Gemma leaned back against the wall. She recognized the man. He was that awful so-called professor who’d been so offensive that day in Ellie’s store. His disguise was half on, half off his face, but it was easy to see that he wasn’t as old and certainly not crippled as he’d presented himself when she’d met him.
Gemma wasn’t sure what she should do. She glanced at her phone and saw that none of her messages had gone through. It looked like Tris needed some new routers for his Internet service—or the wires had been cut.
She took a deep breath and looked back through the glass door. Jean was leaving the room, probably to find a better connection for her phone. Was she trying to contact Colin? She took the gun with her.
Gemma knew that the smartest thing for her to do was to go back to her car and leave. Let Colin handle this, she thought.
She gave one last look through the door befo
re she left, but she stopped cold. Since the man’s back was to her, so were his hands. He was frantically working to loosen the tape Jean had used on him, and it looked like he was a few minutes away from being free.
Maybe Jean was involved in the robberies and maybe there was animosity between the two women, but Gemma knew she had to warn her.
Around the corner was a window that led into Tris’s exam room. She ran to it, hoping that it wouldn’t be locked. It wasn’t. She pushed the window up, swung her leg over, and went inside. To the right was the sitting room and at the end was the kitchen.
When Gemma got to the doorway, she saw Jean standing at Tris’s kitchen island, a cup on the way to her lips. Unseen by Jean, her uncle was behind her. He was holding aloft the belt to his trousers and he was about to wrap it around his niece’s neck.
Gemma didn’t give herself time to think about what she was doing. She silently ran the few feet, and yelled, “Hey Professor!”
When he turned, she did to him exactly what she’d done to Colin in the gym. She twirled around to put a spinning back kick into his stomach. When he bent in pain, she did another spin and hit him in the jaw with a punch that had all her strength behind it. Whereas Colin could take all she’d given him, the uncle couldn’t. He went down, his head hitting the corner of the stone countertop. As he slid down, he left a stream of blood along the cabinets. By the time he hit the floor, he was unconscious.
Jean was standing there, the cup still halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide.
“Where is Tris?” Gemma asked.
With her hand shaking, Jean set the cup down as she stared at her uncle’s unconscious form. The belt was still wrapped around one of his wrists. “Tris is in Miami, visiting his sister.”
“No, he’s not. He sent me a text about something only he and I know.”
“He”—she nodded to her uncle—“was watching you and Tris, following you. If he wrote something private, it’s because he saw the two of you together. Did it happen outside where he was able to see you?”
Gemma was sickened that the man had been skulking about in the dark that night, but she wasn’t convinced that Tris was safe. “Tris wouldn’t have boarded a plane without his phone.”
“Maybe he came back and that’s what threw my uncle’s plans off. That I was able to sneak up on him is not something anyone else has been able to do.”
“So where is Tristan?” Gemma demanded as she picked up the gun off the counter.
“I don’t know where Tris is,” Jean said as she sank down to the floor. “He was going to kill me,” she said, looking at her uncle.
Gemma’s main concern was Tris, but at the same time she didn’t dare leave Jean and her uncle unguarded. She reached into her pocket for her phone. Her texts had finally gone through. With joy, she saw that there were two texts to her, one from Roy saying that Colin was on his way, and another one from Joce saying the police were coming.
Jean started talking. “He heard about the paintings that had been found in Edilean, and he knew I had a connection here. He was broke, so he came here to see what he could find out, if there was something worth stealing here. If he found nothing here he probably meant to get money from me. He’s good at getting into bank accounts and emptying them. I just wanted him gone.”
“Would he have killed you?” Gemma asked. She was nervous and wanted to look for Tristan, but she couldn’t turn her back on those two.
Jean’s voice was quiet. “You know that little trick with his hands that Colin does?”
Gemma wasn’t sure what she meant, but then realized that Jean was talking about sex. The thought of sharing the man she loved with another woman made her hand tighten on the gun she held at her side.
“That’s all right,” Jean said. “You don’t have to tell me. I taught Colin to do that. You know who taught me?” She looked at her uncle on the floor. “Him. When I was ten years old.”
Gemma gasped.
“Colin doesn’t know it, but before I changed it, my middle name was Willow. Uncle Adrian liked to rob houses with ten-year-olds in the family, and he’d leave behind a sprig of willow wrapped in a pink ribbon. He thought of it as a joke.”
“Yet you spent time with him while you were in law school.”
“Yeah,” Jean said with a sneer. “I thought I was protecting Mom and me. And I thought he didn’t know how much I hated him.”