The Hidden

Yes, it was Gwen. And now Scarlet understood. Terry hadn’t killed Cassandra. Gwen had committed that murder. And it had probably been easy enough for her to hide her activities from Charles. She had pretended to be out cold on her headache pills, and he had borne witness to that.

“Oh, shut up and help,” Terry said. “Scarlet, come out, wherever you are. I really would like to make this easy on you.”

“You’re not going to make it easy on her. She knows where the damned gold is, and you’re going to have to make her tell you,” Gwen said.

Scarlet tried to register just where Gwen was standing. Voices had a strange habit of ricocheting around the stones and mausoleums in a cemetery. She was hiding behind the Vickers mausoleum, ironically enough, and she thought the two of them were near the old wrought-iron gates, but she didn’t dare look, in case they spotted her.

She had to be careful when she made her move. Terry might not be the best shot unless his victim was right in front of him, but even if she was only winged or wounded, she would be in trouble.

She started thinking about the six-shooter he was carrying. He’d obviously shot Angus, and he’d used another bullet on Lieutenant Gray. He’d shot her foot. He had three shots left.

Scarlet heard rustling and realized Terry and Gwen were on the move, and it sounded as if they were flanking her hiding place.

Was Gwen Barton carrying a gun? Did the disgustingly perky ex-cheerleader even know how to shoot?

Yes, she did, Scarlet thought. She was the one who had killed Cassandra.

Scarlet knew she might be signing her own death warrant, trapping herself, but she carefully opened the wrought-iron door to the mausoleum and slipped inside the cold stone darkness, hoping she could silently push the door shut and slide the lock into place from inside.

To her amazement, she accomplished the task with a minimum of noise—easily hidden by the rustle of her pursuers’ footsteps.

Then she nearly screamed.

There was a woman inside the mausoleum with her.

The long lost ghost of Jillian Vickers Kendall, appearing at last?

No.

The woman was real—well, real as in carved from wood. The matching piece to the statue of Nathan Kendall was standing at the far end of the vault. Scarlet couldn’t see her clearly, because the only illumination was the moonlight slipping through the wrought-iron door, but the workmanship looked to be as exquisite.

No one had been entombed in the mausoleum since the early 1900s, Scarlet knew. Had the mannequin been there since then?

And what the hell difference did it make? Terry and Gwen were out there looking for her, and they had at least one gun.

“Come out, come out, Scarlet, its playtime!” Terry called.

She could hear him coming closer. She had trapped herself.

To her left were the sealed coffins of her long gone family members. To the right, more of the same.

And at the back, the mannequin.

“Quit fucking around, Terry. She has to be in there, so go in and get her!”

“All right, all right!” Terry said, and shot at the lock.

Once. Twice.

The lock gave. Terry entered the mausoleum, and Scarlet shoved the mannequin of Jillian Vickers Kendall at him as hard as she could.

Terry screamed.

And shot the mannequin.

*

Diego reached the cemetery and slid off his horse’s back, racing as silently as he could through the cemetery, hoping that he was right about where the shots had come from.

As he neared the Vickers mausoleum, he saw Gwen Barton looking shocked and Terry lying on the ground beneath...

...a statue of a woman?

Diego couldn’t be bothered to worry about that, because Gwen was holding what had to be the missing antique Colt and Scarlet had to be somewhere nearby.

“Drop the gun, Gwen, or I’ll shoot,” he said, his Glock aimed at her heart. He’d meant what he’d said, and he was sure she knew it.

“My, my, my, we do have a dilemma here, don’t we? Honestly, men screw everything up. Terry turned out to be as big a buffoon as that idiot I had to marry to make this work.”