No Limits (11 page)

There hadn’t been much of her old self in evidence since she’d crawled soaking wet and sputtering through the open window of the rental, crouched on the higher ground as the nose was sucked into the same mud that had taken her shoes, the taillights flickering until the water extinguished al
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the life from the car’s electrical system the same way it could so easily have taken hers.

Until Simon squatted in front of her and wiped his thumbs over her face, she hadn’t realized she was crying. The hitch in her breath, her sobs, the moisture on her face, she’d thought those all in her mind.

She shook her head, murmured, “I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say, but the words were the only ones that would come.

“It’s okay. You have nothing to be sorry for. Being a charm school dropout is not the end of the world.”

She tried to laugh. The sound came out as a hiccup, one that sounded so ridiculously pathetic that she buried her face in her hands to keep from breaking down completely, hysterically. But breaking down seemed the only thing she was able to do. He was teasing, trying to lighten the mood, and she was reverting to the basket case she’d been when he’d pulled her from the closet—the one she’d never had time to be when she was fighting her way out of the swamp.

“All I wanted to do was spend time with my girlfriend. To eat, drink, and talk ourselves silly over a Sex and the City marathon. And look at me. My mind takes one wrong turn and I’m back at the bridge living through the accident again. And Lisa, God, if they were so ready to get rid of me, what did they do to her? I can’t even think about it. I’m not sure I can handle knowing.”

His hand was cupping her cheek, his thumb smoothing over her cheekbone. “You’ll handle it just fine, but you don’t have to think about it now. You need to take care of you.”

“I need to make sure someone is looking for Lisa. Really looking.” She shook her hair from her face, dislodging his hand, telling herself she was strong enough to deal with this, with it al
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. “I don’t believe for a minute that the judge cares about anything but what she might have said before she went missing. He was more interested in her note—”

Simon stiffened. “What note?”

“It arrived in the mail about a week ago. She told me it had been too long and I should come visit if I could tear myself away from the wild life. She made it a point to keep up with what the press found newsworthy about me when I wasn’t good enough to stay in touch.”

She wasn’t going to tell him about Monday night in case he hadn’t yet heard. “But that was it. A don’t-be-a-stranger reminder. She said it was bad enough that her family kept her out of the loop, that I didn’t need to.”

“What do you think she meant by that?” he asked, sitting back on the balls of his feet, his elbows on his knees. “Being out of the loop?”

It had seemed so innocent. An offhand remark. Or she’d been too caught up with herself to read between the lines. “I didn’t take it as anything cryptic. Just maybe that southern hospitality ran out at the Mississippi River.”

“How long have she and Terrill been married?”

She counted quickly. “Eight years.”

“Any complaints before now about feeling left out? Or like not part of the family?”

“None at all.” That she could say with no reservation. “It’s only Lisa, Terrill, and his father. She always thought the judge was full of himself, but she adores Terrill. I don’t think she’s ever mentioned disagreeing with him about anything.”

“What does she do?”

“Besides playing Martha Stewart inside, landscaping outside, and lately working on the Landry genealogy?” Micky smiled, pictured her girlfriend in the various roles. “There aren’t a lot of career ops for a marketing major in the bayou. I tried to get her to come to New York for a few months and brainstorm a new Ferrer campaign with our ad people, but she didn’t want to leave Terrill.”

“What about the genealogy? Has she mentioned anything about that?”

“You mean has she dug up any deep dark Landry secrets? Any illegitimate heirs birthed to young slave girls on the plantation?” She shook her head. “Not a thing.”

“So being left out of the family loop…”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Simon thought for a minute, got to his feet. “I’d like to see her research notes. Find out what she might have uncovered.”

She snorted. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble getting permission.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Who said I was going to ask?”

Okay. This was interesting, this confidence, this entitlement, this cheek. “Who are you, Simon Baptiste?”

Laughing, he headed for the door, gesturing for her to come inside, too. “Someone who’s been sitting behind a wheel too long, unloading double his weight in supplies, swinging a hammer in a shirt that doesn’t breathe, and needs a shower before he can even think of rustling grub for dinner.”

He sounded like a cowboy. It made her smile. “Fair warning. The water pressure is pathetic, and the hot-water valve needs help,” she said.

“That’s okay. A cold shower sounds like just the thing.”

She cocked her head. “I hope you’re not saying that needing one’s my fault.”

“You never know,” he said, his grin a devilishly delicious thing.

The whole world is my native land.

—Seneca, Roman philosopher, mid-first century A.D
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The Landry family Bible held an amazing secret, a secret neither my husband nor his father had hinted at knowing even once during the eight years of my living in Bayou Allain. I let that bother me for a while, let myself pout privately about being left out of the loop. I pouted semiprivately as well, dropping a note to my best girlfriend, knowing she’d pick up on things not being quite right.

But then I realized how stupid that was. Terrill shared everything with me. He told me personal things I knew he’d never trusted anyone else to know. Since he hadn’t mentioned that a Civil War treasure was buried on the family’s land, it made sense that he, too, was in the dark. Before telling him, however, I needed to know more, to figure out exactly how the code pointing to the cache of gold worked.

The inconvenience of having to go to the parish library so often was minor. The Bible, though the family’s property, was considered a historic find, having been unearthed during the razing of a tumbled-down barn that was part of the original Landry homestead. The judge had agreed to let the book remain on public display.

I have no idea why the letter in the binding hadn’t been discovered before. Maybe it had. Maybe the decision was made to leave it where it had been found. Or maybe the lack of resources for restoring the worn leather meant no one had ever looked at the cover carefully.

The minute I read it, I knew what I had—but only because I’d been looking through the boxes in Bear’s attic, and the list of codes the letter referenced was fresh in my mind. It wasn’t a complicated cipher, but a series of dots and dashes resembling Morse code that referred to books, chapters, and verses in the Bible instead of representing the alphabet.

Alone, the markings meant nothing and were virtually worthless, but the handwritten letter in the leather binding made them worth, well, whatever the key to a buried treasure was worth! And, honestly, it wasn’t that hard to figure out how they worked after I read the note….

My name is Ruth Callahan Landry. I am the lawful wedded wife of Samuel Jonathan Landry. We have not been blessed with children for me to tell what has happened, and my Samuel wi
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l be dead and soon in the arms of the Lord, though I would wish him to stay on this earth as my husband for fifty more years were the Lord willing and had not the gangrene set in before he got himself home for me to tend to the gunshot wound. I know what he did was sinful but I am a woman alone and I am not of a mind to face the Union soldiers even now in New Orleans to return the gold my Samuel took when he knew he was going against the Lord. The satchel is safely buried in the ground, and I have made markings in the Old Testament books of Ruth and Samuel 1 to serve as a guide to the location should I have a need to settle monetary obligations I am unable to satisfy with the fruits of honest labor. The clarification of how the markings are to be read have been recorded with this letter.

If no such need arises before I am joined again with my beloved Samuel at the feet of the Lord, the gold will remain in its final resting place until it is discovered and returned to whom it rightfully belongs.

After reading Ruth Callahan Landry’s words, I couldn’t wait to work out the symbols for myself. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to find the treasure, or if almost a hundred and fifty years later there was anything left to find, but I wanted more than anything to surprise Terrill with an amazing inheritance that was by all rights his. When I went back to the attic for the codes, a newspaper clipping slipped loose from a folder containing several more. I picked it up, glanced at the story, and that’s when I knew the puzzle was bigger than a cache of gold—and more than I could solve on my own.

Fifteen

Having realized four hours wouldn’t be enough time to go through even half the documents boxed up in Bear’s attic, Terrill had carried al
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he could find to the trunk of his patrol car last night. His father would never miss them. He would never even know they were gone.

Bear wouldn’t be able to climb the stairs or haul himself through the narrow opening into the top of the house if the place were on fire and his life at stake. He was too wide, too old, too dependent on the cane he swore was a decorative accessory like the cigars he never smoked, his only vice being his nightcap.

Well, the scotch, and Lorna Savoy. Why the old man was still keeping company with that woman was beyond Terrill’s grasp. She was young enough to be Bear’s daughter, though his relationship with her had never been paternal. It was strictly business, with sex thrown in for good measure—a fact that made Terril question Lorna’s motives more than Bear’s.

What either of them got out of their association—and such a long-running one at that

—was something he’d never understand. He remembered Lorna being at the house off and on when he was in high school, and more than a few times when he came home on leave.

He’d chalked that up to the secretarial work she’d done for Bear, work that had started out as a part-time job during a vocational program her senior year. She’d stayed on with him at the courthouse after graduation, had never done more than a few hours at South Louisiana Community College in Lafayette that Terrill could remember. Yet, for some reason, she and Bear had never parted ways. Terrill knew that her real estate business kept her plenty busy even in the small town of Bayou Allain, and that his father had helped her get started.

She handled a lot of seasonal rentals, folks wanting to tour the swamps before hunting season, others taken in by the bald cypress, the alligators, and the snowy egrets that made the bayou their home.

Her brokerage also held the contracts for a lot of the storefront leases in the small town, and she was the Realtor anyone wanting to sell looked to. She was a pro when it came to turning over private property.

And then Terrill got to wondering what was at the root of Bear and Lorna living in each other’s back pockets the last few days and if it had anything to do with his father being such an asshole last night.

Not that he really cared; he was just curious. All he had time to care about right now was his wife. He would’ve thought Bear would’ve felt the same. Today had been shot to hell as far as making any headway in finding Lisa. He hadn’t even made it to Bear’s for the promised meeting this morning with the P.I. The car that had gone off the bridge and the subsequent search for the driver had eaten up all of his day.

He was only taking the break now to do something with the boxes in his trunk. Keeping them in his patrol car as long as he had wasn’t smart, but last night he’d grabbed them without thinking things through.

It had been close on midnight when he’d made it home, and he didn’t want to be seen that late carting the boxes inside. He had neighbors who’d been friends of the judge since before Terril had been born, and he wouldn’t put it past any of them to slip that tidbit of info to Bear.

He’d thought about transferring them to his personal vehicle, but the Jeep didn’t have enough hidden storage space to accommodate his haul, and it made no more sense to keep them there than in his patrol car.

What he needed was privacy and space to dig through the contents of them all. With his father stopping by unannounced the way he often did before going to Red’s in the evenings, laying them out in the spare bedroom wouldn’t work. He’d finally thought of a solution when he’d seen his father and Lorna out on the town at lunch and had wondered how long Paschelle Sonnier had been holding down the fort. She lived right across the street from Terril , and her cottage had a detached garage with an office built into one corner.

The CPA who had lived there before had used it. Terrill knew from Lisa that Paschelle did not. When he’d called her late this afternoon, she’d told him he was welcome to store anything he needed to in the space.

Her Mustang was sitting in her driveway. He pul ed into his and backed across the street, angling his car so that his open trunk would act as a shield. He hit the latch to release the lid, then climbed from the car just as Paschelle opened the office door on the side of the garage.