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Tears streamed down Bernie’s cheeks as she read the last words her father had written to her mother so long ago.
He hadn’t abandoned her because he didn’t love them. He’d left and hadn’t contacted them to keep them safe from the woman’s family.
Part of Bernie wanted to hold onto her anger at having been abandoned. Her father could have tried harder. He should have found a way to spirit them away to a safe location where they would have remained the happy little family they’d been.
But from what she’d learned about her half-brother, he belonged to a mafia family. It could be one of those families that, once you joined it, you couldn’t leave unless they carried you out in a box. Or threw you in a river with cement overshoes.
What had brought Dean to Bayou Mambaloa? Had their father sent him? Was her father still alive?
Bernie gathered the box and the letter and pushed to her feet, eager to find Gerard and show him the letter that proved her father hadn’t left because he didn’t love them, but because he loved them. When she turned toward the bedroom door, she froze.
A man dressed all in black, wearing a ski mask, pointed a gun at her.
“Where is it?” he demanded.
“Where is what?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“You damn well know what,” he barked.
A surge of anger pushed through her veins. “No, I damn well don’t. If it’s the foot you want, you’ll have to go to the state crime lab to get it.”
“I’m not after a goddamn foot,” he growled. “I want the bag,” he said.
“What bag?” she shot back.
“The bag he stole. I know you have it.”
“What’s with you men thinking I have something that I don’t?” She set the box on the bed to free her hands in case she had to fight for her life. “Who stole what bag? And what’s so special about a bag?”
“Your half-brother, Dean, stole a bag filled with three-hundred-thousand dollars in cash.” The man in the mask’s eyes narrowed. “The family wants it back.”
“The family or you?” Bernie asked. She was stalling, hoping someone—Gerard—would notice she’d been gone too long and come find her. “If the family was that concerned about the money, wouldn’t they have sent more people to retrieve it?”
“They sent me,” he said.
“Or were you in charge of safeguarding the money, and Dean absconded with it on your watch?” She laughed. “That’s it, isn’t it? You have to get that money back, or they’ll come after you, thinking you stole it.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “Give me the goddamn money.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t have it.”
“Then get it,” he commanded.
The man wasn’t going to believe she didn’t have the money. The problem was that he had a gun. There were a lot of people in her yard and going in and out of her house. If this man started shooting, the innocent lives of her friends would be lost.
She had to do something to disarm this man without getting shot or getting other people shot in the process.
“It’s not in this room. I hid it in the barn,” she lied. If she could get him out of the house and into the barn, she’d have more room to work on getting that gun out of his hand. Holy shit. She’d never had to disarm a gunman.
Before she’d married Ray, she’d never driven a tractor, milked a cow or stuck her arm inside a pregnant cow’s hoo-hah to help it birth its calf. She’d done a lot of things she’d never done before. How hard could it be to disarm a gunman?
Gerard, where are you? This damsel is in distress and in need of a knight in shining armor to save her ass.
Chapter 13
Bernie had been gone long enough to use the bathroom, take a shower and bake a cake.
