Carolina Isle (Edenton 2)

“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?’”