“Are you sure this’ll work?” Gil asked me for the hundredth time as we walked up the drive.
“Just let me do all the talking,” I told him.
Gilley’s stomach rumbled. “You got any food on you?”
I gave him an exasperated look and walked up the ramp to Mulholland’s front door. Ringing the bell, I stepped back and waited.
No one came to the door and Gilley whispered, “I don’t think he’s home.”
I eyed the van at the end of the drive. “Oh, he’s home all right.”
Ringing the doorbell again, I stepped back and leaned against the side of the house, looking like I wasn’t about to go anywhere. A moment or two later I heard, “A moment!” from inside.
The door was opened and Bertie sat in his chair looking rather flushed. “Good morning to you, Miss Holliday!”
“Hello, Bertie,” I said, smiling all friendly-like. Turning to Gilley, I said, “This is my associate Gilley Gillespie.”
Bertie extended his hand. “Lovely to meet you.”
Gilley shook his hand and smiled cordially. “And you, sir.”
Bertie then turned his attention back to me. “I hope you’re here with good news?”
“Oh, we are,” I gushed.
For a moment, Bertie appeared a little taken aback. “You’ve found your friend, then?”
I laughed like he’d just said the funniest thing. “Oh, no,” I said. Turning to Gilley, I added, “Isn’t that funny? It’s been such an exciting twenty-four hours that I totally forgot about Gopher!”
“Gopher who?” Gilley mocked with a chuckle. And the two of us laughed and laughed.
I took note of the fact that Bertie appeared confused and perhaps even a little irritated. Collecting himself, he backed his chair up and said, “Won’t you please come in, then, and share your good news?”
Gilley and I waltzed into Bertie’s home and followed him down the ramp to the sitting room. Taking a seat, I made sure to gaze appreciatively at all the artwork and knickknacks again. “I swear, this house gets lovelier every time I see it!” I said.
Bertie placed his chair opposite us at the coffee table, his smile a bit strained and his eyes impatient. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, you were saying something about good news?”
“Oh!” I giggled. “Yes, that!”
Gilley laughed wickedly next to me, and Bertie’s confusion deepened.
I decided to get to the point. “We’re leaving this morning,” I told him.
“Leaving?” he gasped, then caught himself. “So soon?”
I nodded and beamed him a happy smile. Gilley snickered and held his hand up to his mouth as if he were struggling to hold back a fit of laughter. “We’ve come across a bit of good fortune,” I said. “And we really must be on our way.”
Bertie blinked in surprise. “Good fortune?”
I nodded again, and added a wink as if he were in on the joke.
Understanding seemed to blossom in his eyes ... along with something far more cunning. “But what about your friend? The producer you were looking for?”
I flicked my wrist impatiently. “Oh, phhhht!” I said. “Screw him. Gopher was always a pain in the ass, and if he wants to wander off and not call, well, then he deserves to get cut out—I mean left behind.”
Gilley giggled.
Bertie fidgeted nervously. “I see,” he said. “But I thought you were terribly worried about him.”
I sighed. “Yeah, well, it’s funny how good fortune can take your worries away. Right, Gil?”
Gilley laughed and nudged me. “Good one,” he said.
Bertie’s eyes darted back and forth between us. “Where will you go?” he asked.
I looked at Gil as if that was the first time I’d considered the question. “Someplace tropical?”
“Definitely. I could totally use a vacation. Especially after all that heavy lifting last night. Man, I could go for a massage!”
“Heavy lifting?” Bertie asked anxiously.
I ignored his question and stood up. “Yes, well, we really do have to go,” I said. “We just wanted to stop by and thank you for all your help.”
“My help?”
“Yes,” I said with another happy smile. “We couldn’t have done it without you, Bertie.”
“Done what exactly?”
“Accomplished our mission,” I said, motioning to Gilley that it was time to leave.
As we began to move to the door, I stopped abruptly and said, “Oh! I almost forgot!” Whirling back around to face Bertie, I said, “We’re so appreciative of your help that we got you something.”
Gilley nodded enthusiastically. “A present.”
“Yes, a present, and it’s well deserved.” I then reached into the side pocket of the messenger bag and slid the talisman out carefully. Making sure to hold it in range of the camera, I said, “Here, Bertie. This is for you.”
Mulholland wheeled backward from us. “Get that away from me!” he snapped.
I continued to hold the disk out to him. “Oh,” I said innocently. “You recognize this?”
Bertie realized his mistake and tried to catch himself. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
I looked at Gilley as if I were truly puzzled. “Huh,” I said. “You know, that’s so interesting, because I would have thought for sure you’d remember it.”
“Maybe he thinks we’re being rude by regifting it to him.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that must be it. I mean, how often do you give someone a gift, and then twenty years later it’s given back to you by someone completely different?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re going on about!” Mulholland snapped, still eyeing the talisman warily.
I sat down on a chair, cradling the talisman in my lap. “Oh, Bertie, I’m afraid you do.” When he remained silent, I explained, “You see, you already told us everything we needed to know to point the finger at you. You were the one that told us you’d ventured to Spain to research the ship from the Spanish Armada that crashed on these shores. And in that research, Bertie, I think you came across a story about a group of Spanish conquistadors who were driven out of Peru by a mysterious phantom who could be drawn from an Incan stone if its stopper of gold was removed.
“And then I believe you traveled to Peru in search of this talisman, and I believe you found it.”
“Loved your book on Machu Picchu,” Gilley said with a sly smile. “Didn’t sell many copies, though, did it?”
Bertie glared hard at Gilley.
But I picked up on the thread. “No, it didn’t sell many copies. In fact, there’s not nearly as much money in travel books as you’d have people believe, right, Bertie?”
Again he remained silent, which wasn’t helping our cause, so I continued to goad him.
“Wonder how you got the money to pay for this gorgeous house?” I said.“And all these expensive artifacts ...”
“Things like that don’t come cheap,” Gilley remarked. “Especially not that antiquey-looking telescope.”
I made a show of eyeing the telescope. “Oh, that is too cool! I’ll bet it still works, too, huh, Bertie?”
“I’ll bet he can see all the way down to the beach with that thing,” Gilley added.
“And to the secret passage just to the right of the causeway,” I agreed.
“Which is how he knew that we’d found the church exit,” Gil said.
“Even though he’d conveniently left it off the copy of the blueprint he made for us.”
“Again, I’ve no idea what you two are rambling on about,” Bertie snapped, all pretense of the kindly older gentleman gone.
I let go of the act and got deadly serious with him. “Struggling to keep up with us, Bertie?” I snarled. “Well, then. Let me spell it out for you. We know you were the one that gave Bouvet this talisman and encouraged him to uncork the stopper.
“The phantom went after him with a vengeance, didn’t it? And he never stood a chance. And then you worked out where
the gold was, from the letter that Josephine had written to her friend about her husband’s deathbed confession. I figure that either Bouvet did actually tell you what she’d said, or you lifted the letter off him one night while he was asleep here in your home.
“Bouvet had it wrong, though, didn’t he? Being a romantic, the Frenchman would have naturally assumed the treasure was buried in the tomb of the first wife. But it wasn’t, Bertie, was it? No, you found it exactly where we did. In the tomb of his firstborn son.
“And I’m figuring that you discovered it shortly after Bouvet was pushed over the cliffs and the phantom began hunting for poor Jeffrey. You then stuffed your pockets with all the gold you could carry, which is how you eventually managed to pay for this place, and went back to Dunlow the day after Gaston was killed to retrieve the rest of the gold.”
“But the phantom caught you,” Gilley supplied. “And it chased you to the stairs, where you tripped over the rope you’d brought along with you.”
Mulholland’s face registered the truth.
“It never attacked you on the stairs, Bertie,” I said to him. “Because it couldn’t. It was bound by the talisman, hidden in a tomb it couldn’t get to. And you tortured it for twenty years by keeping it from its house. No wonder it went after Jordan and that poor coast guard officer with a vengeance.”
“They never stood a chance,” Gil said with a tsk.
“And after the money started running out, you came up with a new plan, didn’t you, Bertie? You knew that if Jordan would risk his life to find the gold, others might follow, and you couldn’t let that happen, because someday, someone might get lucky. So you tried to buy the castle back from the government, but they wanted more than you could pay.”
“We found your bid online,” Gil told him. “You had until the end of next week to come up with the money.”
I smiled sweetly at Mulholland. “And as long as there’s a bid in for the purchase of the property, you could have laid claim to any treasure on it as long as the sale eventually happened. You must have thought after reading about our success in Scotland that we were the perfect team to tackle the phantom.”
“And we were,” Gilley reminded me.
“And we were,” I agreed. “But we weren’t moving fast enough, were we, Bertie? You were running out of time, and you needed some assurance that we would stay until the phantom had been taken care of. So that night when Gopher found his way back across the causeway, and he was so traumatized by what had happened to him, you lured him here, and somehow managed to imprison him. And you sent us letters letting us know that we had to get rid of the phantom, or else. But I figure that you were thinking that if we did get the phantom back in its disk, and started taking the gold for ourselves, then you’d ransom Gopher for all of it. It was win-win any way you looked at it, right, Bertie?”
Bertie’s lips were pressed tightly together. “You Americans,” he snarled. “Always making up such tall tales.”
Gilley and I exchanged a mock look of surprise. “Tall tales?” I said.
“Really,” Gilley sneered. “As if we’re capable of having any imagination at all. Clearly, M. J., the man is completely underestimating your intuitive abilities.”
“I think what Mr. Mulholland needs is a little demonstration,” I said, getting up and turning on my sixth sense. Closing my eyes for a moment, I focused and was rewarded with a feeling of Gopher’s presence at the back of the house in a cold, damp space.
Opening my eyes, I regarded Bertie and asked, “Which way to the garage, sir?”
“Get out of my house!” he shouted.
“Not without Gopher,” I replied evenly. I then began to move in the direction I had felt the subtle waves of Gopher’s energy coming from. “The door to the garage is down that hall, isn’t it?” I asked, moving to pass Mulholland.
As I went by him, however, I heard a gasp and Gilley cry, “M. J., watch out!”
Something very hard whacked me across the back, and I stumbled forward to crash into one of the bookcases. The disk I’d been carrying flew out of my hands to land with a hard thud on the floor near Mulholland’s wheelchair, and I saw then that he held a walking stick gripped in his hands.
I was in complete shock that he’d hit me, and at first didn’t notice that the gold coin I’d placed in the center of the disk was rolling around on the floor. At least, I didn’t take note of it until the hole in the middle of the disk began to ooze inky black smoke.
“Ahhhhhh!” Mulholland screamed as he tried to back away from the disk at his feet.
Gilley also whirled away from the talisman as its terrible genie poured out of the bottle.
My head had hit the bookcase hard and it began to throb, and for a moment I had a difficult time putting the scene together—that is, until the phantom formed fully in the middle of the room, angry at having been disturbed.
I froze and couldn’t even take a breath as it turned to consider first me, then Gilley, and finally Mulholland.
Gilley was wearing his sweatshirt, and I’d come to the house with Alex’s magnetic belt secured around my waist. We were taking no chances with the disk while we carried it.
But Mulholland was defenseless, and the phantom seemed to know it. “Help me!” he screamed.
I crawled over to the gold coin, but I was a little late, because in the next instant the phantom launched itself at Mulholland.
Bertie was pushed back several feet by the force of the energy hitting him, and his terrified screams cut me to the quick. Grabbing the gold coin, I staggered to my feet and stumbled over to the disk. “Here!” I shouted at the phantom, holding the gold coin right above the hole in the center of the talisman. “I’ve got your gold stopper right here!”
The dark mass attacking Mulholland seemed to pause, and I had the distinct feeling it was now considering me as I waved the gold coin above the hole. “Back inside!” I ordered. “NOW!”
But the phantom didn’t seem to want to take orders from me, and it continued to attack Mulholland.
With desperation I looked around for anything I could use to threaten the phantom and encourage it to get back inside the disk. “M. J.!” Gilley screamed while Mulholland’s anguished cries went on and on. “Do something!”
The edges of my mind began to cloud with horrible images, and I knew that the phantom’s effect was taking hold now of both Gilley and me. It was proving difficult to see, but in that moment my eyes lit on something on the desk right next to me.
I lunged for the mother-of-pearl letter opener and moved to stand over the disk. Holding the cross aloft, I yelled, “Phantom! Get back in this disk or I swear to God I’m going to drive this symbol of divine light right into the heart of your talisman!”
The ether seemed to crackle with energy and I knew that I’d caught the phantom’s attention. It snarled and spat at me as it left Mulholland to inch forward threateningly. Inside my head I reached out to Samuel Whitefeather. Please, Sam! Give me one last huge dose of courage!
To the side of the phantom there was a bright flash of light, and the phantom backed away from me. In the next instant warmth and courage flowed strongly through my veins, and I honestly felt like I could climb a mountain and kick some serious spectral ass along the way. I puffed out my chest, tilted my chin up, and yelled, “Get in that disk now, you filthy spook!”
The phantom hesitated, and I had the distinct feeling it was attempting to take over my thoughts, but the impenetrable wall of courage Sam had helped me create wouldn’t allow it to control me.
I snarled at the beastly thing and lifted the cross even higher. “What do you want to bet that if I drive this cross into the heart of your disk, it’ll destroy both of you?” I shouted. And then I began to bring the cross down. A nanosecond later, just before my weapon would have made contact with the heart of the disk, there was a tremendous BOOM as the phantom dived into its talisman and I was knocked right off my feet to fly backward through the air and slam into the bookcase for a second time. r />
I dropped to the floor, and it was a full minute before I could collect myself. When I felt I could breathe again, I sat up and looked around. The phantom was nowhere to be seen, and Gilley was moaning against the far wall. Mulholland lay limp and pale and gasping for air in his chair, but otherwise, the room was still.
Until a series of loud thumps sounded at the back of the house, and Gopher’s muffled cries echoed softly from down the long hallway.
Trembling from head to toe, I reached again for the gold coin still lying on the floor and placed it in the center of the disk before struggling to get up. Moving as quickly as my legs would allow, I staggered down a long corridor and found the door to the garage. The door was latched and a padlock at waist level told me Gopher was on the other side.
I found the key on the table next to a bottle of sleeping pills and a stun gun, and it only took me three tries to get the key into the keyhole. In the other room I heard the commotion as Heath and Constable O’Grady burst into the front hall.
When I opened the garage door to find Gopher chained to a bed in the dark, looking pale, very thin, and much worse for wear, all he said was “Whatever happened in there, I hope to hell you got it on film!”
Chapter 15
“Is he really across?” Alex said as we stood side by side on the edge of the cliffs at Dunlow Castle.
I smiled. I’d seen Jordan so clearly in my mind’s eye, stepping into the bright ball of light that would carry him to the other side. “Yes.”
“And Bouvet too?”
“And Bouvet too. And the coast guard officer. They have all made it and they never again have to relive those terrible moments.”
Alex wound her arm through mine. “Thank you,” she said hoarsely.
“My pleasure.”
“M. J.!” I heard someone yell.
I turned around and saw Heath jogging toward me. You’d never know he had a serious back injury. When he reached us, he pointed to the castle and said, “We got some great footage in there.”