Simply Lies

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.

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?

She rose as an idea occurred to her. He had left behind one message, perhaps he had left another.

Clarisse started searching through the crates, but then another thought struck her. It would make sense, after all. In a classic manner at least.

There were only five bottles down here. Four were empty and cracked; one was intact but empty of any wine. Well, that was intriguing in and of itself. Why have a corked bottle with nothing in it?

Or was there something inside?

She used a rusty wine opener lying on one of the crates to uncork the bottle.

Nothing.

“Shit,” she muttered.

Was she just wrong about all of this? Was it just a wine cellar only with no wine?

But the one constant in Clarisse’s life was attention to detail. Her hundreds of notebooks compiled over the years would attest to that. So she examined the cork closely in case something was embedded in it. She hit the glass with her light to see if there was any writing or clue on it.

And then her attention turned to the wine label. It was not entirely affixed to the glass. One edge was curled up. She slowly and carefully removed it. The folded-up slip of paper secreted behind it fell out.

A message outside a bottle. How quaint, Harry.

However, the message was anything but quaint.

This is the twenty-first century. Act like it, you idiot.

She stared at the paper for a few moments before slipping it into her pocket.

Twenty-first century?

Okay, that could mean a number of different things, some apparent, others not. She had just started pondering a few of the more obvious ones when she heard a noise from above.

As she listened, it was repeated.

It seemed she was not the only person at Stormfield tonight.