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She drew back and said, “I want you to remember what you just said about cheating fate.”
“Same for you.”
“Deal.”
“I’ll take the rental car to the airport,” he said. “The Justice Department plane is waiting for me.”
The same jet that had brought them to Arkansas.
“Pick up the rental car tomorrow to use. I’ll leave the keys in the glove compartment. We’ll worry about getting you out of here later.”
She nodded. “I’ll make do.”
“Of that I have no doubt.”
She watched as he headed back to his room. “Cotton.”
He stopped and turned.
She caught the look of consternation on his face.
“Call Danny Daniels. He needs to know.”
* * *
She reentered her room to find Lea awake in bed.
“Are you two a thing?” the younger girl asked.
“Were you spying through the peephole?”
“I heard voices and looked out to see who it was. That was quite a kiss.”
She nodded and smiled. “We have a thing.”
“He’s handsome.”
“He’s headed back to Washington, DC. Some things there have to be handled. I’m going to stay here and make sure you two are okay.”
“We don’t need a babysitter. Me and Grandpa have gotten along real fine on our own.”
She noted that the declaration did not carry any anger or resentment, more just a statement of fact. “I realize that. But this is a little above and beyond what the two of you are accustomed to handling.”
“Where are you from?”
She decided to go with the abrupt change of subject. “I live in France, but I was born and raised in Spain. My father’s ancestry goes back to the Moors, my mother was European.”
“You have nice clothes. Are you rich?”
She was impressed with the girl’s powers of observation. “I’m not poor. My father left me a company that makes a great deal of money.”
“I look at the fashion sites online. I like fashion, though I don’t get to wear much of it.”
Walls were definitely cracking so she decided to see if she could break them down further. She grabbed her laptop and accessed the website for her castle reconstruction project. Lea came close and they scanned through the pages, which were loaded with photos and information.
“This is my passion,” she told Lea.
“We have one of those here.”
Which she knew about, as her project had been its inspiration. The Ozark Medieval Fortress. Like her own, it was to be a reproduction of a French castle. Unlike her own, which she personally funded, that project had closed for lack of money.
“It’s up in the northern part of the state,” Lea said. “I heard about it from some people who went and saw it.”
She’d already sensed that this girl had too few female influences in her life. She loved her grandfather, but sometimes that wasn’t enough. So she kept the conversation going and they talked more about each other.
“If you’re rich and buildin’ a castle, why are you workin’ with the feds?”
“Cotton and I help them out sometimes. Of course, we had no idea it was going to turn into all this. It was supposed to be a simple fact-finding mission.”
“I’m ashamed of what Grandpa did with those men,” she said. “Trickin’ you. He was actin’ stupid.”
“I think he knows that.”
“Can I tell you somethin’? Between you and me?”
She nodded.
“I have a special fella.”
She smiled. “Like Cotton is to me?”
“Yep. We like each other. But I know how Grandpa feels about that. He says boys are bad.”
“He’s just looking after you.”
“I guess. But he really thinks all boys are bad. I get it. He just wants me to be careful and sure, and I am.”
There was a lot of maturity in this young woman, evidenced by how she’d earlier handled a gun to her neck.
“My fella’s uncle was a sentinel, too, who guarded some important stuff, like the stone. We’ve talked about it, tryin’ to figure things out.”
“And what did you decide?”
“That my grandpa and his uncle were not crazy.”
She could sense there was more.
“I can show you somethin’, if you want.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TENNESSEE
Diane could not sleep. She’d lain down after Vance had left, switching off all the lights in the house and enveloping herself in a welcomed darkness. Her brother’s missing notebook weighed heavy on her mind. Somebody had taken it from the study, of that she was sure. But who? And why? Tops on her list was Danny Daniels, especially since he’d possessed the cross-and-circle necklace. He’d acted as though he knew nothing of its significance, but that was coming from a man who knew how to lie. Did he know what the cross and circle meant? Were all the questions about Alex’s death just curiosity or something else?
She had to stop.
Damn this paranoia.
Danny Daniels could not care less about what she was doing. Why would he? He was nothing more than Alex’s friend and had returned the necklace. So she asked herself once again, who could have taken the notebook? It was there two days ago after Grant delivered it, when she’d read every word. Luckily, most of it was shorthand reflections, bullet points and legal citations, meaningless to almost everyone and certainly not threatening. The cross and circle on the front would probably not even be noticed. Just some manufacturer’s decoration. She’d debated whether to tell Vance about Kenneth’s breach of secrecy with Alex and the notebook being gone, but decided to keep that to herself.
Like everything else.
“You can’t do this,” Alex said to her, his voice rising.
They were sitting alone in the great room.
“I won’t allow you to do any of this,” he said.
That, she resented. “I don’t require your permission.”
“No, you don’t. But I am the senior senator from this state, and I can stop you, Kenneth, and Lucius Vance.”
She shook her head. “What a hypocrite. All your preaching about changing the government. All your complaining. Here you have a way to fix it, and you don’t want to take it.”
“This is not a fix. It’s a revolution. One the people should decide for themselves.”
“They will, through their duly elected representatives. If they don’t like it, they can un-elect them. They get that opportunity, in the House of Representatives, every two years.”
“It’s not that simple and you know it. Once done, this will be tough to undo. And once power is tasted, people have a tendency to keep on eating it. Even the minority in the House, who will oppose the change by the majority, will see the political advantages.”
“What’s the matter, Alex? Afraid you and your Senate cronies will lose your clout? Right now you take every molecule of oxygen from the room. Senators get the local party money, the local party support. House candidates fight for the scraps, and most times they don’t even get those. They have to go out and raise every dime for their campaigns, while you prima donnas in the Senate have everything handed to you. That will all change, won’t it?”
“You don’t have a clue what you’re about to unleash. Lucius Vance is no benign statesman. He’s ambitious and arrogant and wanted to be president. Now he will essentially become an autocrat. More powerful than any president. That kind of concentration was never meant for one man. This country was not founded on that principle.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Alex. This plan is exactly how this country was governed for its first thirty years. The House dominated, and the Senate followed. And we survived. We’re just going back to our roots.”
“We were a tiny nation, with a tiny central government that did little to nothing. The world has changed. This plan, as you call it, was designed by men
to strip the North of its ability to hold the South in check. It was meant to be a declaration of political war—which by the way was never implemented. Perhaps they realized, as I do, it’s a risk too great to take.”
“Where is Kenneth’s notebook?”
“I left it in DC. It will make for good evidence, if needed.”
