“What is it you want me to do?”

He smiled, smug. “You’re the president of Crockett Industries. I’m sure together we can come up with something that would make it worth my while to return the Balaton jewels to you. An exchange, perhaps? Information for jewels.” His smile deepened. “Let us use our imaginations.”

Ashley wrapped herself in a ratty afghan and settled down on the couch next to the wood stove. Jeremy was putting another log on the fire. They’d come back from the hospital, where they’d been forced to leave David. The break wasn’t as clean as Barky had promised it would be. David had had to go into surgery for an open reduction; the doctors put on a fiberglass cast and hooked him up to an intravenous solution to pump some antibiotics into him. He’d have to remain in the hospital overnight, possibly longer.

Ashley had a nasty bruise; the doctor gave her a prescription for some painkillers, which Jeremy insisted they stop and have filled.

He sat next to her. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

She could appreciate his discomfort. She had lied to the doctors about how she and her brother had been injured. She had refused to call the police. And she was beginning to resent Jeremy because the evidence was mounting against Bartholomew Wakefield instead of MacGregor Stevens.

None of it was Jeremy’s fault; she knew that. And despite all the anger she directed toward him, anger that was at once as unreasonable as it was inevitable, she didn’t want him to leave. She couldn’t bear to be in the house alone.

It occurred to her that she never had. Barky or David had always been there.

Now they were both gone.

“When we were kids, David and I, we used to get bats upstairs at night.” She spoke softly as the fire crackled and filled the air with warmth and the distinctive smell of burning oak, and nostalgia for her girlhood overcame her. “We’d wake up and hear a bat flapping its wings somewhere. We could never tell right away where it was. So we’d lie on our beds, under our blankets, and be very still and listen, and try to figure out if it was in my room or his. I can remember times when the bat would suddenly land on my bed. It would crawl on me, and I’d have to lie there, not moving, until it flew away. When we were really young, we’d scream for Barky.”

“He slept downstairs?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes.” She smiled. “He’d come stomping up the stairs in his underwear, and he’d have a mop or a broom or something. He’d beat the living hell out of those poor bats. Eventually we got old enough so we could deal with them ourselves.”

“I can’t imagine you killing a bat with a broom.”

She picked a wood chip off the pilled afghan. “We tried killing them at first, but we were never very good at it—the stupid thing would fly in our faces and we’d get mad at each other and go into a panic about getting rabies. Then we figured out it was easier just to throw a blanket over the little bastard, gather it up and toss it and the blanket out the window.”