The Final Victim(115)

And that her stepsister is precisely what Lianna instinctively perceived her to be: a lying, conniving fraud.

Hearing an explosion overhead, Lianna believes for I a moment that another tree has fallen-this time on the house.

Then she realizes that it wasn't a tree.

That time, it really was a gunshot.

Charlotte hears a loud bang, and this time, she instantly realizes what it is: a crack of gunfire.

And that it came from inside the house.

She never even considers running down the driveway toward the gate and the old stone wall; running for help.

That isn't an option.

Her only thought is that she has to get to her daughter.

Please, God, let her be all right.

Her oozing sneakers pound up the steps and across the wet flagstone of the portico.

Please let her be alive.

Too late, she realizes that the door is locked, and that she doesn't have a key.

Lianna's instinct is to hurl herself down the stairway in the dark, anything to get away from whoever has the gun.

But she's outnumbered already; there are two of them.

Royce is somewhere above, but there's no telling where Aimee is.

Well, Lianna will have to take her chances.

She has to try to get away.

This is her own fault. She should have been braver. She should have gone shopping with her mother this morning, instead of sulking, and then cowering, in her room.

Now she has nobody to blame but herself.

Nobody is going to come and save her, just like nobody could save Adam.

But that wasn't his fault.

It was mine.

And now I'm being punished for what I did… just like I always knew I would be.

*

Royce has just encountered what feels like a loose panel beside the fireplace when he hears a gun go off upstairs.

"Aimee?" With a curse, he rushes to the hallway, dragging his bad leg. "Are you all right?"

Odette appears, holding her pistol. "She was armed up there, Joe."

"Shhh!" He gestures wildly to alert her that she's slipped up and called him by the wrong name: his real name. Not that anyone else gets away with the shortened version of it.

Aside from his mother back home in Chicago, who calls him Joey, he's been Joseph his entire life, Joseph Borger… well, that is when he's not busy being Royce Maitland or whatever dearly departed soul he's had the pleasure of impersonating for the purpose of a well-planned con.

"Oh, give it up already, Joe. Who's going to hear?" Gone is the honey-sweetened N'Awlins drawl, replaced by the twang of the Tennessee mountains, where Odette Krupp-AKA Aimee Maitland-was born and bred.

"The old lady's dead, and so is the housekeeper," Odette informs him. "All we have to do is grab the kid and Charlotte, and we're home free."

Incredulous at her laid-back attitude, he snaps, "All we have to do? It's not that simple."

"Sure it is. Remember, Daddy} You came up with the plan yourself. We just use this"-she waves the gun-to convince your lovely wife and stepdaughter to get into the car and drive. Then I grab the wheel and make sure that they overshoot the foot of the causeway-so easy to do in this nasty weather-and land in the water. Oh, but first I have to remember to jump out."

She flashes the dazzling row of white teeth Joseph paid a fortune to have capped. That was almost as expensive as the liposuction, but not as much as what he spent on the colored contacts, the frequent hair salon visits, the gym, and the personal trainer.

But it was worth all the money and well worth the wait. Odette Krupp was transformed into a tawny Southern beauty. She looked at least ten-or twelve, to be exact-years younger. She could easily pass for a nubile twenty-five, virtually unrecognizable as the mousy nurse who had once worked for the hospice clinic-and stumbled across a multimillion-dollar secret.

At first, when she told Joseph, he thought they might just blackmail the old man with what they knew.

Then Joseph looked a little more closely at the illustrious family tree, and realized that there might just be an old-fashioned, legitimate way to inherit the entire Remington fortune: by marrying into it Maybe he should have left it at that. As Charlotte's husband, even with Charlotte inheriting just one-third of the fortune, he would be set for life. Nobody would ever have to know who and what he really was.

But his own greed, and Odette, got to him.

He wanted it all.

So he took a gamble-and he won.

He'd guessed that Gilbert actually had a conscience-and could be convinced that leaving Charlotte all his money was the best way to appease it. What better way to compensate his unwitting granddaughter for Gilbert's own role in her mother's premature death?

What Joseph didn't count on was that Charlotte would work her way under his skin-or that it would be so damned hard to see this thing through to the end.

Odette is much more cavalier about it than he is. As she likes to tell him, "You've just got to do what you've got to do. You can't let emotions get in the way."

He's come to realize that she's absolutely right And that when the time comes, he will push aside his emotions to do exactly what he's got to do.

Heedless of the howling wind and driving rain, Charlotte races around the perimeter of the house, trying first the side door, and then the back.

Locked, both of them. Just as she expected.