Four of the texts were from Colin. The missing teenager had been found with her boyfriend, and her parents were grounding her for the next twenty years. He wrote that he would be there in half an hour, but then he said that someone had spray painted the back of Ellie"s grocery and he had to see to it. See you when I can, he"d finished.
The last message was from Tristan and had been sent an hour ago. I need to see you ASAP.
As Gemma ate her second piece of toast, she frowned. Colin"s jealousy was absurd, but she didn"t see any reason to fan it into flame, so she didn"t immediately get in her car.
Is it important? she texted back.
Very came the reply. I need you at my house right away.
That didn"t sound like Tris, she thought. Maybe it was Colin"s fear, or maybe it was that Gemma now had a life growing inside her, but she was cautious.
You know what happens at seven, don"t you? she texted back.
While she waited for an answer, she noticed Shamus"s art box on the coffee table where it had been for days. She picked it up and pulled the tape off the end of it to examine the damage. The corner was broken, but the piece was there, and as she fiddled with it, she noticed paper inside. More of his secret drawings, she thought, and wondered who the boy had portrayed with pinpoint accuracy.
When her phone buzzed, she put the box down.
I"ll hold your head again was the text. Please come NOW!
There was no denying that that request was from Tristan, and where better to be than with him when "morning" sickness. .h.i.t?
She called Colin, but it went to voice mail, so she texted him that she was going to Tris"s house to do some research. Please meet me there, she wrote.
She grabbed a cold hard-boiled egg from the refrigerator and a bottle of fruit juice and went to her car.
As Gemma neared Tris"s driveway, she didn"t pull in. She didn"t like Colin"s jealousy, but she also didn"t want to cause him any embarra.s.sment, and for right now, for all she knew, half of Edilean was watching. She drove past until she saw another gravel road and turned down that. To her right she could see the top of what looked to be a large white house, and she remembered Colin saying that Mrs. Wingate lived near Tris.
Gemma pulled her car off the road into a large clearing in the woods. Bushes hid the entrance so her vehicle wouldn"t be seen by anyone driving past.
If her sense of direction was right-and it usually was-then Tris"s house was directly in front of her. She sent another text to Colin to let him know where she was, but the message didn"t go through. The trees were blocking the signal.
It was because she was in the woods and not on the road that she saw Jean"s silver Mercedes hidden under the trees. The second she saw it, she knew she should leave. She should run, not walk, back to her car and get out of there.
But she knew that the text message had been from Tris. Only he knew about her 7 P.M. nausea, and he needed her.
Quietly, she went to Jean"s car. It was empty, but the fact that it was hidden furthered her belief that something was wrong. It had always been her guess that whatever was going on had to do with the Heartwishes Stone. If Jean"s uncle was an international thief, wouldn"t he want to steal something that was believed to be magic?
Gemma tried to send another text to Colin and an e-mail to Joce. She wrote, Please send help to Tris"s house. Send police with guns.
If there was nothing wrong, she"d look like a fool, but better that than anything bad happening to Tris.
She went through the woods quickly, stopping where she could see Tris"s house. It had been designed to look out the front at the lake, so the back of it had few windows. On the right was the big conservatory, and she could see the orchids inside. On the left were three tiny windows for a powder room and the laundry. Smack in the middle were two gla.s.s doors that led to the big room that had been added on to the house.
If Gemma walked straight up to it, she"d be seen.
It took her a few minutes, but she went to the side of the doors and plastered herself against the wall. After a few moments she quickly bent to look inside.
What she saw made her breath catch. There were two people in the room, Jean and an older man, who Gemma a.s.sumed was the uncle. What was astonishing was that the man was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair in the middle of the room and his hands were tied behind his back. Jean was a few feet away, her back to the man as she was typing out a message on her phone. There was a gun on the table beside her.
Gemma leaned back against the wall. She recognized the man. He was that awful so-called professor who"d been so offensive that day in Ellie"s store. His disguise was half on, half off his face, but it was easy to see that he wasn"t as old and certainly not crippled as he"d presented himself when she"d met him.
Gemma wasn"t sure what she should do. She glanced at her phone and saw that none of her messages had gone through. It looked like Tris needed some new routers for his Internet service-or the wires had been cut.
She took a deep breath and looked back through the gla.s.s door. Jean was leaving the room, probably to find a better connection for her phone. Was she trying to contact Colin? She took the gun with her.
Gemma knew that the smartest thing for her to do was to go back to her car and leave. Let Colin handle this, she thought.
She gave one last look through the door before she left, but she stopped cold. Since the man"s back was to her, so were his hands. He was frantically working to loosen the tape Jean had used on him, and it looked like he was a few minutes away from being free.
Maybe Jean was involved in the robberies and maybe there was animosity between the two women, but Gemma knew she had to warn her.
Around the corner was a window that led into Tris"s exam room. She ran to it, hoping that it wouldn"t be locked. It wasn"t. She pushed the window up, swung her leg over, and went inside. To the right was the sitting room and at the end was the kitchen.
When Gemma got to the doorway, she saw Jean standing at Tris"s kitchen island, a cup on the way to her lips. Unseen by Jean, her uncle was behind her. He was holding aloft the belt to his trousers and he was about to wrap it around his niece"s neck.
Gemma didn"t give herself time to think about what she was doing. She silently ran the few feet, and yelled, "Hey Professor!"
When he turned, she did to him exactly what she"d done to Colin in the gym. She twirled around to put a spinning back kick into his stomach. When he bent in pain, she did another spin and hit him in the jaw with a punch that had all her strength behind it. Whereas Colin could take all she"d given him, the uncle couldn"t. He went down, his head hitting the corner of the stone countertop. As he slid down, he left a stream of blood along the cabinets. By the time he hit the floor, he was unconscious.
Jean was standing there, the cup still halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide.
"Where is Tris?" Gemma asked.
With her hand shaking, Jean set the cup down as she stared at her uncle"s unconscious form. The belt was still wrapped around one of his wrists. "Tris is in Miami, visiting his sister."
"No, he"s not. He sent me a text about something only he and I know."
"He"-she nodded to her uncle-"was watching you and Tris, following you. If he wrote something private, it"s because he saw the two of you together. Did it happen outside where he was able to see you?"
Gemma was sickened that the man had been skulking about in the dark that night, but she wasn"t convinced that Tris was safe. "Tris wouldn"t have boarded a plane without his phone."
"Maybe he came back and that"s what threw my uncle"s plans off. That I was able to sneak up on him is not something anyone else has been able to do."
"So where is Tristan?" Gemma demanded as she picked up the gun off the counter.
"I don"t know where Tris is," Jean said as she sank down to the floor. "He was going to kill me," she said, looking at her uncle.
Gemma"s main concern was Tris, but at the same time she didn"t dare leave Jean and her uncle unguarded. She reached into her pocket for her phone. Her texts had finally gone through. With joy, she saw that there were two texts to her, one from Roy saying that Colin was on his way, and another one from Joce saying the police were coming.
Jean started talking. "He heard about the paintings that had been found in Edilean, and he knew I had a connection here. He was broke, so he came here to see what he could find out, if there was something worth stealing here. If he found nothing here he probably meant to get money from me. He"s good at getting into bank accounts and emptying them. I just wanted him gone."
"Would he have killed you?" Gemma asked. She was nervous and wanted to look for Tristan, but she couldn"t turn her back on those two.
Jean"s voice was quiet. "You know that little trick with his hands that Colin does?"
Gemma wasn"t sure what she meant, but then realized that Jean was talking about s.e.x. The thought of sharing the man she loved with another woman made her hand tighten on the gun she held at her side.
"That"s all right," Jean said. "You don"t have to tell me. I taught Colin to do that. You know who taught me?" She looked at her uncle on the floor. "Him. When I was ten years old."
Gemma gasped.
"Colin doesn"t know it, but before I changed it, my middle name was Willow. Uncle Adrian liked to rob houses with ten-year-olds in the family, and he"d leave behind a sprig of willow wrapped in a pink ribbon. He thought of it as a joke."
"Yet you spent time with him while you were in law school."
"Yeah," Jean said with a sneer. "I thought I was protecting Mom and me. And I thought he didn"t know how much I hated him."
"Why did he start robbing here in Edilean?" Gemma asked. "He must have known that there"s nothing here to meet his standards."
"Well . . ." Jean said.
When she didn"t look at Gemma, she understood. "You committed the robberies here, didn"t you?"
"Yes," Jean said. "I think maybe he was going to leave town, but then he heard of that d.a.m.ned Heartwishes Stone, so he stayed and began to watch you and Tris. He was convinced that you two had found the Stone and that"s what you were being so secretive about. I thought that if I did some robberies using his old MO, it might draw the Feds here and that they might scare him into leaving. But he knew what I was doing and why-and he was amused. They were so very amateurish, the kind of thing he did when he was a teenager."
Gemma was disgusted by this whole story. "I guess he had a buyer."
"Several," Jean said. "If my uncle had sold that Stone, no one in the world named Frazier would have been safe."
They heard gravel flying outside as a car skidded to a halt. "That"s Colin," Gemma said.
Jean looked at her, her eyes pleading. "Look, I know the robberies were wrong, but I didn"t know what else to do. I was losing everything. On that first night at the dinner I cooked, I saw how much Colin wanted you. And I guessed that his mother had planned it all. She can be a conniving snake."
Gemma started to protest, but she knew that Jean was at last telling the truth.
"Please," Jean said. "I"m putting my life is in your hands. If you tell Colin what I did . . ."
Gemma looked at the man on the floor. He was beginning to stir. No one had been hurt in the break-ins. "Will evidence be found against him at the robbery sites?"
"On the last one, I left hair and a fingerprint." Gravel was crunching; Colin was running toward them.
This was a decision Gemma couldn"t make quickly. She needed to think about it. "How did you find the ring in the bedpost?"
Jean gave a derogatory little snort. "The bed was homemade. The post was screwed on crooked. He taught me to first look for the obvious."
Colin threw open the door. His arm was around Tris, whose face was drained of color, and he was holding onto his left arm, which looked like it was broken.
Gemma wanted to hug both men and cry in relief, but at that moment a strong wave of nausea went through her, and she put her hand over her mouth.
Tris, in spite of the obvious pain he was in, grinned at her. "It must be seven." He stepped away from Colin, who was looking at Gemma in fear.
"Are you all right?" he asked as he grabbed her by the shoulders.
Gemma"s answer was to throw up on his shoes.
Colin erupted in anger. "I"ll kill you for hurting her," he bellowed as he leaped toward Jean"s uncle, who was pulling himself upright.
"Colin, no!" Tris yelled. "It"s your kid who"s making her sick." Colin had the man by the front of his shirt, his fist drawn back to hit him, but when Tris"s words reached his mind, he dropped the man to the floor.
"Gemma?" he asked, looking at her.
She was fighting more nausea.
"Get her to the sink," Tris yelled. "It"s your turn to hold her head."
Outside was the sound of sirens. The police had arrived.
"That you felt you had to keep this secret from me . . ." Colin said as he held Gemma to him. Behind them, the police and Roy were handcuffing Jean"s uncle Adrian. "I can never apologize to you enough."
"It"s all right now," Gemma said.
He ran his hand along her cheek. "No, it"s not. I thought you and Tris-"
"I know." She knew she should admit to her jealousy of Jean, but now was not the time. It felt too good to be held by him, to be rea.s.sured.
"I won"t be jealous again," Colin said. "And I promise that I"ll spend my life making it up to you."
"I"d like that," she said as he kissed her.
"I love you, Gemma. I will love you forever."
"And I love you," she said, then laughed when he insisted on carrying her to the car.
28.
OKAY?" COLIN ASKED Gemma for the thousandth time. It was the morning after Jean"s uncle had been arrested, and Gemma was on the couch in the guesthouse, a quilt over her legs.
All she could do was smile at the way Mr. and Mrs. Frazier and even Shamus were hovering over her. Mrs. Frazier had wanted Gemma put to bed in their best guest suite, but Colin had said their house-his and Gemma"s-was better for her.
"I"m not ill, I"m just pregnant," Gemma had said.
Those words had made Mrs. Frazier burst into tears-again.
In the end, they"d compromised. Gemma was to spend the next three days in the Frazier house, looked after by Mrs. Frazier, then she"d move into Colin"s house for good.
"You"re sure you"re all right?" Colin asked as he looked down at her with a mixture of pride and wonder.
"Yes," Gemma said. "Please go and take care of the case. And find out about Tristan. I want to know how he is and what happened to him."
Roy stepped into the room, her phone in her hand. "I can answer that. Dr. Tris was halfway to the airport when he realized he didn"t have his phone, so he went back to get it. He surprised Jean"s uncle as he was searching Tris"s house."
Gemma looked at Colin, and he took her hand as he nodded. She was right; Adrian had been looking for the Heartwishes Stone.