Scarlet Nights

  After that, Lissie refused to say another word about Mr. Lang. Aunt Lissie had believed in the power of positive thinking so deeply that she absolutely refused to allow bad words to cross her lips. It had always amused Sara that some people in Edilean remembered this trait with great fondness, while others said Lissie made them insane.

  So now, it was afternoon, and Sara was once again visiting Merlin’s Farm. This had come about because at two she’d been outside sewing when she saw Luke walking about Edilean Manor garden with a little man. She didn’t think about it until she felt a chill go through her. She gave a little shudder, rubbed the goose bumps on her arms, and looked up. Standing just a few yards away from her, glaring at her in what she could only describe as hatred, was the boogeyman of all her dreams: Mr. Lang. She hadn’t seen him up close since she was a child—she’d made sure of that—but he hadn’t changed much. He was still ugly, his head as large and round as a pumpkin. Maybe he was a bit shorter and his face had a few more wrinkles, but he was essentially the same.

  And yet again, just as he had before, he made a motion as though he was shooting her. But this time, Sara wasn’t a little girl. She gave him her sweetest smile, then lifted her second finger at him. He smiled back at her in a way that made the goose bumps return to her arms, then he turned away and trotted after Luke.

  After that, try as she might, Sara couldn’t continue sewing. She gathered her things, went back into the apartment, and locked all the doors and windows. When she’d finished, she remembered that Mike was staying with her and he’d not be able to get in.

  With the thought of Mike, everything fell into place. Last night at dinner he’d been so nice, listening hard to her reasons of why she should go with him to see the old farm. She’d gone to bed confident that she’d persuaded him. Since she’d first seen Merlin’s Farm, she’d dreamed of going back, but only if “he” wasn’t there. When she’d had the idea of going with Mike, a detective who probably carried a gun, it had seemed like the perfect opportunity. She’d even thought about what she’d wear and the food she’d pack for a picnic.

  But it looked like Mike had never had any intention of letting her go with him. “After all I’ve done for him!” she muttered in anger. That she couldn’t think of anything she’d done for him didn’t stop her anger. She knew Mike had arranged for Luke to babysit old Mr. Lang while he, Mike, went to see the farm. Alone.

  “Two can play at this game,” she murmured, then called her mother’s store manager and asked that they make a picnic lunch for two. Sara knew the news that she’d ordered a basket full of food would spread all over town within minutes, but that was fine with her. She was truly sick of men treating her like she was too delicate to hear the truth. Greg refused to tell her what had happened that was so urgent that he’d had to leave immediately. And now Mike had made it clear he thought she couldn’t handle visiting a farm! With the help of her relatives, he’d gone there a day before he said he was going.

  Twenty minutes later, Sara had the picnic basket in her car and she was on her way to Merlin’s Farm. When she saw Mike’s car partially concealed under the big oak tree, it made her even more sure she was doing the right thing.

  For herself, she refused to sneak about. She drove in through the gate, parked her car in front of the farmhouse, and got out. If she saw Mike fine, if she didn’t, that was all right too.

  As she picked up her handbag, she felt her phone buzz. Her mother had sent her an e-mail saying she had the dried molokhia Mike wanted, and Joce had texted to ask her to come over and tell her all about the dreadful little man who was following Luke around the garden. And Tess had left a voice mail asking how she and Mike were getting along. And there were four e-mails from clients asking when their clothes would be ready. Sara put her bag back on the seat, took her cell, and as she walked, she rapidly pushed buttons to answer everyone.

  8

  MIKE WAS IN the loft of the old barn using a pitchfork to search through the dried-up hay. He’d already found two leg traps in the barn, one homemade and one that was probably old in the Civil War. The tine of the fork caught on something by the overhead door, and he bent to look at it. There was a long, ragged tear from the hem of his jeans where he’d nearly been caught by a snare that sent steel darts flying. The only warning he’d had was the sound the lethal projectiles made as they came toward him. He’d dropped and rolled and the darts had whizzed over his head and embedded themselves in a nearby tree.

  Mike had cursed as he pulled the darts from the branches and reset the trap. As much as he hated doing it, he was keeping with his decision to not let ol’ man Lang know anyone had been there.

  Now, it was late afternoon and Mike was almost ready to leave. He’d found traps and snares everywhere. He hadn’t visited any building or garden that hadn’t been rigged to hurt an intruder, to maim, and even, sometimes, to kill.

  He had only the barn left to go through and he’d be finished. Mike didn’t flatter himself that he’d found all of the contraptions, but he’d certainly made a dent in the number of them. And during the hours that he’d been searching, he’d learned a great deal more than just how to rig a homemade killing device. He’d seen that Lang was a clever—and strong—old man who had no conscience at all. In his blind obsession with protecting what he saw as his, he was ruthless—and without any concern for the consequences. If a child had sneaked into the orchard … Mike didn’t want to think what could have happened.

  It was obvious that Lang cared only about keeping out whomever was trespassing.

  Mike heard a noise below, inside the barn, and caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. Instantly, without a sound, he went flat onto his stomach and looked down to the floor below, but he saw nothing. Damn! Luke said he’d keep Lang away until four.

  Mike lay absolutely still, thinking how he could get out without Lang seeing him. Behind him, above the open window, was a big post with a rope suspended from it. He didn’t know much about barns but he figured it was there to help haul bales of hay up to the loft. Turning only his head, he studied the rope and the beam. They looked to be sound, but after what he’d seen today, he wouldn’t be surprised that if he swung out on it, it would break.

  He looked back down through the cracks in the floorboards, and what he saw shocked him. Sara was blithely walking into the barn with her head down as she concentrated on the keyboard of her BlackBerry.

  Mike’s first instinct was to shout at her to stay where she was, but he didn’t know who had come with her and might hear.

  “Sara!” he hissed down at her.

  She kept typing.

  He couldn’t figure out how she’d entered the barn without being hit. Just in front of the doorway was a thin piece of nearly invisible nylon fishing line, and hovering about it, ready to fall, was an old horse collar made of wood, leather, and iron. Mike didn’t want to think what such a thing would do to pretty little Sara Shaw if it dropped on her.

  “Sara!” he said again.

  She hesitated on her keyboard, then, to his horror, she started walking out of the barn. She may have missed the trap on the way in, but she’d certainly trigger it on the way out.

  Mike didn’t think about what he did. Many years of training had made him react without thought. He jumped up and leaped out the big window, clutching the rope as he flew past it. The rope, attached to the pole above, kept swinging. It burned Mike’s hands, but he slid down enough that when Sara stepped through the doorway, just as her foot was about to set down on the fishing line, Mike grabbed her with his right arm and kept swinging.

  They landed on the grass at the side of the barn just as about fifty pounds of old horse harness came tumbling down in the exact spot where Sara had been.

  She was lying on top of him, the breath half out of her, and her face inches from his. “We really must stop meeting like this.”

  Mike didn’t laugh but rolled out from under her to stand up and bend over her. “What the hell are you doing here?! I told yo
u to stay away. I told you—”

  “Actually, you didn’t tell me anything and I’m beginning to think that whatever you have told me is a lie.” She looked him up and down. “You’re a mess. Would you like to tell me the truth about what’s going on?”

  Mike was torn between wanting to angrily shake her—or kiss her in relief that she wasn’t hurt. She was so pretty in her little yellow dress with the pink flowers on the big collar that he just sat down on the grass beside her. “You could have been killed.”

  “I can see that,” she said as she looked at the pile of leather and wood. “I wonder where Mr. Lang found that and what century it came from?”

  Mike’s mind was working at warp speed as he tried to figure out how much he could tell her and what had to be hidden.

  “What’s going on here?” she repeated.

  She was so calm that the last of Mike’s anger left him. “All I wanted to do was to look at the property my sister gave me.”

  Sara looked from him to the barn and back again. “You didn’t want me to go with you because you thought there might be something like this here, didn’t you?”

  Mike gave a half smile. He wasn’t going to be able to lie his way out of this. “Smart women are a real nuisance in my business.”

  “So you are here in Edilean on a case?”

  “You didn’t happen to bring any food, did you? I’m starving.”

  “I did. A whole basket full of it.”

  Mike stood and held out his hand to help her up, but she ignored it. She kept looking at the pile of horse harness. “I’m not going to let you stay in my apartment a minute longer if you don’t tell me what you’ve been doing here today.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Fine. My mother has a spare room. If you think I’m a snoop, you haven’t experienced anything until you’ve spent a day around her. My dad says she can squeeze secrets out of a pineapple.”

  Mike sat down again. Maybe it was better to tell her at least some of the truth. “A major criminal lives in or near this town.”

  “Who?”

  “If we knew that we’d arrest her, but we don’t even know what she looks like. The only picture we have of Mitzi Vandlo was taken in ’73 when she was sixteen years old.”

  “So she’d be fifty-three now?”

  “Right.” He admired her arithmetic abilities.

  “And you know for sure that she’s here in Edilean?”

  “There’s no mistaking the name of this town.”

  “What’s she done?”

  Mike hated having to tell this, but then, it was better than hitting her with the truth about Stefan. “You name it, she’s done it. Murdered her husband, for one. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but it’s still illegal.”

  “She’s come to Edilean to kill someone?” Sara’s hand was on her throat.

  “Honestly? We don’t know why she’s here, and a lot of what we know about her has come to us second- and third-hand.” He wanted to lighten the moment. “There’s a rumor that she’s so ugly that to trick Marko Vandlo into marrying her, she had to wear a veil over the bottom half of her face. The story’s even more remarkable when you know that she was sixteen and he was fifty-one.”

  Sara didn’t let him take her off the main subject. “If she killed her old husband, why wasn’t she put in prison?”

  Mike shrugged. “The family keeps what they do to themselves. The agents working on the case were told by an informer that the story was that he fell down some stairs and died. However, when his body was exhumed recently, he had three depressions in his skull that exactly fit a golf club.” Mike lowered his voice. “She specializes in duping people out of their life savings, and we really want to get her off the streets.”

  “If she was doing something like that in Edilean, we’d all know about it.”

  “Why she’d be in this little town is a big puzzle to everyone. She usually works out of cities, the bigger the better, so what’s in Edilean that she wants?” He waited a moment to give Sara a chance to answer, but she said nothing. “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

  “Not that I remember, but I’ve been so busy with the new store and Greg that I might not have noticed. My mother might know—”

  “No! The fewer people who know about this, the better.”

  “I understand,” Sara said, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

  “What about the rich women who go to your shop? What do you know about their lives?”

  She looked at him in speculation. “If you’re interested in them, then I’m your best bet as a contact. You did plan all of this, didn’t you? Luke ran me out of my apartment so you could come up through the tunnel and move yourself in.”

  Before Mike could think how to answer that, Sara got up and started quickly walking down the path to her car.

  Mike caught her before she’d gone three feet and held her by her upper arms. “Yes! You have been lied to and used shamelessly. But you don’t know how many lives have been ruined by this woman. There were some young girls who—”

  “Greg! Did you take him away just before my wedding?”

  There was no time to consider his answer. “Yes.” When she tried to twist away from him, he held on. “And they burned my apartment and everything in it just to give me a good cover. Sara, I’m sorry you were pulled in to this, but you have access to places and people that no one else in Edilean does. For all we know, Mitzi could be one of your clients.”

  “You took the groom away before my wedding!” Sara said. “That isn’t fair.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “But what Mitzi does to people is a great deal more than unfair.”

  “Where is Greg?”

  “Safe.”

  “What does that mean? That you put him in jail somewhere?”

  Mike knew that at the moment Greg was still being held in custody, but his lawyer was about to get him out. That was too bad, because the man in the cell with him was an undercover agent. But Mike couldn’t tell Sara any of that. “I was told so little about this case that there’s still a lot I don’t know. My captain told me about it, then when I said I needed to go home and pack, I was shown a newspaper photo of my apartment on fire.” When he saw the sympathy in her eyes, Mike relaxed his grip on her shoulders, but he didn’t release her.

  “I’m sorry for all this,” he said again. “Some guy I knew way back in training remembered that I’d said my grandmother was from Edilean. That was when I was too young to know not to tell much about myself. When the name of the town came up, he remembered it and me, and the Feds contacted my boss, so here I am.”

  Sara was frowning, but in a way that made Mike relax more, and he removed his hands from her shoulders. “It looks like I got blood on your dress.”

  Sara glanced at the stains, then took his hands in hers and turned them palm up to look at the torn skin. “You did that on the rope?”

  “Yeah.” He was watching her.

  “I think that was the only time I’ll ever get to play Jane.”

  Mike’s eyes lightened. “We could always go to the flower garden and have a net fall on you. I could put a knife between my teeth and cut you out.”

  “Out of the net or my dress?” Sara asked seriously.

  “Dress. I’d leave the net alone.”

  The look he gave her was so lascivious, so naughty, that she laughed. “All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going back to my car and I—not you—am going to drive us to your car. We’re then going to walk down to K Creek—you may carry the picnic basket—and we’re going to eat and talk. And you’re going to explain to me what’s going on.”

  “As much as I can.”

  She glared at him.

  “Okay. All of it.” They started walking. “So how do you know where my car is?”

  “Puh-lease. It’s where everyone trying to hide on this road parks. Half the girls in Edilean lost their virginity under that tree.”

  “Did you?”

  S
he opened the door on the driver’s side. “Who said I’ve given it away yet?”

  Laughing, Mike got in the other side and closed the door.

  9

  SO YOU’RE SAYING I own that tree?” Mike asked. He was stretched out on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, the basket of food was between them, and Sara was sitting on the other side. At the bottom of the gentle slope was pretty little K Creek.

  “Every inch of it.”

  “The Virgin Tree. That thought is going to keep me awake at night.”

  “You also own some of the creek and all those old buildings. What are you going to do with all of it?”

  “Move into the house and let Lang be my butler. He’ll serve me sliced tomatoes with a marijuana dressing—all from his garden.” He gave her a sideways look to see if she’d be shocked, but except for a flicker of her lashes, she didn’t react. Good, he thought. Cool in the face of surprise.

  “If Luke finds out about illegal plants, he’ll skin the old man.”

  “That’s just what I thought, but what your mother would do scares me more than Luke.”

  “Me too,” Sara said and smiled at him.

  He put his hands behind his head and looked up at the sky. “I’ve never owned any property before.”

  “Not even a condo on the beach in Fort Lauderdale?”

  “Especially not a condo.”

  “So are you ready to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Couldn’t we just enjoy the day?”

  “No,” Sara said. “I want to find this woman so I can get the groom back for my wedding. How do we go about finding her?”

  “DNA.” He moved on to his side and looked at her. “We have to collect DNA from every woman in this town who is around fifty-three years old and send it to a lab. We don’t have anything from Mitzi, but we do have DNA from her son and other relatives, so we can match them.”

  “And you’re sure she’s here?”

  “No, but with this woman even a possibility is worth whatever it takes to get her.” Mike picked up a bunch of tiny, sweet, champagne grapes, turned on his back, held them above his head, and began to eat them.