Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [89]
“It’s a loan.”
The man let out a low whistle. “The guy must be in love with you, then. No man would let a car like this out of his sight for anything short of true love.”
Jamie’s laugh was without humor. “I’m afraid he doesn’t believe in true love. He believes in cars.”
“And there’s a difference?” the man said. He had the name Wilfred embroidered across the pocket of his old-fashioned uniform. “This baby’s worth fifty grand, easy. Be careful of her.”
Jamie blinked. The old man must be nuts—an old American car couldn’t be worth that much. And Dillon wouldn’t have let her take it if it was. Not to mention telling her to dump it when she didn’t need it anymore.
“This town looks pretty dead,” she said casually, changing the subject.
“It is dead. Factory closed down twenty-five years ago, and each year more businesses close, more people move away. Used to be five gas stations in town—now I’m the only one left and I hardly have any business. Everyone’s moved closer to the cities. Hell, even the rich folks who used to come here don’t bother anymore. The land’s useless for growing anything but tobacco, and no one wants to buy tobacco with all those do-gooders around trying to make rules for people that aren’t any of their damned business.”
“People are like that,” Jamie said in a noncommittal voice, reaching into Dillon’s wallet for a couple of twenties. It was a good thing he’d had plenty of cash as well as credit cards in his wallet—the car seemed to go through a tank of gas every hundred miles, and it liked premium gas.
“What’s a young lady like yourself doing in a ghost town like this?” Wilfred asked, topping off the tank. “We don’t get many people wandering off the beaten track nowadays.”
She’d had long enough to come up with a variety of excuses, and she trotted out her favorite. “I’m looking for the ruins of an old place called Dungeness Towers.”
“The Dungeon? Why would you want to go there? Nothing left but a couple of towers ready to collapse and maybe a few ghosts. It’s dangerous out there—the police posted the place years ago. Doesn’t mean that kids don’t still go out there to make out, maybe look for ghosts. But it’s not a place for a lady. Especially not after dark, in the middle of a snowstorm.”
Jamie glanced out the huge windshield of the Cadillac. “I think the snow’s stopped.”
“It’ll start again,” Wilfred said gloomily. “What do you want with the Dungeon?”
“I’m a writer,” she said blithely, she who could never lie. “I’m doing a feature on the robber barons of Connecticut, and I’ve worked my way around to Dungeness Towers.”
“Robber barons? I guess you could call old James Kincaid a robber baron. He built the factory that kept everyone around here employed. He wasn’t so bad, but that son of his was a cold-blooded bastard. He sold it off to some corporation who didn’t give a damn about Danvers or the economy of a small town. He bought it for a tax break and closed it.”
“But the son still lived here, right? At the Dungeon. Died here, didn’t he?”
“Yup. He and his wife. The place caught on fire one year, and the two of them were trapped in one of the towers. It was a snowy night, and the fire department couldn’t get there until it was too late. That poor kid was sitting out in the snow, huddled up, listening to the screams of his parents as they burned to death. I always wondered what happened to that boy. Thing like that must have scarred him.”
The stinging sensation beneath her shirt was a sudden surprise, when she was close to forgetting about it. The scratches were closing up, healing, but every now and then she felt a flash of fire across her chest.
“It must have been hard on him,” she said neutrally. The young boy she’d grown up with hadn’t seemed the slightest bit traumatized by watching his parents burn to death. She’d always assumed he’d been away from home when it happened. Not that he’d actually been there, the only witness, the only survivor.
“If I were you I’d skip the Kincaids,” Wilfred said.