Scarlet Nights (34 page)

Mr. Lang got up and went to the kitchen.

“You got rid of him,” Mike said, “so what do you want to tell me?”

“Did you really
look
at that tea set? It’s eighteenth century if it’s a day. And these are old recipes. We went through this house thoroughly but I didn’t see these dishes, did you?”

Smiling, Mike kissed her cheek. “You
are
a good detective. Maybe there’s something here, after all. I’ll tell Vandlo I own the farm. It’s another thing he’ll have to come through me to get.” As he said it, he took Sara’s hand in reassurance.

“Mike!” Sara said in exasperation. “That wasn’t my point. I thought you and I together could search and—”

“Shhhh. He’s coming.”

Lang sat down, a red metal box in his hands, and she recognized it from having seen it in magazines. It was a candy box from the 1920s, in pristine condition and valuable to a collector. Inside were fresh cookies with pretty nasturtium flowers put into them while they were still warm.

Sara took one but Mike passed. She took a bite. Delicious. “If you sell these at Luke’s booth at the fair I’ll see that you get a hundred percent of the money.”

“No rent, no commission?”

“Nothing,” Sara said. “In fact, if you want to use Luke’s wife’s new kitchen to do the baking, Joce will help you.”

“Don’t you think you should ask her first?” Mike asked.

Sara shrugged. “She’s so bored she’d work with the devil. Sorry, no offense, Mr. Lang.”

The old man and Mike were looking at her with identical stares of consternation.

“So, uh, back to Greg,” Sara said as she leaned back on the
old sofa, two cookies in her hands. She’d had an ulterior motive in sending Mr. Lang to Joce’s house. If he was going to be hanging around the fair, then she wanted him bonded to Joce. Mike said there was no danger to Joce even though she was holding the tarot cards as bait, but Sara wasn’t so sure. Besides, Mr. Lang was more experienced in spying than all of Mike’s fancy Federal agents put together.

She took another bite. “Oh wait! Did you use stevia?”

“Grow it myself.”

Sara nodded. “My mother’s erotic dreams have come true. Okay, I’m done.”

Rolling his eyes, Mike looked back at Lang. “Did you ever see Anders with an older woman, early fifties? She has a prominent nose.”

Lang smirked like a dirty little boy. “I saw him with two at once. An old one and a young one. Together.” He looked at Sara, but she studiously kept her eyes on the cookie.

“Look at me,” Mike said, “not my wife. Are you saying that Anders killed your dogs just to keep you from telling what you know?”

When Mr. Lang said nothing, Sara spoke. “I don’t mean to butt in, but my guess is that the dogs were Greg’s way of punishing you because you told the sheriff, didn’t you?”

Lang looked down at his hands.

Mike fell back against the couch, his face a study in exasperation. “Are you saying there’s a
sheriff
in this one-horse town? And you told him about Anders’s thievery?”

Lang shrugged, but he didn’t look up.

Mike turned to Sara. “Why wasn’t I told about a police force in this little town? I figured this place was in Williamsburg’s jurisdiction.”

“It is, more or less, and there’s the county sheriff,” Sara said,
“but we have our own, sort of, caretakers. They don’t get paid, so outsiders don’t consider them real.”

Mike waited but neither Lang nor Sara said anything else. “Might I be told
who
handles this ‘sort of’ police force?”

Sara smiled. “Guess.”

“Sara, I don’t—” He sighed. “My cousins, the Fraziers.”

“You are such a clever man!”

Mike ran his hand over his face, then looked at Lang. “You told the … the honorary sheriff that Anders was sleeping with half the women in the county, mostly married women, and he steals information from them. Was he blackmailing them too?”

Again, Lang shrugged. “I don’t know. Stealing isn’t right.”

“Neither is spying on people,” Mike snapped, then calmed. “I guess the sheriff talked to Anders and later your dogs were …”

“Poisoned,” Mr. Lang said.

“But that wasn’t the end of it,” Mike said, “because afterward you put up traps all over this place. If you’d put them up beforehand, your dogs wouldn’t have died.”

Mr. Lang nodded, then said quietly, “I think he did it on purpose.”

“What do you mean?” Mike asked.

“I think Anders wanted me to see him, wanted me to go to a Frazier. He
wanted
to kill my dogs.” There was a catch in the old man’s throat.

“That would mean that the real target was
you
,” Mike said. “You’re well known for greeting guests with a shotgun, so is there anything around
here
that Anders wants?”

Again, there was that flicker in the old man’s eyes.

“What are you hiding?” Mike asked quickly, but Lang said nothing.

“Any Civil War silver?” Sara asked into the silence. “More of this china?”

“No,” Lang said. “It’s not mine any way. Belongs to …” He looked at Mike, his eyes full of love. “Prudie’s grandson.”

“All this makes you even more of a target,” Sara said softly to Mike, with fear in her voice. “If what Greg wants is here, when he finds out you own this place, he’ll … he’ll …”

“Good!” Mike said. He reached into his shirt pocket, withdrew a photo, and handed it to Lang. It was the picture of Mitzi Vandlo, taken when she was a teenager, but it had been age progressed. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

Lang barely glanced at it. “No.”

“Look at it again.”

Reluctantly, Lang took the picture, studied it, then gave it back to Mike. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I remember faces. Never seen her before.”

Mike put the photo away. “This weekend is the fair. I want you to snoop around, spy on people, and tell me everything you see.”

“Dirty people in this town,” Lang said primly. “Always in bed together.”

“The things you get up to in private are just as bad,” Mike said as he looked at his watch. “I want you to tear down every trap you’ve set around here. Don’t leave one of them. And burn the Mary Jane.”

“I think it would be better if you buried it,” Sara said, “or it might be like in that movie
Saving Grace
. We don’t want Colin dancing around in the nude.”

Mike looked at her as though she were crazy, but Mr. Lang gave an expression almost like a smile.

Sara didn’t say anything, but she knew he’d seen the obscure movie. He might not have TV but, somewhere, he had a DVD player. Wonder if he’s seen
Mad Men
? she thought. And he’d probably love
Dexter
.

“We need to go,” Mike said as he stood up and looked down at Lang. “Remember to tell me everything.” He put his hand on Sara’s lower back and escorted her to the door. Lang went out with them, but he stopped by the dogs. Sara didn’t think she was supposed to see that Mike slipped Mr. Lang some folded hundred-dollar bills, about five of them, and again told him to get rid of the traps.

After Mike opened the car door for Sara, he went to his trunk. It had half a dozen fifty-pound bags of dog food inside. “I’d put them away for you,” he called to Lang, “but not until the traps are gone. Do it today.”

Sara watched Mr. Lang nod, then Mike pulled out of the drive. “You weren’t afraid of visiting him at all, were you?”

“Why would I be afraid?”

She stared at his profile until he smiled.

“Sara, my dear, I’ve seen how you love to take care of people, so I let you take care of me.”

For a moment, she couldn’t say anything. When Mike had been saying he didn’t want to visit Mr. Lang, he had been completely convincing—but he’d been lying. She suddenly saw how he’d been able to work undercover for so many years. “Did you find out what you need to know?”

“Not a word of it, but he made me think about some things. From the time Vandlo was a kid, he was trained in reading people’s faces. All he had to do was see the way your eyes got dreamy whenever that rotting old farm was mentioned and of course he’d start saying he was going to buy it for you. You know, Sara, I’m beginning to think that it might be true that Vandlo wanted that old farm just to please you.”

“No,” she said softly. “That would imply that he loved me, but he never came close.”

“Really stupid man.” Mike reached over to take her hand.

This time, she knew he was lying—and distracting her from Mr. Lang. He’d found out a lot but he didn’t want to tell her what it was.

“So how about we get take-out sandwiches, go home, and eat them off each other’s bellies before we go to the fair?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better plan,” Sara said, smiling.

But on the drive home, his cell rang, he said a few words, then hung up. “Stefan Vandlo has been released.”

24

B
Y THE TIME
they’d bought sandwiches, driven back to Edilean Manor, and Mike had made a pitcher of green tea—he refused to drink carbonated beverages—their minds were on things other than bellies. All Sara could think was, This is it. Now it was just a matter of time before the “action” would start. Over the next few days she and Mike would have little time to be alone. He’d told her that at least a dozen agents would be coming to Edilean for the fair. They’d all be undercover, so any couple or groups of flirting males and females could actually be well-armed law enforcement people.

The sober news had taken away their original eating plan. They both had the same sandwiches: lean meat and lots of vegetables. Sara’d given up her tuna salad that was drowning in mayonnaise.

“I think I should go over some things with you,” Mike said from across the table. He reiterated that at the fair they would act like a normal couple, lots of hand holding, teasing, laughing together. The idea was to shock the townspeople and set them to talking. It was to
be a buildup to when Stefan Vandlo arrived and Sara told him—and the town—that she and Mike were married.

When he saw that what he was saying was scaring Sara, he tried to entertain her with a story from the dossiers he’d read. It was said that when Mitzi’s husband found out that he’d been tricked into marrying an ugly woman, he couldn’t consummate the marriage. But his young wife still got pregnant, and her old husband was too proud to say that he’d never touched the girl. When the boy was born and said to resemble a handsome young man who was a master pickpocket, no one mentioned it, but six days after the baby’s birth, the young man was found dead. It was years later, when the husband said he was leaving everything to his stupid and cruel son with his first wife, that Mitzi’s husband was found at the bottom of a staircase with holes smashed into his head.

When Mike finished the story, he again talked of using the games at the fair to draw attention to himself—and that made Sara think about what would happen when it was all over.

When they take Greg and his mother away in handcuffs, Mike will leave with them and I’ll never see him again, she thought.

She did her best to calm down. It wasn’t as though he’d lied to her. From the first he’d told her he was marrying her for the case. He’d even told her that after it was done they could divorce. And since the wedding, he certainly hadn’t said he loved her. And he hadn’t—

“Sara?”

“Sorry, my mind was wandering.”

“You want some more tea?”

She held up her empty glass, and he filled it. “Last time” kept going through her head. A few days from now it would be like they’d never met. Their whirlwind relationship would be finished and they’d go back to the way they had been. She had a vision of
herself alone in her little apartment, a hundred dresses on her lap. Maybe she’d take some refresher courses and try to get a job as a conservationist in Williamsburg.

She looked across the table at Mike. When they’d come in, he’d removed his clean white shirt and his shoes and socks. Now all he had on was his perfectly pressed black trousers and the belt with the little gold buckle. She’d ironed his trousers that morning and she’d chosen that belt when they were in Fort Lauderdale. His whiskers were very black and she knew he hadn’t shaved before they went to see Mr. Lang because he’d been too busy making love to her. As for Sara, she’d removed her dress and was wearing her favorite blue teddy.

She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she didn’t. He was telling her about the cameras they’d installed in the fortune-telling tent, but she could tell that he was worried about something. She hoped it was the case and not what she feared, that he was thinking about how to let her down easily when he told her she was just another victim that he’d had to rescue.

“Can you remember all that?” Mike asked.

She hadn’t been listening, but then she’d heard it all before. “Tell no one we’re married. That’s to be dropped on Greg when I see him.”

“And?”

“Be sure and get him into the open. To get the ultimate effect, I’m to shock him by telling him that just before our wedding I ran off with another man.”

Mike raised an eyebrow at her sarcastic tone. “I hear his wife had a face-lift and she’s looking good.”

“That’s nice,” Sara said as she cleared the table.

“Your mother texted me that I’m to go to her house early tomorrow to get dressed.”

Sara had her back to him as she stood at the kitchen sink. “In your kilt. Nearly all the men from Edilean will be wearing them, even my father and he hates dressing up. Luke will—”

Before she could finish her sentence, she was crying. Instantly, Mike had her in his arms. She buried her face in the warm skin of his shoulder and the tears kept coming.

Picking her up, he carried her into the bedroom, where he put her on the bed and stretched out beside her, his arms around her.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said.

He handed her a tissue and stroked her hair. “It’s all right to be frightened. I wish you didn’t have to do this, but we need to surprise Vandlo, and only you can do that. From the second you’ve told him that his plan has been foiled, we’ll tail him so close that he—”

“It’s not that,” she said. She ran her hand across his bare chest, her fingers in the dark hair. Would they ever be together like this again? Who was going to make her go to the gym? Who was going to hold her when she cried? And make her laugh?