Rustler's Moon. Jodi Thomas

       Copyright

       PROLOGUE

      Anna Marie Island, Florida

      September

      ANGELA HAROLD SAT in her father’s cluttered office, still wearing the black dress she’d worn to his funeral. She stared at the framed picture on his desk. The one she’d given him when she was seven. Their first fishing trip. He was smiling, the sun shining off his glasses. She stood by his side holding up a fish half her length.

      A memory saved forever in the heart. For Angela, this one photo had come to signify the time before the fall. Before Florida. Before her mother’s illness. Before her father started withering inside. Before she’d felt trapped in her life.

      Only now the bars that held her here were crumbling like columns of sugar in the rain. She should feel free, but all Angela felt was fear. A trapped bird staring at an open cage door. Afraid to fly. Afraid to stay.

      The police had explained to her the night they’d found his body that he’d been mugged as he left his office. Neither the blows he’d suffered nor the gash on his head when he’d fallen had killed him. But his heart hadn’t been strong enough to survive the attack. Benjamin Harold’s heart may have stopped three days ago, but he’d stopped living years ago, one unfulfilled dream at a time.

      “Who robs the bookkeeper on a Sunday night?” Angela whispered to the smiling man in the picture. The antiques store had been closed that day. Her father had said he was going in to straighten out the books. Whoever attacked him couldn’t have gotten more than a few hundred dollars from his wallet. They couldn’t have known about his weak heart.

      Out of curiosity, she flipped open her father’s ledger book. He’d kept the books for his brother’s business since they first moved to Florida when she was seven. Her uncle Anthony owned the multimillion-dollar antiques business and he trusted no one with the books but her father. After all, Anthony might be the head of the company, but his brother had loaned him the money to get started. The last entry was a transfer from the store’s account to a numbered bank account.

      She stared at the logbook and recalled the family story. Her father had loaned his younger brother, Anthony, fifty thousand dollars and the priceless necklace that was his inheritance for display once the store was built. The necklace was an heirloom and had been in the family for generations: an ancient Greek coin set in a cradle of gold and diamonds. Her grandparents’ will had stipulated the necklace go to the oldest son and never be sold off for profit.

      In those early days, it was the one draw to an antiques store full of otherwise questionable treasures.

      In exchange for the loan and letting the store display the necklace, Anthony agreed that her father would always be the bookkeeper. He’d have a job as long as he lived. Her father, who’d lost half a dozen jobs in his thirties and been injured at his last employment site, saw the offer as too good to turn down, even though he and Anthony had never been close.

      Only, her father had grown tired of his brother’s questionable practices, even though the company flourished, opening stores all along the East Coast. Her father wanted no part of the profits and took only his salary as Uncle Anthony grew rich selling early colonial antiques that came on a boat from China.

      Angela knew her father would have quit years ago if her mother hadn’t been ill. A slow-moving cancer had eaten away at her body. At first they fought with operations and treatments between short periods of remission, until she was finally too weak to fight any more. Angela stayed with her, missing proms and dating and sleepovers through her teen years.

      For a few hours each day, the tiny office became her father’s refuge from the constant reality of his wife’s illness. Once out of college, Angela got a job at a local museum and moved in with her parents to help. By then, her mother needed constant care and Angela and her father managed the night shift.

      When her mother passed peacefully in her sleep at home, Angela felt as if she lost her father, too. Within weeks, he was working six, sometimes seven, days a week in his office, usually late into the night. At first, she’d thought he was simply catching up, but finally she understood he was hiding away, living a little less each day.

      “Something’s not right,” he’d sometimes mutter when he came home late. He mentioned more than once his concern over the company’s accounting.

      She asked if he’d talked to Anthony about it and her father had simply smiled and told her not to worry, that his brother didn’t want to hear about problems.

      Angela picked up the fishing picture as his worry over the accounts seemed to echo in her memory. She wished she could have helped him. “I love you, Dad,” she whispered to his picture.

      Absently, she flipped over the frame to see if the note she had put in the back saying how she loved him to the moon and back was still there.

      She opened the frame and a small piece of paper fell out. She recognized her writing and the hearts drawn all around the edges.

      Smiling, she pulled it out and noticed, in deep pen marks, someone had scribbled something on the back of her note. The note was addressed “To my Angel” and dated three days ago. The day he died.

      “You have to get away from here,” the note read. Three words were printed in all capitals. “RUN DISAPPEAR VANISH. Your life depends on it. Trust no...”

      He hadn’t finished. Something must have stopped him. Maybe a noise in the alley that interrupted his thoughts. She imagined him hastily returning the unfinished note to the frame, then going to investigate.

      For a while she looked from the picture to the note, to the ledger. Florida was her home. Why would he tell her to run?

      He must have known he was in danger. The police said the phone line to his office had been cut, but the muggers couldn’t have known he’d left his cell at home that night, as usual. And even if he knew he was in danger, why would he tell her to run or disappear?

      A chill slid along her spine. Her father had hidden the note. He’d been afraid someone would find it. Someone besides her.

      Bits of conversation they’d had over the past few weeks circled in her mind. He’d suggested she apply for a curator job in Texas he’d seen online, even posted the job opening on the note board in the kitchen to remind her. He’d told her it would be good to get away. He’d brought home a little trailer he’d picked up at a yard sale and tucked it away in a garage full of other useless junk. He’d transferred all his stocks to her name, claiming he no longer had time to keep up with them.

      Maybe he never guessed he would be mugged, but suspected his heart might give out. Or had he feared violence might be coming his direction? Now, looking back, she wondered if he had wanted her to leave Florida so he could do the same. But why? He had a job for life. Even if Uncle Anthony was shady in his dealings, Benjamin would never have turned in his own brother.

      She’d thought all his changes were part of the grieving for her mother, but now she reconsidered. Her forever-organized father must have had a plan, but what?

      Slowly, she saw the answer. Not in the picture, or the note he’d written, but in the ledger. The numbered account where he’d transferred the money was hers, and the amount was exactly what he’d loaned his brother years ago. He didn’t even calculate the interest he was entitled to.

      Her father might not have ever been able to leave Florida, but he was telling her to and making sure she had the funds to do it.

      No, not telling, demanding. Even from the grave.

      Angela stood, put the note back behind the picture, stuffed the frame and the ledger into her purse, and walked out of her father’s office.

      How could she disappear? Everyone she knew lived in Florida, which admittedly wasn’t too many. She’d had a few jobs in college,