The Messenger: A Novel (19 page)

N
one of Brad’s friends has seen Eduardo Leblanc recently,” Alex said to the group gathered in the library—Tyler, Amanda, Brad, and Ron. Rebecca was a no-show. “In fact, Brad seems to have been the last person to see him.”

“You think he’s moved?” Amanda said.

“Or is dead,” Ron put in. “These people obviously play rough.”

“Hard to say,” Alex said. “For all I know, Eduardo’s still alive.” She handed a photo to Brad. “Is that him?”

Brad studied it. “Wow. He’s younger in this photo, but yes, that’s him.”

She handed the photo to Tyler. The photo had been taken on a ship. A handsome, dark-haired young man smiled at the photographer. It was hard to gauge his build—cradling a dive helmet in his arms, he was dressed in a deep-sea diving suit.

“Eduardo Leblanc has a habit of showing up in places and then disappearing for a while,” Alex said. “He’s traveled throughout Europe, especially in England, Spain, and Italy.”

Tyler passed the photo to Amanda. “You have a list of places he visited?”

“Some.” She consulted her notes. “London, Bristol, York, Chester. Paris, Marseilles. Rome, Florence, Ferrara, Milan. Barcelona, Madrid,
Valencia. He spent time in Navarre—a little longer than the other places. I also have reports that in each of these places, he often vanished into the countryside for days at a time.”

Tyler frowned. “I’ll give you a list of some properties near each of those areas. I’d like to know if he visited any of them.”

“Yours?”

“No,” he said, “but if my list matches his travel pattern, I have an idea why he may have visited those areas.” From the time Horace Dillon, the homeless man whose deathbed he had attended five days ago, had mentioned “an old enemy,” Tyler’s suspicions had lain in Colby’s direction, even though he had never truly considered Colby as such—probably because he was irritated by Colby’s attention to Amanda. Now, he saw his mistake.

All of the cities Alex had named were places where Adrian deVille had lived. In outlying areas some miles from each of them, Adrian had built small cottages, places where he might safely reappear. Tyler had spent a great deal of time discovering these retreats and systematically destroying them. Had he found them all?

He could only imagine Adrian’s wrath at discovering that his refuges no longer stood.

Alex said, “I asked if they were your properties, because Eduardo was apparently looking for you.”

“For me—by name?”

“Yes. He asked about you in each place but didn’t get any help.”

“Tyler…,” Amanda said faintly.

He smiled, trying to reassure her. “Shade is still with me, remember?” He turned to Alex. “What’s his source of wealth?”

“That’s a little difficult to determine, but I have some guesses.”

“Is sunken treasure one of them?” Tyler said.

She stared at him in astonishment. “How did you know?”

“Let’s say I made a good guess. Otherwise, I begin to believe I have been remarkably stupid about all of this. Tell me what else you’ve learned about Eduardo.”

“Eduardo Leblanc is indeed his real name. Cuban American, born
and raised in Florida. He has been estranged from his family since he was a teenager—his dad owned a dive shop, and Eduardo was a good diver, by all accounts. Eduardo turned eighteen, dropped out of high school in his senior year, went to work as a diver for a salvage company. Seemed happy with it until one disastrous dive.”

“They found the
Morgan Bray
.”

“The
Morgan Bray
—,” Amanda said.

“You know about it?” Alex said, openly puzzled.

“I knew someone who lost an ancestor on it,” Tyler said. “And, as it happens, I recently spoke to Amanda about that. It was a famous shipwreck in its day. Said to be cursed.”

“Well, that sure fits what happened to this expedition,” Alex said. “It nearly drove the company out of business. The owner said he had never experienced anything like it, and Eduardo was not the only diver who quit after that day. He and another diver were attacked by sharks—”

“Two divers?” Ron said. “Shark attacks on humans are really rare, and it’s almost always a lone diver or a surfer.”

“The owner of the dive company said much the same thing. He had worked in the Caribbean for decades, completed hundreds of dives, and had never seen sharks behave as they did. It was unheard of. But that wasn’t the only thing that went wrong. Other members of the dive crew suddenly fell ill. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of the ship’s specialized equipment malfunctioned or was damaged.”

“They don’t blame Eduardo for all of that, do they?” Brad said.

“No, of course not.”

After a moment, Tyler asked, “Do you think the ship owner would let you see a list of what they recovered from the
Morgan Bray
?”

“I’ll ask. He told me they had just started work on it when this disaster happened, and it took years for him to rebuild his company—the legal fees alone nearly did him in. But his company had the salvage rights, and he returned. He said they had no problems whatsoever after that.” She paused. “I got caught up in his story, but he gave me most of the information I was looking for early on—that Eduardo Leblanc had
worked for him, but quit and never returned after the problems with the
Morgan Bray
.”

“I may not need the list after all,” Tyler said. “Tell me what else you’ve learned.”

“Eduardo made his wealth from a treasure, it seems, but this former boss doesn’t believe that Eduardo did it legally. Because he started hearing rumors that Eduardo had made a discovery so soon after he left the company, at first he worried that Eduardo had stolen something from the
Morgan Bray
. When he investigated, though, he learned that the items Eduardo sold were two hundred or more years older than anything recovered from the
Morgan Bray,
and were mostly Spanish and Portuguese. The
Morgan Bray
was an English ship, not carrying anything in the nature of those items.”

“He’s had a silent partner,” Tyler said. “And I’m sure whatever wealth he acquired after that was by subtler means.”

“That fits,” Alex said. “I had suspected as much. What little information about his wealth I could track down didn’t match up with the expertise one would find in most twenty-one-year-old salvage divers. Every description of him before that dive was of an impulsive, rough-edged, and rather immature young man. Energetic and smart, but uneducated.”

“And after?”

“I can answer that,” Brad said. “If I hadn’t seen that photo, Alex, I’d swear the Eduardo I met was a different person. The Eduardo I knew was sophisticated, unassuming, soft-spoken…”

“Worldly-wise?”

Brad hesitated. “Yes, but world-weary, too. Cynical to the point of seeming depressed.”

They were interrupted by the entrance of Rebecca.

“Amanda, are you ready to go?”

“Alex?” Tyler asked.

“Sure. If Amanda’s ready?”

“Alex is not coming with us!” Rebecca said.

“Yes, she is,” Amanda said. “But—Tyler, do you think Rebecca should leave?”

“Not this again!” Rebecca said. “I refuse to be held prisoner here!”

Tyler sighed. “No one wants you to stay here if you don’t want to.” To Amanda he said, “I’ve tried to warn her. She refuses to hear what I have to say.”

“Rebecca, you do understand that you could be in danger?” Amanda asked.

“In danger of what?”

“The people who attacked Brad might attack you.”

“Nice try. Look, if you don’t want me staying at your house, I’ll just go home to the desert. But I am not staying here.” She stalked out of the room.

“If you’d like, I’ll have someone patrol there every hour or so,” Alex said. “We’re stretched a little thin right now, but in a few days the people who’ve been tracking down Eduardo can be back here, and I can have someone there twenty-four/seven after that.”

“Thanks,” Tyler said. “I think that would be a good idea, if Amanda won’t mind?”

“Not at all. Thanks.” Amanda sighed. “I guess we’d better get going, or she’s going to get down to my house and discover she doesn’t have a key to get in.”

“Hurry up then,” Brad said with disgust, “or she’ll break in a door.”

Half an hour later, Amanda stood on the small balcony outside her room. Alex had sensed that she needed time to herself, and left her alone on the pretext of checking the house to make sure it was still secure. Amanda had already packed up what she needed, and now she simply tried to calm herself, to overcome the feeling of foreboding that had been pressing in on her from the time she had heard that the wreckage of the
Morgan Bray
had been discovered. Was Adrian deVille alive again?

She looked up the hillside, toward Tyler’s house. She saw Shade standing on the deck, watching. She caught herself just before she waved to him and smiled. That didn’t seem such an odd thing to do, now that
she had come to know the dog better. Not long ago the sight of Shade would have frightened her. Now, he made her feel safer.

She remembered the story of the long-ago ancestor of the deVilles, the woman who had stood up to Adrian and befriended Shade. Shade would keep them safe.

She heard the rustling of leaves beneath the balcony.

She looked down and saw Shade.

Startled, she looked toward Tyler’s house. Shade was still there.

She looked between the two dogs, and although Shade was at some distance from her, she knew him well enough now to be able to see differences in the two dogs. Although also a very large dog, this one seemed to be a little less muscular than Shade, to have a slighter build. She stared, and her stare was returned unflinchingly. The dog seemed as fascinated with her as she was with him.

Him? Her? She couldn’t tell from here. She had the oddest feeling about it, as if she should hurry downstairs to be with it.

Not every big black dog was Shade, she reminded herself sternly, and her hand came up to touch her scar.

Suddenly the dog’s head turned, as if it had heard a distant sound, and it moved out of sight.

“Amanda? Did you find the spare key?”

Rebecca’s voice snapped her out of the spell the dog seemed to have cast on her.

She turned to see Rebecca standing in the bedroom doorway.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

On the way back to Tyler’s house, she thought of the night she and Alex had driven past the woods. Amanda had been distracted by seeing the ghosts, but Alex had said that she thought she had seen Shade.

It seemed likely that this other dog was the one that had been coming around her house. But was it another cemetery dog? Could there be more than one at a time? Was there someone else like Tyler, nearby? She recalled something in the pages Tyler had given her to read—a claim by
Adrian that he didn’t need Shade, that he would find another cemetery dog.

What if Adrian found this dog? What if he had already found it, and the dog was his?

She shivered. She would ask Tyler what to do.

But when she got back to the house, she learned that Tyler had just left.

Ron said, “He asked me to ask you to please—I was supposed to emphasize the ‘please’ part—stay here until he gets back.”

She agreed to do so and decided to spend some time in the library.

The ghosts were waiting for her there.

T
he pill bugs—Evan called them sow bugs—arrived during the morning, and in the afternoon an insect Daniel thought to be one of the most butt-ugly living creatures he had ever seen. When he dared to ask what it was, Adrian told him it was an ant lion, the larva of a dragonfly-like insect.

“They’re quite beautiful in the adult stage,” Adrian had said.

Daniel found that difficult to believe.

To his growing list of reasons for hating Adrian, he added ant lions.

Adrian was probably completely screwing up the environment, Daniel thought. Daniel wasn’t a scientist, but you didn’t need to be one to figure out that if a thousand of something got eaten up in the cellar, whatever usually ate that something was going hungry.

He was wondering if a thousand ant lions could be missed by anything or anyone when Adrian called Daniel and Evan to the basement.

He braced himself and followed Evan down the stairs. They were allowed to turn on the basement light now, but Daniel really wished they were back to the candle days. The only advantage was that they could now see what to avoid on the floor.

Adrian himself was worse than an ant lion. Far worse. Daniel knew that if they avoided looking at him, they would be punished, but the sight always turned his stomach.

Adrian had no skin. In some places—such as along the place where a man’s rib cage would be—he had something like an insect’s shell. His arms and legs were thin sticks, little more than muscle-covered bones. His feet were thin and long, and seemed almost too narrow to support him. His toes were fused together. His hands were pincers. Over his visible muscles, ligaments, and tendons, a thick mucus glistened.

Only his head seemed to be mostly human. He had no visible ears or nose, but he had dark eyes and hard, insect-shell eyelids now. Otherwise his mouth and other facial features seemed to be those of a man. A fleshless man.

The basement held a new odor, something like mustard, and although there was still an underlying scent of decay, the new stench masked it.

To Daniel’s relief, Adrian was focusing on Evan tonight.

“Do you know, Evan,” he said, “I had not realized previously what a handsome fellow you are…”

Evan blushed, but Daniel thought it was true that Evan was good looking, and what’s more, that Evan knew it. He had used those looks to get over on more than one woman. Evan wasn’t tops in the brains department, but women didn’t seem to mind.

Still, he didn’t blame Evan if it made him uneasy to hear Adrian talking like that.

“How old are you?” Adrian asked.

“Thirty-six, my lor—I mean, Mr. deVille.”

“Hmmm.”

Adrian’s eyelids make a clicking sound as he blinked, like the shutter of an old camera.

Adrian turned to Daniel.

“I have work for you to do.”

Daniel waited.

“It will be so much better when I have finished my transformation. I will be able to attend to these matters myself.” He sighed. “Evan tells me that Hawthorne’s lover may be back at her home. I want the two of you to make another trip there tonight, to confirm this. If it’s true, I want you to bring her to me.”

There was only one possible response, and Daniel made it. “Yes, sir.”