Ninth Key (19 page)

“You can’t kill your own
nephew
.” My voice cracked. I was truly feeling…well, horrified. “I mean, I can’t imagine something like that is going to make you too popular at Grandma’s around the holidays.”

Marcus’s mouth set into a grim line. “Perhaps you didn’t understand me. As I have just taken great pains to explain to you, Miss Simon, your death, as well as my nephew’s, is going to look like a tragic accident.”

“Is this how you got rid of Mrs. Fiske?” I demanded. “Jet-ski accident?”

“Hardly,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I wasn’t interested in having her body found. Without a body there’s no proof a murder has taken place, correct? Now, be a good girl and —”

This guy was a complete mental case. I mean, Red Beaumont, for all his believing he’s from Transylvania, isn’t anywhere near as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs as his little brother.

“Is this how you get your kicks?” I glared at him. “You really are a sicko. And for your information, I am
not,
” I declared, “taking a stitch off. Whoever finds this body is going to find it fully clothed, thank you very much.”

“Oh, I
am
sorry,” he said. He actually sounded apologetic. “Of course you’d like a little privacy while you change. You’ll have to forgive me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the company of such a
modest
young lady.” His gaze flickered disparagingly down toward my miniskirt.

More than ever, I wanted to plunge one of my thumbs into his eyes. But I was getting the impression that there was a chance he might actually leave me alone for a minute. And that was too tempting to resist. So I just stood there, trying to summon up a blush.

“I suppose,” he said with a sigh, “that I can spare you five minutes.” He strolled back toward the elevator. “Just remember, Miss Simon, that I
will
get you into that bathing suit one way or another. You see, of course, what poor Tad chose.” He nodded toward the couch. “It would be simpler — and less painful for you in the long run — if you’d put it on yourself and spare me the trouble.”

He pulled the elevator door shut behind him.

There really
was
something wrong with him, I decided. I mean, he’d just given up a chance to see a babe like me in the buff. The guy clearly had a nacho platter where his brains should have been.

Well, that’s what I told myself, anyway.

Alone in Mr. Beaumont’s office — except for Tad and the fish, neither of whom were particularly communicative at the moment — I immediately began trying to figure out a way to escape. The windows, I knew, were hopeless. But there was a phone on Mr. Beaumont’s desk. I picked it up and began dialing.

“Miss Simon.” Marcus’s voice, coming through the receiver, sounded amused. “It’s a house phone. You don’t imagine we’d let Tad’s father make any outgoing calls in his condition, do you? Please hurry up and change. We haven’t much time.”

He hung up. So did I.

Half a minute wasted.

The door to the elevator was locked. So was the door on the opposite side of the room. I tried kicking it, but it was made of some kind of really thick, solid wood, and didn’t budge.

I decided to turn my attention to the windows. Wrapping the end of one of the velvet curtains around my fist, I punched out a few panes of glass, then tried slamming my foot against the wooden shutters.

No good. They appeared to have been nailed permanently shut.

Three minutes left.

I looked around for a weapon. My plan, I decided, since escape appeared to be impossible, was to climb the bookshelf behind the back of the elevator door. When Marcus came though that door, I’d leap down upon him, and point a sharp object at his throat. Then I’d use him as a hostage to make my way past the two thugs.

Okay, so it was a little
Xena, Warrior Princess.
Hey, it was a plan, all right? I never said it was a good one. It was just the best one I could come up with under the circumstances. I mean, it wasn’t as if anybody was going to come bursting in to rescue me. I didn’t see how anybody could — except for maybe Jesse, who was pretty slick at walking through walls and stuff.

Only Jesse didn’t know I needed him. He didn’t know I was in trouble. He didn’t even know where I was.

And I had no way of letting him know, either.

A shard of glass, I decided, would make an excellent, very threatening weapon, and so I looked for a particularly lethal-looking one amid the rubble I’d made of a few of Mr. Beaumont’s windows.

Two minutes.

Holding my shard of glass in my hand — wishing I had my ghost-busting gloves with me so I’d be sure not to cut myself — I scrambled up the bookshelf, no easy feat in three-inch heels.

One and a half minutes.

I glanced over at Tad. He lay limp as a rag doll, his bare chest rising and falling in a gentle, rhythmic motion. It was quite a nice-looking chest, actually. Not as nice-looking, maybe, as Jesse’s. But still, in spite of his uncle being a murderer, and his dad being foreman at the cracker factory — not to mention the whole basketball thing — I wouldn’t have minded resting my head against it. His chest, I mean. You know, under other circumstances, Tad actually in a conscious state being one of them.

But I’d never have the chance if I didn’t get us out of this alive.

There was no sound in the room, save Tad’s steady breathing and the burbling of the aquarium.

The aquarium.

I looked at the aquarium. It made up most of one whole wall of the office. How, I wondered, did those fish get fed? The tank was built into the wall. I could detect no convenient trapdoor through which someone might sprinkle food. The tank had to be accessed through the room next door.

The room I couldn’t get to because the door to it was locked.

Unless.

Thirty seconds.

I dropped down from the bookshelf and began striding toward the aquarium.

I could hear the elevator begin to hum. Marcus, right on time, was on his way back. Needless to say, I had not put on my swimsuit like a good little girl. Although I did grab it — along with the wheeled swivel chair that had been behind Mr. Beaumont’s desk — as I walked toward the fish tank.

The humming of the elevator stopped. I heard the doorknob turn. I kept walking. The chair’s wheels were noisy on the parquet floor.

The door to the elevator opened. Marcus, seeing that I had not done as he asked, shook his head.

“Miss Simon,” he said, in a disappointed tone. “Are we being difficult?”

I positioned the swivel chair in front of the aquarium. Then I lifted a foot and balanced it on top of the seat. From one finger, I dangled the bathing suit.

“Sorry,” I said, apologetically. “But dead’s never been my color.”

Then I grabbed that chair, and flung it with all my might at the glass of that giant fish tank.

The next thing I knew there was a tremendous crash.

Then a wall of water, glass, and exotic marine life was coming at me.

It knocked me flat onto my back. A tidal wave hit me with the weight of a freight train, pushing me to the floor, then flattening me against the far wall of the room. The wind knocked out of me, I lay there a second, soaked, coughing up briny water, some of which I accidentally swallowed.

When I opened my eyes, all I could see were fish. Big fish, little fish, trying to swim through the three inches of water that lay upon the wood floor, opening and closing their mouths in a pathetic attempt to snatch a few more seconds of life. One fish in particular had washed up next to me, and it stared at me with eyes almost as glassy and lifeless as Marcus’s had been when he’d been explaining how he intended to kill me.

Then a very familiar voice cut through my dazed musings on the paradoxes of life and death.

“Susannah?”

I lifted my head, and was extremely surprised to see Jesse standing over me, a very worried look on his face.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi. How did you get here?”

“You called me,” Jesse said.

How could I ever have thought, I wondered as I lay there gazing up at him, that any guy, even Tad, could ever be quite as hot as Jesse? Everything, from the tiny scar in his eyebrow, to the way his dark hair curled against the back of his neck, was perfect, as if Jesse were the original mold for the archetypal hottie.

He was polite, too. Old-world manners were the only ones he knew. He leaned down and offered me his hand…his lean, brown, completely poison oak–free hand.

I reached up. He helped me to my feet.

“Are you all right?” he asked, probably because I wasn’t mouthing off as much as usual.

“I’m fine,” I said. Drenched, and smelling of fish, but fine. “But I didn’t call you.”

From the opposite corner of the room came a very low snarl.

Marcus was struggling to get to his feet, but he kept slipping on all the water and fish. “What the
hell
did you do that for?” he wanted to know.

I couldn’t actually remember. I think maybe when the water hit me, I’d banged my head against something. Wow, I thought. Amnesia. Cool. I’d get out of tomorrow’s geometry quiz for sure.

Then my gaze fell on Tad — still sleeping peace-fully on the couch, an exotic-looking fish flopping in death throes on his bare legs — and I remembered.

Oh, yeah. Tad’s uncle Marcus was trying to kill us.
Would
kill us, too, if I didn’t stop him.

I’m not sure I was really thinking straight. All I could remember from before the water hit was that it had been important, for some reason, for me to get to the other side of that fish tank.

And so I waded through all that water — thinking to myself,
My boots are
so
ruined
— and climbed up onto what was now just a raised platform, like a stage, looking out across a sea of slapping fishtails. The accent lights, still buried in the colored gravel at the bottom of the tank, shined up on me.

“Susannah,” I heard Jesse say. He’d followed me, and now stood looking up at me curiously. “What are you doing?”

I ignored him — and Marcus, too, who was still swearing as he tried to get across the room without getting his Cole-Haans more wet than they already were.

I stood inside the ruined aquarium and looked up. As I’d suspected, the fish were fed from a room behind the tank…a room in which there was nothing except aquarium maintenance equipment. The locked door from Mr. Beaumont’s office led into this room. There was no other form of egress.

Not that it mattered now, of course.

“Get down from there.” Marcus sounded really mad. “Get down there from there, by God, or I’ll climb in and fish you out —”

Fish me out. That struck me as kind of amusing under the circumstances. I started to laugh.

“Susannah,” Jesse said. “I think —”

“We’ll see how hard you’re laughing,” Marcus bellowed, “when I get through with you, you stupid bitch.”

I stopped laughing all of a sudden.

“Susannah,” Jesse said. Now he
really
sounded worried.

“Don’t worry, Jesse,” I said, in a perfectly calm voice. “I’ve got this one under control.”

“Jesse?”
Marcus looked around. Not seeing anyone else in the room, however, but Tad, he said, “It’s Marcus. I’m Marcus, remember? Now, come on down here. We don’t have any more time for these childish games….”

I bent down and seized one of the accent lights that glowed, hidden in the sand at the bottom of the tank. Shaped like a small floodlight, it proved to be very hot in my hands when I touched it.

Marcus, realizing I wasn’t going to come with him on my own accord, sighed, and reached into his suit coat, which was wet and smelly now. He’d have to change before his lunch meeting.

“Okay, you want to play games?” Marcus pulled something made of shiny metal from his breast pocket. It was, I realized, a tiny little gun. A .22, from the looks of it. I knew from having watched so many episodes of
Cops.

“See this?” Marcus pointed the muzzle at me. “I don’t want to have to shoot you. The coroner tends to be suspicious of drowning victims bearing gunshot wounds. But we can always let the propellers dismember you so no one will actually be able to tell. Maybe just your head will toss up onto shore. Wouldn’t your mother love
that
? Now, put the light down and let’s go.”

I straightened, but I didn’t put the light down. It came up with me, along with the black rubber-coated cord that had grounded it beneath the sand.

“That’s right,” Marcus said, looking pleased. “Put the light down, and let’s go.”

Jesse, standing in the water beside my would-be assassin, looked extremely interested in what was going on. “Susannah,” he said. “That is a gun he is holding. Do you want me to —”

“Don’t worry, Jesse,” I said, approaching the edge of the tank, where there’d once been a wall of glass — before I’d broken it, that is. “Everything’s under control.”

“Who the hell is Jesse?” Marcus, I realized, was getting testy. “There is no Jesse here. Now put the light down and let’s —”

I did what he said. Well, sort of. That is, I wrapped the cord that was attached to the light around my left hand. Then with my other hand, I pulled the bulb so that the cord came popping right out of the back of the socket.

Then I stood there holding the lamp in one hand, and the cord with frayed wires now sticking out of one end of it in the other.

“That’s great,” Marcus said. “You broke the light. You really showed me. Now” — his voice rose — “
get down here
!”

I stepped up to the edge of the tank.

“I am not,” I informed Marcus, “stupid.”

He gestured with the gun. “Whatever you say. Just —”

“Nor,” I added, “am I a bitch.”

Marcus’s eyes widened. Suddenly, he realized what I was up to.

“No!” he shrieked.

But it was way too late. I had already thrown the cord into the murky water at Marcus’s feet.

There was a brilliant blue flash and a lot of popping noises. Marcus screamed.

And then we were plunged into impenetrable darkness.