Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (36 page)

***

Faye wasn’t at the rental cabin. Joe thought maybe Amande might know where she was, so he went down to the houseboat. No one answered his knock there.

Standing at the front door, he dialed Faye and actually reached her. “She’s not here. Nobody is,” he told Faye. “Didi’s car and Steve’s boat are gone. Maybe Tebo is keeping one of them company. Maybe Amande is, too.”

Faye’s tart response was, “Please God, don’t let her be off marrying someone awful.”

When he didn’t laugh, she followed up with, “Is something wrong?”

“Naw,” he said, “I just saw something weird.”

At his feet, he noticed the sun glinting off something metallic and a dull red-gold. He bent easily to pick it up. “It’s the old sextant fragment Amande found, wrapped in paper and lying just outside the doorframe. I coulda stepped on it.”

“Amande wouldn’t be so careless with something that old. Since her coins were stolen, that’s the choicest artifact she has.”

“I bet somebody came back to steal the rest of her stuff, and they dropped this.”

“I’m out in the rental boat, but I’m on my way back. I can be there in ten minutes. Less.”

He reached for the doorknob and it turned in his hands. “The door’s unlocked. Wouldn’t she have locked it when she left?”

“If she left. She could still be in there, tied up by the thief or…you’ve got to go in, Joe.”

“I’m already in. Call Benoit and tell him to send somebody over here. Then get your butt home.”

“He’s already on his way. So am I. I bet I can get there first.”

***

Benoit’s voice blasted out of the phone at Faye’s ear, cursing her in real time while Joe was getting killed by entering the houseboat alone and unarmed. Or so Benoit presumed, as he described in excruciating detail what he thought Steve was doing to her husband, even as he spoke.

She chose not to tell him that Joe was never unarmed. He hated guns, and he didn’t understand the point of metal knives when there was flint in the world, but he was never unarmed.

“Give me his number,” Benoit said. “At least I can be talking to him while he’s getting stabbed.”

***

Faye revved the motor. It was time to quit lurking in this bayou while she talked on the phone. It was time to get back to where the action was. Carrying on a phone conversation would be impossible while she was underway, with the wind and the boat noise in her ears, so she was going to have to maintain contact with Joe and Benoit by text. It hardly mattered. She was only a few minutes from the marina.

Then she heard a boat louder than hers whoosh past her secluded spot in the bayou. It was painted in a dappled green-and-tan camouflage, and it had an odd-looking motor protruding from the stern.

Faye idled the motor and snatched up her binoculars. She could make out two blond heads and a brunette one. Steve was a longhaired blond and it was his boat, so identifying him was a no-brainer. Dane was the only other blond she’d seen lately, and the second man had a close-to-the-head haircut very like his. But who was the brunette?

She could have gone through an elimination process—the boat’s occupant was too big to be Didi and too dainty to be Manny and the hair was too long to be Tebo and the brightly colored shirt was a dead giveaway—but she had no need. She knew without thinking that the person sitting way too close to Steve was Amande. Mothers know these things.

She tapped out a text, addressed to both Joe and Benoit.

Steve has Amande on his boat. Don’t know where he’s taking her. Probably her island. Will text you if I’m wrong. I’ll follow so we don’t lose sight of her. Come help me.

***

Joe entered the houseboat cautiously, but there was no one inside. No burglar, no slutty aunt, no worthless uncle, no sleazy stepfather, and no sixteen-year-old girl. Amande’s room looked no different than usual. Benoit had called his cell and was even then yelling at him for going in alone, but Joe was only half-listening.

The only noteworthy things in the room were Amande’s computer, showing nothing on the monitor but the screen saver, and her open artifact drawers.

Joe peered into the drawers without touching the handles or their contents. There was a lot of stuff still in there, and it didn’t look like some ignorant thief had been plundering through it. The basket of potsherds still sat atop Amande’s desk, holding down her school papers. If anything that had been in this room was missing—other than Amande—it had been carefully selected and removed without disturbing the remaining items.

He’d let the phone drop from her ear, but Benoit was yelling loud enough that he could hear him anyway. “Are you okay? What’s happening? I’ve got some people coming your way, and I really hope we don’t find you dead. Stupid and dead, that’s what you’ll be. Say something to me, Joe.”

“I’m fine. There’s nobody here, but keep those officers coming. I feel like something’s wrong.”

“They’re already in the car, and so am I.”

Joe took the phone away from his ear again and used it to nudge the computer’s mouse. The screen saver went away and Amande’s statistics test appeared. At the bottom of the page was a series of messages that said:

Test will time out in 10 minutes. There will be a 10-point penalty for failing to pause properly.

Test will time out in five minutes. Click “pause” or you will need to begin again.

Test will time out in one minute. Click “pause” or you will lose your work.

Test is timing out in thirty seconds. Click “pause” now…

Timed out.

Joe checked the time stamps on these messages, then he looked at the time on the face of his phone. Those messages told him that Amande had been gone ten minutes, tops.

They also told him something else. Living with Faye had taught him something important about good students. They were predictable. They jumped every hurdle set by their teachers, no matter how nonsensical, if that was what it took to make good grades.

Amande had lost ten points on her statistics test by failing to make a simple mouse-click. Something was wrong.

“I’m still okay, but hang on a minute,” he said to Benoit, using a pencil eraser to scroll through Amande’s statistics test, but no other clues waited there.

Squinting at his phone and trying to remember how to work it, he successfully navigated away from his conversation with Benoit and opened up a text to Faye.

She’s not at home. Something isn’t right. Need you here.

Switching back to his call with Benoit, he said, “Amande walked away from a timed test and she left the door unlocked behind her. Her artifact drawers are open, but I can’t tell that they’ve been disturbed. There’s no sign of a struggle.”

“You’ve determined that the girl’s not there. Now get out into the parking lot where my people and I can see that you’re safe when we get there.”

“Just one more minute.”

“Now, Joe!”

Joe turned silently, scanning the room’s floor and walls and ceiling. The pieces of Amande’s guardian doll still lay piled beside her full clothes hamper. Her bed was made. Everything looked normal.

He took a step back to get a better look at one of the posters on her bedroom wall, and something crunched under his heel. Joe knelt down and gathered bits of crushed pottery, hundreds of years old, in his fingers. It wasn’t like Amande to leave her treasures in harm’s way.

Still kneeling, he saw Amande’s version of the bread crumbs that trailed behind Hansel and Gretel. There was a potsherd lying on the floor near the door that opened between Amande’s room and the room that had been Miranda’s, and another one just inside the door that led from her grandmother’s room out into the main cabin of the houseboat. Joe would lay odds that he’d stepped over another potsherd as he entered the boat, and that more were outside, waiting to lead him to a girl needing rescue.

He followed the sherds, leaving each one where it lay, in case he got more data and needed to follow the trail again and reinterpret Amande’s message. When he reached the spot at the door where the sextant had served as his first signpost, he pulled it from his pocket. Unwrapping it, he saw that he’d missed another clue. The sextant was wrapped in a crumpled map—not a copy, but an original. Amande wouldn’t mess up an original.

Opening the map, he saw that her island was dead in its center. It was as if the girl had left him a note that said, “Come get me.” If she’d had a chance, Joe believed she would have taken a pen and labeled the map with an X that marked the spot. He replaced the sextant and map where he’d found them, as best he remembered. Then he stepped back and studied Amande’s trail of clues.

A moment later, he was distracted by the pounding sound of a pair of dress shoes worn by a man unaccustomed to running. Benoit came into view, followed by two uniformed officers. Joe put up a hand, palm out, so that they wouldn’t stomp onto the dock and crush Amande’s plea for help.

The trail of potsherds pointed Joe out of the living quarters and onto the houseboat’s floating dock. The last two potsherds lay on that dock. Like all the scattered sherds, they were tiny, barely visible to anyone who hadn’t spent the last few years searching for such things. He wasn’t sure Benoit and his technicians would have been able to tell them from miniscule gobs of dried dirt.

In aggregate, all the clues pointed to the spot where Steve’s boat had been moored.

Joe ran around the boat and scanned the parking lot. Steve’s car was there. Logic said that he’d left in his boat. Joe’s intuition and Amande’s map said that Steve was headed for the island. The potsherds, sextant, and map all said that Amande was with him.

But where were his wife and son? Faye had said she was so close to the marina that she would beat Benoit and his guys. Well, she hadn’t. Every second that ticked past made Joe antsier.

He tried to call her, and her phone went straight to voice mail. This did not make him feel any better.

Impatiently, he showed Benoit the sherds and the sextant and the map, and started explaining what he thought they meant. The clock kept ticking. Still no Faye.

***

Faye was finding her boat chase to be remarkably tame. Steve didn’t know anyone was on his tail, so he wasn’t traveling particularly fast. Well, yes, he was, but Faye was known for her speed. Right this minute, she felt like she was just puttering along.

There was another reason for her lack of speed. She was making good use of the only advantage she had—her binoculars—and they enabled her to hang back. She didn’t know whether he had a pair, too, but he had no reason to be looking for a tail. She presumed he was operating with his naked eyes, which meant that she could lurk just inside her binoculars’ limits and he’d never know she was there. Judging by his heading, she grew more sure with every minute that Steve was indeed taking the girl out to the island they shared.

She wished Joe or Benoit had answered her text. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? She wasn’t moving at top speed, but she’d been traveling inexorably away from them for every one of those minutes. Faye pulled the phone out of her pocket, hoping the wind had drowned the sound of a return text.

No. It hadn’t, and the truth was so much worse. The wind had drowned the familiar sound of a dying phone. Her battery hadn’t survived the hard work she’d put it through that morning. All those calls and texts to Benoit and Reuss and Joe had taken their toll. Thank God she’d had a chance to get that last text out before she went incommunicado. She’d guess that Benoit’s people had boats that would move like bats out of hell, so they’d be showing up soon.

She trained her binoculars behind her, hoping to see the cavalry riding to her rescue. Not yet. What would she do if they didn’t show?

Another, worse, question bubbled into her brain. What would she do if that text hadn’t gone through? Was her phone already dying when she sent it? Had she been momentarily out of range? If so, she would have gotten an error message, or maybe a message that the text would go through once she was back in range. And maybe one of those things had happened, but now the screen was dark and blank, so she couldn’t check.