“I don’t know anything.” I’m about to plead my case, but Lincoln silences me when he holds up a prescription pill vial with my name on it. Xanax.
I think of the details Guidry shared about Gabrielle and the boys: traces of benzodiazepine, lungs filled with lake water. I’m guessing disposing of our bodies might be a little easier than getting rid of Gabrielle’s. We won’t have to be flown to an ocean to get the job done.
Mick waves at Lincoln to take it down a notch; Lincoln pockets the pills. “My son is running. I assume you’re following him. The authorities have a car full of my son’s blood. Eventually, when he fails to turn up, and when all of their leads take them nowhere, the police will have no choice but to declare him dead, and the insurance will pay the death benefit. Where do you plan to be when that happens, Veronica?”
It feels as if my blood is pooling in my legs. I’m dizzy, and it’s hard to focus, hard to formulate a thought, let alone words.
“Considering your history, do you think anyone will question it, if you turn up dead in a bathtub?”
“Please,” I say. “Not in front of the girls.” The irony is enough to kill me. Despite all my efforts to avoid it, history is about to repeat itself. My child will grow up wondering if there’s something she could’ve done. Wondering why she wasn’t important enough, special enough to keep me alive.
“It doesn’t have to happen that way,” Mick says. “It’s up to you.”
“I’ll cooperate. But I don’t know—”
“My son misplaced something valuable. His survival depends on my finding it.”
“But I don’t know . . .” I swallow over the Sahara in my throat. “Your men told me he was dead, and I believed them. I’m mourning my husband. I don’t know where he is or where he put the money, if he put it anywhere at all.”
“They were testing you,” Mick says. “They knew you’d show up at the bank. They knew you’d leave with money . . . to get it to Micah. So where is he?”
“I didn’t—look. I didn’t expect to find that much money in the box, and I wasn’t getting it for Micah. I was trying to pay the bills. We’re in debt. Lots of debt.”
He continues, as if I haven’t said a word: “I value my son’s life, but the value of yours depends on how helpful you’re willing to be.”
I glance at Lincoln—if I’d let him take the money in the bank that day, would this all have been over then? Not likely—$50,000 isn’t a substitute for $5 million. “You can have it—everything that’s left from the box. I didn’t know he stole from you. The police told me later, but if I’d known . . . Is that what this is about? Money he stole from you a decade ago?”
“Tsk, tsk,” he says. “Is that what you think of your husband’s character? He was honest enough that it took a certain amount of persuasion to bring him into the fold. Fifty thousand, to be exact, planted to make him look guilty. His mother assumed he was.”
The picture is becoming clearer. Mick staged it to look like Micah had stolen the money. When Micah said he was putting five grand in the deposit box, it was actually fifty.
“I made a deal with him,” Mick continues. “I’d drop the charges, and he could keep the money, as long as he did what I needed him to do. And he’s been doing it, until recently.”
My mind is flipping in circles as I piece together what might have happened. Mick needed someone to transport for Diamante. Micah didn’t want to do it, so Mick found a way he’d have to do it. Was that why Micah lost his job at United? Because Mick had him transporting something illegal? After that Micah didn’t have a choice but to go to work with his father—what other airline would hire him?
But something still doesn’t make sense: “If he did what you wanted, why are we here? What else is going on?”
Mick flashes a lupine grin. “Micah’s more of a chip off the old block than I knew. I set you up in that pretty little house on the golf course. Gave him enough to finance more grandbabies. He’s been taking money almost since the beginning. Ten grand here, ten there. Sharing my name only made it easier to access the accounts.”
I glance at Natasha. If he stashed money in the kiln, where else might it be? Then I look around—$1 million to buy this house.
“Let’s consider the money a bonus. But then he disappeared during his last drop, never showed in New York. Money is just money, but there are irreplaceable artifacts. I’m interested in where he stashed the diamonds.” He steps forward menacingly. “Particularly the blue diamond.”
I shake my head. “The blue . . . what?”
Both girls are sobbing now, as is Natasha, whose temple must ache with the cold steel barrel of a 9mm still pressed there.
I bounce Bella on my lap, the way I used to when she was colicky at a few months old. “Shh . . . it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“You need bait to catch a fish.” Mick’s lips curl into a sinister grin. “When Shell told me Micah’s kids were on Plum Lake, I assumed my men would find you there. Not the boys and the dyke.”
Wrong place, wrong time.
“And she was wearing a necklace with a blue stone—”
“It’s an aquamarine,” Natasha whispers.
“A misunderstanding. But things got a little out of hand. Lincoln had the bodies in a plane before my son even got there to tell them where he put the diamonds.”
Natasha draws in a stuttering breath over tears.
“The timing was perfect,” Mick continues. “I was overseas with an airtight alibi. The other one didn’t know enough to save her life. The question is . . . do you?”
I take a deep breath. “If I knew where to find the diamonds, the rest of the money, I’d hand it over to you. You’re welcome to search the entire house. Take whatever you find. But I don’t know where my husband is. Micah never told me anything about his business. I thought he was flying executives around the country. I had no idea he—”
My cell phone, abandoned on the counter when I grabbed hold of Papa Hemingway, rings.
I glance at it, then at my father-in-law.
But if he’s bothered by the fact that Detective Guidry is calling at this hour, he doesn’t let on.
He keeps his stare fixed on me, and finally, the ringing dies. “The blue diamond. He wouldn’t leave without it.”
Natasha’s aquamarine ring catches my attention.
Suddenly, it dawns on me: “The ring. I have the ring. It was in our box at the bank. If I give it to you, will you leave? Quietly? I found it, but I didn’t know what it was.” I swallow hard. “It’s in my suitcase upstairs, under my bed. In a blue velvet box. There’s some money in there, too.”
Mick gives the shorter, silent agent a nod, and the man disappears up the stairs.
We wait.
Natasha’s whimper is constant, as if a recording played on a continuous loop.
Bella shivers with tears and buries her head against me.
When the agent returns, he tosses the box in question onto the counter in front of me. “This box?”
With trembling fingers, I open the box.
It’s empty.
“And the money?” I ask.
“None,” the agent says.
My heart sinks. Micah must have been here again, just as Bella insisted. He must have taken the ring and the money, which means he’s not coming back.
And because I can’t produce it, and because we’re bait on a hook, waiting for a fish that’s not hungry, there’s no saving us.
“Search the garage,” Mick says to his errand boy, who quickly heads toward the front door. My father-in-law then nods to Lincoln. “How about a drink?”
Lincoln holsters his gun.
Natasha instantly gasps in relief.
Lincoln finds two glasses and pours generous shots of my welcome-to-the-island rum. He places one glass in front of me and one in front of Natasha.
I stare wide-eyed at it.
But Natasha gulps it down before I can stop her.
I know what’s in that rum.
Benzodiazepine.
And I know now who left it: The man who followed me halfway to Wisconsin in a brown sedan. The man now playing bartender in my kitchen.
“Drink,” Lincoln says.