Grand Passion

  “You think he did some checking on me, found out I'd written The Mirror, and decided to set up the scenario that would make people think I was murdered by a deranged reader?”

  “He probably knows how much Cosmic Harmony means to you. I don't like the sound of this fire. A little too coincidental.”

  “That's what Max said.”

  “Max is on his way to the cove now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You stay put, Cleo. Don't step foot outside the inn until he gets back.”

  Cleo gave up trying to argue. “All right. I'll go downstairs and wake Sylvia. She and I and Sammy will circle the wagons and wait for the men to do their thing.”

  “I'll be there in another hour or so.” O'Reilly paused briefly. “Tell Sylvia I'm on my way, will you?”

  “She'll be waiting for you. We'll all be waiting.”

  “That's nice to know,” O'Reilly said. “Been a long time since I had anyone waiting for me. Listen, I've got to get off the phone now. I'm going to call your police chief. I want to let him know what's going on.”

  “We've only got a one-man force, O'Reilly. Harry will be out at Cosmic Harmony right now.”

  “Hell, that's the trouble with small towns. Okay, sit tight. Max and I will handle everything.”

  Cleo put down the phone.

  Her parents had been killed. Murdered. Shot by a cold-blooded hit man.

  But all she felt was relief.

  As horrible as the truth was, it was infinitely preferable to the explanation that the authorities had insisted upon all these years. Her father had not gone mad and killed her mother and himself. Her parents' love for each other had not been tainted by a foul sickness in her father's mind. The bond between them had been pure and clean, wholesome and steadfast. Just like her love for Max.

  In spite of the situation, Cleo felt as if a dark weight had been lifted from her soul.

  She rose slowly and started for the door. She wanted to talk to Sylvia.

  The flames in the distance caught her attention once more. She paused to glance out the window. It was impossible to tell if it was the main lodge that was on fire or one of the smaller buildings.

  The hall floorboard squeaked.

  Cleo went perfectly still.

  I have a reputation to maintain.

  Her own words to Sylvia a few hours earlier came back to her. Does it strike you that Max and Herbert T. Valence have something in common?

  A reputation.

  A reputation.

  Cleo leaped for the door. It opened before she could lock it. Herbert T. Valence stepped into the room. He had a pistol in his hand. There was something odd about the shape of the barrel, Cleo realized. Perhaps that was what a silencer looked like.

  “Well, Ms. Robbins.” Valence smiled his thin, humorless little smile. “We meet properly at last. Allow me to introduce myself. My real name is Emile Wynn. Perhaps you've heard of me. Your father ruined me professionally.”

  Cleo tried to speak and realized that she could not find her voice. She took a deep breath, the same kind she took when she meditated. She had to say something, anything, in order to break the paralysis.

  “You bastard.” Her voice was only a squeak. But rage swept through her without warning, driving out the fear. “You killed my parents.”

  Valence frowned as he closed the door behind himself. “I had no choice. Your father's testimony destroyed my reputation. I could not rest until he had paid for it. A man's reputation is everything, Ms. Robbins.”

  “My mother…,” Cleo began in a choked voice.

  “Had to go, too, I'm afraid. I plan my little dramas with exquisite care, and I had determined that a murder-suicide seemed most appropriate for that particular situation.”

  “You've come after me because you knew I'd find you sooner or later,” Cleo said.

  Valence looked at her with a strangely troubled gaze. “You hired a second-rate investigator last summer. He was a very unprofessional sort, Ms. Robbins. I realized almost immediately that he was nosing around, and I took appropriate steps. But I also knew then that I had to do something about you.”

  “In other words, you knew I might decide to hire someone else, and next time I might get my money's worth.” Cleo took a step back.

  Valence did not appear to know that O'Reilly had already learned who he was. Whatever happened here tonight, she must not betray O'Reilly or Max. Valence would surely go after them next.

  “Unfortunately it became clear that you were going to be a nuisance, Ms. Robbins.” Valence followed her movement with the pistol. “But I must confess that one thing puzzled me. If you had suspicions about your parents' death, why did you wait nearly four years before you hired an investigator?”

  “It took me all that time to recover to a point where I could deal with it.” Cleo had never known such primitive rage. It consumed her. She was no longer afraid of Valence. “You destroyed my family, you stupid, crazy little man.”

  “Don't call me crazy.” Valence's eyes glittered with an evil light. “Those idiot psychiatrists in prison called me crazy. But they were wrong. You're all wrong. I was a professional with a perfect track record. I never made mistakes. I never failed. Your father destroyed my reputation.”

  “He didn't destroy it. You screwed up.”

  “Don't say that.” Valence took another step forward. “It's not true. I never screw up, as you so crudely put it, Ms. Robbins.”

  Cleo edged back toward the mirror. The only defense she could think of at the moment was to keep him talking. The man was insane. It occurred to her that a genuinely professional hit man would have killed her by now. “You're going to try to make people think I was murdered by some deranged person who hated my book, aren't you?”

  Valence scowled. “Even if I did not have my personal reasons for terminating you, you deserve to be punished for writing The Mirror.”

  He was even nuttier than she had first thought, Cleo decided. “Why do you say that?”

  “You are the author of a pornographic novel, Ms. Robbins,” Valence chided with the outrage of an evangelist. “You're no better than a whore. You write filth, and every decent person knows it.”

  “Decent person?” She looked at him in disbelief. “You consider yourself a decent person?”

  “I am a clean man, Ms. Robbins.” Valence's fingers flexed around the grip of the pistol. “My mother made certain that I did not dirty myself in the gutter of sexuality. I am proud to say that I have not had carnal knowledge of a woman since she showed me how obscene the act was.”

  “Let me guess. You're the product of a dysfunctional family, right?” Cleo did not know if taunting Valence would keep him talking or push him over the edge, but she couldn't think of anything else to do.

  “My mother was a pure woman,” Valence said savagely. “And she kept me pure.”

  “By keeping you for herself? I'll bet those prison shrinks had a field day with that, didn't they?”

  “Shut up,” Valence snarled. “You created a work of filth. No one will think it strange that some clean person took it upon himself to punish you.”

  Cleo realized with shock that Valence believed what he was saying. “You've got a lot of nerve condemning me for writing erotica. You're a hit man, for God's sake. What does that make you?”

  “It makes me a professional.” Valence drew a length of red ribbon from his jacket pocket. “A professional with only one stain upon my spotless reputation. But I will soon rub out that stain.”

  He started toward her. Cleo saw the glint of the wire entwined in the ribbon. She knew that he was going to put it around her neck. The same way the man in the mirror put the ribbon around the throat of the woman in The Mirror.

  Valence was going to strangle her with the scarlet ribbon.

  She opened her mouth to scream, knowing Valence would probably shoot her before she could make herself heard. Perhaps if she made enough of a racket before she died he would not escape undetected.

&
nbsp; At that instant the lights flickered and went out.

  “Goddamn it,” Valence shouted in intense agitation. “Don't move. I'm warning you.”

  Cleo ignored him and dove for the floor. Valence was as blind as she was, and she knew the room far better than he did. She crawled toward the door, knowing it would take several seconds for Valence's eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness.

  A soft, hissing sound overhead told her that Valence had fired the silenced pistol. The bullet splintered wood.

  At the same instant the floorboard outside the door squeaked. A draft of air from the hallway told her that someone had opened the door and entered the room. She looked up and thought she could see a dark shadow moving against the deeper shadows of the attic.

  Max.

  Her hand touched the base of the mirror stand.

  Another soft, hissing sigh seared the air in the room. Cleo surged to her feet, grabbed the mirror and its frame, and hurled it toward the spot where she knew Valence was standing.

  The mirror struck something solid and fell to the floor. Glass shattered. Valence cried out, revealing his location.

  The bright rays of the powerful flashlight that Cleo always kept behind the front desk snapped into life. They pinned Valence in a beam of blinding light.

  “Get away from me,” Valence screamed. He held out one hand as if in supplication, aimed the pistol toward the source of the light, and pulled the trigger.

  The crack of an unsilenced revolver shot rang out at the same instant. Valence slumped to the floor, motionless.

  The flashlight fell to the floor, its beam still illuminating Valence's body.

  “Max,” Cleo shouted as she dashed across the room. “Max, answer me.”

  “Shit,” Max said. “The same damn leg.”

  Chapter

  19

  Valence was dead, but the following morning Max decided he was still pissed at him and would be for a long time. Every time Max felt the lancing pain from the new stitches in his thigh, he was reminded of how close he had come to losing Cleo. Rage and fear had surged through him last night as he had made his way up the stairs to the attic. The damned cane had never felt so clumsy in his hand. Trying to manage the revolver and the flashlight had been a difficult task. He had never resented his bad leg so much.

  But Cleo was safe now, and Max intended to keep her that way even if he had to put a leash on her.

  Ensconced in a bed in the local community hospital, Max studied the ring of anxious faces gathered around him. He was still not accustomed to having people fuss over him, he reflected. He wondered if he would ever get to the point where he would take such concern on his behalf for granted. He doubted it. When you had spent most of your life looking for something, you weren't likely to treat it casually when you finally stumbled into it.

  The whole family, with the exception of Ben and Trisha, who were still blissfully unaware of events, was hovering at Max's bedside. Cleo had insisted on spending what was left of the night in a chair in his hospital room. The others, who had been sent home by the staff a few hours earlier, had crowded back in right after breakfast.

  The nurses had already complained twice that there was no room for them to carry out their duties. The doctor, a smiling woman in her mid-fifties, had told Max that it looked like he was in good hands.

  “Does your leg hurt real, real bad?” Sammy clutched Lucky Ducky and gazed at Max with wide-eyed concern.

  Max considered the matter closely. Getting shot had been a definite screwup. When he'd gotten a fix on Valence's location, thanks to Cleo, he'd switched on the flashlight with the intention of blinding Valence.

  Knowing that Valence would fire toward the beam of light, Max had taken pains to hold the light well off to the side while he aimed his own weapon. Unfortunately, crazy as he was in some ways, Valence had still been enough of a cool-headed professional to shoot to the left of the light. Most people, after all, were right-handed. It was a safe bet that whoever had entered the room would be holding a gun in his right hand and the flashlight in his left. If that person was thinking, he would be holding the flashlight as far from his body as possible.

  Valence had been right on all counts. Max had taken the bullet in his left thigh. He would have another scar two inches away from the first one. The doctor had assured him that it was only a flesh wound. Unfortunately, that didn't make the stitches any more comfortable.

  “It doesn't hurt real, real bad,” Max said. “Just sort of bad.”

  “Hey, could have been worse.” O'Reilly grinned. “Could have been the other leg this time, and then you would have had to use two canes.”

  “You're a real ray of sunshine, O'Reilly.” As it was Max knew he was going to be on crutches for a while. He looked at Cleo, who was standing at the head of the bed. She had such a fierce grip on his hand that the ring on her finger was leaving an imprint on his skin. It felt good. “You're sure you're okay?”

  “For the hundredth time, I'm okay.” She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “Thanks to you.”

  “You're a hero, Max,” Andromeda told him proudly. She poured some of her special tea out of a thermos she had brought with her. “The local newspaper wants to do a feature on how you rescued Cleo from that horrid Mr. Valence.”

  Max grimaced as he took the mug of tea from Andromeda. “I don't want to talk to any reporters.”

  “It's just Bertie Jennings from the Harmony Cove Herald,” Daystar assured him. “Don't worry. I've already told him that he can't talk to you until you're back on your feet.”

  “Thanks.” Max scowled. “Maybe by that time he won't want to do the story.” A thought occurred to him. “How much damage did the fire do?”

  “The meditation center is gone, but the lodge is fine. So are the guest quarters,” Daystar said. “We're in good shape, considering what might have happened. But, then, O'Reilly says that destroying Cosmic Harmony was not really Valence's goal. He just wanted to use the fire as a means of causing confusion.”

  “Valence set the fire using timed fuses so that he could get back to the inn before the blaze started,” O'Reilly explained.

  “Poor Nolan,” Cleo said. “To think we once suspected him of being behind the incidents.”

  Max did not like the sound of “poor Nolan,” but he nobly chose to ignore the reference. He could afford to be generous, he told himself. He had Cleo. All Hildebrand had was a budding career in politics, to which he was more than welcome as far as Max was concerned.

  “Valence knew a fire at Cosmic Harmony would create chaos not just there but also at the inn,” Sylvia said.

  “He'd stayed at the inn often enough to know how important Cosmic Harmony was to me,” Cleo agreed.

  “He obviously figured one of two things would happen when the fire was discovered,” Max said. “The first possibility was that Cleo would rush to the scene. If that happened, he no doubt intended to follow and try to get at her in the confusion and darkness while everyone concentrated on the fire.”

  “The other possibility was that you would leave her safely behind at the inn while you went to see what was happening,” O'Reilly concluded.

  Max swore softly. “It was a logical plan. Either way Cleo would be vulnerable for the first time since that day Valence had stalked her in the fog.”

  “He must have realized that Max was keeping an eye on you, Cleo, because of the incidents that had been occurring,” Sylvia said. “It was no secret, especially after O'Reilly started talking to people in town about them.”

  “That's right,” Daystar said. “Valence knew he would somehow have to separate Max and Cleo. Trying to get at Cleo while Max was protecting her would have complicated things no end for him.”

  “He was very proud of his research and planning,” Cleo whispered. “And absolutely obsessive about his reputation.”

  Max felt the shudder that went through her. He tightened his grip on her hand. She smiled tremulously at him. The love in her eyes was bright and clear, and he
knew it would last him his whole life.

  No one had ever looked at him the way Cleo did. Last night when she had told him that she loved him, he had been so shaken by his good fortune that he had been unable to sort out his emotions. He had only known that he wanted her more than ever, that he had to protect her. She was the most important thing in his world.

  This morning when he had awakened to find Cleo sitting beside his bed, he had taken one look at her and finally understood what had happened to him.

  “When did it hit you that the fire might be a diversion?” Andromeda asked.

  Max pulled his thoughts back to the subject at hand. “When I was about a quarter of a mile down the road. I turned around and drove straight back to the inn. But I had a feeling that something had really gone bad. I started to call Cleo on the car phone, but O'Reilly called me first.”

  “He was just pulling back into the parking lot when I reached him,” O'Reilly said. “I told him what I had told Cleo about a psychotic killer who had a thing about his reputation and who always planned his hits with military precision. The last thing I heard Max say before he hung up was that he knew who the guy was.”

  “I came to the same conclusion Cleo did,” Max said quietly. “Valence was the obvious suspect. He'd been in and out of Harmony Cove all winter giving his damn seminars. He'd had plenty of opportunity to see how things worked at the inn. Plenty of time to set things up.”

  “We didn't think of him when we drew up that list of guests who had been at the inn the night the ribbon was left on my pillow,” Cleo said ruefully.

  Max exchanged glances with O'Reilly. “I put him on the list,” he said.

  “You did?” Cleo was startled.

  O'Reilly made a face. “Valence was on the list, and I checked him out, but there were no red flags. The guy had a nice, clean background. Everything was in order.” He held up his hands. “What can I say? Valence was a pro.”

  Max looked at Cleo. “All I could think of was that I had left you alone. I knew that group of seminar attendees had all had too much to drink and were probably sound asleep. When I reached the lobby, George was also asleep, just as he had been when I'd left. I went to Valence's room, and it was empty.”