Chapter 28
I raged at the door, screaming for help. Someone had to hear me. I’d seen that housekeeper downstairs, Ester. Surely, he had
to have other staff. Gardeners, pool boys . . . When I stopped screaming, I heard raised voices—downstairs? Was he talking to Ester? I couldn’t tell, and after the voices quieted for a long time, I resumed screaming. When I paused
to listen again, I heard nothing.
“Dammit!” I kicked the door in frustration and tried to calm down so I could think. My father had taken my phone, so I couldn’t
call Seb. He’d be worried about me when he got off work, if he wasn’t already, judging by that last text he sent. Worried
and pissed as hell, probably. Hard to blame him. This was shaping up to be one of the dumbest things I’d ever done, coming
out here alone.
Then again, no one expects to be kidnapped.
Maybe I should have.
“Is this about the Golden Venus?” I finally called out with a hoarse voice, heart racing.
No response. Could he even hear me up here?
I was all the way at the end of the upstairs hall.
After a while, I gave up at the door and tried across the room, where the French doors led out to the balcony.
Locked, naturally, but not one I could just flip open.
There was a keyhole. Who locks their damn balcony with a key?
Was this a rich-people thing I didn’t know about, or had he locked other people in this room?
“Help!” I banged on the glass and looked outside. The neighbors weren’t visible; trees surrounded the property right up to
the edge of Reeds Lake. Even if I could open the door, it was too far above the ground. I’d probably break both my legs on
the concrete that surrounded the pool. Only thing I could do was call for help. Someone had to hear eventually. We were in
a residential neighborhood, for the love of God!
Maybe I could find something in the room to help me escape. A key to the balcony or a screwdriver. Something! But the room
was devoid of humanity. The bedside tables had no drawers. The only thing that did was a bureau, but it was empty. Nothing
in the closet but an extra pillow. But when I bent to look under the bed, I heard a voice coming from inside the heating vent
in the nearby wall.
I put my ear next to the vent and strained to hear.
“—up your phone when I call, got it? Just shut up and listen to me. We’ve got a change of plans. I’ve got her here. Well,
that’s your problem, now, isn’t it?”
Who was my father talking to? He went quiet, listening to the person on the other end of the phone. I waited for him to speak
again.
“Fine, I don’t care, but I’m not bringing her to that cesspit you call a compound.”
Holy mother of God, it was Big Burg. Panic surged inside my chest.
“Just send Paul back out here,” my father’s voice said from inside the vent. “But he can’t park that truck in my drive. Draws too much attention. Tell him to park it down the street. I’ll leave the gate open for him.”
He must’ve hung up because I heard nothing else, even after I camped out on the floor and waited to see if he made any other
calls but it was silent.
None of this was good. Now I worried my father might be planning to hand me off to Paul, a prospect that made my stomach sick.
I tried to consider less-awful hypotheticals that might play out but just couldn’t see how my father would let me go without
some assurance I wouldn’t head straight to the police.
No possible scenario would end with him handing me back my phone and opening the front door. This wasn’t an Oops, my bad situation. It was a felony. And I didn’t know enough about the true nature of my father’s character to make assumptions about
his reasoning. All I knew was that he’d manipulated legal loopholes to rob my family blind, and when it came to him accepting
guardianship of me, his only child, he’d tossed me aside like a broken doll.
What else would he do?
What else had he done already?
I emptied my purse onto the bed, searching for something to pick a lock. Granted, I had no idea how to, but if I stuck something small inside the keyhole for long enough, maybe I’d get lucky. While I was searching, a knock on
the door made me jump and scatter my things.
“Paige?” my father’s voice said behind the door.
“Let me out!” I shouted, racing to the door and slamming against it with my shoulder.
Bad idea. Not sure how that always worked in movies, but the pain that rocketed down my arm was almost unbearable. The door didn’t budge.
“Stop wearing yourself out,” my father said in a muffled voice beyond the door. “No one can hear you through these walls but
me, and it’s getting a little annoying.”
Jesus fucking Christ. Who even was this monster? How did I share any DNA with this man?
“I knew you were up to something with Paul,” I said.
“Is that why you brought that form for me to sign? Was that just a rouse?”
I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction of knowing it wasn’t. The form was on the bed with all the scattered contents of my purse.
I snatched it up and quickly folded it into a small square and stuck it in the coin pocket of my shorts in case he tried to
take it back.
“You know,” his voice said outside the door. “When Big Burg called me up last month after that gold bar resurfaced, I hadn’t
heard from him in a few years. I’m sure your grandmother has told you by now, but we use to run together, back in the day.
Never knew my daddy, and my mom was a boozer who couldn’t even hold a job cleaning toilets. But Big Burg and his daddy took
me in—they were good to me. Showed me the way of the world. We chased treasure, just like you and your friends are doing now.”
“You are nothing like us.”
“Maybe. But we were the OG treasure hunters. I heard about the Golden Venus from the Vanderburgs, long before I met your mother.”
“Did the two of you plan to steal from her?”
“Oh, Paige. You know nothing about any of that. All we did was take control of an account that belonged to your mother—not to Kitty. Your mother knew about it. Why do you think she left it all to me in the will?”
“She didn’t! You took it!”
“Remember that Kitty poisoned your mind to me,” he said. “So if I were you, I wouldn’t trust anything she’s told you about
me, your mom, or the Venus. Kitty just wanted to horde it—she even kept its location from your mother. Big Burg was the one
who figured that out and opened my eyes to it. What kind of mother keeps things from their child?”
“What kind of father ditches their child for cash? Did Big Burg inspire that, too?”
“Say what you will about Big Burg. If it weren’t for him, I might be dead in a ditch.”
“I wish you were.”
“Now, now. I know you’re sore about the family money. But you should know that I wanted to take you with me. I tried. My lawyer
tried. But Kitty was relentless.” He chuckled darkly. “Sorry to speak ill of the dead, but your grandmother was a selfish
bitch.”
My blood boiled.
Whatever leeway I’d given him for being my flesh and blood vanished.
“Listen to me, Paige,” he said. “You may have memories of your mama; I don’t know. But you don’t have a full picture of her.
The one thing she wanted in life was to find the Golden Venus. I’m going to honor that wish.”
“Bullshit!”
“When it’s finally uncovered, I don’t need you and your friends taking it to Haven Pawnshop and selling it for a fraction
of what it’s worth. Let the adults take care of it, darling.”
“I’m not your darling or your daughter, you sick bastard! I’m the person who’s going to cut out your heart and feed it to my dog if you don’t let me out of here right now!”
“Keep screaming at me, and I’ll call the police and say I caught you breaking in here, trying to steal valuable artwork from
me. I’m one of their biggest donors in town, so I’m sure they’ll be happy to take you in and lock you up. One way or another,
we’re going to have a chat about those rings you dug up, and you’re going to tell me where the lock is that they fit.”
Jesus. He knew that much about our treasure hunt?
“When you do,” he finished, “you have my word that I’ll cut you in for some of the profit, under the table—Big Burg doesn’t
have to know. I’ll pay for Harvard, if that’s what you need. You think about it, and see if we can come to an understanding
before Paul gets here with the rings.”
I listened to his footfalls retreating down the hallway before he called out for his housekeeper and headed downstairs. Shock
held me at the door a little longer. I just couldn’t wrap my head around everything he’d just told me, couldn’t wrangle all
the wild emotions that were filling up my chest.
Stumbling to the bed, I fell apart, crying into the mattress so he couldn’t hear me.
Until I was empty.
There wasn’t a clock in the room, and I didn’t have my phone, so I had trouble gauging how much time had passed since he’d
locked me in here. But I could tell by the light that it was no longer morning. My throat hurt from all the screaming. I stared
at my father’s dumb double-vision beach painting for God only knows how long, until the two suns in its swirling sky started
to look like the eyes of some sky god, peering back at me.
I needed to pull myself together and figure out how to escape before Paul got here.
Because the last time I saw him was when he was pointing that gun in our faces, and I didn’t know what he’d do this time.
Or what my father was capable of doing under pressure.
All I knew was that Nana had been right to hate him, and if he was telling the truth about trying to keep custody of me, then I owed Nana everything for preventing that from happening.
After taking a moment to breathe, I tried to focus on getting past either of the locked doors. I picked through everything
I’d dumped on the bed and shoved it back in my purse. The only thing I had that might pick a lock was an old ballpoint pen
with a chewed cap. I took it apart and tried to use various pieces of it to open the lock on the bedroom door. But I just
ended up getting ink all over my fingers.
MacGyver I was not.
More time passed. I was starving, so it was well past lunch. I paced the room, combing every inch of it. Crouched near the
vent to try to hear more conversations. Trying to figure out how long I had until Paul got there. It was only an hour away. Shouldn’t he be here by now? I’d been trapped in here for hours, surely. I finally sat down in the farthest corner from the bedroom door, so that I could
watch it, stroking the Blackbeard ring around my neck like prayer beads.
Until I heard something . . .