CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
When Con emerged into the living room of the cottage, the enormous fireplace closed of its own volition, sealing up the underground complex behind her. Con couldn’t even find the seams in the wall with her fingers. That was probably for the best. In the kitchen, she took a glass from a cupboard and filled it with water, relieved that the cottage wasn’t entirely for show. Leaning against the counter, she gulped it down and looked out the window.
A car sat idling out front.
At first she assumed it must be Gaddis, but how had he gotten past the gate? And the last two rDogs were nowhere to be seen, which meant that the car and its occupants must be trusted by her aunt. What would that make them to Con? She cast around for a weapon and found a dull kitchen knife in a drawer. How far was she going to get with that?
She went back to the window. The car hadn’t moved, but she caught a glimpse of a bald white head peeking out from above one of the Adirondack chairs. Someone was sitting on the porch enjoying the view. When she cracked the front door a few inches, a white man stood to greet her. He was convincingly tall, with a patrician bearing that Con associated with movies from the twentieth century. He had to be at least sixty but looked tennis fit in his crisp blue suit.
“Hello, Miss D’Arcy.”
“You know me?” Con said, ready at the first hint of danger to shut the door.
“Only from your picture,” he said, running his fingers across the remnants of his hair as if smoothing a blanket too small for the bed it covered.
“And who are you again?”
“Oh, I apologize. Where are my manners?” he replied, extending a manicured hand. “My name is William Small. I’m a senior partner at Daniels Lovell in DC. I am Abigail Stickling’s personal attorney and continue to represent certain of her lingering interests.”
“Well, you sure talk like a lawyer,” she said, opening the door and shaking his hand.
“Occupational hazard,” he acknowledged. “I’m quite harmless otherwise.”
“How long have you been sitting out here?”
The man looked at his watch with pursed lips. “Not long. I knocked but no one was home,” he said, although she had clearly come from inside the cottage. “Not to worry. My instructions were to wait.”
“For?”
“You.”
“How? How did you know I’d be here?” Con asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not free to discuss that.”
“When were you told to come?”
“I’m not able to discuss that either. May I come inside?” he said, picking up a briefcase from between his feet. “We have a great deal to go over.”
Con let him into the house. He asked for a glass of water, and she brought it to him in the living room. He was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, shaking his head.
“You know, I was Abigail’s attorney for almost twenty years. She was always so vague about this place. At the firm, we used to speculate what could be up here that she would spend so much time here. Especially toward the end. Hector will be so disappointed.”
“Why?”
“He has this crazy theory she’d built a secret laboratory. Calls it her fortress of solitude. But no, it’s just a shack. I mean, look at all this junk. Can you imagine anything more absurd than Abigail Stickling doing a jigsaw puzzle?”
“My aunt was a very eccentric woman,” Con said.
“Preaching to the choir there,” he said, looking around again. “The woman was worth close to a billion dollars, and this was where she chose to spend her time. If I live to be one hundred, I will never understand what goes through the heads of the very rich.”
At first, she’d taken his ignorance for an act. A role player in her aunt’s sprawling charade. But as he’d talked, Con realized that he’d been kept in the dark too. When you meant to steal the secret to immortality, no one could know. There was no amount of money that would buy his silence if he knew the truth. What was the old adage about the only way two people could keep a secret was if one of them was dead? No one could ever know. That had been Abigail Stickling’s plan all along.
Con asked, “So, what’s this about? Why did you drive all this way to see me?”
“Well,” he began, opening his briefcase and arranging documents on the coffee table. “As you may or may not know, upon her death a year and a half ago, your aunt’s estate was placed in a sealed trust that came with very specific instructions for how and when it should be opened. Only myself; Hector Alonzo, the managing partner at Daniels Lovell; and Anne Friedman in Boston knew its terms.”