Twist of Fate

  The book was nothing in and of itself. But it was the first step down a glittering road that could lead to real power. She wouldn’t be able to stop. There would be no room in her life for a man except for fleeting physical affairs. She would need all her emotional energy for herself. No longer would she waste compassion or empathy on others. Guidance counseling would not interest her as a career. It was too “other” oriented.

  Hannah touched the necklace again. By the time she had finished the book, she would be concerned with no one but herself. She would be like Vicky Armitage in some ways and like Elizabeth Nord in others. She would be a young Amazon.

  Hannah turned to walk along the water’s edge, her bare feet finding firm purchase in the wet, packed sand. The lures lay stretched out ahead of her, beckoning with shining, mesmerizing power. She would be rich, Hannah decided. Making money would be high on her list of priorities because money was a source of power. There was money to be made from the Elizabeth Nord journals if she played her cards right. Wealthy collectors or a rich research foundation would pay considerable sums to obtain the valuable library Nord had left. The book Hannah would write before she sold the library should bring in a healthy sum on its own.

  No, she decided, there was a better way to play it. She would not sell the library for cash, but would exchange it for a director’s position on the board of an important research foundation, the kind that provided money to the Victoria Armitages of the world. From there she could wield influence over the kind of research that received funds. She could begin to control people such as Vicky Armitage. If they wanted foundation grants they would be forced to deal with Hannah Jessett. If the sale of the Nord biography brought in sufficient money, Hannah realized, she would be able to set up her own foundation. All things were possible if you were thoroughly committed to the end result.

  The people who controlled money were the ones who controlled research. Yes, Hannah thought, that was the route to take. She would use her aunt’s legacy to buy her way into a position of power and from there she could climb as high as she wished. She would ultimately have more control over the field of anthropology than any single professor with a Ph.D. could hope to have. Ph.D.s were a dime a dozen. The people who controlled research money were a far more important group. She would join that group.

  Everything started with writing the book.

  The sun climbed higher in the brilliant blue sky as Hannah continued to contemplate the future that lay before her. As the day wore on, things began to fall quickly into place. The haze of uncertainty that had masked her future was clearing with breathtaking rapidity. She had been right to come back to the island. Things were so much more obvious here, so self-evident. How could she have wasted so many years of her life floundering? Where had this stark, sharply etched vision of her future been hiding all this time? She felt as if she saw clearly for the first time in her life.

  Hannah was suddenly consumed with energy. It burned in her, simmering in her veins. She wanted to run, but the first tentative attempt almost ended in disaster. She managed to steady herself in time with the cane and then laughed at her own exuberance. Glancing back at the cottage, she imagined Elizabeth Nord standing on the porch, smiling at her.

  “Look at me, Elizabeth. You were right. All those times you told me to follow my own instincts, you were right. It just took me a while to figure out what I wanted. But now I know, Elizabeth Nord. I want what you had. And I’m going to get it. In my own way, I’m going to get it. My God, but you had guts, Aunt. You lied your way to fame and fortune. You lied your way into power. And now I’m going to use the myth you created to find my own way to power. You’ll be proud of me, Aunt Elizabeth. And so will all those other women who once wore this necklace.”

  She shut up abruptly, realizing how foolish she would look to anyone who might see her. But there was no one around to watch. Hannah was free to talk to her aunt if she chose. Grinning, Hannah started back toward the cottage. Nothing could get in her way. All she had to do was follow the path that had opened up ahead of her. It stretched endlessly toward the horizon, narrow and sure and full of brilliant promise. The heat of the rising sun had warmed the necklace around Hannah’s throat until it almost burned against her skin.

  She had been right to return to the island.

  It wasn’t until the evening of the following day that Hannah began to come down from the euphoric high she had been experiencing as her future crystallized. Perhaps it was the advent of darkness that quieted her overexcited spirit. Or perhaps she was just tired from trying to contain such energy. Tired from too much energy. That was a paradox, she told herself, but somehow it made sense. She poured herself a glass of wine and decided to take another walk along the edge of the cove. Then she would go back to work on Elizabeth Nord’s journals.

  Feeling quite decadent walking barefoot along the water’s edge with a glass of wine in one hand, Hannah drank in the balmy, scented air and let her mind skip from one thought to another. It was going to rain this evening. The usual afternoon thunderstorms seemed to have been postponed by a couple of hours. Or maybe this was a major storm approaching. Whatever the reasons, the dark clouds were filling up the sky and obscuring the moon’s light.

  There were things to be done soon. She would have to make some contacts to determine the best way to go about selling the idea of her book to a publisher. An agent would undoubtedly be necessary.

  She was wondering how to go about finding an agent when another stray thought drifted into her head. To her surprise, Hannah found herself thinking about what Gideon Cage was doing that evening.

  Making a firm effort to push the thought aside, Hannah tried to concentrate on the business aspects of bringing out her book. But the word “business” meant Gideon Cage. A few weeks ago when she had walked along this beach he had been with her. It was Gideon who had pulled her from the clutches of the diver who had tried to drown her.

  Hannah stopped walking and took a long sip of wine. She didn’t like thinking about either the diver with the blue eyes or Gideon. Both were too disturbing. But it was easier to dismiss memories of the diver than of Gideon. The assault was in the past. Gideon was still very much in her present.

  “Damn you, Gideon. Go away. I’m not going to let you interfere any longer. You chose your path, now let me choose mine.”

  But the uneasiness wouldn’t fade. Maybe she was just getting spooked by being out here alone at night, Hannah told herself. She finished the wine and decided to head back to the house. It wasn’t really late but the isolation of her aunt’s cottage was suddenly very evident. She would feel better back inside with the doors locked.

  Irritated with her jumpy mood but unable to talk herself out of it, Hannah started toward the front steps of the cottage. She was still some distance away when she thought she caught a shadowy movement in the stand of palms. Her jumpiness shifted into outright alarm. Hannah quickened her pace toward the house.

  It was ridiculous. There was no one hiding in the palm grove. Her imagination, fueled by memories of the near fatal incident in the cove, was working overtime. She began to wish that the cottage contained a phone, though. It would be soothing to know that she could reach help in an emergency. She would have one installed when she moved in on a permanent basis, Hannah thought as she started up the veranda steps.

  The tap of her cane on the bottom step almost but not quite concealed the small scuffling noise that came from the palm grove. Hannah froze. It took an effort to turn and search the shadows. She was acting like a child who felt safer hiding under the covers than looking for trouble in the darkness. Taking a deep breath, Hannah forced herself to calmly watch the palm grove until she was certain there was no one there.

  She wished she had a gun in the house or stashed in the jeep. But of course she didn’t. Innocuous, insipid, sweetly earnest guidance counselors didn’t own guns. She wouldn’t know how to use one even if she had it put in her hand.

  That would change, Hannah thought. She woul
d buy a gun and learn how to use it. If she were going to live out here alone she would need to have some protection. But the prospect of protection lay in the future. Tonight she would have to think of something else.

  Because there was someone out there.

  Hannah had operated on her instincts often enough in the past when it came to offering advice to others. She decided that she would be a fool to ignore those instincts now. The house was not a safe refuge. The louvered windows could be pried open easily and the lock on the front door was a joke to someone who lived in the city. The lock on her apartment door in Seattle was three times stronger than the one Elizabeth Nord had placed on her cottage door.

  Hannah hesitated no longer. She hauled herself up the steps with the aid of her cane, slipped into the front door and found her purse. It contained the keys to the jeep. Before she stepped back out onto the porch she switched off the light. There was no reason to silhouette herself.

  The jeep seemed very far away even though in reality it waited just at the bottom of the steps. Hannah climbed inside with a sigh of relief and shoved the key in the ignition. She would spend the night in a hotel. In the morning she could come back and have a look around. Then she would see about getting a local locksmith in to put some decent protection on the doors and windows.

  The engine caught immediately and Hannah turned the wheel. The pink fringe swayed playfully in the darkness above her as she sent the jeep out of the driveway and toward the main road into town. The rocky cliffs above the sea were mercifully concealed in shadows as Hannah drove along their upper edges. She would not look to the side or down. She would concentrate on the road ahead.

  There were no lights in the rearview mirror until the car behind her was almost on top of her. Then they flashed on with blinding brilliance.

  Hannah had an instant of startled terror that mingled with an old horror left over from her accident. Flashes of memory came back to her. This was the way it had been. A car surging out of the darkness behind her, blinding her with headlights, and then sideswiping her car viciously before roaring off into the night.

  Perhaps it was the rush of memory that saved her life. Perhaps it was sheer luck. Whatever the reason, Hannah shoved the brake peddle to the floor instead of giving in to the impulse to swing the wheel and swerve to the side.

  The car jerked out from behind her and shot past, managing to catch the hood of the jeep with a rough, savage scraping sound. The little pink jeep rocked with the force of the impact and jolted toward the edge of the cliff in spite of Hannah’s fierce war with the brakes. There was a timeless moment of utter silence as the vehicle shuddered on the edge of the cliff. Hannah felt her fate being decided by careless gods.

  Then she was clawing at the seat belt. She shoved open the door and threw herself out onto the road as the finger of one of the island gods reached out and casually flipped the jeep off the cliff.

  Hannah lay on the pavement, gasping with pain and clutching her left leg. She’d landed on the injured knee when she’d thrown herself out of the jeep. In that moment of shock and agony she knew a rage that was unlike anything she had ever experienced in her life. Fury roared through her.

  Above her the skies opened, spilling a torrent of rain onto the narrow road where Hannah lay. The crashing sound of thunder faded into the distance to be replaced by the angry throb of a car’s engine.

  Hannah knew that whoever had tried to kill her was returning to make certain that he had succeeded.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  GIDEON DIDN’T BELIEVE in premonitions but he had a great deal of faith in his instincts. He’d depended on them too many times on the street and later in business. When the dark gray sedan that was parked by the edge of the road loomed up out of the rain he knew there was trouble. The car was too close to the Nord cottage, the night was too wild with the storm that had swept in right after his plane had landed, and Gideon was too certain that accidents were becoming too frequent in Hannah’s life.

  The only thing that gave him hope as he pulled his rented car over to the side of the road was that there was no sign of a silly pink jeep. Ignoring the warm, pounding rain he climbed out of the compact and slowly approached the dark sedan. There was no sign of anyone around, but the knowledge didn’t do much to untwist the knot in his stomach. There was a feeling of wrongness here and he’d long since learned to respect that sensation. After a glance into the car which told him absolutely nothing, Gideon walked around it. He spotted the scraped and dented rear fender immediately.

  Then he glanced over the cliff and saw the pink-fringed jeep on the rocks below. For a sickening instant Gideon simply stared down at it, wanting to deny the evidence, willing to trade everything he’d ever had to change reality and knowing all the while that you can’t make deals with the universe.

  The sickness in him turned into a cold chill that at least allowed him to function. He stripped off his jacket and started down the jumble of rocks that led to the beach. He had to know the worst, had to see for himself if his soft, sweet Hannah was lying broken inside the jeep. Then he would destroy whoever had been in the dark sedan. There was no doubt in Gideon’s mind that the other car had forced the jeep over the edge. For the second time in his life the violent desire for revenge swept through Gideon. He would do whatever had to be done to make the people in the car pay.

  Scrambling on the rain-slick rocks, Gideon reached the jeep. The closer he got the more he tried to prepare himself for the sight of Hannah crumpled on the rocks or trapped inside the jeep which was lying on its side. Nothing he did could unfreeze the coldness in his guts, but he found no sign of her at the bottom of the short, tumbled cliff. It took all his willpower to look into the front seat. The seat belt clasped nothing. It was lying undone. Hannah always wore a seat belt. It had saved her life during the first accident.

  For the first time since he’d looked down from the road above and seen the jeep Gideon allowed himself a small measure of hope. He tried to kill it almost at once because it left him feeling jittery. It was, however, just barely possible that she’d survived the crash and managed to crawl out of the jeep. She’d survived a car accident once before, he reminded himself.

  He was turning away to scan the cliff face when he spotted the rakish leather-trimmed photojournalist bag, the one with all the buckles and pockets. It had been thrown out of the jeep and lay on the sand near the water’s edge. The skewed lights of the jeep illuminated it. With a final glance up at the dark sedan, Gideon turned to walk through the rain toward the bag.

  He picked it up and went through it. Hannah’s wallet was still inside. Whoever had driven the sedan hadn’t been the type to indulge in casual looting. Gideon dropped the bag down onto the sand. Someone who passed up a wallet in circumstances such as this might have been intent on offering assistance. Or he might have had other things on his mind.

  Gideon looked back at the jeep and tried to imagine which way Hannah might have gone if she’d unbuckled herself after the accident and crawled out. She would have been shaken and badly bruised at the very least, probably far more severely injured. The rocks would have seemed much too formidable to climb in that condition. She would have headed toward the beach, perhaps with some idea of walking to a point where she could more easily scale the cliff to the main road. The beach stretched invitingly to the left but twisted into a jumbled maze of rocks and slippery sand to the right. Someone trying to walk away from a serious accident would probably have turned to the left.

  That analysis left unanswered the question of what the person or persons in the dark sedan had done. If they had come down the cliff and found the jeep empty they would probably have reasoned much as Gideon had. They certainly had not driven off in search of assistance. That left Gideon with the conclusion that whoever had been driving the sedan had gone in search of Hannah.

  The storm was letting up a little already. A weak moon offered some visibility as the clouds began to disperse. Rain still fell in wind-driven sheets here and there
. There was no point searching in the glove compartment of the jeep for anything so useful as a flashlight. Rental agencies weren’t that thoughtful. In any event there was a chance that a light might be more dangerous than useful. It would advertise his position for several yards. Gideon wasn’t sure he wanted his position advertised. Not until he’d figured out who had been in the dark sedan.

  A fierce urgency drove him as he started along the beach in the only direction in which Hannah would have gone if she’d managed to escape the jeep. The waves that broke along the sand glistened with an iridescent whiteness less than a yard from his shoes. Gideon broke into a ground-covering jog. The storm-ruffled sea created enough noise to shield the sound of his footsteps.

  Every inch of the way Gideon kept his eyes moving, scanning the open expanse of sandy beach for a dark, huddled form. Surely she couldn’t have gone far. She would be suffering from shock at the very least. In the chancy moonlight and the intermittent rain there were no clues to tell if someone had come this way ahead of him. He could only follow the logical route and hope.

  The beach began to narrow. The cliff walls grew closer as Gideon moved along the water’s edge. He was going to run out of sand fairly soon. It looked as if the beach ended in a formidable tumble of rocks at this end just as it had at the other end. If someone else had followed Hannah, he couldn’t be far ahead. Gideon slowed and moved into the deep shadows of the cliff.

  He thought again about the photojournalist’s bag lying on the sand. There was another possibility that he didn’t want to contemplate. Once before someone had attempted to drown Hannah. If whoever had followed her down the cliff had found her unconscious or injured in the jeep, it would have been a simple matter to pull her free and drag her into the water to finish the job.