Eye of the Falcon (Psychic Visions #12)(48)

She looked down at the pile of broken glass she’d collected, chose one long shard, and set it down beside her, just in case. Then she grabbed for the last envelope in the box, asking Eagle, “Did you see anything?”

“No, not yet. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Going through the last envelope of this box. Hoping for answers.”

Just then one of the dogs came over to lick her face. Obviously, if they were doing that, the danger must have downgraded.

She opened the envelope but did not understand what she was looking at.

Until she got halfway through and realized it was the same information she’d glanced at when she took the boxes out of her mother’s apartment. The sheets contained information on criminal charges, legal documents, and police reports. An investigation into her father’s activities. She frowned when she saw the dates. Just months before he died.

How could her mother have gotten this information? And how serious were the charges against her father? Would somebody have killed him to stop him from saying something about somebody else? There was no damn time to go through it now in greater detail. She replaced the documents in the envelope, repacked it in the box, putting this packet on top.

As Eagle continued to keep watch, she reached for the smaller keepsake box. She pulled it to the floor beside her and flipped it open. The light was poor underneath the table, but she found another envelope—similar to the one that contained pictures of her with Hadrid.

Only these photos were of a different falcon with an older man. It was Angus. She didn’t recognize the falcon. Birds often chose their own bonding partner. It didn’t matter what the human said.

As she continued through a small stack of letters banded together, she saw death threats. Letters blaming Issa, blaming her bird, Hadrid, for the failure that night. She realized how many people knew of her and Hadrid. It was a small community, but everybody benefitted from the smuggling. And, with that colossal failure that led to so many deaths, the villagers’ lives and way of living were all in danger.

Issa was shocked at the hatred expressed in those letters. She and her mother remained in Ireland only a few more days before bolting for America.

The villagers feared what they hadn’t understood. There was admiration as long as things were going well. But, once that turned sour, the community needed to expunge her and Hadrid from their presence. Maybe her mother had left Ireland by choice. Maybe they’d been forced out. Issa had no idea. She quickly folded the letters back into their envelopes and put the elastic band back around them. Why had her mother kept these poisonous reminders? In the bottom of the box was one more envelope. She pulled it out to find several loose-leaf pages.

It was a letter her mother had written on the day her father had died.

It’s my fault. Dear God in heaven, there can be no salvation for this. For the rest of my days I will know no peace for the part that I played in this travesty. My sons, all three of them, have died by my actions. My husband too, brutal and uncaring in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of God, yet my husband. He is also dead by my incompetence. I should have been watching over my family but was instead concerned with only myself. I know not how to make things right. I can only run and hide in shame and hope the world never finds out what I did.

Tears filled Issa’s eyes. She held the letter against her chest, feeling the sobs threatening to come out.

When she went to read the letter again, her tears started again. Unable to deal with the emotions at the moment, she quickly folded it and stuffed it inside her sports bra. She slipped her hand around the bottom of the box and found a key. She studied it for a long moment. It looked like a safe-deposit box key. Maybe it was older, something from her previous life. She had no way to know. Should she stuff that in her bra too? If she was captured, the key would be found on her body, and she’d be in real trouble then. She tried to remember all the questions the kidnappers had asked of her.

But, at the moment, her mind was too shocked to consider if anything she’d seen in these boxes was related to her kidnapping. She repacked the contents into the leather-bound keepsake box and hid it under the couch. And then unpacked all the envelopes about her brothers’ lives and her father’s and mother’s lives from the bigger cardboard box. She tucked the little envelopes and the manila envelopes under the couch with the keepsake box and slid the now-empty cardboard box off to the side, as if it was just an empty box from bringing groceries home.

On her hands and knees, the shard of glass in her pocket, she peered around the side of the couch. “Eagle, are you here?”

“I’m behind you,” Eagle said, his voice quiet. “Did you hide what you wanted to keep?”

She started, but of course he’d seen her. “It’s all stuff I don’t want to lose. I figured that fancier-looking keepsake box would look more important. So I hid it with my family’s information from the other box.”

“Good thinking. But it’s probably better to hide them somewhere safe.”

“Agreed, but where is that?”

After a long moment of silence, he said, “Good point.”

“Which brings me back to the question I asked earlier. Do we have any way of getting out of here?”

“If we can reach the truck, we do.”

Just then a huge loud, noxious ringing sounded out across the property, followed by several sharp splitting sounds and loud screams.