The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) Page 23

  Doc laughed at his own cleverness.

  "I met the Brazilian business people as well as the foreign doctors I'm going to be dealing with in Rio. I found a job at the local hospital there and took a crash course in Portuguese. I was talking to my chief Brazilian contact this afternoon all the way to Smith's Airfield. I paid dearly to have facial reconstruction done in the hospital in Rio. It's the sort of thing that actors and spies do. It was such a good job that I could fly back to St. Simons Island, meet the Shipleys, hobnob with my old friends, even meet my own parents and siblings, and nobody recognized me.

  "But—"

  "I had a new voice as well, thanks to the acting lessons I took in Rio after I got out of the hospital. I thought I should talk like a Brit to match my new passport." He switched back to his British accent.

  "But—"

  "Working out in the gym developed some shoulder muscles that I didn't have before either." He stretched out an arm to show off his torso. "I have to be careful to wear long sleeves and long pants. I didn't want anybody to see the injuries I suffered when falling down the stairs at the Shipleys' house in May."

  He pulled up his suit pant leg to show Bianca a scar.

  "This summer I was able to go back to the same old Brunswick Memorial Hospital and sign on for another internship. Nobody had the slightest suspicion. Like you, they thought Doc was dead. I have to remember to wear my contacts so my eyes are blue. I have to dye my hair once a week so that none of the roots grow in dark. I have to shave a lot, too. You might notice I spend a lot of time in the bathroom."

  Harry had been right! When he had warned Bianca that night at the party at the Cloister Hotel, she should have listened. He had told her that there was something suspicious about Dr. Byron Kingsley. He had no friends. He was a loner. He was buying blond hair dye at the drugstore and working out at the gym in long pants and long sleeves in the hot, humid summer weather.

  When Harry had called and told her that there was nobody by the name of Byron Kingsley except a dead British dentist, Bianca should have known that something was wrong. Yesterday she'd been on that medication that had fuddled her brain. It was hard to remember exactly what Harry had told her now. Bianca had not even recognized him on the other end of the phone! Only now could she recall his voice.

  "What do you want with me?" Bianca swallowed hard.

  He lifted the child off Bianca's lap and lowered her on to his. Little Katie started wailing at the top of her lungs. She flailed her arms and legs wildly about, dropping her toys onto the floor.

  Bianca snatched the child back without thinking. She picked up Little Katie's toys.

  "I'm kidnapping Little Katie Shipley. Just as you are, my dear," Doc answered.

  "We? Kidnap Little Katie? I — I would rather break my own neck."

  "We left a ransom note on the coffee table for the Shipleys to find — or rather for their servants to send to them in London. It's very explicit. A cool five million will be fine, thank you, all in cash to be conveyed by a system I've researched that can't be traced."

  "But Katie —"

  "The child will be returned safe and sound. We'll hire somebody to drive her to Mexico City and put her on a plane. It wouldn't be safe to send her back directly from Rio. I might be traced. She won't have her skin rash by then. Why, she won't have any traces of it by tomorrow morning!"

  "How do you know?" Bianca pressed.

  "The skin rash was caused by a poison I prepared at the hospital's medical lab. It was a mixture using croton oil as the main ingredient."

  "Croton oil?"

  "Yes, mayapple — croton oil's other name — is harvested in the southwestern United States. I stopped there on my way from Rio to St. Simons Island last month. I rubbed it on the insides of Katie's clothes whenever I was over at her house with Dr. Rankin or you. The dose was strong enough to cause a skin rash, not strong enough to kill her if she ingested it by sucking on her clothing."

  "Mayapple?" Bianca had not heard of that name either.

  "The first signs appear almost immediately. It causes blistering. If taken orally in a strong enough dose, it can kill you. I made sure I mixed in only enough mayapple to cause a severe rash."

  With a sense of desperation, Bianca glanced out the window into the darkness. She looked back at him again.

  "If you notice, we're flying south. We're not headed northeast to London."

  The lawyer handed Doc a paper. Doc gave it to Bianca. "This is a Xerox of the ransom letter we both signed." He explained as if lecturing about overly complicated matters to a child.

  "I never signed it. I—"

  "Don't you remember the stack of papers that I gave you yesterday at the Shipleys' house? The ransom note was among them."

  It was just too terrible to be true. She tried to tear it up. He snatched it away from her first.

  "Remember, it's only a Xerox, not the original. Right now, it's the only copy we have."

  "The Shipleys would never believe I'd kidnap Little Katie! I've always protected her."

  "When they get our marriage announcement in the mail, sent from my old address at the apartment, they will believe it. They know how sweet you are on Dr. Byron Kingsley. That's how the ransom note is signed. I have no intention of letting them know I'm really Doc Ernie McCollough come back from the grave to haunt them. Just you, sweet." He caressed her cheek. "I shall remain dead to the rest of the world."

  She shrank away.

  "Why so shy? After all, we're legally married. I had you sign the marriage license yesterday before we left. I didn't forget a detail. Not even the blood tests — though mine had to be faked. I don't want them to use DNA testing to identify me and trace me through that."

  He slipped his arm around her shoulders and pressed her lips against his. She tried to wriggle away. He wouldn't let her. He concluded his kiss by putting the pen back in her hand.

  "Sign the marriage certificate!" he barked at her. "That's the last detail to make everything perfectly legal and binding."

  "But what is she doing here?" Bianca pointed at Marianna, who was leering at her from across the cabin.

  "I hired Marianna and Rick Roscoe to work for me, just as I hired the Harry look-alike." He glanced across the aisle at the guy who had brought him the rings. "I needed to get Harry out of your head if I was going to get anywhere. What better way than to pretend Harry was fooling around? That was accomplished by employing someone who looked like him at a distance. He posed in the tub with Marianna. I took the photos."

  Marianna blew Bianca a kiss.

  "But — but I heard Marianna answer Harry's phone in his dorm room!"

  "She had a key made. She let herself in and answered his phone when he was in classes. Harry was none the wiser."

  "You hired Rick Roscoe? Did you know he tried to kidnap Little Katie himself on the day that she came down with the rash?"

  Doc chuckled. "I paid Rick to try to kidnap Little Katie. Who knows? It might have worked. You might have been able to take Little Katie to the movies and hand her over to me that night when Rick drove you up to the Shipleys' house and held a gun to your head. We might have left for Rio sooner. It was my back-up plan in case the mayapple didn't work."

  "Your back-up plan?" Bianca could not fathom just how intricate Doc's plot was.

  "By the time Rick brought you to the Shipleys' house, I knew the mayapple was working beautifully. If you remember, I stood there on the doorstep pretending that I was waving goodbye to Dr. Rankin. Really I was signaling Roscoe that I didn't need him there any more. I assumed he had already snatched the passport in your suitcase by then. My plan to abduct you on the way to London was already well under way."

  "Rick returned to threaten me again in the window well of the school, the day the power went out."

  "I wanted him to terrify you so you were more completely in my power," Doc boasted. "I wanted you to flee the school that day and never return. I followed you to the cemetery and pretended that my spirit was talking to you
from the grave."

  "Where is Rick, anyway?" Bianca looked around. She had not seen him since she had boarded the plane.

  "He's up in the cockpit with his buddy, the pilot that I bribed to fly us to Rio. Manuel comes from Brazil. He's such a slime that he and Rick took to each other right away. They think alike. Of course, Rick is on hand in case I need him back here at a moment's notice."

  So that was why Bianca hadn't seen Rick in hours! She shouldn't have asked. It didn't exactly make her feel safe to know that the pilot thought like Rick Roscoe.

  "Were you the one who tried to kidnap Little Katie on the night after her second birthday party? You chased me off the yacht?"

  He nodded. "Everything could have been very short and sweet if you hadn't escaped me then."

  "You murdered the bodyguard, Tom Jones?"

  "That was an accident. I wanted to defend myself when he challenged me and asked who I was, trying to board the yacht in the middle of the night. My bullet went wild."

  So Doc had slain his second victim! First it had been Mrs. Ingersoll. Now it was Tom Jones.

  "You chased me up the lighthouse tower?"

  "I rescued you, didn't I? I made sure I was on the ambulance and made certain it was around the corner at dawn. I had it stocked with a sledgehammer in case the door was somehow locked. I brought a fireman's net. I carried you down the stairs after crawling out on the roof after you myself."

  That had been the beginning of Bianca's severe relapse into feeling all these fears. She had thought that she'd overcome them this past spring. The lighthouse episode had made her nervous about heights for the first time.

  "You tied me to the tree so the alligator could chew on my shoe?"

  "Alligators have no brains. They are easy to scare away. I had to make Byron Kingsley look like a hero rescuing you so you would fall for my charms right away. I was careful not to tie your gag too tightly, so you could scream."

  "You were the one in the elevator in the library, the one who put your fingers around my neck?"

  He caressed her throat. "I didn't make red marks."

  "What about Mike Fellini? Did you tell him to clap me into a coffin in the cemetery?"

  A nasty look suffused Doc's face. "Fellini? I never have anything to do with Harry or his jailbird brother if I can help it. Doc Ernie McCollough doesn't stoop that low."

  His tone made Little Katie cry. Bianca had to dry the little girl's tears.

  "I'm running out of patience with you, dear. Now sign our marriage certificate!" he thundered.

  Shakily she picked up the pen and signed: "Bianca Winters".

  "The state of Georgia now allows you to sign whatever name you like, maiden or married. They like to be modern and don't care what name you use as long as you are consistent. I'm more old-fashioned. I insist you sign Bianca Winters McCollough."

  She humored him. She didn't want him holding a gun on her, let alone Little Katie. She didn't like the idea of guns at 30,000 feet. Now that she knew Ronnie was really Doc, she was positive that he was capable of anything — anything at any time.

  Doc snatched up the marriage certificate as soon as she had added "McCollough" to her name. He glanced at her signature with a smile.

  "That will be the last legal document we will file with the state of Georgia. It will arrive in Georgia in a plain brown paper envelope from an anonymous address in Mexico. From now on it's Brazil for everything! I thought of getting married by a priest in Rio. But I wanted the folks back home to know that you were mine in every sense of the word — especially that Harry creep."

  Doc passed the marriage certificate on to his lawyer friend to file away in his briefcase full of stacks of legal documents.

  Doc said something to the lawyer in Portuguese. They smiled in triumph and shook each other's hands. Doc patted the lawyer on the shoulder. Doc got out a wallet that was fat with one-hundred-dollar bills. He had handed the guy who looked like Harry a cool one hundred earlier. He handed the lawyer a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills right now.

  Bianca had the sinking feeling that he had withdrawn the cash from the Shipleys' bank account yesterday with his carte blanche to do anything to prepare for the trip. She knew that the Shipleys were going to bed in London right now, expecting to see Little Katie in the morning. She didn't want to imagine the expression on Mrs. Shipley's face if she could see that the plane was flying to Rio instead of Heathrow Airport.

  Bianca remembered the servants back at the Shipleys' house. She wondered if any of them had found the letter with her signature on it that Doc had left on the table for the Shipleys. No doubt it was enclosed inside a fancy envelope attached to a basket of flowers delivered by the florist.

  The servants would not dare open the fatal letter themselves. They would forward it to the Shipleys — by FedEx. She doubted if they would dare to open it long enough to fax it. The Shipleys valued their privacy too much. They had a standing order that no one else was to open their mail. When she had been babysitting at their house, Bianca had always brought in the mail and laid it neatly in a pile on the dining-room table.

  FedEx International usually took two days to get there — two whole business days. There was a new service that the Shipleys often used. It was called FedEx International First. They had once had her take packages of theirs to the FedEx drop-off station when she had been babysitting. That service got letters delivered earlier in the morning to select international locations — still usually two days later.

  FedEx had to be flown to Memphis, Tennessee, as Mr. Shipley, who did a lot of international business transactions, had explained to her. The package was put on another plane and flown to major hubs in Europe. It had to be put on a truck early in the morning and delivered by 8 a.m. local time. Mr. Shipley had his own FedEx account number. Even that would not get anything delivered faster than two days — unless you were sending the package directly to London from a big city like New York or Los Angeles, when maybe it would take one day. St. Simons Island was no New York City!

  Early tomorrow morning nothing would happen. The Shipleys would wake up. They would get the London edition of The Times at their suite at the hotel before the appointment with Dr. Bennett. They would pick up the phone to call the airport to see if the plane from Jacksonville, Florida, had arrived yet. It had been scheduled as an overnight flight leaving at about 9 p.m. Eastern time. It had been due to get in mid to late morning, London time, the next day. They would be expecting to call a limousine to take them to the airport to pick up Dr. Byron Kingsley, Bianca and Little Katie.

  It made Bianca cringe to imagine how the lady on the other end of the phone would cheerfully explain that the flight was on time and was due to arrive at 10 a.m. sharp. Suspecting nothing, the Shipleys would drive to the airport and watch as the passengers disembarked. Even with airport regulations tighter than they had been before, the Shipleys would get permission to go as far as the gate. They would comment to each other that Bianca wasn't first off the plane. They would be expecting her to be first since they knew that she had first-class tickets.

  When everyone had disembarked and there was no Little Katie, no Bianca and no Dr. Byron Kingsley, they would get alarmed. They would call on their cellphone back to their house in Georgia and question the servants, making sure that Bianca and Byron Kingsley had left on time. The servants might mention the letter attached to the bouquet of flowers that they were having FedEx-ed. The Shipleys would think nothing of it at that point.

  Next the Shipleys would call the airport in Jacksonville to ask if passengers by those names had checked in and boarded the flight. This was information that would be classified. It would not be revealed to the general public. The Shipleys had ways of getting around such things. They owned the controlling shares in the airline that Bianca and Ronnie were supposed to have flown.

  When the Shipleys discovered that Bianca and Byron Kingsley had not boarded the flight in Jacksonville, they would call the police and hire a detective. They would not suspect either
Bianca or even Ronnie of kidnapping. They would assume that they had been abducted by another kidnapper on the way to the airport.

  The tension would mount as the hours ticked by. The Shipleys' suite at the hotel would become a command center. The FBI would be notified. A manhunt would ensue. Mrs. Shipley would lie collapsed on the sofa weeping for Little Katie. Bianca could hear the lady's sobs right now, though she was sitting on the plane at 30,000 feet.

  At long last the FedEx package would be delivered to their suite by the next morning at 8 a.m. There would be a pause of consternation and disbelief. Then all hell would break loose.

  Bianca could only hope and pray that they would not believe that she had willingly signed that ransom note. She hoped that they would guess what had really occurred. She wished that she could reach out and rip that page out of time so that it would never happen. She knew that she couldn't.

  "Bianca, do you hear me? There is another paper to be signed right now. It won't wait." Doc was prodding her.

  Bianca had no idea what this paper was. It looked like another one of those documents written in mysterious legal jargon that she could neither make sense of nor understand.

  He slapped it down in front of her on the food tray that he had fastened to her seat. "Sign right here on the dotted line."

  She couldn't read a word of it either. It was written in Portuguese.

  "What — what is it?"

  "It's your power of attorney."

  "My what?" She really didn't understand now.

  "You're turning over your power of attorney to me as your new husband."

  "What does that mean?"

  He sounded impatient. "I'll be able to sign all documents and bank instructions as if I were you without having to forge them. I'll be able to make withdrawals from your account in your name without your signature once we get to Rio. I'll be able to pay bills by writing checks on your two-million-dollar account. I'll be able to take loans using your credit. I'll be able to invest your money in your name now that it's all there in the new bank in downtown Rio."