“What is unfortunate,” Roget bit out, and the urbane mask slipped away, “is that you didn’t pick some other corner of the world to hole up in.” He snapped his fingers, and a tall, slim figure in black rose from one of the stalls. A black cap covered her hair, but as she stood in profile to Blade and me, the body was unmistakably female. She held a wicked-looking little silver gun and it was pointed straight at Peter.
Peter smiled at her. “Why am I not surprised?” he said.
“Nothing personal,” she said. The voice carried, flat—and American. Tracy, I realized with a jolt.
“It’s kismet,” Roget said blandly. “We’re all the pawns of our destiny. Your destiny unfortunately ends here tonight.”
I don’t remember moving, but Blade yanked me back hard, and I landed on my tailbone. He continued stealthily down the line of box stalls. Scrambling up from the sawdust, I saw Roget nod to Tracy. But they both froze at the movement on the stairway leading from the loft above.
“I’d think twice about that, old thing,” A cool voice with a soft Highland lilt said, “That is, if you want to live to see the sunrise.”
We all stared as a tall, slim figure in black, red hair tumbling over slender shoulders, came swiftly, surefootedly down the narrow stairs.
Then Tracy’s face darkened; she spun, bringing up her pistol as Catriona jumped lightly to the floor below. Peter dived for Tracy, knocking her arm up. She fired into the ceiling.
Men rushed in through the open double doors—I recognized the dark uniforms of the police—and then I spotted Brian.
“Throw down your weapons!” he ordered. “Police. Put the guns down!”
And there were now multiple guns. Something dull and deadly glinted in Roget’s hand. I saw it in the instant before he reached out and knocked over the lantern. The barn plunged into darkness, the lantern rolling across the floor, flickering wildly, before it vanished behind a stall. The taint of kerosene cut the benign barnyard odors.
To the left, I saw a muzzle flash in the darkness, and then there was movement speeding up the aisle toward Blade and me. A dozen flashlight beams began to stab the darkness.
Someone knocked into me with force, tripped, and went hurtling forward. I rolled out of the way. There was a scuffling above me, another muzzle flash, the bang of a shot; and Blade let out a sharp oath.
“Are you all right?” I cried out, reaching for him.
The door behind us pushed open and a shadow briefly blocked the stars. The door slammed shut and leisurely drifted open again.
His voice startlingly near, Peter said furiously, “What the hell are you doing here?” And I was grabbed and hauled to my feet. He began to feel me over with hard, anxious hands. “Are you hurt?”
“I think Blade’s been shot,” I said.
“He bloody well ought to be!”
“I’m all right,” Blade gritted out.
“Jesus! I could shoot you both,” Peter said. He pulled me briefly into his arms. I clutched at him in relief and gratitude for his safety, but the next moment he thrust me away and gave me a shake. “What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”
“Is that rhetorical?” I said shakily.
The light came on from another lantern, the unsteady lamp glow fluttering against the rough beams and open stalls. To the side, two policemen were stamping out the tentative flames of the fallen lantern. Brian stood near the double doors trying to hold onto Tracy. She was kicking and wriggling, swearing with a vigor and inventiveness even surprising for her.
“Where the hell did he go?” he shouted to Peter over Tracy’s raging.
Peter pointed furiously at the door offset, on its jamb. “Brilliant work as usual!”
“Don’t let him get away!” Brian’s curses joined Tracy’s. He began to shout orders. Policemen ran out into the night in pursuit of Gordon Roget.
Releasing his punishing grip on me, Peter knelt beside Blade, who was sitting up, clutching his arm. Blood glistened in the dim light, trickled down Blade’s black leather sleeve.
“It’s just a flesh wound.”
“Not for your jacket, mate.” Peter’s grin was reluctant.
Blade’s swearing joined the general profanity around us.
I was looking for Catriona, but I didn’t see her anywhere. For one awful moment I thought she might have been hit by the gunfire, but then I realized that she was nowhere to be seen. This was confirmed a moment later when Brian said, “The Ruthven woman—where did she go?”
“I can’t believe you went to the police,” I said much later that morning, as Peter unlocked the door to Rogue’s Gallery.
“I should think you’d be pleased. Isn’t that what you’re always advising me to do?”
Bells chimed soft and silvery as he pushed the door open. We stepped inside the dim interior and Peter fiddled with the alarm. I looked around. Golden sunlight glanced off the familiar marble bust of Byron, flooded the old maps on the wall illuminating the delicate tracery of long-lost roads and byways.
“And Brian believed you?” I glanced up expecting to see the door of Peter’s flat open, expecting to see some sign that Catriona was here—and bracing myself for that encounter. But the door to the flat was closed. And I noticed that the mermaid figurehead—her dark wooden belly repaired and whole—hung suspended once more from the vaulted ceiling above us.
“I don’t know if he believed me,” Peter said. “I think he was hoping to watch me outsmart myself and fall into his trap. Although he did say something about no one being mad enough to make up such a story.”
“He’s a good man,” I said.
Peter was smiling at me.
“What?”
“Perhaps you didn’t notice. Twice he said, ‘So that was Catriona Ruthven?’”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You can’t mean what I think you mean. There’s no way Brian would fall for your psycho ex-girlfriend. She’s a villain!”
He just continued to smile in that maddening way.
“It’s unthinkable,” I said.
He said blandly, “She’d be very good for him.”
I was shaking my head, repudiating such a notion. “I don’t want to think about it.” I was too tired to think about it, frankly, but…I had to admit that during the carriage house mop-up that night, for the first time ever, I’d had the odd feeling that Brian had only been peripherally aware of me.
Starting up the stairway to the flat I said, “What happens if they don’t catch Roget?”
“I don’t think there’s a chance in hell they’ll catch Roget.” He sounded very weary.
I glanced back, and he said, “It doesn’t matter. They’ve got Tracy, and if last night was anything to go by, she’ll spill everything she knows in the interests of a reduced sentence.”
“But does she know everything?”
“She knows enough to clear me of any suspicion of murder.”
I wasn’t convinced of how much talking Tracy would do. Regardless of who had been pulling the strings, it was evident that Tracy had been the trigger woman. According to Brian, Interpol had matched her profile to that of an international hit woman. While she had failed to kill Peter, it looked likely that in a fit of exasperation she had eliminated her erstwhile partners, the February brothers—the night I had revealed that police scrutiny had fallen upon them.
So much for my feminine instinct. The irony was that all those times I had imagined Tracy was making romantic advances toward Peter, she had actually been trying to get him alone long enough to kill him. I suspected she had been a little attracted to him, though, because she had certainly taken her time trying to dispatch him.
We reached the flat; Peter unlocked the door, pushing it wide. Sunlight illumined the long, lovely room. The grandfather clock against the wall, the curio chest before the red leather sofa, the telescope facing out the picture windows that framed the dark woods and purple-shadowed mountains beyond: all seemed untouched, unchanged. I truly felt that I was coming home. But was this my h
ome?
“Is that it then?” I asked. “Have we seen the last of Gordon Roget and the Serpent’s Egg?” Have we seen the last of Catriona? I wondered.
When he didn’t answer, I turned to face him. He was studying me quizzically.
“Is this where the story ends?” I asked, and my voice was softer than I intended.
His mouth curved in a slow smile, and without moving consciously I was somehow across the room and in the warm circle of his arms. He gazed down at me, and his eyes were bluer than the bluest of the lakes.
He said, “Some stories don’t have an ending, Esmerelda....”
Epilogue
“What’s this?” I asked as Peter offered a large, square, beribboned box he had fished out from beneath the bed.
It was Tuesday afternoon following after the arrest of Tracy Burke—and the escape of Gordon Roget. Peter and I had slept late, then woke and talked, made love, and talked some more. And then he had apparently remembered the parcel beneath the bed.
The silver-wrapped box was far too large to contain a jewelry case. I took it and shook it gently. He winced.
“Does every girl get a prize?” I inquired, plucking at the large white bow. “Or have I been especially good?”
His mouth twitched, but something in his eyes told me to—just this once—shut up.
“Open it,” he said.
I pulled the white silk bow, and it slipped loose, pooling on the sheet. I gently peeled back the foil paper. The box inside was simple and white. I opened it, moved aside the star-spangled tissue paper. My fingertips found something cool and pointed. I reached in and lifted out what I took at first to be a fragile statuette: Two bisque doves nestled beneath a wire arch of tiny seed pearls, pale pink stones, and silvery velvet leaves.
“It’s lovely,” I said. “What is it?” And then I knew what it was. I met his eyes. “It’s a wedding cake topper.” I felt a prickle behind my eyes.
Peter cleared his throat. “Circa nineteen twenty,” he said.
One of the doves held a ring in its delicately formed beak. I freed the ring. It was a delicate twist of gold and diamonds and tiny smoky stones—of cairngorm perhaps. Just the color of the tarns and lakes when the evening sun burnished them.
He took the ring from me and slipped it on my left hand.
“How does that fit?” he asked.
“It fits perfectly,” I said, and kissed him.
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For more information on the works of Diana Killian please visit The Girl Detective Website.
Table of Contents
Title Page
untitled
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Docketful of Poesy Page 24