Elementary, My Dear Watkins (8 page)

“Here you go,” Danny said, closing the bag and setting it neatly on the floor next to him. “There’s more in there if you need it. Will there be anything else?”

Mr. Bashiri took a long sip of the water, wiped his mouth with a crisply folded cloth handkerchief, and then replied, “Not right now, thank you.”

The train slowly began to move. Leaving his bag on the floor, Danny excused himself to look for Luc. Fortunately, the confident Frenchman was just coming up the hallway, a wide grin on his face.

“Whew! We did it,” Luc said enthusiastically.

Reading the numbers on the doors, he stopped at the one just prior to Mr. Bashiri’s, said
“Voici,”
opened it, and tossed his luggage inside.

Then he brushed past Danny and stepped next door into Mr. Bashiri’s compartment, stepping over Danny’s suitcase and taking the other window seat, across from Mr. Bashiri. Danny was a bit startled at Luc’s aggressiveness, but he had come to learn that it was par for the course with him.

“
Eh bien, monsieur
,” Luc said, flipping through the papers in his hand. “I will just take a moment to tell you all you need to know. First of all, Danny and I are in the sleeper right next door. If you need anything, you can just knock on the wall.
Comme ça
.” To demonstrate, he tapped lightly on the wall beside the seat. “It’s too late for any meals tonight, but Rémi provided you with some sandwiches. Breakfast will show up between six and six thirty, and we’ll reach Zurich at seven twenty-four. We have asked the
préposé
to turn down your bed in about an hour.”

The train began to pick up speed, and Danny realized that he ought to put his own stuff away. As Luc continued to tell Mr. Bashiri about the arrangements in Zurich, Danny moved his duffel bag into the other room, taking out his camera first and then setting the bag safely on the floor of the closet. He still couldn’t believe he’d been given this opportunity.

Danny moved back to the doorway of Bashiri’s room and stood there for another moment, observing his conversing travel companions. According to what Rémi had told him back at the office, though most successful photographers worked alone, Mr. Bashiri no longer did. With his advancing age and a bad back, he couldn’t handle the weight of his equipment, and he didn’t like the logistics of preparing an itinerary or driving in unfamiliar locations once he got there. Being semiretired, Mr. Bashiri could pick and choose his work more carefully these days, and one of his stipulations was that whatever magazine hired him for a job must provide what he called a “liaison”—but was actually just someone to do the footwork, the gruntwork, and the navigating.

Of course, Mr. Bashiri’s loss was Danny’s gain, as he had never expected to work so closely with such an icon in his field. Pushing down an anxious surge of nervousness and excitement, Danny said a prayer of thanks for the opportunity, asking God to help him do a good job and to be with them all on their journey.

Bradford held Jo’s arm as they made their way through the train station.

“Start talking,” Jo said softly, still feeling doubtful but also strangely nervous. “Tell me everything that has happened and everything you know.”

He put an arm around her, pulled her close, and placed his cheek against her hair as they walked, so that his lips were near her ear. She didn’t like his proximity—or familiarity—but right now she didn’t see that she had much choice in the matter.

“It all started with a Jaguar,” he said softly. “A little more than a year ago, your dad invited me to the company house out in the Hamptons for a weekend. I was thrilled to go and glad to have a quiet time of relaxing and getting to know each other better. Your mom came too. She made a fabulous rack of lamb and spent most of the dinner talking about you, about how great you are.”

Jo didn’t comment, but inside her stomach was clenching. Her mother always made rack of lamb when she wanted to impress someone—or butter them up to do something she wanted.

“The next morning, your dad invited me out to the garage. In it was a brand-new Jaguar XJ8, indigo blue exterior with a champagne interior. I was in love.”

Jo felt bile rising in her stomach, remembering all the times she had ridden in that car with Bradford. Was she really ready to hear this?

“I thought it was his new car, but then he said, ‘I bought this for you, Bradford, and there’s a lot more where that came from. I’ve got a proposition for you, and if you’re interested, you’ll never want for anything again.’”

Jo’s heart was pounding, and she felt sure that everyone who passed them by could see her emotions flashing clearly across her face. She was scared, angry, frustrated, and most of all anxious to hear what else he had to say. So far, knowing her parents as she did, everything Bradford was saying rang strangely true. Her father had pulled the same thing on her once with a red Porsche when she was fresh out of college and he was trying to get her to forget all about being a household hints expert and come to work for him at Bosworth Industries instead. Jo had been secretly flattered by his gesture, but the world of big business held no appeal for her at all. She had turned down the Porsche and the big salary, saying she was quite happy living with her grandparents in Mulberry Glen, thank you, and learning everything she needed to know to take over the “Tips from Tulip” newspaper column from her grandmother. Jo had never regretted that decision, especially when one after the other of her sweet grandparents died and she was left to carry on the legacy alone.

“Oh, man, I forgot it was rush hour,” Bradford said. “It’s so crowded here.”

The station grew even more crowded as they neared the boarding area. Jo realized he would have to finish talking once they were on the train and couldn’t be overheard quite so easily. She allowed Bradford to keep his arm around her anyway, partly because she didn’t want to lose him in the shuffle, partly because she needed the support for all this walking in her cast, and partly because she was starting to feel downright scared. Next to her, she could feel that Bradford’s body was tense and on alert, his eyes darting constantly around the corridor. Jo found herself doing the same, though she wasn’t sure what she expected to see. Finally, she couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

“Bradford, what are we watching for? Who is it that you think wants me ‘eliminated’? Is it someone I know? Someone in the company? Someone in my family?”

“Jo, all I know is that your life is in danger,” he whispered in return, “and that it has to do with something big that’s going on at Bosworth Industries. Otherwise, I’m as clueless as you are.”

Jo swallowed hard. If by some wild chance Bradford really was telling her the truth, then her life could be in serious jeopardy right now.

“But
why?
” Jo demanded. “I have nothing at all to do with Bosworth Industries. I don’t work there, and I don’t have any dealings with them. I own a couple of measly shares of stock, certainly not enough to be killed over. I don’t participate in any of the votes. When the stockholder’s report comes in the mail, I usually toss it in the trash. I’m telling you, before today I hadn’t even set foot in the Bosworth building in several years.”

“Look, all I know is that something’s cooking at Bosworth, and for some reason you present a problem. I’ve tried everything I can to get more information, but once I started sniffing around with some of my old contacts and former fellow employees, it’s like they closed ranks. Nobody’s talking.”

They separated to take the narrow escalator and head downward. Jo stepped on after Bradford so that she could lean forward and whisper in his ear.

“Who told you all of this?” she asked, halfway between skepticism and terror. Could he really be telling the truth? Or was he just working some strange sort of ploy, the motives of which she had yet to learn?

Holding onto the rail, Bradford turned his head to whisper in return.

“Let’s just say that I heard it from a friend who was in a position to know.”

“Oh, good grief, Bradford, stop being so cryptic and just say what you came here to say. Lay it out on the table.”

He lowered his voice even more and whispered, “Just wait. I’ll tell you everything I can once we’re on the train. In the end, you’ll probably want to skip your father completely and go strait to see your grandmother instead. She’s really the only one who might be able to help.”

They reached the bottom of the escalator platform, and because of the proximity of crowds, they once again had to stop talking. Bradford stood closely by her side, this time with both hands clutching her arm at the elbow, holding on tightly as a throng of people closed in around them. Jo’s senses were on hyperalert, picking up the smells and sounds of the throng: garlic, curry, cheap perfume, aftershave, body odor, sneezing, coughing, chattering, one-sided cell-phone conversations. For someone who no longer lived in the city, it was overwhelming. A sense of light-headedness briefly threatened, but she took a deep breath and inched as close as she could to the yellow line at the edge of the platform, relieved when a train whistle sounded in the distance.

As the train drew closer, Jo’s mind swirled with doubt, confusion, and fear. She thought about the questions she would ask Bradford once they were on board, and how she could figure out what was truly going on. Was she really targeted to be killed? If so, why—and how did Bradford know? What did her father have to do with any of it? Did he really want her to be married so badly that he had gone so far as to buy her husband? And how did that tie in with this supposed threat on her life?

Another whistle sounded and then the train rounded the bend and began to roar closer toward them. By now the platform was completely full, and Jo could feel the crowd pressing in from every side.

Suddenly, Jo felt the distinct pressure of a hand on her back. The hand pushed and Jo lost her balance, falling forward, directly toward the path of the oncoming train.

She screamed. Bradford was still holding her arm with both hands, and as she started to fall, he jerked backward, hard, turning at the same time, trying to twist her around and back into balance. As he did, she managed to find her footing and recover. But their movements caused him to lose
his
balance.

Before she could scream again, Bradford fell from the platform—right against the hard, steel side of the speeding train.

A
lexa quietly shut the door and slid the lock into place. She had been given a lot of things since she moved on to the estate, but privacy wasn’t one of them. She knew it wouldn’t be long before someone started banging on the door, asking why it was locked, insisting that it be opened. At least the old lady wasn’t around today. She had gone into the city for a meeting and then to take her granddaughter to the doctor. But for everybody else around here, it was business as usual.

Alexa knew she had better move fast.

Quickly, she tiptoed across the study to the shelves that held the oversized part of the collection. When she had been in the room that morning, working on a research paper with her tutor, she had spotted what looked like a bunch of blueprints up on a high shelf. But this was the first chance all day that Alexa had had to come back alone and take a look. Her desperate hope was that she’d find a drawing of the entire Bosworth compound, one that included the outbuildings and the perimeter of the old stone wall that surrounded the place.

Nervously, she stood on a step stool and reached high, grabbing from the pile, retrieving a cardboard tube about three feet long and capped with white plastic. Climbing down from the stool, she pulled off the lid and then tilted the tube so that the contents slid out onto the nearby table. Trying not to make much noise, she unrolled the large paper and took a look.

As her Uncle Rick liked to say,
Close, but no cigar
.

It was a blueprint, all right, but just of one building. From the looks of it, it was the gardener’s cottage or the carriage house. She rolled it up, managed to get it back into the tube, and then climbed up on the stool, put it away, and tried again. Her physical therapist wouldn’t have been happy to see her up there balancing on the stool as she went through the tubes, but Alexa wasn’t worried about getting hurt; if she did fall, her biggest concern was that the crash would be so noisy it would alert everyone in the house to what she was doing.

There were ten cardboard rolls, and Alexa went through them one by one, still hoping for a master plan, one that showed everything. To her mind, it could be the key to her freedom—not that she was being held prisoner here in the compound, exactly. But getting away still wasn’t a simple matter, at least not if she wanted to go alone and unobserved. If she had the blueprints, her hope was that she could find a better way to come and go, all on her own, despite the high stone wall and the security guards.

She’d already escaped twice. The first time went off without a hitch, but the second time she’d been caught on her way back in by a security guard. That had earned her a stern lecture from Dr. Stebbins, a loving reprimand from his wife, Nicole, and a cold warning from the old lady. They all kept saying the same thing, that Alexa was free to leave, but not like that, not at night, not when she would be putting herself in danger. Of course, Alexa didn’t really want to leave—or, at least, she didn’t want to
stay
away.