Bitter Gold Hearts gf-2 Read online

  "Would you care to run through your reasoning?"

  It would appear simple and obvious enough for even one of your narrow intellectual focus to unravel. I gave him a big grin. That was his way of zinging me for having dared entertain overnight in my own home. He couldn't shake his good humor completely, though. He added, Troublesome as females are when they step out of their proper roles as connivers, manipulators, gossips, backstabbers, and bearers and nurturers of the young, slaughtering them is not an acceptable form of chastisement. I urge you to persist in your inquiries, Garrett. With all due caution. I would not care to see you share the woman's fate. How would I attend the funeral?

  "You're just a sentimental fool, aren't you?"

  Too often too much so for my own welfare.

  "Ha! Dirty truth gets caught with its nose sticking out. If I get scrubbed, you might have to get off your mental duff and do some honest geniusing in order to keep a roof over your head."

  I am an artist, Garrett. I do not—

  "And I'm a frog prince under a witch's spell."

  "Mr. Garrett?"

  I turned. Dean was at the door. "What?"

  "That woman is here again."

  "The one who was here yesterday?"

  "The same." You would have thought he smelled spoiled onions in his pantry the way his face was puckered.

  "Take her into the office. Don't let her touch you. It might be communicable." I let him get out of hearing before adding, "You might carry it to your nieces and suddenly have them all turn desirable."

  You ride him too hard, Garrett. He is a sensitive man with an abiding concern for his loved ones.

  "I let him get out of hearing, didn't I?"

  I would not want to lose him.

  "Me neither. I'd have to go back to cleaning up after you myself." I got out then, ignoring him trying to come up with the last word. We could kill a whole day that way. Amber was looking her best and sensed that I saw and felt it. She tried starting up where she left off. I told her, "I've decided to find that money for you. I think we're going to have to stick to business and move damned fast if we want to catch the trail before it's cold. I did a lot of legwork yesterday, poking under rocks. I came up with a sack full of air. I'm starting to think the whole thing was an out-of-town operation."

  "Garrett!" She wanted to play. But she could accept two hundred thousand marks gold as a good reason for not, for the moment. I figured her for the type who could get hooked on the challenge. That might be my next problem.

  "What do you mean, out-of-town operation?"

  "Like I said yesterday, a thing involving two hundred thousand and snatching Raver Styx's kid is going to take big planning and leave big tracks, even when the best pros are working the job. One way to give the tracks a chance to disappear in the mud is to do your design work, recruiting, purchasing, and rehearsal somewhere far away. Then you might take the gold somewhere else, still. In fact, with so much gold involved, you might want to tie up loose ends by erasing any connection between yourself and the kidnap victim."

  "You mean kill off the people who helped you?"

  "Yes."

  "That's horrible. That's... that's terrible."

  "It's a terrible world. With a lot of terrible people in it. Not to mention things like ogres and ghouls. Or vampires and wolf men, who see the rest of us as prey, though they used to be human themselves."

  "It's horrible."

  "Of course. But it's the kind of thing we may run into. You still game? We're partners, you're going to have to carry your half of the load."

  "Me? How can I help?"

  "You can get me a chance to talk to your brother and Amiranda."

  She looked puzzled. Not too bright, my Amber? But decorative. Definitely decorative. "I haven't dug up but one clue yet, and it's not worth squat by itself."

  "What is it?"

  "Uh-uh. I keep my cards to my chest till I get a better picture."

  "Why do you need to talk to Karl and Amiranda?" "Karl because he's the only one who had any direct contact with the kidnappers—except maybe Domina Dount, when she delivered the ransom. Amiranda because she works for the Domina and might have picked up something useful. I can't go grill Willa Dount. She'd want the gold back herself if she knew we were looking for it. Wouldn't she?"

  "Yeah. But Karl would want a cut if he knew what we were doing. He wants out of that house as bad as I do. Amiranda, the same way."

  "You get me a chance to talk to them. I'll think of some reason for it."

  "All right. But you'd better be careful. Especially with Amiranda. She's a little witch."

  "You don't like her?"

  "Not very much. She's smarter than me and when she wants she can make herself almost as pretty. Even my own mother always treats her better than me. But I don't think I hate her. I just wish she'd go away."

  "And she wants to get away as badly as you and your brother do? When she gets better treatment?" "Better than awful is still bad, Garrett." "How soon can you fix it so I can see Karl?" "It'll be hard. He won't be able to sneak out right now. Domina has Courter watching him every minute. She says the kidnapping won't stay a secret and when the news gets out how much the ransom was, somebody else might try it again. Would they?"

  "That happens. There are a lot of lazy, stupid crooks who try to get by imitating success. Your family will be at risk till your mother takes some action to make it plain that folks who mess with her live short and awful lives." "She probably wouldn't even care." She would care even if she had no use or love for her offspring, but I had no inclination to illuminate Amber about the symbols and trappings of power and what the powerful have to do to keep them polished and frightening. "The next step has to be your brother. If he can't come to me, I'll go to him. You arrange something. I'll follow you home about a half hour behind you. I'll hang around outside somewhere. You give me a signal when it's all right to come in. Might as well set it for me to see Amiranda, too. What will the signal be?"

  I had chosen a conspiratorial tone. It worked. She got into the spirit of doings shadowed and sinister. "I'll flash a mirror out my window. Give me five minutes after that, then meet me at the postern." "Which window?"

  While she explained, I reflected that she had this gimmick too pat to have come up with it on the spur of the moment. I hoped it was a device she used to sneak lovers inside. If she had been getting away with that, the notion might be marginally workable. If she was setting me up...

  But she had no reason that I could see. It was plain that her only interest was laying hands on her mother's gold. You get paranoid in this business. But maybe paranoids get that way because of all the people out to get them.

  "Better scoot along now," I told her. "Before they miss you up there and start wondering."

  "A half hour wouldn't make any difference, would it?"

  "A half hour might make all the difference." "I can get real stubborn when I really want something, Garrett."

  "I'll bet you can. I hope you're as stubborn about the gold if we find things getting tight." I guided her toward the front door.

  "Tight? How could it get dangerous?"

  "Are you kidding? Not to be melodramatic"—like hell! —"but it could get to be a long, dark, narrow valley between your mother and the kidnappers before we get that gold socked away."

  She looked at me with big eyes while that sank in. Then she turned on the smile. "Keep that golden carrot dangling out front and this mule won't even see the brooding hills."

  So. A little slow, maybe, but gutsy. Old Dean was watching from down the hall, exercising his disapproving scowl. I patted Amber on the fanny. "That's the spirit, kid. Remember. I'm half an hour behind you. Try not to leave me standing in the street too long."

  She spun around and laid a kiss on me that must have curled Dean's hair and toes. It did mine. She backed off, winked, and scooted.

  ______XIV______

  I went back and got a big cold one to fortify myself for the coming campaign. I had to
draw it myself. Dean had been stricken blind and could hear nothing but ghosts. He was exasperated with me. I downed the long one, drew another, lowered the keg, then went to tell the Dead Man the latest. He growled and snarled a little, just to make me feel at home. I asked if he was ready to reveal Glory Mooncalled's secrets. He told me no, and get out, and I left suspecting cracks had appeared in his hypothesis. A cracked hypothesis can be lethal to the Loghyr ego.

  After depositing my empty mug in the kitchen, I went upstairs and rooted through the closet that serves as the household arsenal, selected a few inconspicuous pieces of steel and a lead-weighted, leather-wrapped truncheon that had served me well in the past. With a warning to Dean to lock up after the ghosts left, I hit the street. It was a nice day if one doesn't mind an inconsistent hovering between mist and drizzle. Comes with the time of year. The grape growers like it except when they don't. If they had their way, every Stormwarden in the business would be employed full-time making fine adjustments in weather so they could maximize the premium of their vintages.

  I was moist and crabby by the time I reached the Hill and started looking for a place to lurk. But the neighborhood had been designed with the inconsiderate notion that lurkers should not be welcome, so I had to hoof it up and down and around, hanging out in one small area trying to look like I belonged there. I told myself I was a pavement inspector and went to work detecting every defect in the lay of those stones. After fifteen minutes that lasted a day and a half, I caught Amber's signal—a candle instead of a mirror—and started drifting toward the postern. A day later that opened and Amber peeked out.

  "Not a minute too soon, sweetheart. Here come the dragoons."

  The folks on the Hill all tip into a community pot to hire a band of thugs whose task is to spare the Hill folk the discomfitures and embarrassments of the banditry we who live closer to the river have to accept as a fact of life, like dismal weather.

  Not fooled for a minute by my romance with the cobblestones, a pair of those luggers were headed my way under full sail. They had been on the job too long. Their beams were as broad as their heights. But they meant business and I wasn't interested in getting into a head-knocking contest with guys who had merely to blow a whistle to conjure up more arguments for their side.

  I got through the postern and left them with their meat hooks clamped on nothing but a peel of Amber's laughter. "That's Meenie and Mo. They're brothers. Eenie and Minie must have been circling in on you from the other side. We used to tease them terribly when we were kids."

  A couple of remarks occurred to me, but with manly fortitude I kept them behind my teeth.

  Amber led me through a maze of servants' passages, chattering brightly about how she and Karl used the corridors to elude Willa Dount's vigilance. Again I restrained myself from commenting.

  We had to go up a flight and this way and that, part through passages no longer in use, or at least immune to cleaning. Then Amber shushed me while she peeked between hangings into a hallway for regular people with real blue blood in their veins. "Nobody around. Hurry." She dashed.

  I trotted along behind dutifully, appreciating the view. I've never understood those cultures where they make the women walk three paces behind the man. Or maybe I do. There are more of them around arranged like Willa Dount than there are like Amber.

  She swept me through a doorway into an empty room and rolled right around with her arms reaching. I caught her by the waist. "Tricked me, eh?"

  "No. He'll be here in a minute. He has to get away. Meantime, you know the old saying."

  "I live with a dead Loghyr. I hear a lot of old sayings, some of them so hoary the hills blush with embarrassment at his flair for cliché. Which old saying did you have in mind?" "The one about all work and no play makes Garrett a dull boy."

  I should have guessed.

  She was determined to wear me down. And she was getting the job done.

  Whump! The edge of the door got me as I was bending forward, contemplating yielding to temptation.

  The story of my life.

  I let my momentum carry me several steps out of orbit around Amber. She laughed.

  Karl came into the room spouting apologies and turning red. He might have gone into a hand-wringing act if he had not had them loaded.

  "I smell brew," I said. "The elixir of the gods."

  "I recalled you were drinking beer in that place the other day. I thought it would be only courteous to provide refreshments, and so I..."

  A chatterer.

  I was amazed. Not only had he managed to come up with an idea of his own, he had managed to carry it out by himself, without so much as a servant to lug the tray. Maybe he did have a little of his grandfather in him after all. A thimbleful, or so.

  He presented me with a capacious mug. I went to work on it. He nibbled the foam on a smaller one, just to show me what a democratic fellow he was. "Why did you want to talk to me, Mr. Garrett? I couldn't make much sense out of what Amber told me."

  "I want to satisfy my professional curiosity. Your kidnapping was the most unusual one I've ever encountered. For my own benefit I want to study its ins and outs in case I ever get into a similar situation. The success of the kidnappers might encourage somebody to pull the same stunt again."

  Karl looked very uncomfortable. He planted himself on a chair and gripped his mug in both hands. He pressed it into his lap in hopes of steadying it so I wouldn't notice it was shaking. I let him think he had me fooled.

  "But what can I tell you that would be of any use, Mr. Garrett?"

  "Everything. From the beginning. Where and how they laid hands on you. All the way through to the end. Where and how they turned you loose. I'll try not to interrupt unless you lose me. All right?" I took a long swig. "Good stuff."

  Karl bobbed his head. He took a swig of his own. Amber sidled to the tray and discovered that Karl had brought wine, too, though he hadn't bothered to offer her any.

  Junior said, "It started five or six nights ago. Right, Amber?"

  "Don't look at me. I still wouldn't know about it if I didn't eavesdrop."

  "Six nights ago, I guess. I spent the evening with a friend." He thought about it before telling me, "At a place called Half the Moon."

  "That's a house of ill repute," Amber said, in case I didn't know.

  "I've heard of it. Go on. They got you there?"

  "As I was leaving. Going out the back way so nobody would see me."

  That didn't sound like the behavior of the hell-raiser he was supposed to be. "Why the sneak? I thought that wasn't your style."

  "So Domina wouldn't hear about it. I was supposed to be out working."

  That puzzled me. "The word is that she has everyone on a tight leash while your mother is in the Cantard. Yet you two seem to come and go when you want."

  "Not when we want," Amber said. "When we can. Courter and Domina can't be everywhere watching all the time."

  "I thought you said you wouldn't interrupt, Mr. Garrett."

  "So I did. Go on. When last seen you were making a getaway out the back door of Lettie Faren's place."

  "Yes. I stopped to say good night to someone, right in the doorway, with my back to the outside. Somebody put a leather sack over my head. It must have had a drawstring sort of thing on it because before I could yell I was being strangled. I was scared to death. I knew I was being murdered and there wasn't any way I could stop it. And then the lights went out." He shivered.

  I set my mug down. "Who were you saying good-bye to?" I tried to keep it casual but he wasn't a complete dummy. He didn't answer. I stared him straight in the eye. He looked away.

  "He doesn't want to believe it," Amber said. "What's that?"

  "That his favorite little tidbit was in on it. She had to be, didn't she? I mean, she would have seen whoever it was over his shoulder. Wouldn't she? And she would have had time to warn him if she wasn't part of it?"

  "That's certainly worth a few questions. Does the lady have a name?"

  Am
ber looked at Karl. He tried divining the future from the lees of his beer. Maybe he didn't like what he saw. He grabbed the pitcher off the tray and poured himself a refill, mumbling something as he did so. I collected the pitcher and pursued his fine example. "What was that?" "He said her name is Donni Pell." Put a point down for the kid. If she had wanted, she could have stuck it to him anytime, but she held back until he was ready to surrender the name himself.

  Karl started working himself up a case of the miseries. He said, "I can't believe Donni was in on what... I've known her for four years. She just wouldn't..."

  I reserved my opinion of what people in Donni's line would and would not do for money. "All right. Let's move on. You were strangled unconscious. When and where did you wake up?"

  "I'm not sure. It was nighttime and in the country. I think. From what sounds I could hear. I was bound hand and foot and still had the bag over my head. I think I was inside a closed coach of some kind but I can't be sure. That would make sense, though, wouldn't it?" "For them it would. What else?" "I had a bad headache." "That follows. Go on."

  "They got me where they were taking me, which turned out to be an abandoned farmhouse of some sort."

  I urged him to get very detailed. It was in moments of transfer when kidnappers were most at risk of betraying themselves.

  "They lifted me out of the coach. Somebody cut the ropes around my ankles. One got me by each arm and they walked me inside. There were at least four of them. Maybe five or six. After they got me inside, somebody cut the rope on my wrists. A door closed behind me. After a long time standing there I finally got up the nerve to take the bag off my head."

  He paused to unparch his throat. He could pour it down once he got started. Being a naturally courteous fellow, I matched him swallow for swallow, though I hadn't been working my throat nearly so hard. "A farmhouse, you say? How did you discover that?"

  "I'll get to it. Anyway, I took the bag off. I was in a room about twelve feet by twelve feet that hadn't been cleaned in years. There were some blankets to sleep on—all old and dirty and smelly—a chamber pot that never did get emptied, a rickety homemade chair, and a small table with one leg broken."