“Help yourself to the coffee, Drake.”
“Thanks.”
Drake poured a mug full of coffee and carried it to Alice’s table. She looked up. He saw that she had the diary open in front of her. Houdini was perched on the table, finishing the last of a peanut butter cracker. He chortled a cheery greeting.
Drake gave him a pat and sat down. He looked at the diary.
“Are the answers all there?” he asked.
“Most of them.” Alice gave him a misty smile. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have this diary.”
Drake thought about the hours he had spent in the Sebastian family archives over the years. “I understand how it feels to be able to touch your own past.”
“I owe it all to you. You really are a magician.”
“No,” he said. “We needed each other to get through this thing. If it hadn’t been for you, Tucker would have destroyed Rainshadow.”
Alice shook her head. “I’m the one who put the crystals in her hands.”
“That wasn’t your fault. You were trying to retrieve some pieces of your past. In my family, we don’t consider that a crime.”
She sighed. “Thanks. I appreciate that. Still, if I hadn’t fallen for Fulton’s line—”
“If I hadn’t fallen for Zara Tucker’s line three years ago, none of this would have happened. There’s plenty of blame to go around.”
“She really is a sneaky, conniving, sociopathic twit, you know. Also a total psycho. Any woman could immediately see through her.”
“Maybe that was my problem, I’m not any woman.”
Alice stared at him for a heartbeat. Then she laughed.
“Point taken,” she said. “Think you’ll have a problem seeing through women like that in the future?”
“No,” Drake said. He watched her through his glasses, savoring the light and energy that danced in the atmosphere around her. “I see everything a lot more clearly these days.”
Chapter 43
“ALICE THINKS SHE OWNS HALF OF RAINSHADOW?” Harry asked.
It was rare to see his brother looking dumbfounded, Drake thought. But this was one of those moments and he relished it.
“Half of anything of value that might be found inside the Preserve, to be more precise,” Drake said. “And she’s right. There’s a signed copy of the agreement in her great-grandfather’s diary and, according to it, there’s another copy in the Sebastian family archives.”
Harry whistled softly. “Son of a ghost. Wait until the old man hears about this.”
“Should be interesting.”
Harry raised his brows. “Another person, someone who didn’t know you well, might wonder if that’s why you got involved in an MC with Alice. Maybe trying to use a fake marriage to get her to cooperate with you?”
“No,” Drake said. His sense of amusement evaporated in an instant. He was suddenly angry and a little worried. Was that what Alice believed? he wondered. “That’s not why we’re married.”
Harry nodded. “Figured it wasn’t.”
“I’ve got a strategy.”
“You always have a strategy. That’s why they call you the Magician back home.”
“For the record, I had a hell of a time convincing Alice to go for an MC.”
“Yeah?”
“Her last MC husband tried to kill her.”
“That would be Fulton Whitcomb?”
“Yes.” Drake looked at him. “And before you ask, I believe Alice’s version of events.”
Harry nodded, still thoughtful. “Okay, in that case I believe it, too. Doesn’t explain why you’re in an MC.”
“Ethel Whitcomb has been spending a lot of money this past year trying to make Alice’s life hell. The effort has been successful for the most part. The night I found Alice, I had to deal with a private investigator searching her apartment, looking for anything that could be used against her. Ethel wants Alice in jail.”
“You figured Ethel Whitcomb would back off once she found out that you were in the picture.”
“I thought it would send a message,” Drake said evenly. “At the time I was concerned that Whitcomb might try to have Alice followed to Rainshadow. We didn’t need the complications. That was before I found out that the island had been shut down by the fog.”
“Uh-huh.”
Drake looked at him. “What?”
“You’re sleeping with Alice North.”
“So?”
“I’m thinking you didn’t need to get involved in an MC to protect her from Ethel Whitcomb. You have other resources available to you for handling situations like that.”
“In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t absolutely necessary. It just seemed like the most efficient way to get Whitcomb out of the picture until the problem here on Rainshadow was resolved.”
Harry smiled slowly. There was a knowing look in his eyes. “Wait until Mom finds out.”
Chapter 44
ALICE PUT THE NORTH DIARY DOWN ON THE TABLE AND looked at the small crowd gathered in the café at the back of Shadow Bay Books. Drake and Harry both lounged against the wall. Jasper, Fletcher, Rachel, and Charlotte sat at tables, cups of tea in front of them.
“In the years that followed the breakup of the North-Sebastian partnership, my great-grandfather returned to Rainshadow on a number of occasions,” Alice said. “His light-talent made it possible for him to come and go through the psi-fence, and his copy of the psi-code treasure map allowed him to get to the cave where the crystals were stored. He ran some experiments on the stones and at some point he discovered that they could be made to function as paranormal compasses.”
“Compasses that pointed toward hot spots on the island?” Drake asked.
“Right,” Alice said. She put her hand on the diary and thought about what she had read. “Properly positioned, they resonated with the energy fields coming from the various ruins on the island. But he could not navigate the terrain inside the Preserve any better than anyone else—until he found Bainbridge’s personal papers that led him to the hole-in-the-wall entrance and into the tunnels.”
Rachel smiled, understanding. “Once North was down in the catacombs, he set out to map them, and in the process he found the ruins of at least two Alien labs, the pyramid and the aquarium.”
Drake smiled appreciatively. “Aware that the ruins were finds of potentially incredible value, he very cleverly got his old pirate partner, Harry Sebastian the First, to sign an agreement giving North and his heirs half of anything of value that was ever discovered on the island.”
“That was probably the only shrewd business move my great-grandfather ever made,” Alice said.
Fletcher chuckled. “Could turn out to be downright brilliant.”
“At that time Harry Sebastian probably wasn’t paying much attention to Rainshadow, anyway,” Harry said. “He was busy building his business and starting a family. He would have had no objection to signing the agreement. As far as he was concerned, he and North had been partners when they buried the treasure. He figured North had every right to half the value of whatever was discovered on Rainshadow. But he assumed that nothing of financial importance would be found on the island for years, if ever.”
“He also assumed that if something of value was discovered, Sebastian, Inc., through the Rainshadow Foundation, would control the discovery,” Alice said. She kept her tone exquisitely polite.
A quick grin came and went on Drake’s face, but he said nothing.
Harry narrowed his eyes. “Your great-grandfather’s version of your family history is a little different than the Sebastian family version.”