“He’s lying about letting us go,” Dawson said wearily. “He’s a damned psychopath. He lies as easily as he breathes. He’s been stalking you for months, using Grandmother and me. He’s the one who set up the Ponzi scheme and suckered Grandmother and me into investing in it.”
Lander gave Abby a warm, charming smile. “I don’t want to have to kill anyone. All I want is the lab book. Once you’ve broken the encryption and I’ve verified that it’s the right book, we’ll take a short cruise. I’ll put you and Dawson ashore on one of the uninhabited islands here in the San Juans. It may take you a while, but sooner or later you’ll manage to flag down a passing boat. Plenty of time for me to disappear.”
“What if we go to the police?” Abby said.
Lander shrugged. “They wouldn’t believe you. There was no ransom paid. No money changed hands. At best, the kidnapping story will be viewed as a publicity stunt designed to help your father sell more books. Speaking of books, let me see Willis’s notebook. I want to be sure you brought the right one.”
“Afraid of being scammed the way you scammed Dawson?” Abby asked.
“You wouldn’t take the risk,” Lander said. “You know that it would cost your brother his life, and your own as well. But after going to all this trouble, I want to be certain that the book you found is the right one. You know how it is in the collectors’ market, so many frauds and forgeries out there.”
“True.” Abby put the package down on the desk and started to peel off the tape she had used to secure the wrapping paper. “How will you know if this is the right lab book?”
“I’ll know,” Lander said. He moved closer to the desk to get a better look at the package. “In fact, I can already sense some energy around it.”
“Encryption energy.” Abby finished unwrapping the book. The atmosphere inside the cabin heated a little, but she knew that it wasn’t all coming from the lab book. Lander had heightened his talent. He was powerful. The strange gun in his hand was suddenly a luminous green. A new chill went through her.
“You used a crystal from the Phoenix Mine to power that weapon,” she said.
He followed her gaze to the gun and gave her another approving smile. “Very good observation. My father thoughtfully kept one crystal as a souvenir. I ran a lot of experiments on it before I finally realized what it could do.”
“That’s what you used to kill Thaddeus Webber and the other dealer.”
“Yes. I know the East Coast hot-books market quite well. I’ve been dealing in it anonymously for some time now. But sadly, I lacked connections here in the Pacific Northwest.”
“But your contacts back east knew how to find Thaddeus.”
“It took some doing, but once I located him, I was able to get the names of the most likely auction dealers from him before he suffered his heart attack.”
“Before you murdered him, you mean. You sent those two men to kidnap me.”
“I had hoped to avoid violence, but when it became clear that you had another client and that your dear brother was not going to be able to convince you to work for him, I realized I had to take more drastic measures. I wasn’t absolutely certain that you would show up at Webber’s house, but it seemed likely. I didn’t have time to watch the place myself, so I hired that pair to pick up any female seen leaving his place. Obviously, they did a very poor job of grabbing you. I assume you had Coppersmith with you that day?”
“Yes.”
“That explains why you got away,” Lander said. “Never mind, what’s done is done, and it’s all ending the way it’s supposed to end. Let’s have a look at the lab book.”
He opened the leather cover and examined the first page.
“There’s Willis’s name,” he said. “The dates are correct.” He turned one page and then another. His eyes tightened. “This is a record of experiments conducted on rare earths and crystals taken from a mine, but there’s no mention of paranormal properties or the location of the mine.”
“The book is still encrypted,” Abby reminded him. “It won’t make any sense to you until I break the code.”
He closed the book with a snap. “Do it now.”
“You promise you’ll let us go?”
“I promise,” Lander said. Anger flashed in his cold eyes. “I told you, I have no reason to kill either of you.”
“He’s lying, Abby,” Dawson said.
Lander aimed the gun at him. “It occurs to me that now that I have your sister, I don’t have any more use for you.”
Dangerous currents swirled in the atmosphere. Dawson started to sweat. He gasped for breath.
“No.” Abby grabbed the lab book. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him. I’ll break the code for you.”
“Do it,” Lander snarled.
She jacked up her energy, found the frequencies and held out the lab book.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s done. Here, take the book and let us go.”
Lander reached for the book, ignoring her plea. His fingers closed around the spine. Abby seized the energy of the encryption and sent it into his aura.
Lander stiffened. His eyes widened in dawning horror.
“No,” he screamed. He tried and failed to let go of the book. “You can’t do this to me. I’ll kill you first, I swear it.”
His left hand was still frozen to the book. Abby sensed that the energy of the unlocking code was channeling straight into his aura. But he was so much stronger than she had realized. He managed to let go of the lab book. Gaining strength, he turned the pistol toward her.
“Bitch,” he screamed.
The barrel of the pistol glowed hotter. Icy currents flowed around her heart.
Sam came through the doorway, the Phoenix ring on fire. Paranormal lightning crackled across the small space, igniting Lander’s aura. Ultralight flames blazed. Lander jerked and twitched and writhed.
He stared at Sam from the heart of the inferno. “No. It can’t end like this. The crystals are mine.”
In the next instant, he crumpled to the floor. His aura and the psi-fire winked out with a terrible finality.
Sam scooped up the crystal gun and looked at Abby.
“I told you this was a bad plan,” he said.
“I thought it all went quite well,” she said. Her voice sounded far too high and thin.
She hurled herself against Sam’s chest. His arms closed fiercely around her.
47
“I DON’T GET IT,” DAWSON SAID TO SAM. “HOW DID YOU MANAGE to sneak up on Knox? He watched Abby’s arrival with his binoculars and made sure that she was the only one who came ashore from the floatplane. That island wasn’t much larger than a big rock. We would have heard even a very small outboard engine.”
They were back at the Copper Beach house. Sam had used his phone to summon the floatplane that had been standing by to pick them up. The pilot was a resident of Copper Beach. He had asked no questions about the unusual charter.
Abby sat in a chair near the hearth. Newton was on the floor at her feet. Willow had made coffee for everyone. She and Elias were following the conversation with sharp-eyed attention.
“I came partway out on one of the whale-watching charters,” Sam said. “Figured Knox wouldn’t be overly concerned if he happened to catch sight of a boat full of sightseers in the distance.”
“I understand,” Dawson said. “But how did you get the rest of the way to the island?”
“Kayak,” Sam said. “They make almost no noise. I came ashore on the far side of the island and walked the rest of the way. I stayed out of sight and kept an eye on things from the trees. The plan was for me to move in as soon as Abby started to unlock the psi-code. We knew that even if she couldn’t take him down with encryption energy, she would probably be able to distract him long enough for me to get on board.”
Dawson shook his head. “I still don’t understand this whole code thing. Knox kept talking about how he’d need Abby not just to get the book for him but to unlock it. At first I assumed h
e meant a real code, one with secret meanings for certain letters and numbers. When I realized he thought the book was encoded with some kind of psychic energy, I figured he was just flat-out crazy.”
“I think he was, in a way,” Abby said.
“But you aren’t.” Dawson looked at her. “You never were. The family is wrong about you. There is something to this whole paranormal thing, isn’t there?”
Abby smiled. “What makes you believe that?”
“I felt something weird happen when Knox turned that strange gun on me, and again when you gave him the book. It was as if there was some kind of invisible storm inside the cabin. The air seemed somehow charged.” Dawson looked at Sam. “When you came in, the sensation got a thousand times worse. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Except maybe once.”
“When was that?” Abby asked.
“The day you burned the book in the bathtub and Mom decided that you had tried to set fire to the house.”
“In hindsight, I have to admit that she had some reason to be concerned,” Abby said. “I was just coming into my talent. I had no idea what I was doing.”
“What really frightened Mom was the fact that you seemed to believe you had set fire to the book with some kind of mental energy. But that’s exactly what happened, wasn’t it?”
Abby sighed. “Pretty much.”
Elias looked at Sam. “We need to find the missing crystals. We’ve got one lab book, a good shot at getting the second one if it’s with Frye’s things, and we’ve got Knox’s crystal gun. That will give us a lot to work with.”
“Still got a long way to go,” Sam said. “We’re going to need Judson’s and Emma’s help. They are the only ones we can trust, the only ones who have a sensitivity to the Phoenix crystals.”
Willow picked up her coffee cup. “What did you do with Lander Knox’s body and his yacht?”
“I made sure there was nothing on board that tied any of us to the boat, and then I sank it,” Sam said. “The water is very deep off that island. I doubt that the wreckage or the body will ever be discovered, but if they are, it won’t cause much of a stir. Just one more tragic summer boating accident in the San Juans.”
Abby looked at him over the top of her cup.
“What?” he asked.
“I was just thinking of what Dixon told me about you the first time he brought me here to the island.”
Sam raised his brows. “That would be?”
“I was given to understand that if you ever had to get rid of a body, it would disappear for good,” she said. “Something to do with all the deep water around these parts and the cleverness of Coppersmiths in general.”
“Damn straight,” Elias growled.
Sam let that go. He turned back to Dawson. “Are you going to tell your grandmother that she was giving out details about the family finances to a killer?”
“I don’t think that I’ll mention that he was a killer.” Dawson tapped one finger on the arm of the chair. “That gets complicated.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “It does.”
“I doubt that she’d believe me if I did tell her the whole truth, anyway,” Dawson continued. “But I do plan to let her know that the guy she was doing lunch with on a regular basis for the past few months was the architect of the Ponzi scheme that she insisted I invest her money in. I’m also going to make it clear that it isn’t Abby’s fault that Knox was a fraud and a scam artist.”
Willow exchanged a look with Elias. Abby was sure she saw some unspoken message pass between them. Willow looked at Dawson.
“It might be possible to recover whatever is left of the money that you invested with Knox, assuming he didn’t spend all of it,” she said.
“He didn’t have time to go through that much money,” Sam said. “He was focused on acquiring the lab book and getting the encryption broken. Depriving the Stricklands of the family fortune was merely a means to an end, collateral damage.”
“In that case, I’ll see what I can do,” Willow said.
Elias grinned proudly. “My wife has a real talent for following the money,” he said to Dawson. “If your grandmother’s fortune is out there, she’ll find it.”
Dawson looked at Willow. “That’s very kind of you. I might be able to help. I’ve got a little talent in that arena myself.”
“Excellent,” Willow said. “We’ll work the project as a team.”
They finished the coffee in silence. The flames crackled cheerfully on the hearth. Outside, the long summer day came to a close. Darkness settled on the island.
“I told Knox that he had miscalculated,” Dawson said to Abby. “I explained that he had misjudged the family dynamics. I said you had no reason to risk your neck for me. But he was convinced that you would come. For a smart psychopath, he sure had a blind side. He actually bought into the image in that photo on the back cover of Families by Choice. Thought the happy Radwell family was the real deal.”
Abby smiled. “Like Dad always says, family is everything.”
48
ABBY STOOD WITH SAM ON THE BLUFF ABOVE THE SMALL COVE. Sam was on his phone. Newton was exploring some nearby rocks.
Sam concluded the call and slipped the phone into the pocket of his leather jacket. “That was the lawyer I had looking into the status of Thaddeus Webber’s estate. Turns out there is a will.”
“So Thaddeus did take steps to make sure his most valuable books went to a library?” Abby smiled. “That’s great.”
“He didn’t leave his collection to a library. He left everything, including the contents of his book vault, to a single individual.”
“He had some family after all?”
“According to his will, he left his collection to the person he looked upon as a daughter, although, given the age difference, maybe he should have said granddaughter. He left it all to you, Abby.”
“What?”
Sam smiled.
It took her a few seconds to find her tongue. “But some of the volumes in that collection are worth a fortune.”
“They’re all yours now. The lawyer is making certain that the collection is guarded until it can be packed up and transported here to Copper Beach. You’ll have to open Webber’s vault, though. You’re the only one who knows the code.”
“This is amazing. I can’t believe it. First your mother and Dawson track down the bulk of the Strickland fortune in that offshore bank and arrange to get it back. Then one of your fancy lawyers manages to spring Grady Hastings, who is scheduled to start work in the Black Box facility on Monday.”
“Good talent is hard to come by,” Sam said. “Don’t like to see it wasted.”
“And now I find out I’m inheriting all of Thaddeus’s books. On top of everything else, I actually got a phone call from Orinda Strickland today, informing me that she intended to make provision for me in the Strickland family trust.”
“You told her you didn’t want to be named in the trust, didn’t you?”
“How did you guess?”
“I know you, Abby. The money isn’t important to you. All you’ve ever wanted was to be part of the family. Don’t worry, when you marry me, you’re going to have all the family you can handle.”
The late summer sun was setting, streaking the clouds with fiery light and turning the water to a sheet of hammered copper. Abby watched the spectacular sunset, aware of a glorious sense of happiness and cer-tainty.
“Now I know why they call this place Copper Beach,” she said.
Sam drew her into his arms. His eyes heated. “I told you that you would understand one of these days. Think you can call this island home?”
“Home is wherever you and I are together,” she said. “Well, and Newton, too, of course.”
“Newton, too,” Sam agreed.
He kissed her there in the warm copper light of the summer evening. Abby opened her senses to the powerful energy of the love that she knew would bind them for a lifetime.
The Phoenix crystal burned.
&n
bsp; CRYSTAL GARDENS
A LADIES OF LANTERN STREET NOVEL
THE MUFFLED THUD OF THE SHATTERED LOCK ECHOED LIKE a thunderclap in the deep silence that drenched the cottage. Evangeline Ames recognized the sound at once. She was no longer alone in the house.
Her first primal instinct was to go absolutely still beneath the covers. Perhaps she was mistaken. The cottage was old. The floorboards and the ceiling often creaked and moaned at night. But even as the commonsense possibilities flitted through her head, she knew the truth. It was two o’clock in the morning, an intruder had broken in and it was highly unlikely that he was after the silver. There was not enough in the place to tempt a thief.