Snowfall at Willow Lake: Lakeshore Chronicles Book 4 (7 page)

“Taking children hostage is only going to make you hated and hunted by the world. You don't want the world to hate you,” she said. Her jaw ached from the blow she'd taken, making it hard to speak. “You just want what was taken from you.”

“We are clear on what we want.” The blond Dutchman checked the chamber of the pistol he'd taken from a security agent.

“Then be clear on how to get it,” Sophie stated. Was this her speaking up? Negotiating with terrorists? “You're not stupid. You've gotten this far. You can leave now without incident.”

The man stared at her. Then his eyes glittered and he smiled at her, his mouth curving like a cold slice of moon. “And Madame Bellamy, we are familiar with you.”

Dear Lord. They knew who she was. They probably knew she was a member of the prosecution team. She felt the color drop from her face, though she struggled to show no reaction. “As familiar as you are with the Kuumba Mine case,” he added, “and with the process of setting up accounting in a country with no laws of extradition.” Faintly, from a distance, the two-toned sound of sirens drifted into the room. Their predicament flashed through her mind like lightning. If they stayed here, there would be a standoff—until it deteriorated into a shoot-out.

“None of this will matter,” she told him, “if you allow yourselves to be trapped here.”

The ring of a cell phone sounded, causing Sophie's captor to tense, reminding her that she was a trigger-squeeze between life and death. One of the men she had noticed earlier—the name Karl stitched on his catering livery—rifled through the jacket of a fallen security agent and took out a mobile phone. He glanced at the Dutchman, then answered. She strained to hear, but he was speaking Dutch in a low, rapid voice.

“You don't need a group of hostages,” she said to the men with her. “In fact, you should go now, while you still can. If you try to stay here and bargain for your fortune, you'll fail.” She looked from one man to the other. “These things always end badly.”

The next rapid exchange took place in the Umojan dialect. Sophie was nominally familiar with it but she couldn't catch what was being said. The African gave an order and the men dressed as caterers made for the door. The Dutchman went to the attaché, handed him a mobile phone. The shiny-eyed boy with Sophie kept hold of her upper arm, yanking her forward.

She balked, tried to pull away, but the boy held her fast. The African turned to her. “
Madame,
you must come with me.”

She looked up into his face and saw no humanity there. Only cold determination. It dawned on Sophie that she made the ideal hostage. She was easily outmatched, unarmed, defenseless. Yet she spoke multiple languages and was known in diplomatic circles, thus adding to her value as a bargaining chip.

She briefly considered putting up a fight here and now. She could feel the attaché urging her, and knew he would take action. She also knew that would get him killed.

Seconds later, she found herself in a haze of numbness, being shoved into one of the catering vans.
I'm so sorry,
she thought, wishing there was a way to beam the silent message to her children. She was in the hands of murderers. She had all but guaranteed she would be taken from her children. They would survive. Despite her faults as a mother, she knew they were smart and sturdy—survivors. Perhaps she hadn't been much of a mother, but at least she'd given them that.

It was still snowing outside. She was crammed into the front seat of the van with the Dutchman and the African boy. Her legs were awkwardly canted to one side of the stick shift. Her captors didn't bother restraining her, no doubt—and correctly—deeming her no physical threat.

Four more conspirators crowded into the back, protesting in French and Dutch. The entire operation had gone awry, Sophie gathered, because she had alerted security. From their agitated talk, she gleaned that their plan had been to barricade themselves in the building, demanding the restoration of their impounded fortune and their safe transit to Africa. “We leave with nothing,
nothing,
” groused a reedy voice.

“You leave with your life,” the driver snapped. “That is something.”

“And a life insurance policy,” said someone else.

To her horror, Sophie felt a touch at the nape of her neck. It made her skin crawl. She drew her shoulders up and leaned forward to draw away, eliciting nervous laughter from some of the men. She tried not to think about what they were capable of, but her mind filled with images of torture, rape and murder. She had spent two years building a case of such crimes, but until this very moment, they had been merely legal concepts. Now they were very, very real.

The Dutchman drove, taking corners too fast in the snow and heading for the port with the confidence of someone familiar with the city. The vehicle sped down the roadway that ran alongside the Verversingskanaal that flowed into the Voorhaven, a lock-controlled waterway of the North Sea.

A bridge rose in a high arc over the locks station. Snow flew at the windshield. The tires slipped and spun on the slick roadway. The bridge was entirely deserted of traffic, aglow with amber lights on tall poles, which turned the covering of snow to pure gold.

From the rear of the van, someone said, “There's a helicopter. We're being followed.”

“Not to worry,” said the Dutchman, accelerating past 130 kilometers per hour. “I left instructions.”

Sophie realized then what the man's exchange with the attaché had been about. They had promised to kill their hostage if their needs were not met. She also realized that, at some point, they would kill her anyway. Why give them that chance, then? She had lived her life trying to do everything right, yet things so often turned out wrong anyway.

Her hands seemed to belong to someone else as she moved with a speed and strength she didn't know she possessed. She grabbed for the steering wheel and dragged it into a sharp turn.

The Dutchman cursed and tried to wrestle back control of the van. But it was too late. The bridge was too slippery, the guardrail too flimsy to stop the van from hurdling over the side of the bridge and plunging into the ink-black water.

St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
6 January–Epiphany

M
ax Bellamy couldn't stand weddings. In his family, weddings seemed to crop up on a regular basis, like flu season. Since he was just a kid, he wasn't allowed to check off “regrets” on the invitation reply card and stay home. But boy, did he regret having to sit through a wedding.

Sometimes they even made him participate. Twice, when he was really little, he'd been a ring bearer. At age four, he'd thought it was cool until he realized they wanted him to dress up and stay clean and stand still through a ceremony that wouldn't end.

At twelve, he was way too old for such an indignity, but his family managed to find a new one. Last summer, he'd been upgraded to usher for his cousin Olivia, who married Connor Davis at Camp Kioga on Willow Lake. That was when he knew for sure all weddings were pretty much the same. Same level of discomfort, in starched clothes and shoes that pinched, same droning ceremony and sappy songs, different couple at the altar.

His take on weddings—they were long and boring and everyone talked about love and promises, and it was pretty much all a load of crap, as far as he was concerned.

Today the discomfort came from a different source. Since the ceremony was on the beach, everybody got to wear beach clothes. They looked like a reunion of Hawaiian punch guys, as far as Max was concerned. Which was a lot more comfortable than tuxedos and tight shoes, but that didn't mean he was having a great time.

How could he, when the groom was his dad?

Okay, so Max liked Nina Romano. A lot. She was going to do fine as a stepmother. He wanted her to marry his dad. He wanted them to be married. But he didn't want to have to sit through all the endless vows and recitations. He didn't want to have to listen to his dad say stuff like “I offer you my heart” to
anyone.

That kind of stuff just skeezed him out. He wished they had sneaked off somewhere to do it instead of involving families. There were like a gazillion Romanos milling around. Nina had eight brothers and sisters, and most of them had kids, so between the Romanos and the Bellamys, this had turned into some huge deal.

Cheerful, Italian-American strangers had been coming up to him all week, thumping him on the back and acting like his best friend. They weren't all strangers. Two of them—who by the end of the day would be stepcousins—were in his grade at Avalon Middle School. Angelica Romano was in his prealgebra class and Ricky Pastorini was on his hockey team. Ricky's mom was Nina's sister, Maria. She was the team mother. Although he was Max's age, Ricky was already shaving and his voice had changed.
Big deal,
thought Max.

He tried not to grind his teeth in disgust as another lame song was sung about two hearts beating as one, while most of the women cried. It was just too sweet. He was going to slip into a diabetic coma if they didn't end this soon.

He cast a restless eye through the gathering on the beach. Everyone was seated in white folding chairs, their feet in flip-flops, sifting through the white-sugar sand. Max's hand stole into the pocket of his cargo shorts. He palmed his phone, checked the screen. His mom hadn't texted him back after he sent her the picture earlier. He'd tried to put a positive spin on it, because his mom was all about trying to act like everything was fine, all the time, even when you had to sit through your own father's wedding. Max's message had been that St. Croix was awesome.

He couldn't exactly say the same for today's ceremony. It seemed as though everybody but him was really into it, though. He stuck the phone away, endured another reading. Finally the ceremony was winding down. There was a moment—a split second, really—when Max's dad looked so happy that Max caught himself smiling in spite of himself.

During the kissing, he stared at the ground—
enough's enough
—and at last, it was over. The ensemble played a reggae rendition of “What a Wonderful World” as Dad and Nina came down the aisle formed by the rows of chairs.

All the wedding guests filed out behind them to the pavilion with the banquet and dance floor. As they made their way to the feast, Max found himself surrounded by Romanos. Nina sure had a big family. The sun had just begun to set, turning everything in sight a livid sunburned pink.

His phone rang. He looked at the screen, seeing an international number he didn't recognize. “I think this might be my mom,” he said.

Nina's sister, Maria—the bossy one—gave a sniff. “Unbelievable. On today, of all days.”

He pretended he hadn't heard her, and flipped open the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Max.” It was his mom. She sounded…different. Her voice was thin. “Max, I know this probably isn't the best timing—”

“It's all right.” He stepped aside and moved to the shade of a large tree where it was quiet. “I'm glad you called, Mom,” he said.

“Are you, Max?” She sounded so tired, more tired than he'd ever heard her. He wondered what time it was, over in Holland. The middle of the night. “I'm glad, too,” she said.

Daisy Bellamy loved weddings. She always had, ever since she was little and got to be the flower girl in her aunt Helen's wedding. She still remembered the lacy dress, the flowers twining through her hair, the shiny patent-leather Mary Janes, the feeling that she had a critically important role to play.

Taking a break from her dad's wedding festivities, she sat on the balcony of her hotel room, looking down at the pavilion that had been set up on the beach for the reception. Sunset painted the sky every color of the rainbow. In a few minutes, she'd take out her camera to get some candid shots of the party.

All her life, she had fantasized about the day it would be her turn to be the bride. She had actually planned the entire event, right down to the seed pearls on her gown. She could perfectly picture every moment of her special day, from the delivery of the flowers—daisies, what else?—to the roaring send-off, to the Parisian honeymoon.

The only detail she couldn't picture was the face of the groom.

At nineteen, she still couldn't help dreaming about her own wedding, but there was a difference now. It was only a dream, not an eventuality. That option had been taken off the table last August.

She glanced down at the infant nursing at her breast and knew that the fantasy wedding simply wasn't going to happen. Unless Prince Charming was willing to take on Daisy and Charlie both.

Logan O'Donnell, the baby's father, kept trying to convince her that he was the one. There was one problem with that. Logan wasn't Prince Charming. Oh, he looked like a prince, which was what had landed Daisy in trouble in the first place. But now that reality had hit Daisy like a brick to the head, she knew it took a lot more than looks to make a prince.

She lifted Charlie against her and draped a cloth over her shoulder to catch the spit-up, which was his custom after every meal. Thanks to Charlie, she had missed the very tail end of the wedding. He'd been great right up until the final reading. She'd promised her dad and Nina that she wouldn't let him interrupt and, true to her word, she'd whisked him away at the first squawk.

Now she rubbed the baby's back, standing up and swaying back and forth on the balcony. “We don't need a prince, do we?” she whispered in his ear. “We just need to fanta-size about something different. I've been meaning to talk to you about that. I mean, I know you're really little, but I wonder if you'd mind staying with a babysitter for a few hours a week while I take a photography course at the college.”

He rewarded her with a gentle belch.

Daisy smiled. “That's right, I got in. My portfolio was approved for the class, and it all starts in a few weeks. I'm going to feel totally guilty about leaving you, though. Mom left Max and me a lot when we were little. She had to, because of her work. I wonder if she felt like this, too. Just totally guilty—”

“Hey, Daisy!” Standing two stories below, Sonnet Romano waved at her. “Come on down. They're about to cut the cake.”

“Don't let them start without me,” Daisy called.

“You want some help?”

“That's okay. We'll be right there.”

Nina's daughter Sonnet was the first friend Daisy had made in Avalon, New York, where they'd moved after Daisy's parents divorced. She was the first person Daisy had told, after her dad, about being pregnant. Now Sonnet and Daisy were stepsisters. She hoped that didn't mean the end of a beautiful friendship.

“You hear that?” Daisy said to Charlie as she put her camera into the ever-present diaper bag. “Cake! I love cake.” One of the best things about breastfeeding was that you could eat anything you wanted—cake, peanut butter, cookie dough, you name it—and you didn't gain weight, because it took a lot of calories to be a milk factory.

She buckled the baby into his carrier and headed out the door. The hotel had open-air hallways and stairwells, and a warm breeze flowed through, carrying the scent of exotic flowers. Here in the tropics, winter seemed a million miles away.

At the bottom of the stairs, she headed toward the reception, but stopped when she saw Max running toward her.

She took one look at her brother's face and knew something was wrong. Well, whatever it was, they weren't going to bug Dad about it. Not today, of all days.