The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (7 page)

‘Yeah. Well, I wasn’t.’ Miriam relieved her of her coat and led her into the living room. ‘I’m really glad you’re taking it so calmly. For me, I put in three
years and nothing to show for it but hard work and junk bonds – then some asshole phoned me and warned me off. How about you? Have you had any trouble?’

Paulette peered at her curiously. ‘What kind of warning?’

‘Oh, he kind of intimated that he was a friend of Joe’s, and I’d regret it if I stuck my nose in any deeper. Playing at wiseguys, okay? I’d been worrying about you . . .
What’s this about a job offer?’

‘I, uh – ’ Paulette paused. ‘They offered me my job back with strings attached,’ she said guardedly. ‘Assholes. I was going to accept till they faxed through
the contract.’

‘So why didn’t you sign?’ Miriam asked, pouring a mug of coffee while Paulette opened the pizza boxes.

‘I’ve seen nondisclosure agreements, Miriam. I used to be a paralegal till I got sick of lawyers, remember? This wasn’t a nondisclosure agreement; it was a straitjacket. If
I’d signed it, I wouldn’t even own the contents of my own head – before and after working for them. Guess they figured you were the ringleader, right?’

‘Hah.’ There was a bitter taste in Miriam’s mouth, and it wasn’t from the coffee. ‘So. Found any work?’

‘Got no offers yet.’ Paulette took a bite of pizza to cover her disquiet. ‘Emphasis on the yet. You?’

‘I landed a freelance feature already. It’s not going to cover the salary, but it goes a hell of a way. I was wondering – ’

‘You want to carry on working the investigation.’

It wasn’t a question. Miriam nodded. ‘Yeah. I want to get the sons of bitches, now more than ever. But something tells me moving too fast is going to be a seriously bad idea. I mean,
there’s a lot of money involved. If we can redo the investigative steps we’ve got so far, I figure this time we ought to go to the FBI first – and then pick a paper. I think I
could probably auction the story, but I’d rather wait until the feds are ready to start arresting people. And I’d like to disappear for a bit while they’re doing that.’ A
sudden bolt of realization struck Miriam, so that she almost missed Paulette’s reply:
The locket! That’s one place they won’t be able to follow me! If –

‘Sounds possible.’ Paulie looked dubious. ‘It’s not going to be easy duplicating the research – especially now that they know we stumbled across them. Do you really
think it’s that dangerous?’

‘If it’s drugs money, you can get somebody shot for a couple of thousand bucks. This is way bigger than that, and thanks to our friend Joe, they now know where we live. I don’t
want to screw up again. You with me?’

After a moment, Paulette nodded. ‘I want them too.’ A flash of anger. ‘They don’t think I matter enough to worry about.’

‘But first there’s something I need to find out. I need to vanish for a weekend,’ Miriam said slowly, a fully formed plan moving into focus in her mind – one that would
hopefully answer several questions. Like whether someone else could see her vanish and reappear, and whether she’d have somewhere to hole up if the anonymous threats turned real – and
maybe even a chance to learn more about her enigmatic birth-mother than Iris could tell her.

‘Oh?’ Paulette perked up. ‘Going to think things over? Or is there a male person in play?’ Male persons in play were guaranteed to get Paulie’s notice: Like Miriam,
she was a member of the early thirties divorcée club.

‘Neither.’ Miriam considered her next words carefully. ‘I ran across something odd on Monday night. Probably nothing to do with our story, but I’m planning on
investigating it and I’ll be away for a couple of days. Out of town.’

‘Tell me more!’

‘I, um, can’t. Yet.’ Miriam had worked it through. The whole story was just too weird to lay on Paulie without some kind of proof to get her attention. ‘However, you can
do me a big favor, okay? I need to get to a rest area just off a road near Amesbury with some hiking gear. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but it’s the best way to make sure nobody’s
following me. If you could ride out with me and drive my car home, then put it back there two days later, that would be really good.’

‘That’s . . . odd.’ Paulette looked puzzled. ‘What’s with the magical mystery tour?’

Miriam improvised fast. ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to get you to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would make anything
The Weatherman
offered you look liberal.
And the whole thing is super-secret; my source might spike the whole deal if I let someone in on it without prior permission. I’ll be able to tell you when you pick me up afterward,
though.’ If things went right, she’d be able to tell a more-than-somewhat-freaked Paulie why she’d vanished right in front of her eyes and then reappeared in front of them.
‘And I want you to promise to tell nobody about it until you pick me up again, okay?’

‘Well, okay. It’s not as if I don’t have time on my hands.’ Paulette frowned. ‘When are you planning on doing your disappearing act? And when do you want picking
up?’

‘I was – they’re picking me up tomorrow at 2 p.m. precisely,’ said Miriam. ‘And I’ll be showing up exactly forty-eight hours later.’ She grinned.
‘If you lie in wait – pretend to be eating your lunch or something – you can watch them pick me up.’

*

Friday morning dawned cold but clear, and Miriam showered then packed her camping equipment again. The doorbell rang just after noon. It was Paulette, wearing a formal black
suit. ‘Hey, Paulie, who died?’

‘I had a job interview this morning.’ Paulette pulled a face. ‘I got sick of sitting at home thinking about those bastards shafting us and decided to do something for number
one in the meantime.’

‘Well, good for you.’ Miriam picked up her backpack and led Paulie out the front door, then locked up behind her. She opened her car, put the pack in, then opened the front doors.
‘Did it go well?’ she asked, pulling her seat belt on.

‘It went like – ’ Paulette pulled another face. ‘Listen, I’m a business researcher, right? Just because I used to be a paralegal doesn’t mean that I want to
go back there.’

‘Lawyers,’ Miriam said as she started the engine. ‘Lots of work in that field, I guarantee you.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Paulette agreed. She pulled the sun visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. ‘Fuck, do I really look like that? I’m turning into my first
ex-boss.’

‘Yes indeed, you look just like – naah.’ Miriam thought better of it and rephrased: ‘Congresswoman Paulette Milan, from Cambridge. You have the floor,
ma’am.’

‘The first ex-boss is in politics now,’ Paulie observed gloomily. ‘A real dragon.’

‘Bitch.’

‘You didn’t know her.’

They drove on in amiable silence for the best part of an hour, out into the wilds of Massachusetts. Up the coast, past Salem, out toward Amesbury, off the Interstate and on to a four-lane
highway, then finally a side road. Miriam had been here before, years ago, with Ben, when things had been going okay. There was a rest area up on a low hill overlooking Browns Point, capped by a
powder of trees, gaunt skeletons hazed in red and auburn foliage at this time of year. Miriam pulled up at the side of the road just next to the rest area and parked. ‘Okay, this is
it,’ she said. There were butterflies in her stomach again:
I’m going to go through with it,
she realized to her surprise.

‘This?’ Paulette looked around, surprised. ‘But this is nowhere!’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Best place to do this.’ Miriam opened the glove locker. ‘Look, I brought my old camcorder. No time for explanations. I’m going to get out of
the car, grab my pack, and walk over there. I want you to film me. In ten minutes either I’ll tell you why I asked you to do this and you can call me rude names – or you’ll know
to take the car home and come back the day after tomorrow to pick me up. Okay?’

‘Miriam, this is nuts – ’

She got out in a hurry and collected her pack from the trunk. Then, without waiting to see what Paulette did, she walked over to the middle of the parking lot. Breathing deeply, she hiked the
pack up onto her back and fastened the chest strap – then pulled the locket out of the outer pocket where she’d stashed it.

Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enameled knot painted inside it.
This is stupid,
a
little voice told her.
And you’re going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don’t need to see a shrink.

Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knot –

HIDE-AND-SEEK

This time it was raining gently.

Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she’d planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and
deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.

‘The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five
miles per hour. I think.’

Snap, snap, snap
: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she’d have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss
army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversary – an odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewelry and real life – she
shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she’d come through. (It wouldn’t do to go back only to come
out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)

As she worked, she had the most peculiar sensation:
I’m on my second moon mission,
she thought. Did any of the Apollo astronauts go to the moon more than once? Here she was, not
going crazy, recording notes and taking photographs to document her exploration of this extraordinary place that simply wasn’t like home. Whatever ‘home’ meant, now that gangsters
had her number.

‘I still don’t know why I’m here,’ she recorded, ‘but I’ve got the same alarming prefrontal headache, mild hot and cold chills, probable elevated blood
pressure as last time. Memo: Next time bring a sphygmomanometer; I want to monitor for malignant hypertension. And urine sample bottles.’ The headache, she realized, was curiously similar to
a hangover, itself caused by dehydration that triggered inflammation of the meninges. Miriam continued: ‘Query physiological responses to . . . whatever it is that I do. When I focus on the
knot. Memo: Scan the locket, use Photoshop to rescale it and print it on paper, then see if the pattern works as a focus when I look at it on a clipboard. More work for next time.’

They won’t be able to catch me here
, she thought fiercely as she scanned around, this time looking for somewhere suitable to pitch her tent and go to ground.
I’ll be
able to nail them and they won’t even be able to find me to lay a finger on me!
But there was more to it than that, she finally admitted to herself as she hunted for a flat spot. The
locket had belonged to her birth-mother, and receiving it had raised an unquiet ghost. Somebody had stabbed her, somebody who had never been found. Miriam wouldn’t be able to lay that
realization to rest again until she learned what this place had meant to her mother – and why it hadn’t saved her.

With four hours to go before sunset, Miriam was acutely aware that she didn’t have any time to waste. The temperature would dip toward frost at night and she planned to be well dug-in
first. Planting her backpack at the foot of the big horse chestnut tree, she gathered armfuls of dry leaves and twigs and scattered them across it – nothing that would fool a real woodsman,
but enough to render it inconspicuous at a distance. Then she walked back and forth through a hundred-yard radius, pacing out the forest, looking for its edge. That there was an edge came as no
surprise: The steep escarpment was in the same place here as on the hiking map of her own world that she’d brought along. Where the ground fell away, there was a breathtaking view of autumnal
forest marching down toward a valley floor. The ocean was probably eight to ten miles due east, out of sight beyond hills and dunes, but she had a sense of its presence all the same.

Looking southwest, she saw a thin coil of smoke rising – a settlement of some kind, but small. No roads or telegraph poles marred the valley, which seemed to contain nothing but trees and
bushes and the odd clearing. She was alone in the woods, as alone as she’d ever been. She looked up. Thin cirrus clouds stained the blue sky, but there were no jet contrails.

‘The area appears to be thinly populated,’ she muttered into her dictaphone. ‘They’re burning something – coal or wood – at the nearest settlement. There are
no telegraph poles, roads, or aircraft. The air doesn’t smell of civilization. No noise to speak of, just birds and wind and trees.’

She went back to her clearing to orient herself, then headed on in the opposite direction, down the gentle slope away from her pack. ‘Note: Keep an eye open for big wildlife. Bears and
stuff.’ She patted her right hip pocket nervously. Would the pistol do much more than annoy a bear? She hadn’t expected the place to be quite this desolate. There were no bears, but she
ran across a small stream – nearly fell into it, in fact.

There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she’d seen. It was four o’clock now. She
returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and
leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-liter water carrier. Another half-hour
went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. As darkness fell, it found her lighting her portable gas
stove to boil water for her supper.
I did it
, she thought triumphantly.
I didn’t forget anything important!
Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the
morning of the next day without detection.