Widow - Anne Stuart [95]
He stared up at the abandoned church. Charlie had said that someone destroyed another painting and pitched it at her. That meant there might only be one more painting missing. If it was anywhere it had to be up there, and somehow he and Charlie had missed seeing them. If the old lady had taken the paintings herself she couldn’t have lugged them very far, and her cottage was too crowded to hold them. He was guessing there was some other place up beneath the church where Antonella had hidden Pompasse’s paintings, maybe behind that huge pile of rubble that Charlie said hadn’t been moved in decades. Though he still wasn’t quite sure why.
The one thing he knew for certain was that Aristide Pompasse had filed for divorce three days before his death. But his divorce was from one Antonella Bourget Pompasse. Not Charlie Thomas.
He took the steep way up, steering clear of Antonella’s cottage. As best he could figure, the old woman had stayed watching, the abandoned wife, for the last forty or fifty years, as Pompasse brought in a parade of women to serve as his mistresses and his models. Through it all she had stayed up in her cottage, waiting.
But Charlie must have been the last straw. He had actually dared to marry Charlie, or at least managed a semblance of a marriage, depriving Antonella of her secret position as favorite wife. She must have hated Charlie intensely.
But as long as she was the only real wife, it didn’t matter. It was when Pompasse finally decided to break his true marriage that she acted. Killing Pompasse. The problem was, would she stop there? And why hadn’t Lauretta realized what she had done and stopped her? Unless that resemblance went deeper than an artist’s preference for the same physical type. Lauretta would protect her own mother at all costs. Maybe even at the cost of Charlie’s life.
He had no doubt the old lady really was senile. She wasn’t faking it—she was old and crazy and very dangerous. But she wasn’t nearly as physically frail as she pretended. Beneath her shuffling, madwoman exterior was a strong, cunning monster.
It was getting dark by the time he reached the church. Someone had been there recently—there were more boards across the gaping hole in the center, and the pew where Charlie had napped had been pushed off to the corner. He stepped inside the ruined church, utterly silent, listening for the sound of voices.
All was quiet but for the rustle of the leaves over the missing roof, the faint soughing of the wind through the shattered building. And then the sound of muffled voices began to rise, just barely audible. He moved into the church, making no sound at all, moving to the very edge of the pit and peering down.
It was almost impossible to see anything but the piles of rocks and rubble beneath the gaping hole. The huge mound of rocks at the far end of the passageway had been moved, exposing a thick oak door. The painting and the journals had to be in there.
It was farther down than he remembered—no wonder Charlie had panicked when she’d made her way across the narrow plank. A fall like that could break a few bones if you were unlucky. A fall like that could kill you if you landed just right…
He never felt it coming. Something slammed over his back, something hard, and he was tumbling headfirst into that deep, endless hole, and the last thing he saw was Madame Antonella standing over him, a heavy piece of wood in her strong hands. And then he hit the ground.
Charlie woke up slowly, cold and damp and shivering. It was pitch-black, and she tried to lift her hand to see whether she was blindfolded, but she found she couldn’t move. Someone had pinioned her arms to her sides, her legs together, in the inky darkness.
She was lying on something relatively soft. She was able to move her fingers, and it felt like an old mattress beneath her, covered with some kind of wool blanket. The smell of the place was horrendous—a sickly sweet