Mimosa Grove (22 page)

In a short time there was a large-enough crack in that corner that Robert could put his thumb through. With his last ounces of strength, he pulled himself forward, laid his cheek against the floor as close to the crack as he could get and inhaled.

It was dusty and rank and smelled hotter than the insides of hell, but it was air, and better than what was left inside some stranger’s final resting place. He took another breath, then another and another, until enough oxygen had filtered through his brain that he trusted himself to speak.

The phone was still in his other hand. He lifted it to his ear, making himself focus when it would have been far easier just to sleep, and heard his daughter screaming his name.

“Laurel.”

Her name on his lips was like music from the angels. She pressed her fingers against her mouth to keep from crying and then made herself focus.

“Daddy. I see things…but nothing specific that will help us find you. Do you know where you are?”

“In a crypt.”

“Oh, God…oh, God,” she muttered, then made herself calm down. “Do you know where it is? Are you close to a town or a city? Did you see a name on any road signs?”

“I told you everything I know,” he mumbled, then tried to laugh. It sounded more like a sob, but she wouldn’t let herself think of what that would mean. “I don’t know where I am.” Then he added as an afterthought, “There’s a casket in here.”

Laurel closed her eyes. “Touch something, Daddy. Touch the walls. Touch the casket. I need something to lock onto.”

He tried another laugh. “This is crazy.”

“Humor me,” she begged. “Where are you?”

“Lying on the floor. Running out of air.”

Fear shattered her concentration. It was a sharp shake from Marie that made her focus again.

“Touch the walls, Daddy. Do it for me.”

He sighed, then opened his hand. The wall was damp and slightly cool, reminding him of how desperately he wanted a drink of water, but he did as he’d been told.

Almost immediately, Laurel saw twin crypts and again the angel with hands reaching toward her. Then the vision suddenly narrowed, and she saw the door of a crypt, then a name carved in stone above it.

“George Henry Gooden—1904-1980.”

Justin scribbled the name, yanked his cell phone out of his pocket and called Harper Fonteneau.

“Harper! Don’t ask me why, but can you find the final resting place for a man named George Henry Gooden? Born 1904. Died 1980.”

“Yes.”

“Then do it! As fast as you can. It’s worth a man’s life. Call me back at this number.” He rattled off his cell phone number, then disconnected.

Laurel was still talking to her father, but his side of the conversation was starting to break up as the battery in his phone started to go dead.

He could hear a faint beep against his ear and knew what it meant. His tenuous connection with her was almost over.

“It’s not your fault,” he said hoarsely.

“Daddy…don’t die. Please don’t die. I’m sorry for all the fights we’ve had. I’m sorry for everything that made you unhappy. Just please don’t die.”

His answer faded with the weakening battery, leaving her with only half the truth.

“…love…not your…sorry, too. You’re…danger. Tell Clausing…Trigger…”

The line went dead. Her connection with her father was gone.

The phone slid out of her grasp, dangling from the cord against the wall as she buried her face in her hands.

Marie laid a hand on the back of Laurel’s head.

“I’m sorry, baby girl.”

Laurel turned around and buried her face against the old woman’s breasts. Marie hung up the phone, then wrapped her arms around Laurel and held her close.

Justin came running into the kitchen.

“We’re not out of this yet,” he said, and laid his cell phone on the table, then put his arms around them both. “Don’t give up, honey. Not yet.”

As always after a vision, Laurel felt herself weakening. She needed to sleep but was afraid that if she did, she would wake up to find herself having to plan a funeral.

“Help me,” she begged, and with their help, she managed to stand.

She staggered to the kitchen door, then opened it and walked out onto the back porch. Almost immediately, she saw the occasional flash of light moving through the grove.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing toward the trees.

Marie put a hand on her back.

“That’s the men huntin’ for the painter.”

“In the dark?” Laurel asked.

“That’s when the big cats hunt. The men…they playin’ on the painter’s turf, so they have to do as he does.”

Laurel shuddered. “I never knew life could be so…so…visceral. It wasn’t like this in D.C.”

Marie sighed, gave Justin a worried look and went back into the house.

Justin hated the sound in Laurel’s voice and feared that she was pulling away from him and the land that he loved. He put his arms around her, then held her close, resting his chin at the crown of her head and feeling the weight of her breasts against his wrists.

“Are you sorry?” he whispered.

“For what?”

“For coming to Mimosa Grove?”

“No.”

“You need to know that I would die to keep you happy.”

Laurel turned in his arms and then realized true night had come when she couldn’t see the features of his face. She reached up, taking comfort in the shape of him beneath her palms.

“And you need to know that your death would break my heart, so don’t waste the gesture.”

“Something your father said…”

“What?”

“Something about you being in danger.”

Laurel frowned. In the heat of the moment, she’d let that go over her head, but now that he’d reminded her, she remembered.

“Yes, he did, didn’t he?”

“From the man who kidnapped him?”

“I guess so.”

“He said something about a trigger. Do you think he was talking about a gun?”

And in that moment, she knew.

Before, her father had said to tell them it was DeLane. And all the while she’d thought he was talking about the general who sat on the President’s cabinet. But it wasn’t him. It was his son, Trigger. She vaguely remembered seeing the blond playboy at various parties over the years but hadn’t given him a thought. Now she realized she’d better think twice.

“It wasn’t a gun. It was a man. His name is Trigger DeLane, and somehow he’s connected to McNamara, the man my father’s prosecuting for treason.”

“Then you could be in danger,” Justin said.

“Maybe,” Laurel said. “I don’t know why.”

“I do,” Justin said. “Think about it. If he knows you, then he knows what you can do. Your father was talking to you when your call was cut short, right?”

She nodded.

“Then it stands to reason that the man who took your father might believe you know his identity, if for no other reason than your second sight. Obviously, wherever he left your father, he intended for him to die. So it follows he’ll want to get rid of anyone else who could still identify him.”

Laurel turned, then stared out into the darkness.

“Come inside,” Justin urged.

She followed without hesitation.

W
ithin seconds after Justin reentered the house, a phone began to ring, but it wasn’t the residence phone. He hurried toward the table where he’d left his cell.

“Harper?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Harper said. “I got your information. The man is buried in a small cemetery near St. Lorraine.”

Justin groaned. “That’s nearly an hour’s drive from here. We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Yeah, I gathered that from what you were saying,” Harper said. “I’ve got the parish police from St. Lorraine on hold on the other line. What do you want me to tell them?”

“Just a second,” Justin said, and ran from the kitchen to the library, where he’d written down the information. “Here it is,” he said. “Tell them someone kidnapped Laurel’s father, Robert Scanlon. It’s too complicated to explain right now, but we think he’s in their local cemetery and locked inside one of the smaller mausoleums. Laurel said to look for two identical crypts standing side by side with an angel between them. The angel’s arms are reaching forward. Scanlon will be in the one that has George Henry Gooden’s name above the door.”

“Holy Moses,” Harper muttered. “What’s going on out there?”

“Just tell them to hurry and, Harper, call us the moment you hear anything more.”

“You got it,” Harper said.

Justin disconnected, then realized Laurel was standing beside him. She’d learned to mask her feelings so well over the years that he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Then she spoke, and he heard the tremble in her voice.

“Justin…please tell me something good.”

“Gooden was buried in a small cemetery outside St. Lorraine, which is about an hour’s drive from here. Harper had the local authorities on the other phone waiting for instructions. They can be there within a matter of minutes. I gave them the directions. If he’s there, they’ll find him.”

“Oh, Lord,” she muttered, and covered her face with her hands.

“It’s going to be all right,” Justin said, and took her in his arms. But as he held her, he wasn’t so sure that he hadn’t told her a lie. After everything that had happened, he didn’t see how anything could ever be all right again.

And then, once again, the phone began to ring, but this time it was the phone at Mimosa Grove.

Laurel turned away from the sound and put her hands over her ears.

Justin reached for the receiver and picked it up.

“Mimosa Grove.”

“This is Attorney General Andrew Clausing. I need to speak to Laurel Scanlon.”

“One moment, please,” he said, and handed Laurel the phone. “It’s Clausing.”

After the way he’d dismissed her before, she was in no mood to talk to him again. She was frowning as she took the phone.

“Yes?”

Clausing sighed. The distance in her voice was unmistakable.

“Miss Scanlon, I just called to apologize and to tell you that your father was right. We have issued a federal arrest warrant for Gerald Dupont DeLane, aka Trigger DeLane, for charges of treason against the United States of America, as well as conspiracy to commit treason.”

“You can add kidnapping and attempted murder to that,” she said shortly. “And if my father does not survive until the arrival of the St. Lorraine authorities at the burial vault where DeLane left him, then you can amend that to murder.”

Clausing sat down.

“What?”

“You heard me,” Laurel said. “I told you he’d been kidnapped. I told you he was in danger.”

“Where—”

“If you have any further questions regarding what happened to my father, contact the parish police here in Bayou Jean. The man in charge is Harper Fonteneau. Or you can call the parish police in St. Lorraine, Louisiana. They’re in the act of recovering my father…or what’s left of him.”

“But how—”

“We have nothing to say to each other,” Laurel said, and handed Justin the phone.

“She might be through with you, but I’m not,” Justin said. “One of the last things Robert Scanlon said was that Laurel was in danger. So I’m giving you fair warning. If anything happens to her because of your reluctance to react or any kind of negligence on behalf of the federal government, I will drag you and everyone connected with you through the dirt in front of every media outlet in the Northern Hemisphere. Do I make myself clear?”

Clausing’s face paled as his fingers tightened around the phone. “Yes.”

“Do you know where Mimosa Grove is located?”

“No, but I can—”

“Five miles south of Bayou Jean, Louisiana. Make yourself known upon your arrival or you’re liable to be shot on sight for trespassing.”

The phone went dead in Clausing’s ear. He stared at the receiver, then slowly laid it back on the cradle and took a deep breath. The clock on the wall opposite his desk began to strike the hour. He looked up in disbelief. It was almost nine. He looked out the window. It was dark.

“Eileen?”

His secretary appeared in the doorway.

“Why are you still here?” he mumbled.

“Because you are, sir. Is there anything you need?”

“Yes. Get Gabe Clancy on the phone. I don’t care where he is or what he’s doing. We need to talk.”

Robert Scanlon came to just long enough to realize something was crawling on his face. He swiped it away and then shuddered, trying not to think what it might have been. His lungs felt heavy, as if someone was sitting on his chest.

He shifted slightly, then rolled over, feeling the roughness of the floor against his bare belly as he pressed his nose toward the crack in the wall, then took a small breath. Before, he’d taken the act of breathing for granted, but never again. He’d never realized that air could be tasted as well as smelled, but he knew it now. He lay without moving, savoring the faint scent of night that had come to the land, and thought about his life. He’d always heard that when a man was near death, his life would pass before his eyes, but since his death was taking longer than usual, he had more time than one might expect to contemplate his failures.

At the thought, he wondered what a psychiatrist would make of the fact that the first thing to come to his mind had been his failures, rather than his successes. He supposed it might be construed as not having enough successes to contemplate. Lord only knew how many mistakes he had made. His marriage had been a mistake. Then he edited the thought. It hadn’t been the marriage so much as the way they’d behaved. That had been the mistake, and both he and Phoebe were to blame. Looking back over her behavior, he knew that if it had happened now instead of almost thirty years ago, her condition could have been treated. Even after she’d started blaming her psychic abilities on her inability to cope, he’d gone along with the notion because it seemed to give her some sense of relief. But it wasn’t true, and to his shame, he’d never told any of the family, not even Laurel, the truth. Phoebe hadn’t killed herself because she couldn’t bear the trauma of what she claimed she “saw” during psychic episodes. She was manic-depressive and had killed herself during one of her downswings. If he didn’t die in this mess, he was going to tell Laurel the truth. He owed that much to her, and more.

He lay for a few minutes with his nose to the crack, breathing and thinking how loud true quiet really was. He could hear his heartbeat, the sound of his breath. Even the sound of time ticking away seemed real, although he knew that was a crazy claim to make.

He wondered if the lack of oxygen was making his brain turn to mush, then supposed it was possible. If it was true, unless someone rescued him soon, it wouldn’t matter. If heaven was all it was cracked up to be, then God wouldn’t care what his earthly condition had been. It was Robert’s immortal soul that would be His concern.

Something was digging into his right leg near the knee. He shifted his position enough to alleviate the pain, then realized it hadn’t helped. At that point, he couldn’t really determine where the pain began. All he knew was that he hurt all over. And that he was sorry he was going to die before he got a chance to tell Laurel he loved her.

Tears came suddenly, followed by harsh, choking sobs. He wanted to curl up and weep for all the wasted years, but if he moved, he would not be able to breathe. So he cried, anyway, with his face against the wall and his fingers curled into fists, and thought of his mother and father, who’d been gone for years, and a childhood friend who died from polio when he was seven.

Two cars from the St. Lorraine police department were running lights and sirens as they sped out of town. The fire-rescue unit was behind them, as was the police chief in his private car. It was the largest display of local authority that had been seen since an eighteen-wheeler hauling for the Townsend pig farm had picked up a load of weanlings, then gone off the Fourche Maline bridge, dumping upwards of seven hundred just-weaned pigs into the river. It was the first time some had ever seen pigs swim, while others claimed little pigs were climbing up on shore for days all along the river. And since there were a good number of wild pig herds in the area, most decided there was more truth to the story than fiction.

But this time the deputies in the lead were less certain of the emergency. They had orders to drive out to the cemetery and pop the door on Old Man Gooden’s crypt. It seemed like the worst possible thing to do to a man’s final resting place, but orders were orders, and neither wanted to admit to the other that it gave them the creeps.

Marty grabbed hold of his seat belt and braced himself against the dash as Harvey drove headlong toward what felt like imminent disaster.

“Dang it all, Harvey, what is it we’re doing out here again?”

Harvey took the curve in the road too high and felt the tires on the passenger side of the patrol car sliding off the pavement. He corrected the skid and accelerated, relishing the feel of speed and the sound of the siren blasting in his ears.

On the other hand, Marty was not a man who enjoyed confrontation and, from time to time, thought about following in his daddy’s footsteps and joining the family funeral business. The only thing that kept him from pursuing it was the fact that he hated embalming dead people worse than he hated confrontation with the living.

“Somebody’s supposed to have stashed a kidnap victim in Old Man Gooden’s crypt. We’re goin’ to see if he’s really in there.”

“And if he’s not, who’s gonna tell Old Man Gooden we made a mistake?”

Harvey snorted. “You’re scared, aren’t you. Scared you’ll find a ghost in there.”

“No, I’m not scared. I just don’t like bothering a man’s final resting place, that’s all.”

“Look at it like this,” Harvey said. “If the victim is in there, he’ll be real glad we bothered.”

“I guess,” Marty said, and then pointed. “Slow down, Harvey. Up yonder is the gate.”

Harvey tapped the brakes, took the turn off the highway too fast, hit the old wire gate that was put up every night at sunset and drove clean over it.

“You drove over the gate!” Marty yelled.

“So? It’s not like anyone in here is gonna suddenly jump up and run out,” Harvey said, and headed toward the back of the cemetery.

He knew where George Gooden was buried because he’d been a pallbearer at the man’s funeral, but everything looked different in the dark.

“Look for two crypts with a big angel in between them,” he told Marty.

Marty leaned forward, squinting as they flew past one marker after the next without seeing anything familiar. “You need to slow down some,” he said.

“There they are!” Harvey shouted, and turned abruptly, then came to a halt, parking so that the headlights shone directly onto the door of George Gooden’s final home.

“Get the tools out of the trunk,” Harvey ordered, ignoring the still-blasting siren as he started toward the crypt.

Marty grabbed a sledgehammer in one hand and a tire iron in the other, opting to leave the pickax behind unless they ran into trouble.

Harvey was already at the crypt and pushing on the door when Marty thrust the tire iron in his hand.

“Here! See if you can wedge it into the crack, then I’ll drive it home with the hammer.”

Harvey hesitated, then shoved the tire iron in Marty’s hand and took away the hammer.

“Hell no. I’m not holding anything for you to hammer until you get your glasses back from Doc Bartlett.”

“I can see fine,” Marty argued.

“Good. Then you can watch me while I do the hammering.”

Marty thrust the tire iron into the crack beside the decorative knob, then turned his head as Harvey drew the hammer back. The blow from the sledgehammer was hard enough to make his arms tingle, but he managed to hold on. Two more blows and the door gave way, almost as if someone—or something—had decided to let them in.

“Christ,” Marty muttered, and took a sudden step back.

But Harvey had seen something that Marty could not. The headlights from the cruiser were aimed a little too far to the right to give him a perfect view, but there was still enough light to see the casket on the pedestal—and the body lying next to the wall.

“Tell the chief that he’s in here,” Harvey said. “And get the ambulance up here fast.”

He grabbed his flashlight from his belt and strode through the door as Marty turned on his heel and ran.

Harvey barely gave George Gooden a glance as he hurried past, then went down on his knees near the wall. When he put his hand on the man’s neck to test for a pulse, the skin felt clammy against his palm. He rolled him over on his back, uncertain what to expect.

“Mister! Mister! Can you hear me?” Harvey said.

Robert thought he was dreaming until someone moved him. At that point, he realized that either DeLane had come back or he’d been rescued after all.

He tested the air by taking a deep breath and almost cried when oxygen filled his lungs, then went rocketing through his system. Then he choked and spent several precious gasps trying to catch his breath before a normal breathing rhythm kicked in.

“I’ll be damned,” Harvey muttered when the man showed signs of life.

“Hurry up!” he shouted. “He’s in a bad way.”