An Angel for Emily Read online

  David Graham turned toward her and Emily thought how the woman in the rest room had been right: he seemed so very nice. “You really don’t know, do you?” he asked as he held up the set of rubies she’d worn. The large drops caught the light from the single overhead fixture and looked like miniature fires.

  “I have no idea,” she said tiredly.

  “Shall I tell her?” David asked the others, making them turn toward her.

  “Can we stop you?” Statler asked, looking at Emily in a way that made her body feel very cold.

  There was a sneer on Charles’s thin face. “He’s the wolf as you so charmingly put it.”

  At that Emily blinked. Maybe her little jest hadn’t been as charming as she’d thought at the time. Saying what she did would seem funny in the movies but in real life it had been rude.

  The next moment, her head came up. What was she thinking?! Next she’d be apologizing to men who had tied her to a chair and were probably going to kill her. She glared at them.

  “Did you think we’d fall for your insolence, for your…” Charles asked.

  “That’s enough,” David said. “She’s going to die, what else do you want?”

  “Michael,” Emily thought. Maybe if she called him in her head he’d hear her and come rescue her. But even an angel needed an address. “Where are we?” she asked, hoping to send that information to him telepathically.

  “We’re in a state you never heard of,” Statler said. This got a laugh from the other two.

  “So where did you find these?” Charles asked. “We looked everywhere.”

  It took her a moment to realize that he meant that they looked through the Madison House attics. “You searched the house? But I saw no evidence that anyone had been there.”

  “Do you think we’re amateurs? Who do you think spread the story of there being a ghost in that house?” Charles asked, his hatred of her clear in his voice.

  “But there is a ghost in that house. Captain—” she began.

  “Spare us your silly tales. Where did you find the rubies?”

  “My, uh, friend did and I don’t know where he got them. Maybe you should ask him.” Maybe she could persuade them to bring Michael into this then he could rescue her. As he always did, she thought, and there were almost tears in her eyes. Be brave, Emily, she told herself. At least you know for sure that there is life after death. But even that thought didn’t make her less frightened.

  “Is this the friend who’s asleep in the limo?” came a female voice and in walked the woman Emily had met in the rest room. “Honey, if you gave him all three of those pills he won’t ever wake up.”

  For a moment all Emily could do was gape in consternation.

  “Did you think you could get the kind of information that I gave you from just anyone?” the woman asked, her face showing her amusement at Emily’s confusion. Moving toward the desk, the woman put her arm around David’s waist. “This is my dear little brother,” she said as she reached for the rubies. “I do think they’ll look better on me than in your bank vault,” she said, smiling, then turned back to Emily. “You do look disbelieving. Did you think I just happened to be in that place and happened to give you all that information? Didn’t you think it was odd that only one woman came in during the whole time we were in there? We had someone outside guarding the door. Oh, and too bad about your friend. He was nice-looking.”

  At the thought of Michael’s death, Emily almost gave up. So now Michael was probably without a body and was back in Heaven, but then she remembered something. “You can’t kill him. Not until he finds out what evil surrounds me and fixes it.”

  At that absurdity, they all laughed. “Baby,” Statler said, “there’s lots of evil around you.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to make a nasty crack to that remark, but a phone rang and Charles pulled a cell phone out of his suit coat pocket. The men were clean and dressed in fresh street clothes while Emily felt as though she’d never had a bath in her life, plus, her bladder was bursting.

  “Yeah, uh huh,” Charles said into the phone. “Got it. Let’s get her out of here.”

  Statler grabbed her upper arm with one hand and held a knife in the other—whether to cut the ropes or slit her throat, Emily didn’t know.

  But before she could find out, the phone rang again and Charles put his hand up in that way that powerful men do when they expect to be obeyed. For a few moments he listened, then he put the phone down. “The jail bird escaped.” He turned to glare at Emily. “Seems your friend is on the loose again.”

  At that Emily nearly burst into tears of relief that Michael was still alive, but she got herself under control and tried to remain calm. She had no doubt that Michael would find her; after all, he had contacts in very high places.

  “So we’ve got to wait until tonight to get rid of you,” Charles said in disgust.

  Emily took a deep breath to give herself courage. “Can’t you at least tell me why you’ve stalked me? You’ve planted bombs in my car twice.”

  “I told you that was a stupid idea,” David said to Statler. “Stat thought that a car bomb would make everyone believe that your death was connected to the Mafia and that crook you were with. But it didn’t work, did it? Somehow, the FBI knew.”

  Emily was silent. She was not about to tell them that Michael was her guardian angel and could see the auras of cars.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t figure it out, smart lady like you. When we started to find out about you, we were…” David looked up. “What were we?”

  “Impressed,” Statler said.

  “Yes, impressed. You were feeding some big news stories to that brainless boyfriend of yours and he was rising in the news world because of it. Too bad you didn’t marry him, you could have made him governor.”

  “But the stories I researched had nothing to do with why you tried to kill me?” she asked and in spite of the horror of the situation, she was very interested now.

  “None whatever.” Again he held up the rubies.

  “You tried to kill me for those?” Emily asked in disbelief. “You could have stolen them. Or, from what I hear, you could have bought them.”

  “But they are yours,” David said and this seemed to be a great joke to him.

  Emily was confused. “You could have had them reset, recut, anything and that would have made them yours.”

  “I thought you said she was smart,” the woman said with contempt.

  Emily’s mind raced. Softly, she said, “What do you mean that they’re mine?”

  “You own them legally because you inherited them.”

  “From the captain?” She was getting more confused by the moment but then her head was full of things outside the normal world. For the last weeks she had been living in a world that included both people with and without bodies. If the captain, who was dead, owned the rubies then he gave them to her, did that mean she had inherited them?

  “You ought to shoot her just for being so stupid,” the woman said, turning her back on Emily.

  “What was your mother’s maiden name?” David asked.

  “Wilcox.”

  “And her mother’s name?”

  “I…I don’t remember.”

  “Try Simmons.”

  “Ah, yes, I do believe that was it,” Emily said and was even more confused because it was a common enough name.

  “And what was Captain Madison’s wife’s name?”

  “Rachel—” Emily’s head came up. “Simmons,” she whispered. Emily just sat there blinking as thoughts raced through her mind. “You mean that I have something to do with Captain Madison?”

  “Ever see a picture of his wife?”

  “No, after the captain’s death she destroyed all pictures of herself.”

  “Not all of them. My family had a few from when she was a girl.” David put his hand to his inside coat pocket and withdrew a photo which he held before Emily’s face.

  “But she…”

  “L