Ivy Secrets (46 page)

She turned sharply and headed toward College Lane, knowing that the path along Paradise Pond would be a faster route to Tess’s and a less conspicuous place to run. She reached the path, took a deep, shaky breath, then started to race. Past the faculty center. Past Burton Hall, past the crew house and the plant house. Her calf muscles tightened; her feet burned. Why had she been such a fool to come to America unguarded? Why had she been so pigheaded about not bringing Reggie? Why hadn’t she tried harder, waited longer, to find Nicholas? Marina was alone now, alone, free, and scared. She slowed her pace, reached down, ripped off her sandals, tossed them over the embankment, and kept running. The asphalt stung her soles; cinders crunched into her flesh. She kept running. Alone.

She fled past the gardens of the president’s house. An image of her first Mountain Day rally leaped to mind: the throngs of girls gathered outside the house, bellowing for something as inconsequential as a day off from classes.
God
, Marina thought, as she pressed a hand to the stitch in her side,
none of these girls have any idea what real problems are.

She came out of the path onto … she didn’t know where. A street. Not Elm Street. A side street. Facing the Quad. Her heart pounded.
Stupid fool
, Marina thought.
What made you think you’d remember where you were?

She looked to the right. Was that Elm Street? She struggled to catch her breath. She looked to her left. Suddenly,
Marina knew where she was. Paradise Lane. She quickly regained her bearings. Two houses to the left, on Paradise Lane, she remembered there was a small white cottage with dark green shutters. The house that had once belonged to Edward James. Edward James. Jenny’s father.

She took a deep breath and turned to the right, away from the house, toward Elm Street. She began running again, running more slowly this time, as another thought jumped into her mind.

What if Edward James had found out about Jenny? Would he have abducted her?

    Except for a small lamp in the kitchen, the house was dark when Marina returned. On the table was a note:

    
Marina
—

    
Tess is asleep. I’m going to take the couch—you can sleep in Jenny’s room upstairs. I’ll see you in the morning.

Charlie

Marina stared at the slip of paper.
You can sleep in Jenny’s room.
Why had Charlie wanted her to sleep there? Didn’t Charlie want to sleep in the bed that was last used by her daughter? Her rightful, legal daughter?

Marina closed her eyes and crumpled the note.

She went into the bathroom, then quietly crept up the stairs, into Jenny’s room—the room that had once been hers, the room where Jenny was born.

She pulled back the covers of the small bed and tucked herself in without changing her clothes. Thoughts of Viktor, Tess, Willie Benson, and Edward James whirled in her mind. Thoughts of Jenny.
Her
Jenny. She nestled her face in the pillow. It had a light, fresh fragrance. She wondered if this was Jenny’s scent, her pure, sweet, innocent scent. She tried to envision what Jenny looked like now at fourteen-nearly-fifteen, girl-nearly-woman. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, recalling the nights she had once slept here, the long days and the long nights of waiting for Jenny to be born.

And then she remembered the night she’d awakened in labor. As she glanced around the room, Marina could almost
see them now: Nicholas, Dell, Tess, Charlie. She could almost feel her pain.

She reached beneath the sheets and lay a hand on her stomach: now flat, unconvulsing. Just as she realized that tears were running from her eyes, Marina could see Dell hand the small bundle to Charlie, and hear her say, “
It’s a girl.
”

Charlie was swimming in the ocean. The water was warm and soothing. She floated face up and closed her eyes to the glaring sun: its rays sunk into her skin. It was peaceful here, so peaceful. She knew she should be thinking; she knew she should be worrying about something important. But she couldn’t remember what it was.

The sound of an approaching boat startled her. She squinted in the sunlight. A man was leaning over the edge, banging on its side. “Fish! Fish!” he shouted and gestured her toward the boat.

She knew that “fish” meant “shark.”

Charlie quickly swam toward the sound. Her heart hammered with the rhythm of the man pounding on the boat. It was so difficult to see in the bright light. Finally, she reached it. The man extended his hand to her to hoist her up. But as Charlie raised her arm, shoulder pain shot through her. Her arm collapsed into the water. She looked up at him. He had no face … no face at all. And though he had stopped banging on the side, she could still hear the sound.

Slowly, Charlie opened her eyes. She was lying on the lumpy sofa in Tess’s living room.
Jenny
, was her first thought. Then she heard banging, the noise from her dream. She shook her head to try and awaken; pain jabbed her shoulder.

“Tess! Tess!” came a voice from the kitchen. “Wake up, goddammit.”

Charlie pulled herself from the sofa, threw a robe over her silk pajamas, and ran her hands through her tangled hair. She walked into the kitchen, and through the window, she
saw Joe Lyons. He stood in the early morning light, a brown bag in his hand.

“Open the goddamn door,” he demanded.

Charlie turned the lock and glanced at the clock. Five forty-five.
Jenny
, she thought as she yanked open the door.
He must know something about Jenny.

“What happened?” Charlie said in a voice too loud for morning. “Did you find her?”

Joe Lyons shook his head and stepped inside. His eyes were puffed, his skin was sallow, as though he’d had little sleep. Charlie tied the belt of her robe and offered him a seat.

“Where’s Tess?” he asked, as he sat down and set the bag beside him.

“Asleep. What’s in the bag?”

Joe put his hand on top of it as Marina appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on?” she asked. Charlie noticed Marina was still dressed in the clothes she’d worn last night. She wondered if Marina had slept at all.

“This is Chief Lyons,” Charlie said. “Dell’s nephew.”

“I know who he is.”

“Someone should wake up Tess,” Joe said. “All of you should see this together.”

“Tess took a sleeping pill last night,” Charlie said.

Joe frowned. “I want her to see this.”

Charlie reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. “If anything in that bag has to do with Jenny, I want to see it. Now. She’s
my
daughter, remember?”

Joe looked from Charlie to Marina, then back to Charlie. He withdrew a pair of tweezers from his pocket. Then he opened the paper bag and took out a plastic bag. In it was a square package wrapped in brown paper.

He opened the plastic bag, carefully removed the package, and set it on the table. Using the tweezers, he slowly peeled back the brown paper. “This was on the doorstep of the police station when I arrived this morning.” Inside the paper was a silver cardboard gift box. With the tweezers, Joe lifted its lid. He slid the box toward Charlie and Marina. “Don’t touch anything,” he ordered.

Charlie peered inside. Even when she saw the contents, even when she instantly knew what it was, she could not speak. She could not breathe.

“Jesus Christ,” Marina said. “Is that the Fabergé?”

“You should have said, ‘
Was
that the Faberge?’ ” Joe commented.

Charlie slumped onto a chair. She lowered her head and put her face in her hands. She couldn’t cry; there was too much numbness inside her to cry. Even through the shattered fragments, Charlie knew it was the egg. The pearls were still intact: spun gold lace lay splintered around them. The rest was pink enamel dust. Enamel dust, semiprecious stones, and the tiny gold mare—the “surprise” inside. Jenny had not chosen the egg with the rubies and diamonds; she had not chosen the one with sapphires and emeralds. She had chosen the plain one, the less heralded one.
Maybe
, Charlie thought,
she’d felt that was all she was worth.
And now, that worth was reduced to ashes.

“I told her not to bring it,” Charlie said quietly. “I told her to leave it home.”

Joe carefully closed the lid. He returned the box and outer wrapping to the bag, then removed a clear plastic bag. Inside was a small sheet of white paper. “There’s something else,” he said. He turned the plastic bag over. Letters—cut from magazines, pasted together into a colorful string of jabberwocky—formed words on a white sheet of paper. It looked like a bad joke from a made-for-TV private-eye movie.

Charlie held her breath and read the message.

    She closed her eyes. “My God,” was all she could say.

“Ransom,” Marina said slowly. “So, Jenny has been kidnapped.”

Joe nodded.

“Well, now we know,” Marina continued. “Where do we go from here?”

Charlie recoiled. Kidnapped. Jenny had been kidnapped. And it was all her fault.

“Technically, I shouldn’t have showed this to you first. But because of Tess … and Dell …”

“We appreciate this, Chief Lyons,” Marina said.

Charlie wondered how she could sound so calm, how she could be in such control, when all Charlie wanted to do was die.

“The FBI is on their way,” Joe continued. “I think you’d better wake up Tess now.”

“At least this takes suspicion off her,” Marina said.

Joe shook his head. “Not really.”

Marina flipped back her hair. “Come on, Joe, if nothing else, Tess would never smash that egg. Right, Charlie?”

Charlie nodded slowly, still trying to digest what was happening.

“Unless she wanted to throw us off the track,” Joe said. “Three million dollars in unmarked cash is a lot more than the egg was worth, and a lot easier to put to good use.”

“It’s ludicrous,” Charlie heard herself say. “We can never come up with three million in cash.”

Joe stared at the brown bag as though it held the answer. “Ludicrous. That’s a good word. You know, maybe Tess didn’t do it. Maybe it was Willie Benson after all. Three million is the kind of money that someone of limited mental capacity would assume could be raised easily.”

Charlie shuddered at the mention of Willie’s name. She touched the now-faded scar on her forehead and tried to push the image of his wild eyes from her mind.

“Well, it can’t be Tess,” Charlie stuttered. “You said someone delivered the package to the police station. Tess has been here, asleep, all night.”

Joe shifted uncomfortably on the wooden chair. “Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

He tented his fingers together. “Did you sleep? Both of you?”

“I did for a while, I think,” Marina said.

“Yes,” Charlie said. “Yes, I slept.”

“Then we can’t be a hundred-percent sure that Tess didn’t leave the house.”

Charlie looked at the bag and thought about what lay inside.
Could Tess rally have done this? And if so, what did she do with Jenny?

Jenny.

Has she, too, been … shattered?

She looked at Joe Lyons with hate in her heart. Tess may
be odd, Tess may be eccentric, but there was no way Tess Richards would harm Jenny. Of that, Charlie was certain. She was also certain that Joe Lyons—Dell’s nephew or not—for some reason didn’t like Tess. An instant flashback to college days sprang to Charlie’s mind. No matter how hard she’d tried, Tess could never seem to get a boy to like her. “She’s too fat,” boys had said. “She’s too weird.” Well, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair then and it wasn’t fair now. Joe Lyons was just another of those arrogant males looking for their vision of the perfect woman. Tess may not be that. But it didn’t mean she was a kidnapper. It didn’t mean she would do anything to harm Jenny. Tess loved Jenny too much.

Jenny.

Charlie stood quickly, her thoughts racing again, her shoulder aching. “I’ve got to make a phone call,” she said and stumbled from the kitchen out to the phone in the hallway.

Charlie trembled as she picked up the receiver. Then a hand quickly reached in front of her and pressed down the button of the phone.

“Who are you trying to call?” Joe asked.

Charlie jumped. She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m going to call my husband.”

“Anything that goes on in this house is now my business.” He released his finger from the button.

“In case you’ve forgotten, I need to raise three million dollars,” Charlie snapped. Her mind had come back into focus. If the kidnapper wanted three million, they would get the money. Somehow. It would get Jenny back as quickly as possible, and it would get Joe Lyons off Tess’s back.

“I didn’t realize you were still married,” Joe said.

“Of course I’m still married. What an absurd comment.”

“It’s a little surprising, then, that your husband didn’t accompany you.”

“My husband was on his way to Singapore. On urgent business.”