“IWISH you’d let me go with you,” Brad said under his breath. “In a situation like this—”
“It’s not a situation, it’s my daughter,” Eden said. “She’s been captive for nearly twenty-four hours now, and I need to get her out. If somebody wants that worthless old necklace, he can have it.”
“You aren’t going to tell this person that it’s worthless, are you? He probably needs to think that he’s going to get the money to bail himself out of whatever problem he has in his life.”
“No, of course not,” Eden said slowly, looking at his profile in the dark car. “Brad, you sound as though you know something.”
“Of course not,” he said quickly as he swung the car onto the dirt road and turned off the headlights. The dashboard clock said 11:32. It hadn’t been easy to get Eden out of the house without McBride knowing, but they’d done it. When Eden had gone into a crying fit and McBride had given her a couple of pills to calm her, Brad thought Eden’s plan was off. But her fit had been faked to create a distraction. Eden had spit out the pills, and when Jared thought she was asleep, she’d sneaked down the tiny, secret stairs to the kitchen and out the back door. The front of the house had been full of FBI agents, all of them waiting for a phone to ring, but the back had been clear.
As planned, Brad was waiting for her on the other side of the bridge.
Earlier in the day, after he’d returned from being with Katlyn, he’d been filled with remorse. He shouldn’t have done that to Eden, he thought. But after he’d seen her in the mud with McBride, and after he’d seen the gifts of the little truck and gardening tools that he was sure McBride had bought for her, Brad had felt defeated. His pride and his ego had been cut in half. He knew he was considered the “prize catch” in Arundel, but when he’d at last found a woman he thought he might be able to share his life with, he was losing her. He needed something—someone—to make him feel like a man again.
But Katlyn hadn’t made him feel good. Instead, she’d made him feel more alone than he had before he’d met Eden.
It was only by chance that Katlyn had told him about the book Eden had written, and only by chance that Brad had seen the riddle for what it was. An ego trip of a bad painter, is what he thought at first. Who else in the Farrington family would write about “legends of me”? Once Brad realized who had written the riddle, all he’d thought about was the last line, but in the car on the way back to Arundel, he’d figured out the rest of the lines.
By the time he reached Arundel, Brad had changed his mind about Tyrrell Farrington. If the young man had openly returned to Farrington Manor with a stack of Impressionist paintings, his domineering father would have burned them. Brad had an idea that Tyrrell had had the foresight to see that the paintings would someday be worth something. But how did he insure that they would stay in the family and survive generations of tastelessness? If his father didn’t destroy them, maybe the next generation would. How to save them?
Brad thought that Tyrrell knew his family well. He certainly understood their vanity. They’d never destroy pictures of what was theirs. So Tyrrell had reluctantly returned to the family, but he’d devoted the rest of his life to covering the wonderful Impressionist paintings with bad watercolors of his family and their possessions. And he had been right: the family vanity had saved them. After all these years, the paintings were still intact and waiting for someone to solve the riddle he’d left behind, and to discover the paintings under the watercolors.
Five by five and three by three. Quite simply, the size of the paintings. Worth more than gold and married to thee. Tyrrell had guessed that the paintings would someday be worth more than gold. He’d covered several of them with portraits of Farrington spouses. Ten times ten and legends of me. He left over a hundred paintings and knew—hoped—that the discovery of them would make a legend of him. Look not where thou canst find me. The easiest one: the real art had been painted over.
Brad had wanted to tell Eden all that he’d figured out the second he saw her, but the kidnapping of her daughter had taken precedence over everything else. And worse was when Brad saw the way McBride looked at Eden. Her only thoughts were about her daughter, but McBride couldn’t take his eyes off her.
They’ve been lovers, Brad thought, and wanted to hang himself from the nearest tree for getting jealous and running off to the comfort of a woman he’d never really liked. His only hope of winning Eden was that figuring out the riddle would pull her back to his side.
When Brad first arrived at her house, he’d had to undergo a humiliating search by the FBI. McBride stood in the doorway, smirking, and enjoying Brad’s discomfort. And McBride had enjoyed telling Brad that Eden was asleep and would be for hours. “She’s been awake all night,” he said, not meeting Brad’s eyes.
Two minutes later, Brad was in a room with two FBI agents and telling them what he’d figured out about the riddle. As a result, they were flying in a couple of men who were art preservationists and would know how to extract the paintings in a way less violent than with the blast of a shower.
At four, Eden came downstairs. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she was inordinately quiet. She ate the food that was placed in front of her, but said nothing. She only nodded when she saw Brad, but she said nothing to him.
But later, when she passed him, she slipped a note into his hand, then she went up the stairs, her feet heavy and her body bent. Brad excused himself to go to the restroom to read the note. She wrote that she’d been contacted by Melissa’s kidnapper, and she asked Brad to meet her at the far side of the bridge at eleven P.M. At the bottom, she’d drawn a map and written “deliver necklace here.” Brad knew he should turn the note over to McBride, but at the same time, he saw it as a second chance with Eden. She trusted him, and he wasn’t going to betray her trust. Before, when her daughter had arrived and Eden had needed him, when he should have stayed and fought for her, he’d abandoned her. He never wanted her to know how completely he’d abandoned her.
He tore the note into tiny pieces, then flushed it. He wasn’t going to let Eden down a second time. He went home, emptied his gun cabinet, borrowed a couple of handguns from his cousin, then spent an hour hiding all of them inside his uncle’s Jeep. He wanted four-wheel drive if he was going to be on a dirt road. He used his CDs of the North Carolina survey maps to bring up the area on his computer, then studied the old roads surrounding the abandoned house. He went to visit his great-uncle in the nursing home, and asked him a thousand questions about the house at the end of the dirt road. His uncle knew everything about everyone around Arundel and had a photographic memory. By the time Brad left, he knew the history of the house back four generations. Best of all, he had the phone number of a man who’d grown up in the house and knew the layout of it well. After Brad talked to him, he was almost ready. He had just one more call to make.
“Remi?” he said when his son-in-law answered. “I have something I want you to help me do. But I warn you that it could be dangerous.”
“Anything,” Remi said.
“I’m serious about the danger of this.”
“Mr. Granville, I’m from Louisiana. We invented danger.”
Brad rolled his eyes skyward. “Spare me,” he said. “If you think you can do this, then get over here right away.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brad put down the phone and stood looking about him for a while. Inadvertently, in his hours of research about the abandoned house, he’d come across the name of someone. The name had come up twice, and as much as B
rad hated the idea, he thought he knew who was behind the kidnapping. All for a worthless necklace, he thought. And the irony was that the man had been alone inside Farrington Manor many times. He could have stolen the paintings at any time. Instead, he was risking everything for some colored glass.
Brad shook his head to clear it, slipped a tiny handgun into his pocket, then looked at his watch. It was after eight. Not much time left before he was to meet Eden. He picked up his Bible, opened it at random, and began to read.
Chapter Twenty-four
“PLEASE don’t try to stop me,” Eden said to Brad. “It’s something I have to do.” Beside her, in his car, she was clutching the paper bag containing the necklace so tightly that her nails had cut through the top of it. “If he wants this thing, he can have it. All I want is my daughter.”