him yesterday. Following the visit, the nurses were encouraged by Linden’s eye movement, but the doctors remained pessimistic.

  Tearing his mind away from his friend, Fred knocked on the door. There was no answer. He tried the door, but it was locked. He drew his gun, giving the signal to his men, and stood back as Justin forced open the front door with a crowbar. They heard an alarm go off somewhere, and Justin went to find and silence it.

  The house was large, but with so many men, they had it searched in minutes. “Not a sign of them,” one said to Fred. “Or of anyone. Everything looks like they just went out for a walk, but there’s absolutely no one here. Not even a maid.”

  “There’s a big cement room beneath the house,” volunteered another man. “There are a few boxes of junk against the wall and some blood on the floor.” The man wrinkled his nose. “A box in the corner was used as a latrine. Someone’s been down there, all right.”

  “Get a sample of the blood,” Fred ordered. “And check for fingerprints. They couldn’t have had time to clean everything.”

  “Even if they were here, it’s unlikely they would leave a clue to where they were going.”

  “Yeah,” Fred growled, “but what else can we do?” Then he stared at Justin gravely. “What I want to know is who warned them we were coming.”

  * * *

  “WHEN CASSI AWOKE, SHE BATHED and dressed in the loose jeans and long-sleeved cotton pullover Jarelyn had laid out for her. Her hair still looked awful, but her face was more normal without the eyeliner freckles. She left the master bathroom and found Robert in the kitchen. The ever-constant smile on his face was noticeably missing.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What did you learn?”

  He met her halfway across the linoleum. “I did as much checking as I could, but there are red flags everywhere. I can’t even report your appearance without alerting half a dozen departments. Before I had finished my first inquiry, I had five phone calls from California. Cassi, I’m really scared. This is something big. I called a friend of a friend of a friend at the FBI in San Diego. At first she claimed there was nothing going on, but then she called me back later and hinted that if I want you to stay alive, I’d better stop snooping and find you myself before anyone else does.”

  Cassi’s heart thudded dully in her chest. Quentin had suggested that Linden had been betrayed, but she had held onto the hope that it wasn’t true—until now.

  “What am I going to do?” She had hoped her big brother would have the answers, but he brought only more bad news. “Laranda’s got Jared, and I have to save him.”

  Robert saw her
despair and immediately offered the consolation she needed. “Now don’t get all crazy,” he said. “Jarelyn went to talk to our neighbors, the Fields, and she’ll bring Brionney back with her if she can. It’s early yet for her classes to start. When she gets here, we’ll see just what mysteries are in that manila envelope.” He put an arm around her. “Now come and get some breakfast before the kids wake up and attack their favorite aunt.”

  Cassi went to the table but couldn’t eat. She was relieved when Jarelyn came inside the house a few minutes later, accompanied by a curvaceous young woman with long, white-blond hair. Her incredibly blue eyes reminded Cassi of Jared’s except they were a lighter blue, like the color of the sky on a warm summer day, while Jared’s were reminiscent of that same sky before dusk.

  “Hi, Brionney!” Robert said. “Thank you for coming. This is my sister, Cassi.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Cassi said.

  Brionney smiled. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Jarelyn. She’s been so excited for your wedding.” She frowned. “Oh, I’m sorry. I always know just the right thing to say. Please forgive me.”

  “It’s okay,” Cassi said.

  A smile replaced Brionney’s frown. She sat at the table. “Are these the papers?”

  “Yes.” Cassi pulled them from the envelope and passed them to her.

  They waited for long moments while Brionney studied the French on the page. Finally, she looked up. “These are addresses, but I guess you knew that. But this paragraph here has instructions on where to bring the following items. Looks like paintings mostly.”

  Cassi looked at the names. What a variety of artists—Picasso, Bonnard, Vuillard, Pissaro, Nolde, and Kokoshka were only the beginning of the list. “These are paintings by important artists. I’d heard a few were for sale, but I didn’t look into them.”

  Brionney’s forehead wrinkled, and she rested her finger on the page. “Hmm, this here seems to have been written by a different person who didn’t know French very well. It looks like a price.”

  “Maybe they’re selling the painting,” Robert said.