Lana smiled. Being addressed so formally relayed the fact Stone was officially on duty, as if the uniform wasn’t enough of a clue. “I’m surprised to see you, Emily. How are the roads?”
“They’re a bit challenging,” Emily admitted as she stepped inside. “I wouldn’t attempt any travel unless it’s an emergency. We’ve had to block off the bridge down below.”
There was more than a slight flavor of the Rock in her voice, the lively lilt of Newfoundland lacing her otherwise officious tones. Mounties weren’t generally posted in their hometowns, but they could choose their home province. Instead, Stone, after graduating Depot in Regina, had spent a few years out west in Saskatchewan, then in Southern Manitoba, before finally settling in Nova Scotia. Lana had ferreted out that much during the many meals they’d shared down at the diner whenever she’d been picking up takeout at the same time the constable was stopping by for a break from her patrol of the surrounding area. Somehow, Emily always managed to convince Lana to eat her fish and chips there with her rather than take them home to eat in solitude.
Lana supposed she couldn’t exactly call her a close friend, since the meals at the diner were the only interaction they shared—outside of the time Emily had stopped her for speeding and let her off with a gravely delivered warning rather than a ticket and fine, for which Lana had been suitably grateful—but they were more than mere acquaintances. It warmed her to know the visit was as much personal as it was official, since she doubted Emily was stopping by every house on this side of the river between here and Windsor just to see how people were doing.
“Does it look like the bridge is going?”
“We hope not, but it’s too early to tell.” Emily absently shifted the heavy Sam Brown belt that contained her cuffs, radio, and Smith & Wesson 4956. “I hope you’re well supplied because it takes about three hours to get from here to Windsor now.”
“I am. I went down to the store last night,” Lana told her. “I think I just made it over the bridge before it became too deep to try. It was a little scary. Fortunately, I don’t plan to be going anywhere for a while.”
She paused, about to tell her the rest when she saw Emily’s eyes widen in what could only be consternation. Uncertainly, Lana turned to follow her gaze, feeling her jaw slacken when she saw Michelle descending the stairs, dressed only in another of Lana’s T-shirts and very little else. A white towel was wrapped around her recently washed hair, her green eyes big and bright. She looked positively decadent and somehow younger than she’d seemed last night.
A range of emotion flooded through Lana—astonishment, desire, chagrin, and a little guilt—when she saw Emily’s raised eyebrows. For someone who was supposed to still be in mourning, this was a little difficult to explain.
“Oh, my, the police. Is the flooding that serious?” Honeysuckle didn’t just flavor the words now: it positively dripped from the golden drawl, as if Michelle had just stepped out of a Civil War-era novel.
Lana swallowed hard, managing to break the silence that followed. “This is Constable Emily Stone,” she said politely. “Emily, this is Michelle Devereaux. She’s—”
“An old and dear friend of Lana’s,” Michelle said smoothly and completely untruthfully as she came to stand beside Lana, wrapping her arm tightly and rather possessively around her waist. “I’m staying with her for a while.”
Lana blinked, too bemused to contradict the tale of old friends reconnecting years later that Michelle was spinning to the constable, who appeared to be so taken aback by the lack of clothes involved, that she wasn’t saying anything in reply. The next thing Lana knew, Michelle had smoothly and confidently eased Emily out the door, shutting it firmly behind her before turning to regard Lana with an ambiguous expression.
Lana shook her head, confusion reigning. “What the hell was that? Why did you lie to Emily?”
“Oh, Emily, is it?” Michelle eyed her archly. “Not Officer Stone?”
“Constable Stone.” Lana corrected her automatically. “Why did you lie to her? Why tell her we’d been friends for years and that you were here on a visit? I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t want her to know what really happened,” Michelle offered in an unexpectedly reasonable tone.
“Why not?” Lana struggled to make sense of what was happening. It didn’t help that how Michelle was dressed, or rather, undressed, was serving as a distraction. She stared at her and then at the door. “Look, we need to call her back and tell her about your car. If they find it and think someone drowned, they’ll be searching for a body.”
“It works for me that people think that.”
That got Lana’s full attention. “For God’s sakes, why?”
Michelle hesitated. “Because I didn’t exactly go off the road on my own. Someone forced me off.”
Lana stared at her blankly for a moment as the words percolated through her mind. “You’d better tell me exactly what’s going on.” She was aware of the frost edging her tone and the rising sense that she’d been played for a bit of a fool.
“I’d rather not,” Michelle told her cheerfully. “In fact, the less you know, the better. So what’s for breakfast?”
She made a move toward the kitchen and Lana reached out, not quite touching her, but with a strongly suggestive gesture nonetheless. “Stop.” She hadn’t sounded like that for some time, she knew, but Sarah had always said she had the most authoritative voice she’d ever heard. The sexiest, as well, according to her, but this wasn’t the time or place to consider that point. Michelle turned, her eyes widening and pupils contracting. She even made a little sound of surprise, almost a squeak.
“Start from the beginning. Tell me everything. Are you even really a professor from Tulane?”
“Uh—” Michelle’s eyes darted to the side. “I don’t have tenure.”
“Of course you don’t.” Lana could feel her shields going up, realizing only after the fact how far they’d fallen. “And your research?”
“That part is true. I am here, researching something.” She hesitated. “I may have been a little vague about what that is, specifically.” She squirmed beneath Lana’s gaze, seeming unable to look her in the eyes but also unable to continue the dissembling.
“Not the Acadians?”
“Oh, yes, to do with the Acadians.”
“What, exactly?”
“You know there was a church in the Annapolis Valley?”
“At Grand-Pré, yes. It’s been rebuilt.”
“But not quite in the same place.”
“No, they don’t know exactly how the original settlement was laid out,” Lana said, trying to remember the vacation when she and Sarah had visited the museum located on the site.
“I do.”
“What?” Lana crossed her arms over her chest. “How?”
Michelle cast a pleading glance in the direction of the kitchen. “Can we continue this over breakfast? I’m starving.”
“Are you sure it’s your metabolism?” Lana said icily. “Maybe you just have a tapeworm.”
Flashing her a narrow look because of the waspish comment, Michelle sighed. “Look, I can explain better over a meal.”
Lana sighed. “Fine. But it better be good or I’m calling Emily back here immediately.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you,” Michelle threw over her shoulder as she headed for the table. “But let’s be sure it’s about me and not just because you want to see her again.”
“What?” Again, Lana felt unbalanced as she turned the heat on under the frying pan and stirred her omelet mixture once more. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on. That woman wants you.”
“Wants me?! She’s a friend. She’s not even a lesbian!”
“Who told you that?” Michelle regarded her, openly skeptical. “Of course she is, and she makes a point of stopping by to see you whenever she has a legitimate excuse, but only then. Because you’re widowed, you see, and it would be unseemly for her to m
ake the first move. You have to do that.”
Lana didn’t want to hear this. Furthermore, she suspected it was Michelle’s way of confusing the issue, which was that—Which was…
What exactly was the issue again?
Chapter Six
Michelle forked into the omelet with a sense of relief that Lana had appeared to let the whole thing go for the moment. So when it turned out that Lana was merely waiting politely until she finished breakfast, then pinned her with a look that penetrated to the bone, Michelle was taken aback.
“Talk to me.” Lana’s dark eyes glinted and her jaw had set to something rock hard, chin lifted haughtily. “What’s going on?”
Michelle considered her options, suspecting she didn’t have many if she didn’t want Lana to be on the phone immediately to that very attractive law-enforcement agent. That had been a hell of a jolt when she realized the voices downstairs had included someone in a uniform with a gun on her hip. She’d barely had time to scurry back into the bedroom and pull on a T-shirt she’d found at the foot of the bed, making herself look as provocative as possible before descending the stairs and distracting everyone quite nicely.
Still, the expression on the cop’s face had been interesting indeed. A clear display of devastated disillusionment before firming up into a more official and impassive mask of impartiality. And it was undoubtedly that sense of deep disappointment that had enabled Michelle to ease Stone out of there without further investigation. Michelle didn’t know how long that would last. She needed to get on the road as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the only way to do that was in Lana’s Jeep. Unless she was prepared to do something drastic like steal it, she needed Lana to drive her where she needed to go, if not to Grand-Pré itself, then to the nearest car-rental place. Come to think of it, could she even rent a car without being immediately identified as someone who’d lost her last vehicle under suspicious circumstances?
Realizing she had no other choice, she caved. “There’s a gold cross,” she admitted reluctantly. “King Louis XV gave it to the Father of St. Charles’s church in Grand-Pré.”
Lana looked skeptical. “The king of France gave a gold cross to a little village in Acadia? Why?”
“Something about a mistress and an illegitimate son no one knew about who ended up becoming a cleric. Consider it a sort of eighteenth-century child support. It was all very secretive and not recorded in the history most people know.” Michelle was a little irritated at the corner she’d found herself maneuvered into. “It’s the Acadians’ greatest treasure.”
“I wasn’t aware they had a greatest treasure. So you’re a treasure hunter,” Lana said, a certain condemnation in her tone. “Rather than a historian.”
“On the contrary, I want to find it so it’ll go to the university or a museum, rather than fall into the hands of a private collector,” Michelle said, offended.
“And is either the university or museum in Canada, or the United States?”
Michelle stopped, confounded by the question, realizing she hadn’t really considered it before. “Uh,” she said, somewhat stupidly.
“How did you find out about it?” Lana demanded, apparently bypassing the subject for the moment.
“A series of letters I discovered between the father and another priest in Port Royal. After the Great Expulsion, Father Beauséjour lived in Louisiana for twenty years before finally returning to Canada, where he died in 1803.”
“And those documents indicated he possessed some kind of golden cross?”
“Yes, hidden when the British rounded up the families in Grand-Pré and left behind when the Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia,” Michelle said. “The British burned down the entire settlement, and the cross was never found.”
“You were forced off the road because of this?”
Michelle dropped her eyes, feeling that grim stare penetrate to the bone. “I first came across the letters and Beauséjour’s journal in the university archives, but to go further, I had to contact a private collector who had the rest of the documentation, the actual piece that tied everything together and revealed where the cross was hidden. In order to see his, however, I had to show him what I had.”
“This collector?”
“Christ almighty, are you sure you aren’t a cop yourself?”
Lana’s jaw tightened perceptibly. “You’re asking me to lie to the Mounties. Worse, you’re asking me to deceive a friend. I’d better have a good reason for it.”
Michelle smiled. “Does that mean you’re willing to consider the idea?”
Now it was Lana’s turn to look away, to drop her gaze. “Tell me everything,” she insisted.
“His name is Hector Duperies,” Michelle said. “Very wealthy. His family consisted of Acadians who remained in Louisiana. He’s quite proud of his heritage and would do anything to add the cross to his collection.”
“Including trying to kill you?”
Michelle looked away, unwilling to go into the complicated situation any deeper. “He has a bit of a reputation,” she said instead.
“He’s a criminal?”
“Not proven, but rumors are that his business practices are a little—” Michelle searched for the right word. “Shady.”
“You knew this going in?”
Michelle hesitated, then lowered her head. “Yes.”
“Wonderful.”
Lana stood up and began to clear the table, her motion agitated, the plates and mugs clinking together. Michelle stayed where she was, not wanting to irritate her any more than she already had, if irritation was the right word. She recognized that she’d time to get used to the idea that she was on the verge of a great discovery. It was all new to Lana, and Michelle had to give her space to absorb and accept the reality of it.
If she could. Michelle was aware that her quest for the cross could end right here, that Lana could simply throw up her hands and be done with it—contact the police and tell them about the rental car and the accident. By the time Michelle had dealt with all that, found another car and made her way to Grand-Pré, Hector’s men would probably have caught up to her again.
“What do you want me to do?” Lana asked finally as she stacked the dishes in the dishwasher.
“Duperies’ men probably think I’ve been stopped,” Michelle said. “But if you take me to Grand-Pré today, we’ll get the jump on them.”
“Oh, ‘we’ will, will we?” Lana’s tone was heavy with sarcasm. “They probably already have it, if they know what you do.”
“They don’t. They’re going on memory,” Michelle said in her most persuasive tone.
“But didn’t you say you only had part of the puzzle?” Lana pointed out, looking confused. “You said their boss had the key piece.”
“He had it,” Michelle said. She got up and went into the spare bedroom to retrieve her briefcase. “Now I have it.”
She set the case on the island counter, dialed in the combination for the lock, and opened the lid. Inside lay a stack of yellowing and brittle documents, each individual piece protected with some kind of polyester sheathing, along with two battered journals. Lana stared at the pile and then at Michelle.
“You stole them?”
“I borrowed them,” Michelle said.
“You couldn’t photocopy everything?”
“I didn’t want him to have them.” Michelle shrugged. “Besides, there wasn’t time.”
“Oh, my God,” Lana said, walking away. “What have I gotten myself into?”
“Look, all I need is a ride to the Annapolis Valley,” Michelle said, shutting the briefcase. “I know exactly where the cross is supposed to be. I’ll go in, retrieve it, and then we can take it to the authorities.”
“Which we can’t do right now because you possess stolen property,” Lana said, beginning to pace about the kitchen like a caged tigress. “And now that I didn’t say anything to Emily, I’m an accessory at the very least for failing to report an accident.”
&nb
sp; Michelle started to protest and then prudently shut her mouth, clamping her lips tight. Obviously Lana considered herself an upright, law-abiding citizen and didn’t like any of this. Either she would help or she wouldn’t, and Michelle suspected anything she could say wouldn’t make an impact on the decision. She’d heard that Canadians tended to be more uptight when it came to certain things. It would be easier to convince her if she was from New Orleans, Michelle thought. We have a more laissez-faire view of legal boundaries.
“Why are you doing this?”
Michelle blinked at the question. Lana had stopped pacing and had now pinned her with another of those sharply piercing looks. She hesitated and decided she’d better be as forthright as possible. Sometimes the truth was more useful than a lie. “Because if I find this thing and give it back to the Acadians, back to my people, it means I’ve accomplished something extraordinary.” She tilted her head sheepishly. “And it wouldn’t exactly hurt my future career options.”
Lana frowned darkly but didn’t say anything sarcastic, for which Michelle was grateful. In the short time she’d known her, she had discovered Lana’s tongue could be as sharp as her pen, and she really didn’t like being the focus of it.
“If I help you, if we find this cross, then we’ll take it to the authorities here,” Lana said finally. “It’s Canadian and it belongs in Nova Scotia. I don’t really give a damn about the New Orleans end of it.”
Michelle wanted to argue, but at the determined expression on Lana’s face, she finally inclined her head for the sake of agreement. “All right,” she said reluctantly. After all, she supposed, she’d still be credited with finding it and that was all she really wanted, wasn’t it? Whether the cross ended up in an American museum or a Canadian one was irrelevant, or at least it should be. “We need to leave as soon as possible.”
“I have to clear up a few things and leave a note.”
Michelle stared at her. “A note? What about? To who?”
“A note detailing everything that’s happened so that if something goes wrong, they’ll know how and why and who was behind it.”
Cross Purposes Page 4