Trophies (53 page)

Wingate, it seemed, had had enough. He tugged
on Sherlock's biceps and guided him toward the nearest police
car.

William withdrew his arms from the ladies and
stepped forward. "Colonel Holmes, may I be of service until a
proper attorney arrives?"

Wingate's perfect shoulders sagged.

An ambulance, emergency lights strobing, wove
through the fence of squad cars and eased to a stop nearby.

Caren ducked down. My attention followed her
motion.

There was the spot where Aunt Edith had died.
I wondered how she'd felt, knowing she'd killed a man. We had more
in common than I'd realized.

For a moment I saw the glitter of jewels in
the depths of Caren's little black bag, repeatedly washed with
blood then wiped clean. Then she snapped the bag closed.

current time

Serious or not, I checked myself out of the
hospital the next morning and hitched a ride home with Caren,
Patricia, and Father. The police held Sherlock a few hours longer,
but the preliminary ballistics report on the slug removed from my
shoulder exactly matched the one from the bullets that had killed
Aunt Edith and injured Trés and the security guard. Even Wingate
couldn't justify holding him after that.

Because my right arm was in a sling and
useless, Lindsay researched the jewelry online and issued
directions, a role that seemed much to her liking. Across the
dining room table, Caren addressed the self-stick labels from Aunt
Edith's maroon leather address book. William and Patty packaged the
priceless jewelry in taped layers of cotton swabbing and mountains
of shipping peanuts. Father, still smiling, sat beside me and
watched.

Bonnie had taken the first flight back to
West Texas, where she could go to ground on her mountain and
indefinitely avoid the training camp no one wanted to attend.
Theresa, finally, was asleep, sated with making things go boom in
the night. And Sherlock was frankly hiding. After all, it was only
Saturday; the training camp had barely begun; and if he left now he
could still get there in reasonable time and take over from Wings
Cadal.

Of course, no one who knew the man expected
such responsible, rational behavior.

"No return address?" The look William gave me
was keen.

"That's right."

"They'll try to trace these packages, you
know."

"I told you to be careful and wipe off any
fingerprints. I've followed Aunt Edith's instructions, I'm
finishing what she started, and I refuse to be held responsible for
these damned things any longer."

The phone rang.

"I'm not here," Sherlock said.

"Why not?" Lindsay asked. Aunt Edith's
emerald ring, the love gift from Uncle Hubert of the forgiving and
adventurous heart, glowed on her right hand, and she angled it
toward the light often.

It rang again

"Because my anatomy is too valuable to let
that man find me until he's had several months to cool off." He
paused. "To me, at least."

And again.

"I'm not here, either," I said. "I've given
the police a statement, sort of, and I'm not talking with anyone
else."

And again. Patty leaned over and snagged the
cordless.

"Ellandun residence. Hello, Detective
Wingate. No, he says he's not here."

I buried my face in Father's shoulder.
Painkillers, after all, make one act in strange and unaccountable
ways.

"Oh. No, I haven't seen that yet."

I looked up. Her gaze slid my way, eyes
twinkling.

"Six o'clock Friday night, then."

I restrained myself until she rang off. "You
are not going out with that man."

"And why not?" She glanced at Sherlock,
suddenly hesitant. But he grinned as if appreciating the joke. She
smiled back and ripped another strip of packaging tape from the
roll.

"He tried to pin a murder on me. Where's he
taking you, anyway?" It really wasn't my business — and her glare
reminded me of that fact — but being protective of Patty was
something of a habit by now.

"To the opera." She wrapped cotton wadding
about the earrings of topaz and green garnet, and taped it down.
"He's not singing Friday night, so—"

"Why should he be singing?" He would do it
perfectly, of course.

She stared, her eyebrows arch. "Stover
Wingate? The new baritone for the Boston Opera? The brilliant
amateur who burst onto the scene this season? Surely you remember
when we saw
Aida
and
Don Giovanni,
and you raved over
how good he was?"

Of course: the framed opera posters on the
walls of Wingate's office; that was where I'd seen the man before.
I reddened and refused to answer.

She blew out her cheeks at me and wiped down
the outside of another package. Caren, wearing surgical gloves,
slapped a label on it and put it in the plastic bag with the
growing pile. I prayed Lindsay was concentrating and they were
putting the correct labels on each package — that the Earl of
Bedford wasn't going to get Lady Meara Montgomery's Stone
Waterfall, or something similar — and left it to them. I meant what
I'd said: my part in this adventure was over and no one's trophies
held any more fascination for me.

"Daddy, I don't want to be an attorney." She
angled the emerald ring to the light; the Easter-morning colors
flashed. "I want to go to Sandhurst instead."

"You want to join the Army?" His face
slackened.

I eased my chair away from his, toward
Father.

"Stop it, Daddy. Uncle Robbie has nothing to
do with this. It's my decision."

"So you say." William crossed his arms. "You
know, Charles, if you post these from around Boston, the police
will figure it out sooner or later. After all, Glendower was a
suspected jewel thief and he was killed here."

He had a point. "I suppose the bright
barrister has a suggestion?"

"I'll take them with me on the plane tomorrow
and post them from Britain somewhere. Perhaps Belfast, hm?"

Causing an international incident, after all,
was one thing; risking the family honor something else entirely.
"William!"

J. Gunnar Grey has never wanted to be
anything except a novelist, so of course she's been everything else
— proofreader, typesetter, editor, nonfiction writer, photographer,
secretary, data entry clerk, legal assistant, Starfleet lieutenant
commander, stable manager, dancer — and no, not that kind of
dancer. Her long-suffering husband is just excited she's actually
using her two degrees, one from the University of Houston Downtown
and the MA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.
Gunnar writes novels that are mysterious, adventurous, and
historical, but all sorts of other stuff can leap out of that
keyboard without warning.

She lives in Humble, Texas, just north of
Houston, with two parakeets, the aforementioned husband (who's more
entertaining than the birds), a fig tree, a vegetable garden, the
lawn from the bad place, three armloads of potted plants, and a
coffee maker that's likely the most important item she owns.

An excerpt from

Deal

with the

Devil

late evening, Saturday, 24 August
1940

over the village of Patchbourne,
England

Something soft and annoying whooshed past his
face. Faust brushed at it, but it was already gone and he was too
fragging sleepy to care. He dropped his arm to the bed.

There was no bed.

There wasn't anything. His arm was dangling
out in space. So was the rest of him. Faust snapped his eyes open.
A strong wind pummeled him, tumbled him head over turkey. The
ground was a long way down. He was falling and it was real, not
some stupid nightmare.

Panic leapt like a predator through his
veins. He twisted, fighting against gravity. An icicle of light
from the distant ground stabbed at his eyes, swept past him, and
several red flashes popped in quick succession. A rumbling vibrated
the air, something sounding like an artillery round exploded
nearby, and sharp chemical smoke scoured his nostrils.

Tight cords wrapped about his body, between
his legs, jerking him upright and throwing him higher, dangling him
across the light-slashed night sky. The rumbling intensified. His
head snapped back. Above him, a parachute canopy blazed white in
the spotlight from below. Beyond it loomed a huge dark beast,
moving past in impossible slow motion. It towered over him. The
parachute danced closer, second by drawn-out second; then it bowed,
canted, and slid away, laying Faust on his back as it hauled him
aside.

He gripped the harness shroud lines, chest
and belly flinching. It was the bomber, the one he'd been riding
in. The belly hatch framed Erhard's laughing face, lit from below
by a spotlight. With one hand, Erhard clutched the rubber coaming,
cupping the other about his mouth. He yelled something—something
short—which was overwhelmed by the racket and growing distance.

Maybe the plane was having mechanical
problems—but they and the mechanics had tuned the Heinkel's twin
engines all afternoon. No one else was bailing out.

Erhard had thrown him overboard.

It didn't matter how much schnapps he'd
slugged nor how drunk he remained. When Faust hit the ground,
Erhard was toast.

The spotlight's cone slid from the front half
of the bomber to the tail fin, the glare flashing across the metal
and leaving a dark, mysterious line at the rudder's hinge. The line
and the glare slid across the matte metal, twisting and writhing,
finally falling off the back edge. The bomber was turning from the
light. It pirouetted in a slow, graceful curtsy like a prancing
warhorse and plowed into the side of the neighboring plane. Metal
screeched and crumpled. The two bombers hung motionless, pinned to
the night sky by the fingers of light from below. Then Erhard's
plane rolled the other one over. Flames spiraled from the mass of
cartwheeling metal.

From between the bombers fell a squirming,
thrashing human. Another white canopy blossomed above it. But
within moments the parachute silk convulsed in scarlet flames,
melted to flaring sparks of gold and orange, and crumpled to
nothing-ness. In a clear, bizarre second, Faust again glimpsed
Erhard's face, no longer laughing but mouth open in a scream not
drowned by the clamor as he fell beyond the reach of the
spot-lights.

The entwined bombers exploded. Faust twisted,
wrapping his elbows about his face, hands clutching the shroud
lines. Something sharp and hot punched his right shoulder. Heat
flared across his back. But when he twisted back around, the night
sky was empty. The droning engines ebbed away and the searchlights
vanished one by one. A final, embarrassingly late flak round
exploded well behind the departing squadron and black smoke drifted
through the remaining searchlight finger.

The light fastened onto him and his slaloming
parachute, tracking his descent. He exhaled with one relieved
whoosh. He'd been trained on parachutes before the invasion of
Norway, months ago, but this was his first real jump. Okay, it
wasn't so bad. But he couldn't wait for the ground crews to find
him so he could scramble back to Paris, and if he never flew again,
it would be too soon.

His breath caught. German ground-fire had no
reason to shoot at German planes.

Where the heck was he?

The spotlight vanished, leaving him blind
upon his stage. He glanced down just as his feet slammed into
something solid. His knees buckled, tumbling him backward into
stubbly stalks. The scent of fresh-mown grass was overlaid with the
acrid tang of burning metal. Clouds lowered the night sky until he
could reach up and grab a handful. Shoot, he didn't want to deal
with Erhard's mess tonight, no matter where he was. Faust lay on
his back and closed his eyes, letting the alcohol fuzz take over
again. The klaxon of the air-raid alarm seemed to fade, not to
silence but to an incomprehensible distance, like waves cream-ing
over a remote Dover beach. Matthew Arnold wrote that one, about
pebbles being drawn back then flung ashore by waves on the Sea of
Faith.
Ah, love, let us be true to one another...