For some weird reason, it didn’t make her feel any better.
Chapter 59
Clarisse was on a train, for the first time in a long time. She had decided against another plane ride. She wanted to be tethered to the earth right now. She could not jump out at 35,000 feet, but she could leave a train with relative ease.
She had packed everything from her rental into two bags and Ubered to the train station. Just to be safe, she had gone into the women’s room, changed her appearance in a stall, and exited the bathroom with one small duffel.
She boarded the train and headed north. She stared out the window into the deepening darkness. As the train picked up speed and the ride became gently swaying, she closed her eyes and tried to process what had happened.
There were two major events, neither one of them good for her.
She tracked me down. All my precautions, all my work, and she still managed to do it.
She touched the wound on her neck.
Would she have cut it all the way?
Look what she did to Bruce.
She pressed her fingers against the coolness of the window.
Next up were Gibson’s stunning revelations. She knows I was Julia Frazier in The Plains. And she’s figured out the connection to Bruce Dixon.
I’ve got two of them breathing down my neck, literally.
Then her spine firmed.
Come on. You’ve got this. They haven’t beaten you yet.
She took out her laptop and inserted the thumb drive in the dongle.
She brought up the files and quickly sorted through them.
The one she was looking at now was, in a nutshell, all the US Marshals Service had on the Langhorne family.
She knew most of it, but not all. She saw pictures of Harry Langhorne when he had been the mob accountant. Tall, somewhat nice-looking, but the arrogance in those eyes, the evil lurking inside what most would assume was a mild-mannered dollars-and-cents counter.
She went through the man’s history, from cradle to, now, the grave. The file had dutifully been updated to include the death (murder, technically) of Harry Langhorne, aka Daniel Pottinger. But that hadn’t ruined the marshal’s perfect record, since Langhorne had left WITSEC long before he was killed.
She glanced away when the pictures of the Langhorne family came up: the mother, the son, the daughter. She knew enough about all of them.
The images were suddenly coming to her again. As they once did on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. She had managed that anxiety for a long time. Years, in fact. She had done so through her concentration on grifting, and in her piles of notebooks compartmentalizing her very existence.
Clarisse looked around, but all the other passengers within her sight line were asleep.
You suffer in silence, you remember that. Seen but not heard. Used, but never a word uttered. Things done to you. Never a protest. But there had been crying; she couldn’t help that.
They actually liked the tears. They longed for the tears to be shed. It made them happy. And even more sadistic.
She refocused on the computer screen and the information there.
The man had his treasure and she meant to have it now that he was dead. It would not make up for anything. She just wanted it because Clarisse knew the dead man would not want her to have it. That was enough motivation. More than enough.
Dig deeper.
She opened the TREASURE notebook and started writing in a precise hand everything that she knew to that point. She figured if she looked at it all comprehensively, she might see something connect to something else.
The treasure must be at Stormfield, she concluded after about a half hour. The note was left on the boat. The place had many nooks and crannies to hide things within. And the grounds were immense.
Do I go there and start searching? How much time will I have? Who gets the property? What was in the man’s last will and testament, if he even had one? Why am I just thinking of all this now?
Clarisse got off at the next stop.
Chapter 60
Stormfield rose from the darkness, like a nightmare from the subconscious. Its facade was shrouded in the fog that had settled in during the night along with a steady rain.
Clarisse had driven her rental car to within a quarter mile of the place and then walked the rest of the way in the wet with only an umbrella to shield her. She didn’t want to be doing this, but what was the alternative, really?
Her flashlight beam stabbed the dark, and she arced it around before moving to the front steps. The door was locked and the key was no longer under the cat statue — she had found that on her first visit here — but she had tools sufficient to defeat it. The door creaked as she opened it, causing the woman to grit her teeth.
Clarisse closed the door and shone the light in front of her.
She had been here once before, stumbling upon the man’s body in that secret room. He hadn’t summoned her, as she had told Gibson. She had never worked with Daniel Pottinger in Miami. But after years of searching she had discovered that Pottinger and Langhorne were one and the same. But he was already dead. She knew who had killed him. The message on the wall told her that.
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO.
That had been Langhorne’s mocking, sadistic mantra. He could do anything he wanted to anyone, but he demanded complete obedience from all those under his power.
She stood there and let this memory take ahold of her for a few moments.
Her goal in finding him had been twofold: first, to find the location of the treasure, a fact that he had let slip long ago; and second, to kill him for his past crimes against humanity.
Against me.
She started on the east side of the building and slowly made her way west.
Then she trekked upstairs to find the only bedroom that was furnished. This was where Langhorne had slept, presumably. She looked through the meager items for a possible additional clue, but came up empty.
She headed downstairs and worked her way from room to room, finally entering the last room on the lowest level, which appeared to be a wine cellar. There were wooden crates etched with the names of vineyards from France, Italy, and Spain. There were a few cracked bottles in the shelving along the walls. But if he was never here, why have a wine cellar? And the whole thing appeared to her to be... what was the word... staged.
She sat on one of the old crates and peered around. The smell of the nearby water was particularly strong, as though the river had somehow encroached on Stormfield’s foundation.
Harry Langhorne was the king of mind games. He would turn your own brain against you. But he had also been cagey, intuitively a survivalist. And he had to be because the people who had wished him harm were very good at killing.
So where would a vindictive, cagey asshole hide his ill-gotten money? She looked at the floor under her feet. Was it just under here? Crates of gold bars? Trunks of dazzling jewels? Paper currency? But all that would take up a lot of space. And in this climate unprotected paper would quickly rot. How was she to get to it? Jackhammer up the floor and concrete foundation beneath it?
Dig deeper. That had been his admonishment from the grave.
Well, this was the lowest spot in all of Stormfield. If one were to dig deeper, it would be here. Yet that somehow seemed too ordinary, too anticlimactic. The man had had ample time to come up with a more inventive location for his plunder.
So would he anticipate that I would come down here? To this very spot? To dig, while he laughed, hopefully from hell? Or had his message been literal, only in another sense?