Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (46 page)

     "I'll make it."

     Jack led them in the direction Fallon had taken the two women. They stopped short when they arrived at three tunnels branching away before them.

     "Mr. Armstrong, do you know your way around down here?"

     Zeb shook his head. "There's a reason the local Indians call these caves haunted. People go in and don't come out."

     "Welcome to the Hotel California," Jack muttered as he surveyed the three branching tunnels.

     "We could split up," Zeb offered, "but we only have the lantern and one flashlight. Which means we can only search two tunnels."

     Vanessa inspected the mouth of each, scanning the rocky walls with her flashlight. "What's this?" She bent and examined the fresh scratch marks in the rock.

     Zeb ran his fingers over the scratches. "Fresh. About waist level."

     "Abby used her wristwatch to mark the way!"

     They moved cautiously into the tunnel, encountering more scratch marks, hearing the wind now, realizing they were not far from an entrance. But they had arrived at another fork in the tunnels. Jack peered ahead into the maw of darkness and recalled what he knew of the layout of Indian Rocks.

     As if he were competing in a field archery competition, unmarked-distance, Jack listened for the wind above them, noted the movement and direction of the cave drafts, mentally calculated the exterior distances...

     "There's an opening not far from here," he said, remembering when he had gone after a stray arrow and found a crevasse. "We can use it to backtrack and head Fallon off. Come on!"

     "Daddy?"

     Fallon spun around. Francesca was sitting up.

     "Is it true?"

     He looked down at her, the gun still in his hand.

     "You married my mother to get the casino? Is that true?" She rose unsteadily to her feet. "And Erik? You had him killed?"
The worthless skydiver.

     She looked at Abby and now saw what she had been blinded to back in the main cave: her resemblance to this woman.

     "Please don't kill her." Francesca held her hands out, pleading. "You're still my Daddy. It doesn't matter how I came to be your daughter. You adopted me. Let's go home. Let's forget about these people. I'll marry Stephen. Everything will be just like it was."

     "No," he said. "We can't trust her not to show up and ruin everything. Trust me, baby, we have to be free of her. I want your life to be perfect. It's what I've lived for." He reached out to touch Francesca's cheek and Abby
seized upon Fallon's brief distraction. Swinging the lantern hard against his head, she grabbed Francesca's wrist, and ran.

     "Are we lost?" Francesca asked minutes later. She was numb with shock. Her father confessing to abducting her as a baby, saying he killed Erik. It was like a horrible dream.

     Abby turned this way and that, sensed a change in the air, and said, "Up ahead, that's the way out."

     But they went just a few yards when Francesca said, "What's that sound?"

     They held their breath as they listened. "Huffing," Abby said. "A female coyote calling to her pups."

     And then there she was, directly in their path, her bushy tail raised horizontally—a sign of aggression.

     "Don't move," Abby said. "If there are pups, the male could be nearby." Abby ran a dry tongue over her lips. "Back up slowly," she said, putting herself between Francesca and the growling coyote. "Watch your step. Don't hurry. Don't make any sudden moves."

     The animal stayed put, alert and ready to spring, as the two woman moved cautiously away. "She won't follow us," Abby said. "She's just protecting her den."

     They backtracked through the passageways, pushing through massive cobwebs, stepping over old bones until they came upon a corridor hewn from the rock by manmade tools. Abby recalled that back in the thirties, miners had dug here. Rotten timber beams still supported the ceiling.

     When they heard a sound, they thought the coyote had followed them. But another variety of desert predator had found them.

     Fallon.

     "I can hear the wind!" Vanessa said. "We must be near an entrance."

     "It sounds like the storm is dying down," Jack said.

     "What's that up ahead? It looks like—Oh my God!"

     Fallon aimed his gun. "Francesca, come here."

     But Francesca had lived all her life with the guilt of having killed her mother. She was being given a second chance. "No. I won't let you do this."

     "Francesca, do as I say," Fallon said more sternly as he cocked the pistol.

     And then: "Drop it!" Jack Burns stood there gripping his service revolver with both hands, aiming it at Fallon.

     Fallon spun around, fired. The bullet struck a rotten beam, splitting it. The ceiling began to give way. Abby grabbed Francesca and ran toward Jack. They covered their heads as the ceiling crashed down in a thunderous roar. When the dust cleared, they saw the tunnel blocked completely with rocks, sealing Fallon on the other side.

     Abby fell into Jack's arms. "Thank God you're okay," he said, holding her.

     "Jack, we have to get Fallon out of there. There was no other exit."

     But Zeb was grabbing Vanessa's arm. "The rest of the ceiling's about to come down. Quick! This way!"

     Fallon dug frantically at the rock slide that had cut him off from the others, trapping him in a small chamber. Sand sifted down as he clawed until his fingers bled. He was hot and suffocating. He stripped off his jacket and threw it down. As the air grew thick with dust, Fallon thought he heard his mother's voice. But that wasn't possible. A phone call yesterday: "The job in Miami has been taken care of." How was it done? Poison? A pillow over the face?
Did Lucy know it was her son who had ordered her murder?

     As sand rained down from the ceiling, he remembered Rocco Guzman years ago, buried up to his neck in sand and turning purple. He thought of all the other graves out there in the desert around Las Vegas.

     And a little one—Gayane's dead baby—buried behind a cheap motel on Highway 91.

     He grabbed the lantern and swept it over the rock pile, searching for places to dig. The light fell upon a white object on the cave floor: the envelope he had found on the passenger seat of the Cessna. He had forgotten all about it.

     Tearing it open, he examined the contents in the fading light of the lantern. It contained a death certificate, the thousand-dollar teal poker chip, and a letter.

     Lucy Fallon's last words, dictated to a nurse three months prior:
"Dearest son, I am old and have not long to live. The priest has heard my confession. I am ready to meet God. This chip was given to me the night you were conceived. It was given to me by your father. I kept his name from you because
I didn't want you to follow in his footsteps. But you did anyway. You are so like him, that charming evil man. I make no excuses for what happened that December night during the grand opening of the Flamingo Hotel. I was young, naïve and dazzled. He seduced me.

     
"You want me to tell you that your father was Bobby Bavacua or Tony Cuzamano, men with glamour in their names. But the man who sired you was Benjamin Siegel, the monster whom everyone called Bugsy. When I told him I was pregnant with his child, he laughed at me and had me thrown out."

     Fallon stared in amazement as the sand sifted down, more heavily now.

     Bugsy Siegel, lynchpin of the Jewish mob! He laughed. Michael Fallon in his Giorgio Armani suit and Bruno Magli loafers and Italian tie and watch, his hair styled by a barber named Scorcese, Michael Fallon who had lived all his life as the proudest Italian on earth, now thought:
What a kicker. All these years I've been going to the wrong goddam church.

     A chunk of the ceiling suddenly gave way, and sand and rock rained down on Fallon's head. "No!" he shouted. He began to dig again, clawing at the stone and debris, frantically tearing at the rubble until his fingers grew raw and bloody. He began to sob.
Francesca!
His lungs hacked up dust until pain shot through his chest.
We'll go away together. We'll forget what happened here...

     A fragment dropped from the ceiling and caught the back of his head. Fallon saw stars and planets. He slumped onto the growing pile of dirt and lay there until his arms stopped moving. Blood trickled onto the rising mound of sand around him, he tasted blood and grit as darkness closed in around him and the lantern was extinguished.

     As he was plunged into the darkness of a grave, and sand filled his lungs, he realized he wasn't a bit surprised this was happening. Michael Fallon had always hated the desert. And after fifty-seven years of fighting it, he conceded that the desert had finally won.

     The sandstorm had moved on and Riverside County Sheriff's search and rescue teams were scouring the caves for Michael Fallon. Among the
volunteer searchers was a Grove employee who had been working under the name of Pierre. When he had received the call that his assignment had been cancelled, he had accepted the dismissal with equanimity, having decided to stay on at the resort, maybe drop out of the contract killing business altogether, the ladies here being so grateful.

     The resort's nurse was seeing to Francesca's head wound, with Vanessa at her side, thinking of the night she was born. And now here she was, reunited with her mother at last.

     Vanessa looked over at Abby who was giving a report to the sheriff, and she thought how ironic to see her friend conversing freely with a law official.
How far we have come since those days at White Hills.
It would never cease to amaze Vanessa the special magic that life can hold.

     She and Zeb had plans to go to Africa. The night before, after making love for the first time, before Fallon and the sandstorm, they had talked until dawn about Africa and Zeb's passion to preserve the endangered wildlife. Vanessa had re-awakened his old dream. In a few days they were leaving for Kenya, both of them "going home."

     The sheriff finished his interview, thanked Jack and Abby, and left. "How are you doing?" Jack asked when they were alone. His arm was in a sling, a proper bandage in place of Abby's ruined blouse. A paramedic had draped a blanket around her shoulders, but one of the silk straps of her camisole peeped through.

     Abby filled her eyes with the sight of him. Jack's face was smudged, there was a wisp of spider web in his hair. It amazed her to think that she did not even know this man five days ago. "I'm fine," she said. "And you, Jack?"

     He was thinking what a gracious hostess she would be at Crystal Creek Winery, what a special place she could turn it into. But he needed to know: "In your bungalow, Abby, I saw a suitcase. It had a coat thrown over it, and your purse. And I saw the airline ticket."

     "Yes," she said. "I'm going away."

     He waited.

     "Jack, last night I didn't get a chance to finish my story. I was never released from prison. I escaped. I have been wanted by the FBI ever since. I have a bounty on my head. That's why I have been hiding here."

     "And now you are going to run again?"

     "No. Ever since I was wrongly convicted I have wanted to fight to have the ruling overturned. But I couldn't do it until I found my daughter. She was all that mattered. Once I found her, and was satisfied that she was happy, then I was going to turn myself in and begin the fight for acquittal. When the private investigator told me he had finally traced my child through an illegal adoption ring, I contacted a criminal lawyer in Houston. He agreed to take my case. His team has been studying the trial transcripts and searching for witnesses."

     Abby's lawyers were already tracking down the people who had been in the roadside nursery at the time of Avis Yocum's murder—tourists her own court-appointed attorney hadn't bothered to look for and who would certainly remember being in the nursery that day because it was Labor Day and a girl with red-gold hair had taken their pictures in front of a giant saguaro cactus named Horny Sam.

     Abby's team had also located the driver of the Greyhound bus, long since retired but who remembered picking up a girl that particular morning, at a deserted crossroads in New Mexico, because it was the first time he had ever picked up a passenger there. So Abby was in the process of being cleared of involvement in the liquor store hold-up and killings. When asked what happened to the black girl Mercy, she said she had no idea.

     "Jack, Abby Tyler is leaving The Grove and never coming back. It will be Emily Louise Pagan who returns."

     He marveled at her courage. She could disappear again under another name. Instead, she was going to fight for her innocence.

     Jack brought out the Wanted Poster and tore it into tiny pieces, placing them in Abby's hand. "I don't think I could have arrested you anyway. Not after everything I've learned in the past few days. The most important of which is that it's impossible to think clearly with clenched fists."

     Her eyes filled with tears. "And I have learned that the heart expands. I thought for years that I only had room in my heart for my daughter. But the heart always makes room for more."