High Stakes Bride (18 page)

M
oonlight slid through a narrow gap where the drapes weren't quite pulled to, gleaming off polished wood floorboards and an elegant Edwardian dresser set against the wall. Cold light reflected off the mirror, making a ghostly image on the wall.

Punching her pillow into shape again, Dani turned over. The mattress was new, but the bed was old and in need of repair. The faint creak of the wire-woven base was almost indiscernible, but tonight every sound registered. The bed was also an antique, carved from the same oak as the dresser and the escritoire in the corner. All part of the set of furniture one of the Galbraith brides had received as a wedding gift from her husband.

Weddings. Dani stared at the intricate plaster moulding in the centre of the ceiling. That was the trouble. In this house she had always been surrounded by wedding memorabilia. Almost every piece of furniture had had a romantic or funny story passed down with it—all connected with the comfortable, seemingly inevitable continuation of the Galbraith family line.

Now that most of the furniture was gone, and with it the stories, the house felt hollow and empty, as if its heart had been taken away. The Galbraith bad luck had finally peaked.

With a restless movement, she shifted sideways on the bed, trying to find a cool spot. Despite the air fanning down from the ceiling, the temperature seemed to be rising.

The muffled roar of the waves had grown louder, and with it the sound of the wind in the trees. Stifling a yawn, Dani leaned over and switched on her bedside lamp.

The darkness remained absolute.

Either the bulb had blown or the power was out.

Frowning, she pushed to her feet, felt her way across the room and opened the drapes. Fantasies of grey sheets of subtropical rain pounding on the roof and dripping from trees died as she stared at the sky. A waning moon hung over the water, surrounded by ragged cloud, but the trees were barely moving and the wind was minimal.

She shoved damp hair back from her face. The air was warm and close—even the floorboards felt hot.

That was because they
were
hot.

Dani stared at the floor where pale moonlight angled across the bare boards. A wisp of smoke drifted between her feet. She had been wrong. The Galbraith bad luck hadn't peaked, it was still on the rise.

The faint roaring wasn't the surf, or the wind.

Someone had set a fire beneath the house.

 

The flames were growing, even though the progress of the fire seemed painfully slow, impeded as it was by the lack of wind, and only visible if you crawled under the house, but even so the satisfaction Carlisle thought he would feel was eaten away by something else.

Slipping into the stygian cavern of the barn, he shrugged out of his knapsack and set it on the floor. His chest and belly felt tight; the tension that gripped him was close to suffocating. The night wasn't proceeding as he'd planned. Something was wrong.

His gaze was drawn upward. A small red dot winked in the corner. For a moment he thought he was staring at a firefly, although he had never seen one outside of a cave, and this was bright, the colour too red.

He stepped closer to the light—risked turning on his flashlight—and found himself staring directly into the lens of a camera.

 

Dani tried the main light switch in the bedroom. The power was definitely out. The blackout took on a more sinister connotation. Either the fire had burned through wiring, or whoever had set it had tampered with the electrics. There was a faint possibility that this wasn't arson, that the electrics themselves had failed and started the fire, but Dani didn't think so. Everything else about the house might be antique, but the wiring was modern. Robert Galbraith had had the house rewired the year before he'd died.

Pulling open a drawer, she grabbed jeans, socks and a shirt and quickly dressed. As she made her way down the hallway and took a left into the mudroom, she thumbed the emergency number into her cell phone.

A drift of smoke clogged her nostrils and stung her eyes as Dani began relaying details. Feeling along the shelf next to the door, she found the flashlight that was kept there and flicked it on. The smoke was thicker here than in the rest of the house, pouring up through floorboards that were rougher and set further apart, courtesy of a conversion that had enclosed what used to be part of the porch, turning it into a utility room.

The operator paused and queried her name.

With jerky movements Dani juggled the phone while pulling on boots. If this had been a movie she would have seen the humour in the situation, but with her throat already raw, her lungs burning, it was hard to smile at the fact that while she had never spoken to this particular operator, he had heard of her. “Yeah it's me. Again.”

She reached for the key, which usually lived in the lock. Frowning when she didn't find it, she tried the handle. The door wouldn't budge. Grimly, she yanked at the handle again. It was locked and the key was missing. Skin crawling, because if she hadn't removed the key from the door that meant someone else had, she backed out of the mudroom and slammed the door closed on the smoke. The key had definitely been there when she'd checked all the doors and windows before bed. For it to be missing now meant that whoever had stolen it had come inside the house to get it while she was lying in bed—and to do that they would have already had to have a key.

The implications piled up. To already have a key meant the person had stolen one earlier, had it copied, then replaced it. That added up to three visits.

Coughing, eyes stinging, she terminated the call, slipped the phone into her jeans pocket and made her way into the kitchen.

The keyboard, which hung on the wall next to the back door, was empty. Every key had been removed.

Cold grew in her stomach as she tried first the kitchen door, then a set of French doors off the lounge. Both were locked. Logic told Dani there was no use trying any of the other doors: as they had been at Dora's house, they would all be locked. The sabotage wasn't enough to imprison, but it had already confused and delayed her, giving the fire more time to take hold.

Holding her shirt clamped over her nose and mouth, Dani unlatched one of the sash windows in the lounge and pushed upward.

Gulping in fresh air, she gripped the sill, flashlight in one hand, and climbed out, half stumbling, half falling into the herbaceous border. Pushing to her feet, Dani unhooked the clinging tendrils of a rose and played the beam of the flashlight over the side of the house. Thick smoke billowed from beneath it.

Chest tight, she found the hose where it was always kept, neatly coiled at the base of the main water supply—a six-thousand-gallon tank that fed the house. As she flicked on the tap, her boots sank into mud. Her jaw tightened as she tested the water pressure. Everywhere else in Jackson's Ridge the ground was as hard as iron: for the mud to be that soft, it meant a lot of water had soaked into the ground recently. It was possible the tap or the hose had a leak, but she didn't think so. She wasn't slapdash with repairs and lately she'd been keeping a close eye on all the water systems. If the hose had developed a leak, she would have known about it.

Grimly, she hauled hose around the side of the house, laying it out as she went. The light from her flashlight picked up details she'd missed before; scattered chunks of wood on the ground, and a dark hole where the hatch to the underside of the house had been left open. Crouching down, Dani directed the flashlight into the smoke-filled cavity. The beam of light was swallowed up within a few feet, but she didn't need the flashlight to see the orange glow that lit the far corner of the house.

The house itself was raised on piles with a deep timber skirt. As a kid she'd crawled under every draughty inch of it. In places the crawl space had been large enough for her to stand up in, in others she'd had to crawl on her belly.

Whoever had set the fire had known what he was doing. He'd used her own wood supply to start it, had set the fire at the point where the house was set low to the ground, then left the hatch open to help fan the flames. With the rising sea breeze, the hollow area was acting like a wind tunnel, sucking flames along the structural timbers.

Working feverishly, Dani pulled the hose further along, found a gap in the timber skirting and began to spray the flames with water. Steam billowed along with smoke, making it difficult to assess how effective the water was. If she crawled under the house with the hose she would be able to direct the water with more accuracy, the only problem was that with the dense smoke and heat she would be overcome within minutes. Her dilemma died an abrupt death when the stream of water dropped to a trickle, then stopped altogether.

Dani stared at the dripping end of the hose. Yesterday, she had had less than a quarter of a tank, which equated to over one thousand gallons of water—enough to run the hose for a good hour. If the tank was empty now, there was only one reason—someone had drained it.

Dragging the hose with her, she backed away from the heat and smoke. Her foot caught on something lying on the ground, and the beam of her flashlight picked out a familiar shape. Bending, she retrieved the axe, which was protruding from beneath one of the leggy hydrangeas that grew rampant in this part of the garden. A chill went down her spine. She hadn't moved the axe from its usual place, propped up beside the woodpile, just as she hadn't removed all the keys and locked the doors.

Someone had been prowling around her place for weeks now, familiarising themselves with the house and outbuildings and finding out where everything was kept.

She'd dismissed her uneasiness and the feeling that she was somehow connected with the arsonist as the product of coincidence and an over-active imagination, but she wasn't imagining this. Someone had drained her water tank, locked her in her own house and set it on fire while she supposedly slept, then removed any tools that could possibly be used to rescue her.

The malice and premeditation were chilling. If she hadn't been too restless to sleep, in all probability she would never have woken up.

When Dora's house had burned down, the locked doors had seemed a nasty and potentially lethal twist aimed at a disabled pensioner. Now Dani was abruptly certain that she had been the target all along.

A thud followed by a splintering sound jerked her head up. Flicking the flashlight off, Dani backed into the cover of a tall, weeping rhododendron, her fingers closing around the handle of the axe. Seconds later a dark figure flowed over the sill of the same window she'd used to exit the house.

The man straightened in the deep pool of shadow cast by the house. His head swivelled, gaze locking with hers, as if she were plainly visible. When she'd grabbed clothing she hadn't cared about the colour; she had pulled on the first things she'd found. Coincidentally, her clothes were all dark; she should have been invisible.

Reaching up, he tugged at his head. Relief shuddered through her when she caught the gleam of blond hair. Carter.

“I thought I was going to be too late.” Stepping toward her, he tossed the scrap of black—a woollen cap—to the ground and jerked her into his arms, his grip momentarily crushing.

“You're supposed to be in Auckland.”

“I had a change of plan.”

“You mean you never left,” she said with sudden insight. Carter and Murdoch had been cooking up schemes for days.

Dani leaned into his warmth, breathing in Carter's familiar, comforting scent. “The fire engine's on the way.” The cold in the pit of her stomach intensified as he loosened his hold and stepped away. “All the doors were locked.”

“Until about thirty seconds ago. You're going to need a new kitchen door.”

The breeze gusted. Dani stared at the house and the smoke billowing from beneath it. The building was over one hundred years old and built of tinder-dry kauri, by the time the fire engine got here there wouldn't be anything left. “In a few minutes there won't
be
a house. The main tank's dry.”

A short burst of static distracted Carter, and for the first time she noticed the lip mike. Her chill deepened as he relayed the information that she was all right. If she'd needed an answer as to why Carter was out this late, dressed in black, she had it.

“Murdoch and his men are searching the grounds, but it looks like our boy has given us the slip.”

Carter directed the flashlight beam into the shrubs surrounding the house. “What about your back-up tank?”

Dani directed her own flashlight at a lichen-encrusted tank almost completely enshrouded by honeysuckle. The tank was old, and it leaked. It was kept functioning as an emergency supply for when the main tank was exhausted. “There's a problem. It feeds directly into the house; it doesn't have a hose connection.”

And the other hose wasn't connected to the main plumbing system—it came straight out of the tank—one of the vagaries of a water system that had been constructed before either of them had been born.

Carter examined the tank. He knew the practicalities of the situation as well as she did. They could connect the house hose up with Dani's garden supply—a small corrugated iron tank that caught the water off the barn roof—but they still wouldn't have enough hose to reach the house. They could try getting more hose from Carter's place, but even if he had enough, by the time they got organized it would be too little, too late.