Truth or Dare

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Arcadia held her cup in both hands and studied the depths of her tea as if it were an oracle glass. “I can’t be absolutely positive,” she said carefully, “but I don’t think that he will try to shoot me dead from a distance.”

  They all watched her.

  “Why not?” Ethan asked.

  “Two reasons. First, Grant is a strategic thinker. It was his forte when he was running his investment empire, and he’s not the type to change his stripes. In fact he’s almost obsessive when it comes to planning. Keep in mind that he has a reason to be careful. The last thing he’ll want to do is give the Feds or his disgruntled former business associates a reason to think that he’s still alive.”

  “Good point,” Zoe said.

  “Running me down with a car or arranging for me to die in a mysterious house fire would be more his style,” Arcadia said.

  Ethan saw Harry’s hand flex once. It was the only evidence of what he must have been thinking but it was a chilling little movement.

  “What’s the second reason he wouldn’t try to gun you down from a safe distance?” Ethan asked.

  “I took out a small insurance policy before I disappeared.”

  “What kind of policy?” Ethan asked.

  “I have something that Grant wants.” Arcadia lowered her cup to the saucer. “And the only way to get it from me is to make me tell him where it is.”

  No one spoke. They all sat there, waiting. Ethan saw the concern mingled with curiosity on Zoe’s face and realized that Arcadia had not told her all of her secrets.

  “When I realized that the safest thing to do was vanish,” Arcadia said quietly, “I made some arrangements. I stashed money in several different accounts under a variety of identities, and I tried to muddy my trail by checking myself into Candle Lake Manor. After Zoe and I escaped, I changed my identity a second time.”

  “Go on,” Harry said quietly.

  “I took one more precaution. Grant kept everything that was important to him on a secret computer that he didn’t realize that I knew he had. A lot of it was the sort of detailed financial information that could have sent him to jail for a very long time. But as I found out later, there was some other, more dangerous stuff on it, too. In any event, I figured out his password and downloaded the entire file. Then I hid my copy.”

  “Tell me about this dangerous stuff,” Ethan said.

  “It consists of the details of some scams that Grant pulled on a few folks who are not as easygoing as the Feds when it comes to things like embezzlement.” Arcadia’s shoulders were rigid. “I discovered rather late in our marriage that my husband had ripped off some extremely unsavory people. If they ever find out that he’s alive and if they learn that he stole a great deal of money from them, they will surely want revenge.”

  Harry whistled tunelessly. “If Loring’s out there, he won’t rest easy until he destroys the copy you made of that file.”

  “As I said,” Arcadia continued, “I hid the file. But I didn’t tell Grant that I had done so. I thought I had some time, you see. I was trying to decide what my next move should be. But then he attempted to murder me.”

  “How?” Ethan asked.

  “It was supposed to be an accident. I told you, Grant favors that approach. I had a late evening appointment with a client who lived in a home just outside a resort town in the mountains. Grant knew that my route followed the shoreline of a large lake. He lay in wait for me. Forced my car off the road at a high point above the water.”

  “Dear God.” Zoe reached out and put one hand over Arcadia’s.

  Harry looked like death made flesh.

  Ethan kept his mouth shut and made more notes.

  “It was night and it was raining hard,” Arcadia went on after a while. “Fortunately, the car landed in a relatively shallow section of the lake. I made it out through the driver’s window and surfaced beneath some overhanging tree branches. That was probably what saved my life.”

  Ethan paused in his writing. “Loring couldn’t find you in the water?”

  “No. I realized it was him when he got out of the car and walked in front of the headlights. He had a flashlight. He used it to search the surface of the lake. But he never spotted me because of the trees. I honestly thought I would die of hypothermia before he finally left the scene.”

  Harry rested his palm on her knee. Ethan saw his fingers tighten gently.

  “After he drove away, I climbed out of the water. I spent the night in an empty cabin. By morning I decided that the safest thing for me to do was disappear until the authorities caught up with Grant.”

  “But they never did catch up with him,” Harry concluded.

  “No, because Grant fled the country early the next morning. He was reported dead in a skiing accident in Europe two weeks later.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the Feds?” Ethan asked.

  “Frankly, I didn’t think they would be able to protect me from Grant. But I did get the word out about that file I had hidden.”

  “How did you do that?” Harry asked.

  “I used a computer to plant the story in the financial press. It was just a short piece about how, before she died, Grant Loring’s wife had confided to an unnamed source that she had copied Loring’s private files. I implied that the tragically deceased Mrs. Loring had stashed said files in a secret location. Sadly, she took the secret with her to a watery grave.”

  Harry tipped his head to one side about an inch. “ ‘Watery grave’?”

  Arcadia raised her brows. “You think that was a little over-the-top for the financial press?”

  “Nah. It’s perfect for the financial press.” He nodded. “Watery grave. Yeah, I like it a lot. I’ll bet they went for it.”

  “They did,” Arcadia assured him. “And so did a lot of the rest of the media. That was all I cared about. I knew that, wherever he was, Grant would be watching the papers, networks and the on-line news sources to find out if my body was recovered and to see how his own disappearing act was going down. I knew the threat wouldn’t provide me with complete protection, but I thought it might give me a little bargaining power if Grant ever came looking for me.”

  Ethan studied his notes. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll proceed on the assumption that Grant Loring is alive and well and has become a problem for Arcadia because it is a reasonable possibility. But we need to keep in mind that we might be wrong.”

  “Do you think we’re jumping at shadows?” Zoe asked.

  Ethan shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Zoe cleared her throat.

  Ethan groaned silently. He knew that little sound she made when she was getting ready to tell him something that he did not want to hear.

  He eyed her warily. “Now what?”

  “I’m not sure what it means,” she said, enunciating each word with great care. “But I think there’s something you should know.”

  “Don’t drag it out,” he muttered. “I can’t take the suspense.”

  Instead of answering immediately, Zoe exchanged glances with Arcadia. He could not read the private message that passed between them, but there was no mistaking that one had been transmitted and received.

  Zoe wrapped her arms around her midsection and looked at him with shadowed, somber eyes. “I felt something in Arcadia’s office this afternoon.”

  “Zoe.” Arcadia turned toward her with a startled movement. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s a little hard to explain,” Zoe admitted.

  Harry looked interested.

  “Okay,” Ethan said. “You’ve got our attention. What did your intuition tell you?”

  “That’s just it,” Zoe whispered. “I’m not sure what it told me. That’s why I didn’t say anything to you, Arcadia. But I know this much: I felt the same thing in my library at the show house yesterday.”

  “Keep talking,” Ethan said evenly.

  “It was very faint.” She moved her shoulders in a tight shrug. “Just wispy little traces.
But it . . . it really freaked me out for a while because I’ve only experienced that kind of energy on one other occasion.”

  “When was that?” Harry asked.

  “One night when I was out wandering the halls at Candle Lake Manor.” She looked directly at Arcadia. “It was coming from a room in H Ward.”

  “Oh, shit,” Arcadia said very softly.

  Ethan glanced at Harry, who silently shook his head. Evidently this wasn’t making any sense to him, either.

  He switched his attention back to Zoe and Arcadia. “One of you want to tell us what was so freaky about H Ward?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got inquiring minds,” Harry added.

  Zoe drew a deep breath. Ethan could see that she was preparing to take some sort of big plunge.

  “You know that Candle Lake Manor is an upscale private sanatorium,” she said. “It was established as a place where, for a price, rich folks could institutionalize their more awkward relatives, the ones with mental health issues and psychological problems.”

  Ethan nodded. “We’ve got that much. Go on.”

  “Well,” Zoe continued. “Hard as it may be to comprehend, it turns out that the very wealthy have their fair share of seriously disturbed family members, too, just like everyone else. H Ward was the wing at Xanadu where those patients were warehoused.”

  “ ‘Seriously disturbed,’ ” Ethan repeated without inflection. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “She’s talking about the potentially dangerous patients,” Arcadia explained. “The real crazies, the ones who scared the daylights out of the staff and everyone else.”

  “Well, well, what do you know,” Harry muttered. “The rich are not so different, after all. But what about this weird sensation you got in Arcadia’s office and your library, Zoe?”

  “I’m starting to think that the crazy psychic energy may have been left behind by Lindsey Voyle,” Zoe said.

  “Great,” Ethan said. “Just what I needed in this case. The interior designer from hell.”

  25

  Singleton was in his tiny office, staring into the depths of his computer when the door of the shop opened. Bonnie walked in, bringing a few megawatts of the late morning sunshine with her.

  “Singleton?”

  “Back here.” He tried to ignore the little surge of pleasure that pulsed through him. Keep cool, man. She sees you as a friend, not a lover. You don’t want to screw this up.

  He pushed himself back from the computer, took off his glasses and got to his feet “You must be exhausted.” Bonnie came to stand in the narrow doorway. “I understand that Ethan woke you up around three this morning to ask you to start working on this situation involving Arcadia.” She held up a large paper cup bearing the logo of a Fountain Square espresso bar. “I thought that by now you could use some caffeine.”

  “You thought right.” He took the coffee from her, peeled off the lid and took a long swallow. When he was finished, he lowered the cup with a sigh of satisfaction. “Thanks. I needed that. You were right about that three A.M. call from your brother-in-law. Lucky for him he’s a friend as well as an occasional client.”

  No point telling her that when he’d picked up the phone and heard Ethan’s somber, coolly urgent voice on the other end of the connection, panic had hit him with the force of a hammer in the gut. For a few dazed seconds he’d been afraid that the late night call signaled bad news about Bonnie or one of the boys. In that short space of time his world had started to shatter and collapse around him.

  When he’d learned that the threat had nothing to do with Bonnie, Jeff or Theo, he’d been so relieved that he immediately felt a pang of guilt. After all, he liked Arcadia a lot. She was a friend, and the knowledge that she was in danger worried him. But the concern he felt for her was not the same kind of bone-deep fear he knew he would experience if Bonnie or one of the boys was in harm’s way.

  Face it, Cobb, you’ve got it bad.

  Bonnie removed a plastic container from another paper sack.

  He studied it with interest. “What have we here?”

  “Tuna fish.”

  He took the container from her and opened it with a sense of anticipation. “On rye. My favorite.”

  Bonnie chuckled. “You always say that. No matter what I feed you, you always tell me it’s your favorite.”

  He removed one half of the plump, neatly sliced sandwich and took a bite. “That’s because it’s the truth.”

  She smiled, looking quietly satisfied, and watched him demolish the first half of the sandwich.

  “I understand that you and Jeff had a talk,” she said when he paused to drink more coffee.

  “Jeff told you about it?”

  “He said that you explained to him that he didn’t have to worry about remembering exactly what Drew looked like. That no matter what happened he would never forget his father.”

  He got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach and knew that it had nothing to do with the tuna fish. It was Bonnie’s very serious expression and tone that was making him lose his appetite. He wondered if she thought he had overstepped the bounds of friendship when he’d taken it upon himself to have that chat with Jeff.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” He put down the unfinished portion of the sandwich. “Look, Bonnie, I apologize if I intruded too much into your family’s private life.”

  “No, please, don’t apologize. That’s not what I meant at all.” She took a step forward and touched his arm. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m very grateful that you spoke with Jeff. I hadn’t realized what was really bothering him this year. I thought maybe he was acting out because he had somehow regressed to the very bad time the first November after we lost Drew. The therapist warned me that could happen.”

  He looked down at her hand. Her fingertips rested lightly on his bare skin just below the rolled-up edge of his denim sleeve. He was intensely aware of her standing so close; had to remind himself to breathe.

  “It’s hard for a boy that age to explain what he’s going through,” he said. “Hell, it’s hard for a guy to explain himself at any age.”

  “I know. You think you know your own children, but like everyone else, they have their private places deep inside. They have thoughts and worries that they feel they can’t talk about. It never occurred to me that Jeff was terrified that he would forget his father.”

  Alarmed, he closed his big hand over hers without stopping to consider the intimacy of the small gesture. “For God’s sake, Bonnie, don’t blame yourself because you didn’t immediately figure out what was bothering Jeff. I know you think you’re supposed to solve all his problems for him, but the truth is, he’s starting to grow up and he needs to work some things through in his own way.”

  “He’s only eight years old.”

  “Yeah, but he’s on his way to becoming a man, and deep down he knows that. He also knows that he’s got some very high standards to meet.”

  “Standards?”

  “The ones set first by his father and now, by Ethan.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, there was clear understanding in her gaze. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “Jeff’s got a lot to live up to and he’s trying. He’s starting to wrestle with the important stuff.”

  “Dealing with the loss of his father? Yes, I know, but—”

  “No,” he interrupted quietly, trying once again to find the right words. “Not just that. See, what Jeff went through this month wasn’t just about the loss of his dad. The real struggle he faced was the fear that if he forgot his father, he would somehow betray you and Ethan, the two adults he loves most in this world.”

  She stood very still. “Betrayal is a very big concept for an eight-year-old boy.”

  “I know. But the thing is, he’s starting to formulate his own private code, the one he’ll live by for the rest of his life. Betraying the people he loves is a bad thing and he knows that. So he was scared when he realized that he might
be doing exactly that and he didn’t know how to stop the process.”

  “But he wasn’t betraying us.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t understand that. He needed to talk to someone who could explain it to him, but that someone had to be a person he couldn’t hurt.”

  “You.” Bonnie blinked back tears. “I don’t know how to thank you, Singleton.”

  An uncomfortable tide of heat rose in his face. He realized that he was probably turning red.

  “Hey, no big deal,” he said gruffly. “We’re friends, remember?”

  To his surprise, her expression clouded.

  “Right. Friends.” She took her hand out from beneath his fingers and moved back toward the door. “I’d better be on my way. Good luck with the investigation.”

  She walked out of the bookshop. When the door closed behind her, the gloomy shadows returned.

  Ethan listened to the footsteps on the stairs. The heavy tread reverberated down the narrow hall outside his office. A man, he thought. One who was not in a good mood.

  He put aside the notes he had made after his discussion with Singleton a half hour before, folded his arms on top of his desk and waited.

  The footsteps stopped briefly outside the entrance of Truax Investigations. He got the feeling that whoever stood there was hesitating, maybe having second thoughts about the wisdom of hiring a private investigator.

  A smart businessman would get up at this point, open the door and try to look sympathetic and encouraging. But he had his hands full at the moment so he stayed where he was. With luck the prospective client would talk himself out of the meeting.

  The door opened.

  That figured. Never rains but it pours.

  The new arrival walked into the outer office. He was clearly visible in the carefully positioned mirror. Athletically built, square-jawed, clean-cut, sandy-haired. His attire was Arizona resort casual: expensively tailored trousers, polo shirt and loafers. He had the look of a guy who had been captain of the football team in high school. He had probably taken the homecoming queen to the senior prom and talked her out of her panties afterward. In college he would have joined the right fraternity, got himself elected president and dated a lot of busty, blond sorority girls.