Chapter 41
ALEXA
“Stop waffling and start from the beginning,” Jez ordered.
Nolan had run into the library with Rusty in tow, handed me a rock, and begun tripping over his words. Something about fossils and a pasture and a lying bitch. Who the fuck was Kimberley?
“Diamonds,” Rusty added. “There are diamonds. Possibly.”
“What are you talking about?”
He pointed at my hands. “There.”
Huh? It was just a dirty rock. When I spread my blanket out under the trees so I could watch Nolan’s striptease, I’d had to scoop a bunch of them out of the dirt so I could sit without getting lumps in my ass.
After several more garbled sentences, I finally began to get the gist of the matter.
Nolan had found the rock in the swimming hole, and Rusty thought that there was a diamond stuck in it.
Maybe there were more. And although the theory sounded bananas, I had to admit it did make sense, or at least, as much sense as anything else that had happened around here lately.
The Cranstons had offered to buy the pasture, but not the rest of the property.
The mine was a red herring. Antonella had studied geology the same as Rusty had, and Everett ran a hedge fund focused on commodities, so presumably he had a working knowledge of natural resources as well.
The ranch had been in Nolan’s family since the Gold Rush, I knew that much. And back then, everyone was probably so focused on digging shiny nuggets out of the mountain that they missed the duller treasure scattered across the pasture. The rock didn’t even look special.
Jez snatched it out of my hand and peered closer. “Remember that time I went to South Africa to, uh, speak with that arms guy?”
By “speak with,” she meant “vaporise using one of his own illegal weapons.” “Yup.”
“Priest’s always saying we should learn about other cultures, so I visited the Kimberley Mine Museum while I was there, and this does look similar to the lumps of kimberlite they had on display.”
“So how do we find out for sure?”
“Does anyone know a jeweller?”
“My friend Guillermo is a jeweller,” André said, walking in with an old-school sketch pad tucked under his arm. “Why do we need a jeweller?”
I looked at Jez, and Jez looked at me.
“Is Guillermo in San Francisco?” I asked.
“He has a workshop and store three blocks from North of Market.”
“How do you feel about another ride in the helicopter?”
He passed a hand over his brow, always so dramatic. “A hardship, darling, but one I’m willing to tolerate for you.”
* * *
Antonella felt right, but Margaret had also felt right, and look what happened there.
André had been dispatched to San Francisco with Nolan’s rock in his purse and Storm in the pilot’s seat.
Jez, Rusty, and Nolan were trekking back up the hill with Juno to see what other rocks they could find, and Erin was still looking at shoe prints.
The FBI database for treads and tyres didn’t work the same way as AFIS—you couldn’t feed in a footprint and wait for it to spit out a match.
Rather, it served up a selection of possibles, and the matching was done by eye.
After the diversion with Margaret, we didn’t want to write off any of the other leads prematurely, so Ari was following up on Lisanne, Wyatt, and Marielle while I cursed and seethed and trolled through Antonella Cranston’s emails.
I didn’t have access to all of Everett’s accounts yet, but I would soon.
Antonella’s life revolved around the horses, an apparent shopping addiction, socialising-slash-gossip, and a never-ending quest to avoid aging.
Creams, lotions, injections, a nip and tuck here and there…
She had a pathological hatred of wrinkles.
Me? I didn’t mind the idea of frown lines because at least I wouldn’t look twelve anymore.
But what didn’t I find? Any mention of diamonds, outside of her jewellery purchases from an upscale boutique in Beverly Hills.
Gah.
Not another wild-fucking-goose chase…
I got up to fetch another coffee and smacked headlong into Erin as she skidded sideways into the library, breathless. She grabbed me before I fell on my ass.
“Hey, slow down.”
“I found them! Well, I’m like eighty percent sure anyway.”
“Are you talking about the boots?”
“They cost eighteen hundred bucks. Who the heck spends eighteen hundred bucks on boots?”
“Millionaires and fashion victims who enjoy credit card debt?”
“They’re hiking boots by Ishmael. I didn’t even know Ishmael made hiking boots. I thought he just made weird dresses out of food and got corpses to model them.”
“Those were two different things. The idiots who wore the food dresses were very much alive.”
Who could forget the sight of dumbass pop star Luna Maara wearing a dress made from cotton candy? And then not wearing it after a prankster threw a bucket of water over her. The video of her sticky and dripping in her underwear had gone viral, like pretty much every other stupid thing she did.
“Okay, so the hiking boots are actually kinda cute, as long as you’re not scared of snakes. If they cost fifty bucks, I might even buy them. They’re Italian leather with hand-embroidered cobras, available in two colours, and the laces have actual gold bits at the ends.”
Hmm… Maybe I could buy a pair for Tulsa as a joke? Her ophidiophobia would love them.
“Can you send me the link?”
“Yup, I already did—it should be on that app thingy. The Cranstons are millionaires, right?”
“They are.”
I forgot about the coffee as I checked out Ishmael’s website. The boots were hideous, and I quickly sent a message to Chase asking him to procure a pair in Tulsa’s size for this year’s Secret Santa. Of course, I’d have to make sure I picked her, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to rig.
The style was called “Bite Me,” and when I searched in Antonella’s emails, I found a purchase receipt for a tan pair in a size seven, dated five months ago.
Got her.
“Nice work. Hey, you want me to buy you a pair of fancy boots? Call it a bonus.”
Erin screwed up her face. “Thanks for the offer and all, but I’d rather have a pair of Chucks.”
* * *
Further confirmation came later in the day, first with a call from André and his buddy Guillermo.
At Guillermo’s estimate, the rock was worth at least ten thousand dollars, maybe more depending on the clarity of the diamond, and there might even be other gems hidden away inside the kimberlite.
Plus the kimberlite had a value of a few hundred bucks just on its own.
André had kept the story vague and said we’d found the rock in a box of Nolan’s grandpa’s stuff when we started clearing his house, which wasn’t even a lie.
And while André flew with Storm to San Francisco, Rusty, Nolan, and Jez had found three more “interesting” rocks up on the hill, one in the swimming hole and two on the ground.
Nolan had dived into the water, this time wearing his underwear, and I knew that because Jez had taken a picture and sent it to me with a “wow” emoji.
I hadn’t been loafing around while the others worked.
No, I’d sent Everett Cranston a menu preview for the AmeriHedge Awards, some bullshit investment dinner that I knew he planned to attend because Antonella had emailed a friend about it.
Once he clicked on the link, I had access to his data, including his four email addresses—work, personal, an old one from his college days, and another he seemed to use for his porn subscriptions.
Fingers crossed he hadn’t seen Nolan’s dick.
I hit pay dirt with the work address. Everett had been emailing with two potential investors—Bray Perakis, CEO of Elemental Gems, and Anthony Simms, executive VP in charge of exploration at Everbrite Trading—with news of “an exciting new opportunity in the American diamond industry.” He claimed to have a lead on a potential diamond deposit “right here in the United States” that “showed great promise.” And hey, if they didn’t mine commercially, how about a new tourist attraction?
Think “Crater of Diamonds State Park meets wine country.” Honestly, I thought Nolan was gonna puke when I showed him the discussion.
“They want to dig up the hill?” he asked. “What about all the wildlife?”
“I doubt the deer have a vacation budget, so…”
“Those motherfuckers.”
That’s the spirit. “On the plus side, they’d probably buy out the Hayes family, so at least you’d solve one problem.”
“They’re not having my land.” I’d never seen Nolan turn that funny shade of red before. Fury was a new thing for him. “They’ll mine diamonds over my dead body.”
“I’m sure that wouldn’t be a problem for them.”
“Even if I have to sell everything else I own, I’m not taking their money. I’m certain Grandpa left this place to me because he knew I’d protect it rather than cashing in the moment things got difficult.” He took a steadying breath. “This is a nightmare.”
“No, no, this is the fun part.”
“How? How is this fun?”
Jez spelled it out for him. “Because we know what they’ve done, but they don’t know that we know. Which means we get to fuck with them.”
The colour drained out of his cheeks, and he turned ashen as he glanced at each of us in turn. Ari was there too. Rusty had taken Erin for dinner at Sanguine, and Storm had decided to spend the evening in San Francisco. She’d fly André back in the morning.
“I…I don’t want any more blood on my hands. What they’ve done is sneaky, and underhanded, and Antonella put Ari’s life in danger when she set fire to the cottage, but I don’t think I could sleep at night if fucking with them involved, say, explosives.”
“There won’t be any explosions,” I assured him.
“I just thought that after what happened with the Lelands…”
Jez laughed. “If it was down to me, I’d stuff a frag grenade up Antonella’s yoga-sculpted ass and wait for her to shit out the pin, but Alexa’s taking the lead on this project.”
“Blood isn’t my thing,” I said. “This time, I’m going to play the long game. Believe it or not, I can be super patient when I need to be.”
I was going to annihilate those materialistic assholes, and I was going to do it in the way that would hurt them most. Through money.
Stealth too—they wouldn’t know what hit them until it was too late.
They thought they were being sneaky when they tried to outmanoeuvre Nolan, but now they were taking on me, and I always played to win.
“So what are we going to do?”
We. My heart skipped when he said that because after all Nolan and I had been through, after all the secrets we’d learned about each other, there was still an “us.”
“We’re going to start by throwing a party.”