“And what do I deserve, Jack?” she asked quietly.
His expression was unreadable. He got to his feet. “I doubt even the hermit knows you took the diamonds. I only figured it out because I fell in love with you. If I hadn’t—” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“It’s wrong.”
He didn’t look at her. “I just need time to clear out.”
“What about me?”
“You won’t talk.” His gaze fell to her, his eyes flat and dead, any warmth that had been there turned cold. “Your silence and what you’ve done to Penelope have already doomed you.”
Twenty
P enelope hit every pothole and frost heave on the road to the airport. She knew her driving wasn’t safe, but she had to find Harriet and Jack Dunning, and she had to find them now. She didn’t trust Dunning, and she was worried about Harriet.
The story was out. On the wires, on CNN, in all the Boston and New Hampshire media. Every reporter in Cold Spring wanted a shot of the heir-turned-hermit. Bubba Johns—Colt Sinclair—and Lyman Chestnut, however, weren’t cooperating. When they emerged from Andy McNally’s office, they went to the Sunrise Inn.
Robby Chestnut brought them into the kitchen, warned the reporters it was off-limits per order of the board of health, and fed them sandwiches and coffee. Penelope had never been so proud of her mother. As enraged as Robby was at the secrets her husband had kept from her, she loved him, and she was going to let him eat lunch with his friend in peace. She did ask Bubba if she needed to spray after he’d sat in her kitchen.
No one offered to fetch his brother and nephew for him. That was for him to request, and he didn’t.
“So,” she said, pouring more coffee, “what happened to Frannie?”
“She died a few hours after the crash,” Colt Sinclair said. “There was nothing I could do. We were supposed to have flown to Canada, but she insisted we detour to Cold Spring. Lyman and his father were going to be waiting at the airfield. It wasn’t much in those days. But I…” His old gray eyes clouded. “Something went wrong, and we didn’t make it.”
Lyman took over from there. “My father started looking immediately. He had a pretty good idea of where they went down. He met up with Colt on the way—Frannie had dragged herself off, wouldn’t keep still. She was bleeding internally. Pop did everything he could. There was just no saving her.”
“All she wanted to do,” Colt said quietly, “was to get to her baby.”
“Jesus Christ in heaven,” Robby breathed.
“I had the baby up at Pop’s cabin on the lake,” Lyman said. “Pop and I took turns for weeks watching her. Mother got suspicious—and I caught Mary following me once or twice. Frannie had come home to have her baby. She didn’t realize I knew she was expecting. I guess you don’t realize what a teenager knows until it’s too late. We kept it our secret as long as we could.”
Penelope was stunned. “Did you help deliver her baby?”
He nodded. “My father arrived right in the middle of it. First thing, he figured I was the father. That was a rough moment, I can tell you. When we got that straightened out, he rolled up his sleeves, and we did our best.”
“Why, Pop? Why not take her to the hospital? I don’t get it.”
“In those days an illegitimate child wasn’t the same as it is now. And Frannie—Frannie had her own ideas about doing things. She didn’t want anyone to know about the baby. She was afraid.”
Colt, his sandwich untouched, clasped his big, scarred, bony hands on the table and shook his head. “I didn’t know. Not until that night in the plane. I never even guessed she was pregnant that whole winter. She was—” He shut his eyes, swallowed. “She was the most wonderful woman I’d ever known.”
“And his old man was the father of her baby,” Lyman said with brutal clarity.
Penelope gasped.
Her mother was horrified. “Willard Sinclair? That rotten son of a bitch!”
“He’d seduced her the previous summer,” Lyman went on painfully. “Frannie didn’t know what to do. She knew Willard would never admit to being the father. He was finished with her, acted like nothing had happened. And Frannie—Frannie wanted her cake and to eat it, too. When he offered her the job in New York, she took it. She hid her pregnancy from everyone, then came home and had the baby here, among friends.”
“Then went back to New York?” Penelope asked.
“She promised to be in touch when she figured out what to do. Pop and I took turns tending to the baby.”
“To Harriet,” Robby said stiffly.
Her husband nodded. “She was six weeks old when Frannie called to say she’d made arrangements to fly to Cold Spring. Only she didn’t make it.”
“How awful,” Penelope breathed. “To have been seduced by one man and then fall in love with his son—”
Colt shook his head. “Frannie was never in love with me. She needed me to help her start her new life. She was desperate. She stole the diamonds—my father owed her that much, she said—and planned to take her baby up to Canada and start fresh.”
“With you,” Penelope said.
“No. Before she died, she told me I belonged with my family—with my brother. She intended to send me back to New York.”
Robby scowled. “Frannie didn’t think that one through very well, did she?”
But Colt refused to speak ill of her. “She was desperate. She knew my father would never acknowledge their child.”
Robby was unmoved. “I don’t care. She used her child’s brother and a fifteen-year-old boy to save her skin.” She swung to her husband. “And your father, Lyman. What in God’s name was he thinking going along with this scheme?”
“He was thinking of the baby,” Lyman said simply. “He thought she should be with her mother, and he didn’t know any way of making that happen besides doing what Frannie asked. We didn’t know about the diamonds, of course. We assumed she’d just been saving her money.”
“So when Frannie died,” Penelope said, trying to sort it all out in her mind, “you and Granddad came up with the apple basket and left her on the church doorstep for Uncle George to find.”
Lyman nodded. “That’s right.”
Robby thrust a finger at him. “If Harriet wants to slice your heart out, by damn it, I’m not going to stop her. Keeping such a thing secret all these years!”
“It wasn’t my secret to tell. My father and I made a promise to Frannie, and to Colt. And we kept that promise. What else would you have had me do? Turn Harriet over to Willard Sinclair? He’d have tossed her back in a heartbeat.”
Robby snorted in disgust, but Penelope could tell her mother’s anger wouldn’t last. She wasn’t sure about her own. She turned to Colt, sitting quietly with his untouched coffee, his untouched sandwich. “What about your family? Why didn’t you go back?”
The gray eyes were so clear. “I couldn’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
He almost smiled. “Be glad you don’t. I buried Frannie under a mountain laurel. I struck off into the woods. I meant to go back to the plane and get the diamonds, but I just kept walking. I ended up on the Canadian border. I stayed there for a while, then came back down here and built my place near the spot where I’d buried Frannie. I guess I just started thinking about how I’d explain everything to my father and never could find a way.”
“But your brother—”
“I believed my brother would be better off without me. I thought of myself as an incompetent fool, a dupe. Because of me, Frannie was dead and her baby was being raised by someone else. I wanted Brandon to look up to me, but I knew my father would never let him—and I knew I didn’t deserve it.”
It was only then, and only because of Andy McNally’s arrival, that they realized Wyatt and Brandon Sinclair had been listening at the door behind them. Robby must have seen them but had said nothing. She tried to get Andy’s attention and stop him, but he said, “Why don’t you two pull up a chair?”
A white
-faced Brandon Sinclair abruptly turned on his heels and walked out. Wyatt, clearly torn, went after him.
Penelope did nothing. She could feel her connection with Wyatt slipping away, and yet she wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything. Andy didn’t seem to understand what he’d done wrong. He’d come for Harriet, and that was all that was on his mind. He was still ashen over what he’d learned from Colt and Lyman, his scar the only color in his face.
“Someone needs to tell Harriet what’s going on.”
“I will,” Lyman said. “And I’ll call George and tell him and Rachel. They’ll want to come up here, I expect.”
“Do they know?”
Lyman shook his head.
Andy couldn’t contain his impatience. “I know you all are caught up with what happened forty-five years ago. But let’s not forget that just yesterday someone smacked the hell out of Penelope—and there’s still the matter of ten million in diamonds missing.”
“That could be anyone,” Robby said. “Colt says they’ve been missing for years. If I stumbled on a fortune in diamonds in a plane wreck, I’d keep my mouth shut about it.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened,” Andy said.
And everyone in the room knew. Penelope could feel the energy change.
Harriet.
Robby paled. “Andy, you can’t think—”
“It explains a lot of things, Robby. Think about it. I’m not saying she fenced them or anything like that—but they’ve been her little secret for a long, long time. I’d stake my reputation on it.”
“I’ll help you find her,” Penelope said quietly.
Someone had reported seeing Harriet with Jack Dunning. Someone else reported seeing Dunning driving to the airport. Penelope volunteered to check the airport, which her father had shut down for the day. No traffic in, no traffic out. It was truth-telling time in Cold Spring, New Hampshire.
She left without a word to Wyatt. Harriet was his aunt. Bubba Johns was his uncle. And Lyman had known it all for years. It was too much to expect Wyatt and his father to digest it over tea and scones.
Penelope bounced over the pits and ruts of the dirt parking lot. Jack Dunning’s rented car was there. Indulging in a small surge of hope, she jumped out of her truck and charged across the parking lot, breaking into a run when she saw his plane sitting on the runway. At least he hadn’t left.
But no one was in the cockpit. She climbed in and sat in the right pilot’s seat. It was a very nice plane. A custom interior, plush, state-of-the-art. She was used to planes she and her father kept together with duct tape and baling wire. Unless the Sinclairs owned his plane, Jack Dunning had expensive tastes.
If she were a New York private detective and wannabe Texan and had made off with ten million in diamonds, where would she put them?
“Christ, you’re like a bad penny.” Penelope jumped as Jack Dunning materialized in the open door and climbed into the left seat, shaking his head. “You keep turning up when I don’t want you.”
She kept her cool. This did not bode well. And she was without dogs, rifle or Wyatt. “You’re clearing out?”
“I have business in New York.”
“Kind of taking off in midstream, aren’t you? We’ve found Bubba but there’s still some nasty bastard on the loose.”
“I don’t think so.” He turned to her, and she realized his expressions had a very narrow range, from none to barely none. “I think everything will turn out to be Harriet and your hermit. Harriet sent you that cute little instant message and the fax, then shot over here and messed up your aunt’s machine to throw suspicion off herself.”
“That’s ridiculous—”
“Oh, no, it’s not. It’s quite true. And our hermit-heir Bubba—he did everything else.”
“Including hit himself over the head, I presume.”
“To draw attention away from himself. So, yes, you presume correctly.”
Penelope calculated her options, which were few. Scream, pray, make a run for it, brazen it out. “Where’s Harriet now?”
He averted his gaze. “I have no idea.”
“She fell for you, you know. But of course you know. You used her to get the diamonds from her.”
He didn’t look at her. “I know you people up here like life in black and white, but here’s the thing. I love your cousin. I didn’t make her do anything. She made her choice, that’s all.”
“She didn’t—” Penelope stopped herself, the thought like a white-hot knife in her stomach. “She’s not going to kill herself.”
“I don’t know what she’s going to do. It’s none of my business anymore. You, however, are.”
She saw what was coming. The gun, the flat eyes. She swore and reached madly for the door, but the blow came hard and fast to the side of her head. She could feel herself collapsing, and in the split second before unconsciousness claimed her, she knew she was in very serious trouble.
If he went over all his moves during the past week, Wyatt was fairly certain he could find alternative choices that would have prevented him from being in his current predicament. He could have stayed in New York with Pill. He could have thrown Jack Dunning out his office window. He could have believed Penelope’s story about the turn-of-the-century dump and decided to visit his father in the Bahamas.
Instead he’d done all the things he’d done, and now he was stuck in the back of a plane with the woman he was fast falling in love with tied and gagged and a larcenous, murderous son of a bitch at the controls.
They were in the air. Dunning had taken off seconds after dispatching Penelope, and Wyatt forced himself to stay cool and time his move. Jack was armed, and he was a professional. Wyatt had only the element of surprise at his disposal—and raw anger.
His father, in shock at what they’d overheard in the inn’s kitchen, had asked him to find Jack. Seeing Colt again had sucked everything out of Brandon, and he wanted to update Dunning and call him off. He’d said nothing, but Wyatt knew they both suspected the same thing—his private investigator was out of control, responsible for turning an emotional situation into a dangerous one.
When Wyatt arrived at the little airport, it was shut up tight. No Jack, not even a security guard. He drove to the hangar where his uncle had spent the past few nights, not knowing what to expect. Diamonds? Jack Dunning rustling through the old hermit’s stuff? But the place was locked. He’d left his car over by the third hangar and walked around in the cold, still air, checking out the other two hangars, trying to picture Penelope’s life before he’d stormed into it.
While he was investigating, Jack arrived. When Jack stepped out of his car, Wyatt decided he didn’t like the looks of things and slipped into the plane, climbing out of sight in back. He expected to give the handsome, custom plane a quick once-over and sneak out before Jack returned. But then Penelope jumped aboard, and Jack right after her, and Wyatt thought it best to duck. He scrunched down behind a cargo trunk and pulled a tarp over him. He would wait for Jack to hang himself, then announce his presence.
In hindsight, not the best plan. Jack had, in fact, hung himself, but he’d also bonked Penelope on the head. Wyatt decided not to announce his presence. He didn’t want to risk doing anything to further endanger Penelope. Next thing he knew, they were taking off. Seeing how he wasn’t a pilot, Wyatt was biding his time. The bad guy pilot was at the controls. The good guy pilot was unconscious. He needed to be patient.
He was still under the tarp, cramped and growing more irritable by the moment. But if he acted prematurely, Jack could end up shooting Penelope, or him, or the wrong part of the plane. It seemed wise to stay put for now.
“Well, well, well,” Jack said. “Look who’s awake.”
He must have slipped Penelope’s gag off, because she said, “Bastard.”
“Ooh, your head hurts, doesn’t it? I could have killed you yesterday when I popped you with the shed door. That’s when I figured out Harriet had the diamonds. I searched that crazy hermit’s pl
ace high and low. He’d have dumped them if he’d picked them up. So it was either Harriet or they were gone.”
“What did you do with her?”
“I told you. Nothing. She’s not going to say anything. She’s in this thing neck-deep herself.”
“You think you know her. But you don’t.”
Penelope sounded groggy and racked with pain, her words slurring. Wyatt kept still, every muscle in his body twitching, ready to spring.
“You can’t possibly think this scheme of yours is going to succeed,” Penelope said.
“Sure I do. I caught you messing around with my plane and realized you were going to pin everything on me to protect your weird cousin Harriet. We struggle. You prevail momentarily and take off, not realizing my plane’s low on fuel. Penelope Chestnut and her impulses, you know?”
“Far-fetched.”
“So’s the idea of sweet, plain Harriet Chestnut being a Sinclair, but look at that one. Besides, I have to work with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got, sweet cheeks, is you.”
“I’ll run out of fuel, crash and die.”
“That’s the plan. Nothing but trees and hills ahead. You could sit out here in the boonies for fifty years yourself.”
“And you?”
“I will go back to New York and continue my work with the Sinclairs. One by one, I fence the diamonds and amass a nice fortune for myself. Then I buy my ranch in Texas. If things get too hot here, I skip to Argentina, maybe Australia. Unfortunately, you were killed in the crash, and the diamonds weren’t recovered.”
“Harriet’ll talk,” Penelope said.
“If she believes her actions—or her lack of action—got everyone’s favorite Chestnut killed? I don’t think so. She’ll just wither into a bitter, pathetic prune. Or hang herself on her front porch.”
“You’re evil.”
“I’m just a guy trying to make a buck.”
Wyatt could hear a rustling sound and something like a lock snapping. Then Penelope’s voice. “You’re going to jump? I hope you break your neck.”
Kiss the Moon Page 29