Authors: Dana Mentink
FIFTEEN
A
va felt fragments of glass whiz by her face before she ducked away. Luca crunched frantically across the littered floor, searching for the flashlight she’d dropped. She found it first and clicked it on. His face was intense in the strange light. Angry.
He ran to the steps and took them two at a time.
“What are you going to do?” she called after him.
He didn’t
answer, just barreled out the basement door. After a moment, she followed. She topped the stairs in time to see Mack Dog’s tail disappearing out the kitchen door after Luca.
The storm hit her like a backhanded slap as she emerged outside, snow pricking her cheeks. Because her jacket remained on the hook by the fire, she was instantly chilled. The black night swirled around her, and it suddenly
came home that somebody had broken the window, hurling a heavy object through that might have crashed into either one of them.
Shadows from her own light picked out sinister shapes, moving trees, windblown pockets of snow. No Luca.
Getting her bearings she headed for the window where Luca would have gone.
He wasn’t there. Neither was Mack Dog.
She looked out into the angry
storm. Hurt as she was that Luca hadn’t been forthright with her about buying Whisper, another emotion rose to the top. Where had he gone? Dressed as he was in regular clothing, he would not last long in the storm. Disorientation could render a person lost in moments.
She remembered one winter blizzard that hit Whisper smack in the middle of peak season. A young man, showing off for his buddies,
insisted on hiking from the family lodge to the lockers where he had left his phone.
Thirty minutes later Ava’s father and Harold were out combing the area for him. Forty minutes later they found him, unconscious after running into a tree branch. Nearly frozen, he’d barely survived. Forty minutes could be a lifetime in these conditions.
“Luca,” she shouted, but the wind snatched it away.
She checked the snow around the broken window. There might have been some footprints, but her light was not strong enough to help her draw any conclusions from the blurry imprints.
“Luca,” she yelled again.
Mack Dog suddenly appeared, bounding over to Ava and poking at her with his nose.
“Where’s Luca?” she asked, teeth chattering.
Mack Dog wagged his tail. She shone her
flashlight around in the darkness wondering again who had been out here in the storm watching them. Mack Dog barked, startling Ava so badly she dropped the flashlight. Floundering around in the snow she screamed as a cold hand brushed her cheek.
She bolted upright, lashing out at her attacker.
A light blinded her.
“It’s just me, honey. What are you doing out here?” Sue asked, eyes
wide.
Ava’s heart slowed a fraction. “Looking for Luca,” she said.
Sue puzzled it over. “You’ve got to get inside.”
“I’m not leaving until we find him.”
“I’ll get Harold. Please come inside and put on a jacket,” she said.
Ava shook her head.
“Now you listen to me, Ava Stanton,” Sue snapped. “Your father would not tolerate this foolishness and you know it.”
“He’s
not here,” she shot back, knowing she sounded like an angry teen.
“Don’t you say that. He’ll be back soon as he’s able,” she said, lips trembling. “You know he trusted me to be in charge, and I won’t let him down. Inside, right now.”
Ava was so surprised at Sue’s emotion that she followed her back toward the house. Sue was wearing a pair of sweats and a long-sleeved shirt with a jacket
pulled over it, boots on her feet. Much more sensibly dressed than Ava whose teeth chattered violently. She would grab her jacket and return to the search.
Ava stopped before they reached the kitchen door and turned to peer through the storm.
A light appeared in the darkness, illuminating a slice of falling snow as it bobbed side to side. A flashlight. She tensed.
Mack Dog barked
again and took off toward it.
Ignoring Sue’s strong protest, Ava ran back out into the storm. It had to be Luca. It had to be.
“Luca?” she called.
“Nope, Tate.” Stephanie’s husband limped into view. “What’s going on? Couldn’t sleep, and I heard barking.”
Ava’s heart dropped. “Luca’s out here somewhere.”
Tate didn’t ask why. “Let’s split up. I’ll take the woods. You scan
the perimeter of the house, stay with Sue.”
“She should come inside, and we’ll wake up Harold,” Sue insisted as she joined them.
Tate was about to respond when a window slid open from the second floor. “What’s happening?” Goren called out. “Is someone hurt?”
“No,” said a deep voice, thick with irritation.
That one syllable flooded Ava’s heart with relief. Luca trudged out from
a thicket of pines, shivering and angry. “I’m fine, and whoever broke the window must be, too, because I couldn’t catch him. He got away from me.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Tate said, clapping him on the shoulder and shoving him toward the lodge.
Ava could not restrain a smile at the look of fury on Luca’s face. She knew it came more than anything from the fact that he’d been outrun.
She’d seen similar expressions on his face when they were kids and she beat him down the mountain. Every time.
She let him go first so he would not detect her own deep sense of relief. Luca was okay and at the moment, that carried more weight than anything else.
Once inside, Luca could not be persuaded to sit down. He headed immediately to the basement. “We should have secured the stuff.
Stupid of me to take off like that.”
“What stuff?” Sue called from the top of the stairs.
Ava was going to call up and explain when Luca let out a grunt of rage.
A heavy metal pipe lay on the floor amid a cascade of glass.
Nearby, the wooden trunk lay empty.
* * *
Ava held the flashlight as Tate made his way painfully down the basement stairs to join them. Their search
netted nothing. Luca smacked a fist on the wall in frustration. “Guy came back while I was chasing shadows. It was just a ruse to get us out of here.”
When Ava could stand the cold no longer, she headed up the stairs and straight for the fireplace. Goren and Sue stood wide-eyed.
“The suspense is killing me,” Sue said. “What did you find in that trunk?”
“Was it the Star?” Goren breathed,
quivering with excitement. “Did you find the Sunset Star?”
Luca accepted a blanket from Sue and stood near the fire. “Not sure. We found a bag of jewelry and a book, but we didn’t get a chance to look thoroughly.”
“The pearl might have been reset onto a pendant or a brooch. Did you see anything like that?” The firelight made Goren’s face younger, childlike.
“I’m not sure.” Luca
sighed gustily. “Now we might never know.”
Sue shook her head. “I can’t believe any of this. I figured this treasure was just another one of Paul’s daydreams.” She laughed. “That was the very best thing about Paul. He could make you believe in the impossible.”
Ava’s heart squeezed. “Yes,” she said softly, “he certainly could.” Luca took a step toward her, as if he meant to give her a
comforting embrace, but he stopped abruptly.
She steeled herself against the unwelcome swirl of disappointment.
No comfort from Luca Gage, Ava.
“We’re all half-frozen. I’m making some tea,” Sue said as Harold joined them, cheeks flushed. He was fully dressed, Ava noted, though she saw no sign that he had been out in the storm. She felt guilty for her suspicions.
Harold was the man
who built ramps after her father was paralyzed, converted the bathroom with wider doors and lower fixtures to accommodate the wheelchair. He’d never complained about the extra work, never asked for more salary although she knew they did not pay him much. The only time she’d seen him emotional at all was the day he married Sue in a civil ceremony with only Ava and her father in attendance. It was
a run-down, dingy room in the town hall, but it might have been the Notre Dame Cathedral for all the pride she saw in his face that day.
Sue took Harold into the kitchen with her with promises to fill him in, and Goren returned to his room, muttering softly to himself on the way.
Tate looked up from scratching Mack Dog’s neck. “Any ideas who busted the window?” he said, voice low.
Luca frowned. “Could have been any of them or none of them. Whoever I was chasing was quick, that’s about all I can figure. He doubled back around into the house after I lost him and headed straight for the basement.”
Tate nodded. “Maybe Victor can do some digging about all three of them. Find out how this all fits together.”
Ava flushed. “No.”
Both men looked at her.
“Someone
is trying to steal from you and they’re not afraid to hurt you in the process,” Luca said. “We’ve got to figure out which one of these three it is.”
“Sue and Harold were my mother’s friends. They love me and they’d never do anything to hurt me.”
“Maybe you don’t know them as well as you think.”
“I know them better than you,” she fired back.
Tate considered. “If Harold and Sue
are out, does that mean you think Goren is our guy?”
Ava shrugged. “I don’t know. The police are already investigating him, but I’m not going to have the Gages prying into the Agnotis’ lives. It’s not right.”
“I know they’re like family,” he said quietly, “and that’s a difficult subject right now.”
A difficult subject? It was the only subject that mattered anymore. Her uncle was
gone and her mother, too. All she had left was her father and she was about to lose Whisper, the one place that held all her most precious memories. All the love that had once thrived here mingled with the sorrow that still circled like the winds that cradled the mountain. “They are good people.”
“Are you’re afraid of what you’ll find out?” Luca asked softly.
She felt her self-control
splintering. “Well, maybe I am afraid. I guess that makes sense because I’m the daughter of a woman who jumped in a lake rather than face her problems.” Tears crowded her eyes, mortification at her outburst flooded through her.
Luca opened his mouth but nothing came out. He tried again. “Ava, I’m...”
She waved him off. She could not stand to see pity on his face, pity for the little
girl whose mother had abandoned her in the worst possible way. She would not be seen as a victim. Not by Luca, especially not by him.
She turned to face him, chin high, when Sue poked her head in. “Tea will be ready in a minute.”
Tate thanked her and begged off. “I’m not a tea guy,” he said. “Besides, Stephanie will have my head if she wakes up and finds out I went wandering. I’ve got
some explaining to do about why I didn’t include her in all the fun.”
He left. The silence thickened around them.
Luca shrugged off the blanket Sue had draped him with and offered it to her.
“No, thank you,” she said, stiffly.
“I am sorry things are working out this way.” He paced back and forth. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or pry into personal business.”
“Then don’t,” she said, arms wrapped around her.
“You can’t just walk away from this,” he said as the kettle whistled in the kitchen.
“Maybe I can.” She looked around the lodge, the warn draperies, the puzzles that had gone untouched for years. “I can contact the agent in the morning. I’ll sell to the highest bidder, maybe even your father, and walk away.”
He sighed. “Is that what
you really want? To leave it all behind?”
She felt a myriad of feelings, joy and sorrow, fear and nostalgia tumbling together through her heart. “I don’t know.” The tears came suddenly, and before she knew it she was in Luca’s arms. He didn’t speak, stroking her back, his chin resting on the top of her head.
“If you need to leave, to get out of here for a while, do it.” His murmurs tickled
her ear, tracing a path of electricity through her torso.
With great effort she pulled away. “And would you make the same choice? Leave the treasure behind?”
He paused. “No.”
She stiffened. “So that is really why you’re here. It’s all about the treasure.”
“No, Ava. You know it’s not true.”
She struggled to keep from crying. “You’re a treasure hunter and that’s the bottom
line.”
His eyes sparked. “Bottom line? Here it is. Someone murdered your uncle. Walk away if you have to, Ava, but you can’t leave that truth behind. If someone finds that treasure before we do, they get away with causing your uncle’s death.” He groaned, closing his eyes for a moment. “Who am I kidding? They might have already because I left that trunk. Easy pickings.”
Ava’s resolve
toughened inside her. He was right, although she still suspected the treasure and Whisper were his bigger motivations. Whoever killed Uncle Paul would not go unpunished as long as she was alive. If vengeance was the only reason to stay here at Whisper, then so be it.
“Okay. If the treasure is the key, then I’ve got something for you.”
Luca’s eyebrows arched. “You do?”
She pulled
the bag of jewelry from her sweatshirt pocket. “I grabbed it before you took off.”
He gaped. And then he took her in his arms and planted a kiss on her temple. “I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“You’re right,” she said, heart pounding.
SIXTEEN
L
uca still had his arms around Ava when Sue cleared her throat discreetly. He let Ava go, watching her eyes shift from looking at Sue over his shoulder to him. He could see the struggle there. She trusted Sue and Harold. She did not want to hide things from them.
He hoped she could read his expression.
Your call.
In the end, she stuffed the bag back into her pocket,
while Luca’s body still blocked Sue from seeing. How hard would it be if these people she loved turned out to be killers? He breathed a silent prayer that it would not come to that, and he and Ava joined the two in the kitchen where they sipped some flavorless tea.
Luca could hardly contain his eagerness to leave, to go and examine the contents. Instead, he forced himself to contribute to
the discussion.
“The pipe that busted the window belongs in the garage,” Harold said.
“Well, don’t move it,” Sue advised. “The police might want to check for prints and such, or maybe I just watch too many crime shows on TV.”
“No, you’re right. It’s a good idea to leave it,” Ava said.
Sue sipped her tea. “You sound just like your father. Practical and pragmatic. How is he?
Did the surgery go well?”
Ava was surprised that Sue knew the details of her father’s recent procedure. “Yes, it went fine. He’s recovering and we hired a nurse. I would have stayed, but he wanted me to move the sale forward.”
She looked stricken. “Don’t say that, Ava. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can turn things around here at Whisper. I know it.”
“Now you sound like Paul,”
Harold said.
“There are worse things than a little optimism. Bruce just needs to recover and he’ll feel differently about selling.”
“The resort is in my name now, Sue,” Ava said gently. “I’ve got to make the best decision for me and Dad.”
Harold thunked his mug on the table. “She’s right. Bad luck is cumulative, like the snow. Couple of bum turns, like lean snow years and expensive
repairs, and you get further and further into a hole. Pretty soon you can’t dig your way out.”
Bum turns, Luca thought, was an understatement. Marcia’s suicide on the heels of Bruce’s accident.
“So you agree we should sell?” Ava asked.
He shrugged. “Not my call, just seems poor sense to watch the money go down that hole with every passing year. I tried to tell Paul that. When he
was poking around up in the gondola I told him it would take thousands to make that thing safe to use again, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg, of course.”
“I’m surprised Uncle Paul went up there at all,” Ava mused. “He’s...he was, terrified of heights.”
Harold continued as if he hadn’t heard. “There are runs to be maintained, the heating system is older than I am and people don’t
want to stay in a run-down lodge.”
Sue took Ava’s hands, mouth tight. “I feel so bad about everything. I don’t want you to lose Whisper, too.”
Luca shifted. If he had known this piece of ground meant so much to Ava, would he have advised his father buy the property? But wouldn’t she rather the resort go to people she knew than strangers?
He looked at the determined lines of her
profile. Maybe it was too hard to think about the Gage family taking over what her own had failed to hang on to. Pride was a tricky thing. He was not sure he would feel any differently in her place if it was his family that needed bailing out. Still, part of him was pained that she’d painted him as an opportunist.
Finally, they finished the seemingly endless discussion and Harold and Sue
trundled off to bed. Luca and Ava waited until the house had quieted again and bundled up to head for the cabin where he was not surprised to find Stephanie awake interrogating Tate about the evening’s events.
Luca gave Mack Dog a pat and made sure the curtains were tightly closed before and he and Ava sat around the well-worn coffee table.
“New developments,” Luca said, as Ava poured
the jewelry out of the plastic bag onto the table. He enjoyed the openmouthed stares of his sister and brother-in-law and the impressed looks they gave Ava when they heard how she’d had the presence of mind to pocket the gems.
“Excellent,” Stephanie said, reaching for the jewelry. She sorted it into piles first, three necklaces, a cameo pin, a few rings and the object that made them all squeeze
closer, a brooch about the size of a half dollar with a fat pink pearl set in the middle.
His heart hammered. This was it, the treasure that would save Whisper and perhaps point them to Paul’s killer.
Stephanie fetched plastic gloves from the first aid kit and set to work examining the items. “It’s too dark in here, I’m going to move to the kitchen where the light is better.”
Luca
followed close on her heels.
She shot him an exasperated look. “You’re crowding me. I’ll holler as soon as I’ve come to any conclusions.”
“But...”
“Go away, brother,” she said.
He huffed and returned to the family room, throwing himself down on the sofa next to Ava who he noticed looked just as anxious as he felt.
“What doesn’t make sense to me is why such a big box for
a small bag of jewelry and a book? And the box under the trailer was pretty big, too.”
“What happened to the book?” Tate asked as Mack Dog came over and bumped against Tate’s leg in search of a friendly scratch.
“I forgot all about that,” Ava said. “It was gone when we got back to the basement. What was the title again, Luca?”
“Something about the history of the printing press.”
He frowned. “What does that have to do with a priceless pearl?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Ava suggested. “It was in the materials Uncle Paul got in that storage unit. Coincidental.”
“Why hide it, then?” Tate stroked Mack Dog’s ears, and the dog subsided into a contented puddle at his feet.
“Good question.” Luca turned it over in his mind, interrupted when his
sister called from the kitchen doorway.
“Well,” Stephanie said. “Maybe because the book was worth more than this jewelry.”
They stared at her.
She leaned on the jamb, a look of irritation on her face. “It’s costume jewelry. Nice stuff, but not anywhere near priceless.”
“Are you sure?” Ava asked.
Stephanie’s lips quirked. “Yes. The metal is actually gold-plated and the
stones are manufactured.”
“The pearl?” Ava’s eyes still held the embers of hope.
“You can ask Goren for his opinion, but it doesn’t warm to the touch like a real pearl. It’s way too light and too round. Real pearls never have perfect shape or texture.”
Ava stood with a groan. “So why all this effort to hide things under his trailer and in the basement?”
“We’re missing something.”
Luca knew it deep in his gut. He took out his phone and dialed Victor’s number.
“It’s after one o’clock in the morning,” Stephanie chided.
“The guy sleeps only four hours a night. I’m sure he’s gotten his beauty rest by now.” Indeed, Victor sounded completely alert when Luca put him on speaker phone.
“Did I wake you?”
“Haven’t gone to bed yet. I’ve been researching John Danson’s
great-grandpa.”
Luca smiled. That was the brother he knew, the one who earned the nickname Sea Tiger, or barracuda, for his tenacity. Luca brought him up to speed on their find of the book and worthless jewelry. “So tell me you’ve got something that will enlighten us.”
“I’m not sure you’ll be happy about this info, but I think I can say without too much doubt that the Dansons did sell
the Sunset Star.”
Luca felt his breath come out in a whoosh. “How can you be sure?”
“Because the family that bought it donated it to a museum along with an anecdotal history that proves it was the Sunset Star.”
The room fell into silence.
Ava closed her eyes. “So that’s that. There is no treasure to be found here. Whoever kidnapped my uncle was mistaken. He never had the Sunset
Star in the first place.”
The look of defeat on her face twisted his gut. “Maybe not, but Paul found a treasure, something bigger than a pearl, so big he went to great lengths to hide it.”
She perked up. “Do you really think so?”
Did he? Or was he clutching at straws to give her hope? Was he letting the growing feelings he had for Ava mess with his logic?
Stephanie took up
the threads. “Goren already told Paul the jewelry was fake.”
“But the kidnapper might not have known that.”
Stephanie twisted a strand of her dark hair. “The morning he met you at the slopes. He knew someone was after him, but he also knew that the jewelry wasn’t the big score. Then we consider the size of the box he hid, the one under the trailer and the trunk. Much too big for just
a bag of jewelry. And the book. Printing presses. Victor, what do you know about early printing presses?” she called.
“Not a thing,” he said, “but I’ll be an expert in a couple of hours.”
“It can wait until morning,” she said with a smile. “Go to bed or Brooke will be worried about you.”
“In a bit,” he said, and they heard the tapping of a keyboard.
Stephanie said goodbye and
Luca clicked off the phone.
“I hope you’re happy,” she said. “He won’t get to bed until morning.”
Luca laughed. “My bad. Maybe we should all stay up until morning and see what we can dig up.”
“Absolutely not,” Stephanie said. “Look at Ava. She’s exhausted.”
It had not escaped Luca that Ava’s eyes were shadowed and her shoulders slumped, but he’d always thought action was the
best way to fend off fatigue and more importantly, a feeling of helplessness. Now that he looked closer, he knew his sister was right. Ava needed rest. He mentally chided himself when he realized it was morning.
Stephanie continued. “Because we’ve got some crazy person breaking windows in the main house, Ava is going to bunk with me upstairs and you two manly men can sleep down here with
the dog. Turn off the lights and get some shut-eye.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Luca said. After Stephanie had gone, he laid down on the lumpy couch. “Your wife is one stubborn woman,” he said into the darkness.
“She learned it from her brothers,” Tate said.
There was one thing Stephanie was right about, Luca thought, as he tried to force his brain to turn off: Uncle Paul had found something
big, something worth killing for.
* * *
Ava tried not to thrash around on the bed and disturb the peacefully sleeping Stephanie. She did fall into a troubled slumber for a few hours until she jerked awake, thoughts chasing each other through her head. She slipped from under the covers and went to the window, staring out into murky darkness, still hours away from sunup, as she thought
about the bag of jewelry. Uncle Paul had been so convinced he’d found a treasure. She desperately did not want him to have risked his life for something worthless.
She remembered the glow in his eyes when he met her at Melody Lake.
“I come here to pray all the time and you used to, didn’t you, Ave?”
She hadn’t prayed much at all since her mother had breathed in the frigid water
that snatched her life away. Long lonely years had followed, hauntingly quiet like snow falling in a silent wood.
Now there was another person gone, another soul whom she had clung to ripped away.
Ava listened to the wind whispering against the windows, startled by a realization. Even though her heart felt cleft in two by grief, mourning her lost uncle, she did not feel alone in that
moment.
She wrapped her arms around herself. The feeling made no sense. Paul was dead. Her mother gone. Her father crippled and likely never to return to Whisper. There was no one here for her, yet she had the odd sense that she was not alone.
“...you used to, didn’t you, Ave?”
She’d prayed with her mother here as the seasons changed in all their splendor, prayed the few months
after her death.
Don’t leave me alone, Father.
She pictured Luca, laughing, sprawled on the basement steps.
Could those prayers have been heard, she wondered? Had her desperate lonely cries risen into the exquisite mountain air, biding time until the Lord answered them?
The notion tantalized her for a moment, warming a place deep inside her soul until the coldness returned.
Luca was a temporary distraction and what’s more, he was here to acquire Whisper, a fact he’d failed to mention. She felt an ache, deep down.
You are alone, Ava.
There could be no comfort here in the place where she had lost so much. Luca would soon be gone and the silence of Whisper Mountain would return to smother her again.