High Tide (34 page)

“I don't think so. Remember the diver and the men who pulled them out of the sea? The ship could have gone down on the other side of the world.”

“And someone made a map,” Fiona said softly. “A map that my father had.”

“That your father stole and falsified,” Ace said as he examined the eyes of the second lion.

Fiona didn't protest. It was a little late to try to believe that her father or anyone else on earth was a saint. “How?” she asked.

“I asked ol' Gibby a few questions about why they never found the lions, and I put two and two together. I don't think your father meant to die when he did; I think he meant for
you
to have these.”

Fiona looked at him in disbelief. “They'd look great in my foyer.”

Ace smiled at her joke. “I only met your father once, but he helped me and, to me, that says a lot about him. I
think he must have felt guilty about leaving you to be raised by strangers, so he wanted to give you something, and I think he meant to go with you on an expedition and find these.”

“Ah. Sort of a father-daughter night at the PTA, complete with door prize.”

“Smokey wasn't used to the ordinary. He was into some pretty underhanded—” Breaking off, he looked at Fiona. “Anyway, that's my theory. Someone took the original map and made a copy of it, a copy so good, so well aged that Edward King, who had the map originally, couldn't tell it from the real map. Gibby said that King had even put—”

“I know, he put his initials in one corner in disappearing ink, and when the map turned out to lead nowhere, he held the map over a candle flame and there the initials were.”

“Smokey was smart. Like his daughter,” Ace said, smiling at her. “And Smokey knew a lot about maps.”

“But he didn't know much about people,” said a voice from the doorway, making both Fiona and Ace turn sharply.

A man was standing there holding a gun.

Ace started to lunge, but the man instantly turned the gun toward Fiona's head.

“Move and she gets it,” the man said.

Fiona was looking at the man, looking at him hard. He wore jeans, but the legs were tight enough that she could see that his left leg was smaller from the knee down.

“Russell,” she said under her breath.

At that the man took his eyes off Ace and gave her the tiniest bit of a smile. “Smokey always said that you were the cleverest little thing he ever saw.” The words were complimentary,
but they were said with such hatred that Fiona had cold chills spring up over her body.

“So now what?” Ace said loudly, as though he wanted to distract the man from Fiona. “You kill us and take the lions? After all, you've already killed three people to get them, so why not two more?”

He was in his late thirties, and Fiona could see that his hair was prematurely gray. Her brain was racing as she tried to remember all that her father had written about this man in
Raffles
. He had been young that year when they were looking for the treasure, eighteen at the most. Her father had liked the boy, and Fiona remembered being jealous when she was reading the letters her father sent. If she'd been a boy, maybe she could have been in one of her father's stories.

Smokey had written with compassion for the boy, telling how he'd had a mother who was a prostitute and how, in a drunken fit, she'd pushed him down a staircase when he was two. The boy had survived, but his left leg had never healed properly, so he always walked with a limp.

“If we're to die, maybe you should tell us why,” Ace was saying, and Fiona could see that he had concealed his lower half behind a lion so the man wouldn't see that he was trying to pull a knife out of his pocket. For a horrifying moment Fiona had a vision of the two of them grappling and someone dying.

But suddenly, Fiona's mind was clear, very, very clear.

She looked up at the man, who was just a few years older than she. “You don't want the lions, do you?” she said softly. “You never wanted them.”

At that both Ace and Russell turned toward her.

Slowly, so as not to frighten him into movement, Fiona came off the floor and stood but a few feet from him. She was taller than he by at least six inches. “You just want me dead, don't you?”

“Yeah, I want you dead,” he said, and there was no life in his voice.

“And him too?” Fiona said softly. “Must he go too? Why don't we let him go back to his fiancée, then you and I—”

The man gave a snort of laughter. “His girlfriend and the lawyer have been having it off for days. That lawyer is after her money. She's loaded, you know, and so is he.” With a sneer, the man pointed the gun at Ace.

“That's enough reason to let him go,” Fiona said. “This is between you and me, not him.”

“Listen, Burke,” Ace said loudly, bringing the attention back to himself, “I'm not leaving here without—”

“Don't call her that!” the man shouted, then held the gun out in his trembling hand. “She doesn't deserve that name!”

“All right,” Fiona said calmly to the man. “He doesn't know what's going on, so he doesn't understand. He just happened to be related to someone who was in the way. It's not his fault.”

“Don't give me that crap. I know what you two were up to last night. I heard all of it.” He was a good-looking man except that there was something missing in his eyes, something that might be called sanity. Now, his mouth twisted into a smirk. “I even saw you two.”

“As you said,” Fiona said with a little smile. “He's rich. I was doing what I could to get him to give me money. I deserve money.” Her voice lowered. “Like you do.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Fiona saw Ace move, and she
knew he had eased his knife out of his pocket. But what good was a four-inch blade against a gun? By now she knew Ace well enough to know he'd try to be a hero, and he was going to end up dead.

In a quick movement, Fiona placed herself between Ace and Russell. Behind her, she heard Ace's sharp intake of breath in annoyance. When she was between them, she turned so she could see both men at once.

“I'd like to introduce my brother,” she said to Ace, then looked at Russell and said, “Half or whole?”

“Only half,” he said. “I got the bad whore and you got the good one.”

“I see,” she said, pretending to know more than she did.

“Well, I don't see anything,” Ace said loudly; then in one fluid movement he sat down on the rear end of the golden lion nearest the man with the gun. For all the world he looked like a man sitting in the company of friends. “One of you want to tell me what's going on?”

“She's the one that got the education, not me,” Russell said, his hostility unmistakable.

“True, but you got to spend time with our father,” Fiona said, sounding like a jealous child.

“Whoa now, I think you better start at the beginning,” Ace said in a half shout as he put up one hand.

Why is he talking so loud? Fiona wondered; then she heard the tiny noise outside the open door. Someone was coming down the stairs, feeling his way down the old stone steps, using only the light that came from the lantern inside the room. But Fiona had to admit that half a ton of gold made good reflectors.

“What did Rose know?” Ace asked loud enough to make the walls ring.

“She saw you, didn't she?” Fiona said, not quite as loud but loud enough to cover the tiny sounds the person on the stairs was making. “She recognized you.” Maybe it was at the mention of Rose, but Fiona suddenly knew who was on the stairs, and, more important, she knew how that person fit into the story.

“Why should I tell you anything?” Russell said petulantly. “Why should I—?”

He didn't say any more because someone hit him on the head with a little nylon backpack, and the gun went off, deafening everyone.

“Tell us again, Aunt Fiona,” the little boy said, looking up at her with big eyes filled with curiosity.

“Yeah, tell us the part about the gun and the lions.”

Fiona still wasn't used to being called “aunt,” and she wasn't used to having a family, at least not one the size of the Montgomerys and Taggerts.

It was four months since that horrible day in the “golden cave,” as the Montgomery children called it.

“Leave her alone,” Cale Taggert snapped as she juggled identical twin boys on her hips.

Fiona was having trouble remembering names and who went with whom, but she knew that Cale was a famous mystery writer, and Fiona was dying to talk to her. She wanted to ask her where she got her ideas for her fabulous books.

“It's all right,” Fiona said, smiling. “I don't mind.”

Looking across the heads of the many people in the room, all of whom Ace swore were related to him, Fiona looked at the man she was to marry and smiled. Family was something that she'd always wanted, and it's what she'd got, although not quite in the form that she meant to get it.

“Go on,” the little boy urged.

Fiona looked down at him and wondered who his parents were. There were so many children, and half of them seemed to be identical twins. In fact, there were so many twins that she wondered if maybe the baby she was carrying was actually two of them. She hadn't told Ace yet, but she would tonight.

She turned her attention back to the little boy. “Okay, let me see, where do I start?”

“With the lions!”

“No, tell us the story of
Raffles,”
said another child. “I want to hear all about the bad men and the one that was your brother.”

Raffles
was a hit TV show now, much to the chagrin of parents, who universally seemed to hate the characters and the morals, or lack of them, that were represented in the show. It hadn't yet been revealed that the plump creature who lusted after the pretty young man was actually a woman.

The Montgomery money had been able to keep the papers from finding out the whole truth about the murders, so the fact that
Raffles
had actually happened wasn't known to the general public. And just before the show aired nationally, someone looked at Roy Hudson's original script and saw the name “Raffles” in there and changed the name from
Raphael
. “It wasn't a show to name after an angel,” someone was quoted as saying.

Any profit that was made by the show that had been left to Ace and Fiona in Roy's will was going to charity.

And the lions that had been taken from the cave were already in the back room of a museum in Florida that was very near Kendrick Park. At the end of the second TV season of
Raffles,
it was to be revealed that the story was vaguely true and that the lions the despicable characters in the show had been searching for but never found were on display in the museum in a brand-new wing. The new wing was a re-creation of an ancient burial mound, with stone walls and steps down into a room where the lions stood alone. The money to build the room had been donated anonymously.

In the new garden off the new wing of the museum was a gorgeous display of birds put on by neighboring Kendrick Park. And when the wing was opened, there was to go on sale a doll named Octavia, manufactured by the newly formed Burke Toy Company.

On the board of directors of the toy company was Fiona's mother, Suzie. “The good whore,” as Suzie said on that day when she stepped through the door and clunked “Russell” on the head with Lisa's little backpack that she'd filled with rocks.

His real name was Kurt Corbin (renamed for the story by Smokey after Kurt Russell, the boy who played Jaimie McPheeters on TV), and he was the product of a liaison between Smokey and an alcoholic prostitute named Lavender. Smokey had been sickened at the way his son had been raised by the woman, so when a second long-term liaison produced a little girl, Smokey was ruthless in taking her away from a woman he viewed as little better than Lavender.

“I loved your father,” Suzie said. “Really loved him. But he …”

It had taken Fiona a while to comprehend that she had a living parent, and it was still going to take time for her to forgive her father for keeping Suzie from her all her life.

“He told me that he was turning you over to some rich relatives of his and that you'd have the best of everything,” Suzie said, sniffing from crying. “He talked about riding lessons and having your own pony. I didn't know the truth until I read about you in the papers. And I thought that if you were a sociopath, then it was my fault. That's why I wiped up the coffee with those papers. They told all about me but it was too soon for you to know.”

Ace said that he only believed half of the story Suzie was telling, since it made her look perfect and Smokey the bad guy. “I don't think we should inquire too closely into where she's been these last years or with whom.”

Fiona nodded in agreement. After all, Suzie had been living in a community that seemed to be riddled with people who didn't want to be seen outside their little compound.