The room went dark. Pitch dark.
Startled, Jack took a second to orient himself. Screams and yells came from all around him. Someone tall bumped against him in the dark and almost knocked him off balance. He righted himself, reaching around him for something, anything, to grab in order to break his fall. His fingers brushed a sleeve. The sleeve was pulled away immediately, but Jack noticed that the person who’d bumped into him had been tall—at least as tall as he, and wearing a suit jacket or sports coat. The material that had brushed against his fingers was a thick, heavier fabric, the kind used to make men’s coats.
Then Jack heard a sound that penetrated all the other sounds around him. It was a shriek and a cry of pain. Cara Lynn.
At that instant the lights came back on. Jack, who was standing less than six feet from where Cara Lynn had been holding up the bejeweled tiara, saw her, crumpled on the floor in her satin gown, not moving.
“Cara!” he cried, just as someone, maybe Cara’s mother, screamed. “Oh, my God, Cara Lynn!” From another part of the room someone cried out, “The tiara! It’s gone!”
People were milling around everywhere. Jack saw the Delancey men moving in concert, as if they were all part of one company or battalion. In sync, they divided up. Some headed toward Cara Lynn and her mother. Some headed for the front doors. One of them—it looked like one of the twins—pulled out his cell phone, calling the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office, no doubt.
When Jack got to Cara Lynn, two of her brothers were already there, bending over her, and a third Delancey was running toward them. He heard someone shout, “There he goes. Out the side door!” Jack leapt up onto a chair and spotted a man dressed in black, hurrying toward a pair of French doors on the side of the large hall. The man glanced backward, then threw open the doors and bolted. He was cradling something close to his chest like a football. Jack couldn’t tell what it was.
Around the doors, people were crying out and pointing, and Jack saw Delancey men pushing their way through the crowd, but the man in black obviously had a huge head start.
Jack’s muscles tensed and his tendons tightened, although intellectually, he knew that if the Delanceys—cops, military men and investigators—couldn’t catch the thief, he had no chance. But just at the instant when he was about to spring down off the chair and try to lend his help, he heard Cara Lynn’s voice.
“Jack?”
It was raspy and choked, but it was her. He turned back toward her. She had three of her big, capable Delancey protectors hovering over her, but she wasn’t paying any attention to them. She was looking straight at him. Horrified, he saw blood streaming down the side of her face and her expression was twisted in pain.
“Cara?” he whispered. Then his gaze rose to the table where the journal and the tiara had sat. All that remained was the square of old cloth. The bejeweled crown and the book were gone. Jack cared nothing—less than nothing—for the tiara. But that journal, if it really was Lilibelle Guillame’s last journal, could exonerate his grandfather from any wrongdoing, if his grandfather’s theory was true and Lilibelle was the one who’d killed Con Delancey.
Jack glanced in the direction of the French doors. Then he looked at his wife, whom he’d duped into marrying him so he could find that journal.
He took a deep breath. The journal! his brain screamed. Get the journal. But his head didn’t stand a chance against his stupid heart. Berating himself, he rushed to his bride’s side, bent down and used his thumb to wipe blood away from the small ridge just above her brow. Instantly, the three men turned on him.
“Don’t touch her,” one said.
Before Jack could react, the second one, who’d been talking on the phone, said, “We’ve got cars coming from everywhere. That guy won’t get far.”
“Right. Lucas took off after him. He’ll have him in handcuffs before the cruisers even get here,” the third one said.
Before he finished speaking, someone in the direction of the French doors shouted. “Look! He dropped the tiara! See it—”
“Nobody move!” a voice boomed. “Hey! Pipe down! Barton, get that crown! Everybody—Shut! Up!”
“Did you see anything?” one of the brothers asked Cara Lynn as another pressed a handkerchief to the cut on her forehead.
“Has anybody got any water?” the third man shouted.
To Jack, their voices sounded like a swarm of bees around his head. It occurred to him that this was what Cara Lynn had been talking about when she’d described how she’d spent her life being suffocated by her brothers. He wanted to swat them away and take care of her himself. She might be their sister, but she was his wife.
Then he noticed that one of the straps of her gown was broken. And sure enough, just as he’d predicted, without the strap, the entire left side of the dress was quickly headed south, toward a serious wardrobe malfunction. Jack shrugged out of his jacket and placed it around her shoulders. She looked up at him gratefully and pulled the lapels of the coat closed and stuck her arms into the sleeves.
Her brothers glared at him but didn’t say anything, so Jack stayed there with his arm around her.
By the time everybody was convinced that Cara Lynn was fine mentally, emotionally and physically, and no ambulance needed to be called, Lucas was back.
Everybody turned to look at him. Even Jack could read his expression like a children’s book. No luck.
“He disappeared,” Lucas said, a disgusted frown on his face.
“Oh, my God,” Paul said from behind Jack. “Did he really drop the tiara?”
Lucas leveled a grim glare at Paul. “We recovered the tiara, but he got the journal. Did any of you get a look at his face? Cara Lynn?”
Beside Jack, Cara Lynn shook her head.
Lucas pushed the fingers of one hand through his hair, then shouted at no one in particular. “How in hell did he get in and grab that stuff in the middle of a room full of cops?”
It was after midnight by the time Jack and Cara Lynn got home.
“You’d think with so many Delancey cops there as witnesses, it shouldn’t have taken so long,” Cara Lynn said, looking in her compact mirror at the cut on her forehead.
“Really?” Jack said. “It’s only been three hours. My guess is if a thief had broken in and tried to steal a six or seven-figure piece of jewelry from any other house in this entire town, every single person there would have been hauled down to the police station, and many of them would still be there twenty-four hours later.”
“Well, that’s what they ought to do. It’s stupid that nobody caught that thief.” She gingerly touched the cut with her fingertip.
“I need to get you some antibiotic ointment and a strip bandage,” Jack said.
“I’ll do it. Damn, it still hurts.”
“Why don’t you get in bed and I’ll get you some water or something?”
“I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.
Jack got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator, opened it and handed it to her. “Were you able to see anything? Could you tell anything about the thief?”
“See anything? I don’t know what room you were in,” she retorted, “but where I was it was black as pitch. Like I told the detective, I felt a hand on me, then I was pushed down and I hit my shoulder and head on the marble table. The next thing I knew everybody was hovering over me.” She shivered.
“I think