Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) (17 page)

On the other hand, maybe it was a scare tactic being employed by Zane Barnes. Perhaps he was terrorizing her in the hope that she’d become so frightened she would abandon her claim to his father’s property. She had no doubt that Barnes was capable of such a campaign. After observing first-hand what he’d done to his own father, she believed him capable of anything. But that would be too much of a coincidence. It had to be Dalton.

She stepped inside the office and locked the door behind her. Then she pulled her cell phone out of her purse and dialed Joe Dillard’s number. She read the note to him, described the strange spacing and punctuation and capitalization.
 

“Go straight to the Jonesborough police department,” Joe said. “Go see an investigator named Mike St. John. He’s a good man. He probably won’t be able to do a thing, but take the note in and show it to him. Tell him I sent you, and ask him to make a copy and start a file.”

“Should I tell him about Clyde Dalton?”

“He already knows about Clyde. He’s arrested him twice on stalking charges.”

“Have you seen or talked to Clyde?”

“I talked to the doctor that did the evaluation. He called him a garden variety paranoid schizophrenic, whatever that means. They gave him his medication and his mother picked him up and took him home.”

“Someone with a shaved head bought my breakfast at your sister’s diner a few minutes ago. It has to be him. He must have followed me.”

“Go see Mike, and then get your butt back to the office. I’m on my way, so I’ll be there when you get back.”

“Should I be afraid?”

“You should be careful, Charlie. I don’t know that much about Clyde yet, but I’ll make some calls. Just watch your back.”

Joe was correct in his assertion that the police would be unable to help. Charlie spoke with Mike St. John, the investigator Joe had mentioned. He made a copy of the note, started a file, and expressed concern that Clyde Dalton could become violent. St. John said Dalton’s disease seemed to be progressing and that he had become bolder with his latest stalking victim, a television weather woman named Veronica Simpson. Dalton had showed up at the television station twice and his notes had become progressively more threatening. They talked briefly about the legal elements of a stalking charge and agreed that the note, while frightening, didn’t quite rise to the offense of stalking, even if they could prove that Clyde wrote it. Another note, perhaps, or a couple of incidents of unwelcome contact with Clyde, would probably classify as a misdemeanor.
 

Charlie left the police station and drove back to the office in a state of agitated paranoia. Her eyes moved constantly, her senses seemed heightened. Every person she saw was a potential enemy, every vehicle contained a potential danger. She’d never felt seriously threatened in her life, but now, in less than a week, she’d received two veiled messages of imminent harm.

“The cost… will be higher than you can imagine.”

“DiE SLut!!!”

As she parked in a space on the street in front of the office and got out of her truck, Charlie saw an old, faded-green Mercedes rolling through the parking lot in her direction. She ran to the door, ducked inside, and watched as the car approached. Her breath came in short gulps as it crawled by. The driver stared straight ahead until he was right in front of the door. The car stopped and the driver’s head, a cue ball with eyes, turned toward her.
 

This was no scare tactic by Zane Barnes. It was Clyde Dalton, staring at her maniacally, smiling the same devious smile that Reynard the fox wore when he was eating Charlie’s grapes.

Chapter 29

THE
more Charlie thought about it – and she thought about it constantly – the more she leaned toward getting more of the gold out of the cave as quickly as possible. The morning after her encounter with Clyde Dalton, as soon as the sun peeked over the mountains to the east, Charlie saddled Sadie and headed for the cave.
 
She was in awe, once again, of its size, its luster when exposed to light, its incredible mystique. It took her about two hours to retrieve four more bars of gold. She packed two in each saddlebag. A million bucks an hour, she thought as she climbed into the saddle. Not bad work if you can get it.
 

The morning was bright and breezy. Gauzy, white puffs of cirrus clouds floated across the blue sky above purple mountain ranges in the distance. Charlie decided to take a closer look at a couple of things. First, she rode Sadie around the west side of the mountain until she found the spot where the stream came out of the rocks. She followed it about a hundred yards where it fed into Tempest Creek. She rode back and climbed from the saddle, knelt and inspected the area where the water emerged from beneath the rock. It was moving slowly and was three, maybe four feet deep, about six feet across. She wondered how far it was beneath the rock to the lower chamber of the cave. Ten feet? Fifty? No way to tell.

She also wanted to check out the split oak. She passed the cave entrance and rode around the eastern side, found a way she could manage, and climbed. She emerged from a thicket of scrub pines into a clearing on top of the ridge near the oak. She reined Sadie in and stopped. The view was spectacular; the mountains stretched off into the distance all around her, almost glowing beneath the morning sun. She breathed in deeply, filling her lungs with the cool, clean air. She imagined herself on top of the entire world.
 

The wind began to carry a faint sound, one she didn’t recognize but one that definitely didn’t belong in this place. She listened carefully; it grew louder. Still quite a distance away, but definitely coming closer from the northeast, the direction of Roscoe’s house. Charlie jumped down off of Sadie and led her back to the scrub thicket. She recognized the sound now, the unmistakable rumble of an internal combustion engine. A four-wheeler and a motorcycle were the only two vehicles that could possibly get around in this terrain, and the pitch of the engine was too low for a mountain bike.
 

Someone was coming toward her, toward the cave, toward her fortune.

Charlie’s heart began to race. Should she run? Sit tight and hide? Bury the gold bars? Who was it? No one was supposed to be on Roscoe’s land.
Her
land.
 

She stood still, listening.
 

The sound of the engine rose and fell with the terrain, louder when it topped a ridge, softer when it went into a valley. It came closer, three hundred yards away, maybe less, went silent. Suddenly, she saw it. A man sitting atop a four-wheeler, parked in a clearing on a ridge, panning the slopes and the valleys with a pair of binoculars. It was Zane Barnes. As the binoculars panned in her direction, they stopped suddenly. It looked as though Barnes was staring right at her. He stood on the running boards.

Charlie knelt instinctively. She was in the thicket, but she felt exposed, naked.
 

He saw me.

She didn’t move for several seconds, although Sadie kept shifting her feet and switching her tail. Her stomach began to churn as anger boiled inside her. Barnes wasn’t supposed to be on the land. She thought about confronting him, but she had two million dollars worth of gold in her saddlebags. She couldn’t risk him discovering it, perhaps taking it as he’d done from Roscoe. If he somehow managed to overpower her and take it, what could she do? She couldn’t go to the police. If she did, word about the gold would get out quickly.
 

The engine roared back to life. She listened closely. It was coming toward her. Charlie led Sadie out the far side of the thicket and climbed into the saddle. The north side of the slope was steeper and more treacherous than the south side where the cave was hidden, but Charlie had no intention of going anywhere near the cave. She leaned far back in the saddle as Sadie picked her way through scrub trees and loose rock. She could hear the rumble of the engine echoing off the slopes around her.
 

At the bottom of the slope, Charlie turned Sadie west and entered a stand of old-growth white oak. She loosened her grip on the reins, gave Sadie her head, and dug her heels into the horse’s ribs. Sadie immediately broke into a gallop. Charlie could hear the gold bars clanking against each other in the saddlebags. Sadie was carrying an extra hundred pounds, but it didn’t seem to matter. The horse was built for speed. Within minutes, Charlie was crossing Tempest Creek, back in familiar territory. Between the clanging of the gold, the beating of Sadie’s hooves and the rush of the wind, she’d been unable to hear the ATV. She pulled back on the reins and listened. The engine sounded far off, but the sound once again started to crescendo. He was still coming.

Charlie guided Sadie up a steep slope into a stand of white pines, through a draw, up another slope, and along a ridge line covered in poplar. She could hear the ATV in the woods below her; Zane hadn’t followed her up the slope. She took a circuitous route across rough terrain and finally made it home. Jasper was standing just inside the barn door when she led Sadie in to cool and groom her.

“Why’s that horse in such a lather?” Jasper asked.

“I let her stretch her legs a little.”
 

“What’s in them saddlebags?”

Charlie sighed. The gold bars had stretched the saddlebags tight. They looked bloated, like the leathery stomach of a malnourished child.

“It’s a surprise,” Charlie said. She walked past him to the grooming area. Jasper followed.

“Why do you look like you just came face-to-face with a pointy-tailed devil carrying a pitchfork?”

Charlie stopped and faced him. “Why are you grilling me like I’m some kind of criminal?”

“Strange goings on around here, Peanut,” he said. He picked up a piece of straw and let it dangle from his lips like a skinny cigarette. “First ol’ Zane Barnes comes snooping around here threatening you, then you tell me you got some crazy man writing you notes and leaving them on your car. Just a little bit ago there was a man with binoculars on a four-wheeler stopped on the ridge up there looking this place over like he was planning an invasion. I ain’t positive, but I think it was Barnes. Now you show up on a horse that looks like she’s been sprayed with shaving cream, saddlebags that are stuffed with something you won’t tell me about, and a look on your face that tells me something’s bad wrong. So why don’t you do your old Uncle Jasper a favor let him in on what’s going on?”

Charlie looked at her intuitive uncle with his furrowed brow above honest eyes. She knew Jasper cared deeply for her, that he would support her and do his best to protect her no matter what. She’d told Joe and Jack Dillard; she might as well tell Jasper.

“Let me take care of Sadie, Uncle,” Charlie said, “and then you and I need to have a little talk.”

Chapter 30

CAROLINE
planned the ambush. After I told her about Charlie and the gold, there was no way Jack was going to escape an interrogation by his mother, and there was no way I was going to avoid being a part of it. She told Jack that she wanted to fix his favorite dish, chicken cordon bleu, on Tuesday evening. When he asked her what the occasion was, she said she’d felt as though they hadn’t been able to spend enough time together, that she’d been spending all her free time with our grandson and niece, and she wanted the three of us to have a nice meal together and catch up. I heard the conversation, and I knew exactly what she was doing, but I didn’t say a word.

 
The dance school year, which ran from August to May, was over, and Caroline had some time on her hands. I’d become accustomed to doing most of the cooking at the house because Caroline worked in the evenings and she worked a lot on weekends, but she was an excellent cook. She spent the entire afternoon puttering around in the kitchen, and when she laid the food out on the table, it smelled fantastic.

“Wow, Mom, this looks great,” Jack said as he dived into the chicken.
 

“You should have invited Charlie,” Caroline said.
 

“I thought you wanted it to be just the three of us.”

“I want to meet her.”

“You will,” Jack said.

“When?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“I understand she’s come into some money.”

Jack looked across the table at me. It was one of those “thanks a lot for throwing me under the bus” looks.

“I knew you’d tell her,” he said.
 

I shrugged my shoulders. “I tell her everything.”

“No, you don’t. I seem to remember hearing you guys argue more than a few times about that very subject. She’s always complained that you keep things to yourself, that you aren’t open enough.”

“I’ve changed,” I said. “I’ve realized the error of my ways. I’ve adapted and I’ve overcome.”

“So tell me about it,” Caroline said.
 

“About what?” Jack said.

“About this new-found wealth that Charlie has come into.”

“What do you want to hear? I’m sure Mister Recently-Converted-Master-of-Communication over there has already told you all about it.”

“What does she plan to do with this gold? Your father tells me he advised her to turn it over to the court, but he doesn’t think she’s going to. Have you talked to her about it?”

“Not only have I talked to her about it, I’ve actually seen it,” Jack said. “Well, I’ve seen one bar. She showed it to me when I went up there. We’re looking into some different things, some options.”

“What kind of options?” I said.
 

“First of all, Charlie says getting it out of this cave where she found it is going to be a logistical nightmare. There is literally a ton of gold stashed deep in a cave in the mountains. The terrain is so rugged you can’t drive a truck or even a Jeep up there. She says we can get a four-wheeler to the cave, but we’ll have to haul the gold out of the cave a couple of bars at a time. I’ve been thinking about it, and I can probably haul six or seven bars out at a time in a backpack. She could haul maybe half that much. We can haul a couple hundred pounds at a time on a four-wheeler, which means it would take us maybe ten trips up and down the mountain to get it all out. From there, we’re thinking we could load it into her truck and my Jeep and take it to an armored car service. She doesn’t want anyone to know where it came from, so we’ll meet them somewhere and they can take it on to a gold broker. We’re researching setting up offshore corporations and bank accounts. We think we’ll form the corporation in the Caymans or someplace like that, then set up a bank account in maybe Switzerland, then take the gold to a broker and have them wire the money to the account. Once we do that, Charlie can have access to the money by using credit or debit cards or checks. She can withdraw cash. She can do whatever she wants.”