Authors: Tara Nina
“I don’t care how heavy
or
light it is,” Kip stated
in a snippy tone. “I simply want it moved in one piece. It’s no good to me in
pieces.”
“Not a problem, mate.” The larger of the two huffed then
completed the task of leaning the statue back into the cradle of the hand
truck. While one held the hand truck steady, the other strapped the statue in
place so it wouldn’t slide or slip.
After a few minutes, they had loaded and secured the statue
into the van.
“Ahhh,” he sighed. He’d acquired his prize without a hitch
and all before lunch.
* * * * *
The door slammed as the O’Reillys entered. Caledonia took
the last step into the kitchen. Momma and Poppa sat at the table having a cup
of tea and a bite to eat.
“Where’d Struan end up last night?” Percy asked.
“What do you mean?” Caledonia replied hoping her cheeks
didn’t give away the events she shared with Struan. “He’s in the shed.”
“We unloaded the scuba tanks from the van to the shed,” Abel
stated as he poured a cup of tea. “He’s not there, lass. We were wondering
where you hid him.”
She shot out the door and across the yard. She yanked open
the door and couldn’t believe what she saw. Struan was gone. She spun around in
a panic, searching the surrounding area for any signs of her Scottish laird.
Percy, Abel and Fin came around the corner of the shed just in time to see her
pound the shed door with her fist and scream.
“Kip,” she growled between clenched teeth. “That no-good
son-of-a-bitch.”
“I’ll call the police. Won’t take them but an hour or so to
get here,” Abel said as he immediately spun around and headed toward the house.
“No,” Caledonia gasped. Abel froze and both he and his
brother, slack-jawed, stared at her.
“Don’t be telling me you’ve still got feelings for that
sap.” Percy’s tone didn’t hide his strong hatred for Kip.
“Oh hell no!” she snapped angrily. “It’s not that—”
Caledonia closed her mouth. What could she say? How much would her closest friends
understand? She darted a moment’s glance from one to the other before making
her decision. These two were her brothers, if not by blood, by a lifetime of
experiences both good and bad.
“Then what is it, Caledonia?” Percy asked with his arms
crossed over his chest. He leveled a direct stare on her that swirled with a
mixture of angry undertones and confusion. The look she gained from Abel was
similar.
Caledonia took a breath and began where she knew she should,
at the beginning of when all the weird spirit stuff started in her life. “Do
the two of you remember the time we ended up in that root cellar behind the
castle when we were kids?”
Percy snickered then said, “You talking about when Abel fell
in and we had to fetch him out? Big scaredy-cat o’ the dark.”
“Hey, I take offense to that. I was a wee lad,” Abel chimed
in. His face flushed a light shade of red. Caledonia guessed he remembered how
he cried until they lit a couple of makeshift brush torches and went in after
him.
Caledonia nodded and cupped Abel’s cheek. “It’s okay. We
know you’ve outgrown that now. If it wasn’t for you, I never would have found
the riddle, which was written to save Struan.”
Brows bunched and total confusion lined their expressions.
Abel asked, “What’s that got to do with this? We need to call the police.”
“You two took an oath and stood beside me then, when we
agreed not to tell anyone about that banshee. You stood beside me when things
went haywire at the Bermuda Triangle. We can’t call the police. Think about it.
He’s an ancient Scotsman trapped by a curse in stone. What happens to him if he
breaks free?” Caledonia looked from one to the other. “Who’s going to believe
him but us?”
“If he’s got his sword on him, I say he kicks some arse.”
Percy’s tone dripped with humor.
Caledonia shot a quick glance about the shed. “It looks as
if he does have it. I don’t see it.”
Abel’s mouth opened but he didn’t get the chance.
“Before either of you say another word,” Fin Kavanagh stated
point-blank. “I see where you’re going here, Caledonia. If he wakes before we
find him, the consequences could be disastrous. We have to find him without the
police.” Fin straightened and shot a glare from one to the other. “Within that
block of stone beats the heart o’ a Scotsman and we must find him and help him
return home. Are you with us or not?”
The oversized, redheaded O’Reilly brothers looked at one
another.
“What’d you think?” Abel asked. “You up for hunting Kip and
getting Struan back?”
“Depends.” Percy looked at Caledonia. “Anything goes when we
find him.”
She nodded her acknowledgement, but he added, “That includes
beating the snot out of him.”
“Aye, but I get first punch,” she replied with a shrug.
“We’re in,” Percy said. “You know, Abel, we could never let
Caledonia or old man Kavanagh down.”
“Who you calling old, boy?” Fin harrumphed good-naturedly.
“If we didn’t have to find that good-for-nothing Kip, I’d show you there’s a
lot o’ fire in me fists.”
“Aye,” Aileen interrupted as she came around the corner and
hugged his waist. “And though I pray it doesn’t come to a fistfight, we might
need that fire to save Struan. So save the flames for that and don’t be wasting
them on the boys, dear.”
Fin turned into her hug. Over his shoulder, he cockily
teased. “You two are saved by a woman,
again
.”
Caledonia shook her head. She had to give it to Poppa. He
knew just how to handle the O’Reilly brothers. He’d been their surrogate dad
ever since their father was killed in a tragic industrial fishing accident when
they were eight.
“What say you to us finding out which direction Kip took off
in and beating the shite out o’ him?” Abel’s comment surprised Caledonia. He
wasn’t normally the one to start the fight. Granted, he wouldn’t walk away once
one was underway, but it wasn’t like him to make the suggestion outright. And
now this was twice within about a week’s time he’d offered to knock some sense
into Kip.
“I’m hoping finding him won’t be a problem,” Caledonia said
as she turned and headed for the house. “But catching him before he sells
Struan to some black-market collector might be. We’ve got to act fast.”
“Don’t fret, dear.” Momma fell in step at her side. “When
night falls, the situation may right itself on its own.”
She crossed the threshold and did a mad dash upstairs to her
room. If there was one thing she knew about Kip, it was that he was
predictable. There were a handful of web loops and sites she was aware he
frequented. Whenever she located a valuable artifact, he jumped online quicker
than she could blink and started a bidding war with some rather undesirable
people in her opinion. It tore her heart apart to think of where a specific few
rare objects of history landed because of Kip’s greed.
Her teeth gritted and her jaw tightened as she shook the
image of what she wanted to do to Kip from her head. Law no longer allowed
disembowelment, but Struan didn’t know that. If he woke and found he’d been
stolen and sold like a trinket, would he react like the warrior she suspected
him to be? Though she hated Kip, she knew she had to find Struan before nightfall.
This battle wasn’t between him and Kip. It was hers and hers alone to fight.
She thought it ended when he won just about everything in the divorce. Guess he
didn’t know when to cut his losses and leave her alone.
Caledonia returned to the kitchen with her laptop and took a
seat at the table. Poppa was on the phone in the next room. Momma set a cup of
tea beside the computer as she booted up.
“Who’s Poppa talking to?”
“He’s setting off the barkin’ chain,” Momma quipped and
Caledonia laughed. It’d been years since she’d heard that term, which usually
Poppa used for Momma when she gossiped with her lady friends via telephone.
“He’s making sure everyone he knows tells everyone they know that the diving
shed was broken into and a valuable asset was stolen. That way, if anyone saw
something odd today, it’ll get back to him and maybe help with finding Struan.”
“Where are the O’Reillys?”
“Patricia came home from visiting with her sister. They
drove the van over to borrow her compact car so we can split up and go out
looking. They’re guessing Kip had to be in a van to cart Struan out o’ here.”
“Since Mrs. O’Reilly’s home, does that mean her sister is on
the mend?” Caledonia asked.
“Aye.” Her mother nodded.
She took a sip of her tea and typed on the keyboard with the
fingers of one hand. One click and the file she kept on Kip’s special auction
sites popped into view and opened. He didn’t know she had this information. She
stumbled upon it by accident after their divorce was final. He left the office
of Marine Treasures Salvage with a window on his computer open while she was
there cleaning out the few items she won.
Good conscience had tried to talk her out of attaching the
zip drive that was in her pile of office materials, but the agony of being
defeated in court controlled her hand. She plugged it in and downloaded copies
of almost everything he wouldn’t want known about him in the proper world of
antiquities. It would probably cost him the company, if she had the money to
drag him back to court and provide what she’d learned as evidence. Caledonia
sat back, set the tea down and skimmed the lists of sites. Lucky he was so damn
anal. They were not only alphabetical, but also listed by what interested
certain collectors.
She visited site after site looking for anything that would
lead her to Struan. Kip wouldn’t let a prize statue simply sit in storage. No,
he had to have a bidding event going on somewhere. Determination made her
fingers fly on the keyboard until she struck gold.
“Bingo,” she squealed.
The screen door flapped shut behind the O’Reillys entering
the kitchen. Percy said, “I take it our timing couldn’t be better.”
“Nope, it couldn’t.” She glanced at the clock. “We’ve got
less than three hours until dusk. The moment night falls, Struan will wake.
That alone should scare the shite out o’ Kip. But I doubt he managed to carry
Struan’s statue alone. He had help. No telling who or what sort o’ thugs he’s
hired.”
“You leave the thugs to us,” Abel replied. Both he and his
brother straightened, biceps flexed, fists at the ready. Their eyes shined with
the hunger for a good fight. “Been awhile since me and Percy had a good row.”
“Aye, way too long,” Percy concurred with a nod.
“Okay,” Poppa said as he hung up the phone after making more
than a dozen calls. “Seems Mrs. Potter passed a van around noon. It turned off
the main road and onto our lane. Since it looked similar to our van, she
thought nothing o’ it. Silas was walking to the pub about a half hour later and
said a van passed him. It was headed toward the A9.”
“Good work, Poppa,” Caledonia praised. “With that, it
confirms the information I found concerning a specific auction.” She waved her
hand excitedly, motioning for them to gather around her laptop. She pointed out
the ongoing bidding war between two individuals. “It appears as if Struan’s
quite popular.”
“You sure this is about our friend?”
“Aye.” She scrolled to the top of the page and there sat the
evidence. A perfect picture of Struan as she’d left him this morning. Kip must
have snapped that with his phone and uploaded it to the site before he left the
shed. What a dumb-arse! She zoomed in on the background and proved her theory.
On the wall behind it hung her diving gear complete with her initials. Proof
enough to get him arrested if it had to go that far.
“Hey, isn’t that your—”
“That it is, Abel. That it is,” she replied.
“What a ball juggler,” Percy proclaimed. “Only an idiot
would take a picture at the crime he just committed and post it on the web.”
Caledonia clicked on a tab at the top. It listed an address
she was familiar with as the pick-up location.
Yep, he truly was a dumb-arse.
Chapter Ten
Traffic stalled his progress and hampered his mood. A
flipped truck and a five-car pile-up on the A9 stopped traffic for over an
hour. Mobile internet dead zones agitated him even more. First and foremost for
a successful bidding war, he needed constant contact with his potential buyers.
Sweat beaded his brow and anticipation knotted his gut when the van lurched and
advanced three whole car lengths. Second most important, a swift close to the
auction and a timely handoff of the merchandise to the highest bidder.
The trick was not to get too greedy, he reminded himself.
Last auction almost ended in disaster when he nearly got snagged in a police
sting operation. The winner picked up their prize and he left with cash in hand
just moments before a special police team encircled the empty warehouse where
they’d met. He felt certain someone tipped them off. Kip sneered. Must have
been that jealous bitch, Lillianna. Never should have hired her. Then again,
she was a tight piece of ass. A slow smile twitched his lips as he stared
ahead.
Unfortunately, she demanded half of the profits and he fired
her.
Kip checked the bars on his phone. Still no viable
connection to the auction. Damn. He thrashed his head against the headrest of
the passenger-side seat in the van. He had one of the hottest items he’d ever
acquired on auction and no way to check on its status.
Once past the traffic snarl, the trek to the storage
facility in Edinburgh should be over long before dark. He shivered inwardly. He
hated the thought of having to switch to using this location. It sat in an
unsavory section of Edinburgh as far as he was concerned. But for this little
venture, it was more centrally located and easily accessible for all involved.
Especially him. A short ferry ride from the port at Newhaven to Kirkcaldy and
he’d board his salvage vessel, the
Spùinneadair-mara
, and set sail for a
distant horizon, long before anyone caught wind of his misdeeds.