“That bad things happen to people who get on the wrong side of the Durrands.”
Jason was silent for a moment. This might be something. Or it might not. He said casually, “Like? Give me an example. Give me a name.”
“I don’t have names. I don’t have an example. If I had an example, it wouldn’t be a rumor!”
“Okay. Don’t get excited. I have to ask, right?”
“No. You don’t. You don’t have to ask me. I can’t be your only snitch.”
“You’re not a snitch. You’re a friend.”
Lux said sulkily, sounding younger than his twenty years, “Yeah, well.”
“You’re a friend able to move in circles I can’t. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Oh, I owe you, believe me, I get that,” Lux’s tone was unexpectedly bitter.
That was the truth, but it pained Jason to hear it. He liked Lux; he genuinely wanted to help him—hoped he was helping him—but he had cultivated their friendship with this end in mind: Lux’s continued usefulness.
All the same, Lux was too young to be that cynical.
“Forget it,” Jason said. “You’re right. I have other informants. How do you like your classes this semester?”
Silence.
Lux burst out, “Rabab Doody. That’s who you need to talk to.”
Before Jason could respond, Lux disconnected.
Jason sighed, pocketed his phone, and strode on toward the Greenleaf estate.
His angle of approach brought him up behind the house on a hillside overlooking the deep bay of a small, sheltered harbor. From this distance, the mansion looked more like an insane asylum for witches. An abandoned asylum. There were large holes in sections of the roof, and a number of the windows were shuttered or boarded up.
Not entirely abandoned, though. There was smoke drifting from one of the chimneys, and laundry hung from a clothesline in a small courtyard.
It was one thing for the Durrands to continue to inhabit ye old family estate. Their ancestral holdings were still in excellent repair, from
what Jason could see. Who the hell would choose to live in a relic like this one? It would take millions to restore the house to its former glory, and clearly there was no spare change in the Greenleaf family coffers. If restoration was out of the question, the next best bet would be to sell the property to some organization that could preserve and protect the building, while profiting from the real estate. A resort chain maybe. Although that might be easier said than done. Camden Island was not exactly on the beaten path. But then that was also what might make it a very enticing property to an investor with vision.
Jason hiked down an steep trail to the burned ruins of a yacht house and then checked out the crumbling remains of a nearby skiff house. It was probably a five-minute walk to the mansion itself, but back in the day, a carriage would have been sent down to the harbor to transport guests and goods.
As he neared the house, he was struck again by the sheer size of the building. That was typical of these Gilded Age palaces. It was built for weekend house parties and lavish summer retreats. It would comfortably house a large extended family as well as a fleet of servants.
He couldn’t quite pin down the architectural style, but Walt Disney would probably have given it a thumbs-up. The mansion seemed to be the end result of a collision of ideas and creative impulses, almost sculptural in effect with its advancing and receding turrets, dormers, and massive chimneys crowning high, steep roofs. Whatever the guiding principle of design might have been, the result was a big and complicated structure, richly, even ornately decorated. The exterior walls of the upper stories were paneled in a variety of silvery diamond and scalloped wood shingles, framed in a semi-Tudor half-timber pattern of wood beams. The lower story and a half were constructed of masonry and clad in a fortune’s worth of beautifully carved gray marble.
The final effect was neither graceful nor stately, and yet it was weirdly appealing. Jason walked to the end of the stone path and glanced down.
A double tier of retaining walls lifted the villa’s gardens—draped in a tangle of dead vines—high above the water.
Even from the garden level, that was one hell of a drop. Stunning view, though.
He ascended a broad flight of steps to a terrace pockmarked with missing stones and littered with broken slats and shingles. He gazed upward.
When whole, the clock tower had probably served as both a landmark and a beacon for miles and miles. The great tower still dominated the scene, rising from a massive stone base toward the clouds. There was something almost shocking about the giant black hole at the summit where the clock face had formerly rested, but it had probably been a wise idea to take the thing down when they had. The wooden framework showed a number of alarming gaps in its trunk. Birds, large and small, flew in and out of the openings.
He walked around the smaller corner tower, to find himself at the true front of the house, and started toward the massive arched entrance—stopping dead when someone shouted, “Hey! What are you doing?”
Jason glanced around. A man was approaching from the other side of the terrace. He wore a red and black plaid hunting jacket, dirty jeans, and a formidable scowl.