Carolina Isle

by Jude Deveraux

  “Rules you?” Gideon asked, then before she could answer, he said, “There it is,” and began to hurry forward.

  Following him, Ariel saw that he was limping, skipping now and then to stay off an injured ankle and foot. There was dried blood on his neck and his shirt, and a long tear in the back of his shirt, covered in more dried blood. She had an idea that he had many more injuries than could be seen. He should be in a hospital, she thought.

  Minutes later, she saw him stretched out on the ground, most of his body covered by the branches of a big pine tree. When she reached him, she looked down to see R.J. standing about twenty feet below.

  “Ariel!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  She was disgusted at yet again hearing that tone that said she could be of no help. “I heard there was a rare form of lizard up here and I need some new belts.”

  R.J. looked at her in silence, as though he didn’t know if she was serious or not.

  “I came to save the lot of you,” she said. “How is Sara?”

  “I’m fine,” Sara called from the corner. “I just have a broken leg and a great need of painkillers. Opium, I need you!”

  “Have you seen the children?” Ariel called down.

  When R.J. and Sara were silent, Ariel looked at Gideon.

  “They had enough to worry about, so I didn’t tell them the kids were missing.”

  “The twins!” Sara said to R.J., then looked up at Ariel. “Get R.J. out and you three go looking for them. I’m safe here. Please hurry. How long have they been missing?”

  “Too many hours,” Gideon said. When he tried to get up, he stumbled and nearly fell into the pit, but Ariel put her body in front of his and steadied him.

  “What happened to you?” R.J. called up.

  “He fell down some rocks,” Ariel said. “I think David may have carried him back to his cabin.”

  “Where is David now?” R.J. asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ariel said, pushing on Gideon to get him away from the edge. “How do we get them out?”

  Gideon pulled a big metal winch from his pack and a heavy nylon rope. “I’ll tie this onto the middle of the tree, put a rope through here, then I’ll pull R.J. up.”

  Ariel looked at the tree. Standing upright, she was sure it would look enormous, but lying down across an open hole it looked like a tightrope with branches. “You’ll fall,” she said.

  “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

  She put her hand on his forearm. “The only knot I know how to tie is a shoelace. Show me what to do and I will do it.” When he started to protest, she said, “If you do fall, it’ll be just me here to get all of you out and to go find the twins. If I fall, there’ll still be you and R.J. to look for them.”

  Gideon didn’t argue, just demonstrated a solid knot to use to tie the winch to the tree. “Keep your eyes on the tree,” he said as he tied a rope onto her waist.

  Ariel kept twisting about to look at the narrow tree. Could she do it? The more she looked, the weaker her knees felt.

  “So who’s this beautiful man you’re searching for?” Gideon asked.

  “You’re too young to know and it doesn’t matter anyway because I’m going to kill him the minute I see him.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Gideon said. His face was inches from hers and his arms around her as he tied the rope about her waist. “I could think of worse ways to go than to be killed by you.”

  “I am not Phyllis,” she said coldly as she moved away from him and toward the tree.

  “Indeed you aren’t,” Gideon said, unperturbed by her coolness.

  Ariel didn’t like his insinuations, didn’t like his flirting, and didn’t like his levity in the face of the situation. She was so angry at him that she was halfway to the center of the tree before she realized it. When she looked down and saw R.J. and Sara far below her, she froze.

  She looked back over her shoulder at Gideon.

  “In those pants you look as cute as Phyllis,” Gideon said, leering at her. “Are you sure you didn’t grow up on King’s Isle?”

  “I’m from Arundel, North Carolina,” Ariel said and there was so much pride in her voice that R.J. laughed.

  “That’s right, honey,” R.J. called up to her. “You tell him.”

  Ariel reached the center of the tree and looked back at Gideon in triumph. He was rubbing the side of his head but he was smiling at her.

  “Okay, baby,” Gideon said, “now straddle the tree like a man and tie him into a knot.”

  Ariel sat down on the tree, looked down at R.J., and said, “Who is this child?”

  “I don’t know, but I plan to find out,” he said softly.

  Ariel concentrated as she tied the winch onto the tree, then threaded the rope through the pulley as Gideon had shown her. Cautiously, she made her way back to the young man, then helped him pull the rope with R.J. on it up to the top of the hole.

  When R.J. stepped onto land he grabbed Ariel’s shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  “Hey! I saw that!” Sara called from below. “He’s mine, cousin.”

  “Oh?” Ariel asked, looking at R.J.

  “We talked about some things,” R.J. said sheepishly.

  “Talked?” Ariel asked. “Your shirt is on inside out.”

  “Ah. Well … there are a lot of ways to communicate.”

  Gideon, coiling the rope around his arm, came to them. There was no more laughter on his face. “R.J., you and I are going to have to separate. Ariel, I want you to go back to town and organize a search party. Get every person you can find and get back up here as fast as possible.”

  Ariel didn’t argue with him, just grabbed her pack and started back down the trail they’d come on. She was cursing Phyllis and all the residents of King’s Isle with each step she took. She no longer cared who killed Fenny Nezbit. Obviously, he’d been killed out of greed. Someone wanted his gold.

  She was just a short distance from Gideon’s cabin when something bright pink on the ground caught her eye. Picking it up, she saw it was a tiny plastic high-heeled shoe. A shoe for a fashion doll.

  She cut off the trail into the woods. She walked slowly, on the lookout for snakes, but also searching for any bright colors. The grasses seemed to have been trampled recently, but she wasn’t sure.

  When she saw a broken branch, her heart sped up. Fifty feet away was another tiny shoe. Holding it, she thought, Now what do I do? Did she stop there and go back to find the men? That would take at least an hour, and an hour lost looking for small children could mean life or death.

  Also there was the surprise element. What if Gideon was right and there had been someone with the twins? There was a murderer on King’s Isle. What if he—

  She didn’t think anymore. She put the shoes in her pocket, then started walking slowly and quietly—much quieter than three people could walk, she told herself.

  Every seventy-five feet or so, she found another piece: sunglasses, Capri pants, a cute little peasant blouse. Tiny earrings had been placed on a rock.

  When Ariel found the first body part, she wanted to sit down and cry. Poor little girl, having to disassemble her doll.

  There were legs and arms, but after the torso, there was nothing. Ariel walked across what looked to be crushed grass, but even after a hundred yards, she saw nothing more. There were no broken branches, no doll parts, nothing.

  She was about to turn back when something made her go right. It wasn’t a sound, but a smell. A fragrance she knew as well as she knew her own body. David.

  For a moment, she closed her eyes, then turned around in a circle, breathing deeply. When she stopped, she opened her eyes and smiled, then walked straight ahead, over rocks, through leaves, across a fallen tree. There, lying on the ground, under a ledge of rock, their hands bound together, their mouths gagged, were two beautiful little children.

  As much as Ariel wanted to run to them, she crouched down behind a rock and waited and listened. She heard and saw nothing
. Cautiously, she stepped into the open. When no one leaped out at her, she went to the children and untied them.

  They clung to her, but they didn’t cry, and when they called her Sara, she didn’t correct them. She pulled them back under the rock with her, one on each side, and asked them their names. “Tell me every word of what happened.”

  “We followed Gideon,” Bertie said.

  “But we got lost.”

  “And it rained on us.”

  “Who tied you up?” Ariel asked.

  “Mr. Larry.”

  “Larry Lassiter,” Ariel said, unsurprised. “Was there another man here?”

  “David,” Beatrice said with a little flutter of her lashes. “He saved us.”

  “But Mr. Larry said he’d kill us unless David went with him, so he went.”

  “Why did he want David?” Ariel asked.

  “He knows where the gold is.”

  “David knows where the gold is?!” Ariel said. “Are you sure of that?”

  Bertie moved away from Ariel and out from under the overhang. He held an imaginary gun on Beatrice. “‘You know what I want, don’t you, kid?’”

  “‘Yeah, I know,’” Beatrice said in a voice that sounded remarkably like David’s. “‘How did you find out?’”

  “‘I looked you up on the Internet and read your paper. “The Weird Man’s Hideout.” Was that the title?’”

  “‘More or less,’” Beatrice said. “‘Let me take the kids back to safety, then I’ll go with you.’”

  “‘Naw. They’re fine here,’” Bertie said, waving his finger around like Ariel had seen Lassiter do. “‘Somebody’ll find them.’”

  “‘You can’t leave them here! They’ll die of exposure.’”

  “‘They’re tough little brats. They’re used to hiding to get away from their mother. Ain’t you, kids?’”

  The twins stopped talking and looked at Ariel.

  “Where did they go?” Ariel asked.

  The children shrugged. How could they know when they’d been tied up?

  Ariel had an idea. “Do you know where the hot springs are?”

  “Sure,” Bertie said. “We go there with Gideon all the time. It’s how he gives us a bath.”

  Ariel smiled. “Can you lead me there?”

  “Sure.”

  She turned to look at Beatrice and saw that in her hand was the head of her doll. Ariel reached into her pocket and pulled out doll pieces and clothes. “As we walk, I bet I can put her back together.”

  For the first time, she saw tears in the child’s eyes. No child should be this tough, she thought.

  “Can you?” Beatrice asked.

  “I’m sure of it,” Ariel said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ARIEL DIDN’T WANT THE CHILDREN WITH her when she found David. If that horrible man Lassiter had a gun, the last thing she wanted was children around. She knew that if she took them back to Gideon’s cabin they’d not stay there. Besides, that would take too long.

  When they got to an area she recognized, she knew that the cave where Sara was was close. When she got to it, she called down to her cousin and said she was going to lower the kids down to her. Ariel wasn’t strong enough to bring Sara up, but she could use the rope to get the children down. The hole was cover, protection. They’d be safe there until help arrived. She looked up at the sky, but saw no rescuing helicopter. Did Phyllis call?

  When Ariel told the children what she wanted to do, they were excited. She tied a loop in the end of the rope and Bertie put his foot in it. She put her pack on his back, then fastened the straps around the rope.

  “Ready?” Ariel asked Sara. Ariel was standing on the tree that a short time before had taken Gideon’s teasing to get her to walk out on. Below her was Sara, standing on one leg, leaning on what looked to be a makeshift crutch cut from a tree branch.

  “I’m ready,” Sara said.

  Ariel had to walk back down the tree to the ground, loop the rope around her waist, then slowly lower the child to the floor below. Sara steadied him, unfastened the pack straps, then sent it back up to Ariel.

  Beatrice went down faster. As she went down, Ariel waved to her, her reassembled doll sticking out of the front of her pack.

  After the children were down, Ariel ran along the tree to hang over the side and look at Sara. “Water and sandwiches are in the pack. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep them quiet if you can. There are telephones on the island and a helicopter may come for us.”

  “You’re an angel!” Sara called up to her.

  Smiling, Ariel went back to the ground. She’d been called an angel twice in one day.

  The children had pointed the way to the old hot springs, but Ariel didn’t follow the path. If anyone was watching, she’d be seen. She stayed close to the rocks and twice she saw what looked like newly made scuff marks. Had R.J. and Gideon gone this way?

  She had gone about a mile and was wishing she’d kept a bottle of water when a hand came out of the bush and seized her ankle. If Ariel hadn’t been so frightened, she would have screamed. In the next second, a hand went over her mouth and pulled her to the ground. She couldn’t scream but she wasn’t going down without a fight.

  “Ariel! Ariel!” came an urgent voice in her ear. “If you don’t stop fighting me they’re going to hear us.”

  “David?” she gasped, then threw her arms around his neck and began kissing him.

  For a moment, he kissed her back, then pulled away. “Honey, sweetheart, now isn’t the time for this. There are some seriously bad things going on and we need to address them.”

  She didn’t like his tone. She longed to tell him about how she and Gideon had rescued R.J., then she alone had found the twins and … but as he’d said, now wasn’t the time.

  “I want to tell you how to get back to Gideon’s cabin,” David said. “Then you need to go through the woods to find some children. Ariel, you can do this. You need to put aside your fears to help these children.”

  Yet another man was telling her to go away. “What do you plan to do?” she asked.

  David rubbed his hand over his face. “So much has happened that I can’t begin to tell you all that I need to do.”

  “Why is your leg bleeding and why is there blood on your shirt?”

  “I had to carry some huge kid, a teenager, nearly a mile. He’d fallen down some rocks and cut his head. Then there were these little kids—”

  “And Larry Lassiter.”

  “Yeah,” David said slowly, looking at her in surprise.

  “Why does Lassiter think you know where Fenny’s gold is?”

  “Cosmic coincidence, but how do you know about that?”

  “Long story. The twins are safe and a rescue helicopter may appear at any time. Do you know where R.J. and Gideon are? And where is Lassiter?” Ariel asked.

  David was looking at her as though he’d never seen her before. “I escaped him. I gave him a bogus map and when he looked in a cave, I jumped.”

  Ariel looked at him a moment, searching his eyes. She had known him all her life and she knew when he was hiding something. Reaching down to his leg, she pulled the fabric of his trousers apart. The gash in his leg was deep and he was losing blood.

  “The last time you tore away fabric—” David said, smiling.

  “That was ages ago,” Ariel said dismissively. “You need a doctor. I want you to tell me where Fenny’s gold really is, then I want you to stay here and hide.”

  “And let you go out there? Alone? Not in my lifetime,” he said and started to rise. Immediately, the wound in his leg opened up and began to bleed.

  “You move from here and I’ll tell my mother I’m pregnant with R. J. Brompton’s child.”

  “She’ll disown you,” David said, smiling.

  “Then I’ll go to New York and you’ll never find me.”

  “Ariel, really, this is ridiculous. You can’t find the cave and—”

  She got up, looked about, then took a step forw
ard. She was leaving on her own and she knew he couldn’t follow her.

  “Okay,” he said. “There’s a map in the front of my pack.”

  She pulled the pack out of the bushes and unzipped the front pocket. “Is this the pack you found in the basement, then secretly filled when we got back from the pub?”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I just didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Ha! You wanted to keep me from doing anything. All of you have treated me as though I can do nothing, as though I’m just excess baggage. Worthless.”

  “Not worthless. Not to me,” David said softly, his hand on her arm.

  “David Tredwell, do you think I’m stupid? You’ve always wanted me for how you can use me. Do you think I don’t know you want a political career? Do you think I don’t know that I’d make a perfect wife for a politician? Do you think I don’t know that you put up with anything I do to you because I fit into your ambitious little scheme so well? You were giving your kisses to that dim-witted, big-breasted Britney while I couldn’t even get you to kiss my hand.”

  “So all this with Brompton was to make me jealous?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I knew from the first that R.J. would treat me as a woman, not as a porcelain doll like you do.”

  David fell back against the bushes and laughed. “And I thought I knew what you wanted. Miss Pommy—”

  “Used to intimidate me because she holds the money, but not anymore. When I get out of here I’m going to …” She pulled the map from the pack. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to make some changes in my life.”

  “I hope you keep me in it,” David said softly.

  “Maybe,” she said, looking at the map.

  “Let me show you—”

  “I can read a map.” She shoved the folded paper into her bra, then looked at him. “Stay here and be quiet. Listen for a helicopter.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, smiling.

  Ariel took a bottle of water from his pack, looked out between the bushes, then on impulse, leaned down and kissed him. “You don’t ever leave me behind again. Understand?”

  “Never again,” he said. “Forever.”

  “You got that right,” she said, then stepped up into the open.