The Baby Chase. Jennifer Greene
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entrances. Rebecca had tried a skeleton key on all the doors—she’d bought the key from one of her writers’ catalogs—and that had been when things started going wrong. The key didn’t work on any of the locks. She’d also brought a crowbar, because every resourceful heroine she’d ever written had found some use for a crowbar. Not her. She’d circled the whole blasted house, checking every window on the first floor. None of them were boarded up, but they were all locked tight. All she’d managed to do with the crowbar so far was chip some paint.
There were a dozen other tricks and tools in her backpack—her writing research had prepared her well for a life of crime. But as yet, none of them had been worth spit, and the pack weighed a ton, biting into her shoulder blades. The sky was a black growly mass of moving clouds, and thunder rumbled close enough to make the whole earth shudder—or maybe that was just her, shivering hard. Any sane woman, she told herself, would give up.
Unfortunately, Rebecca had always been rotten at giving up on anything that mattered to her. Some said she was stubborn to the point of being relentless. Rebecca preferred to think she took after her mother, Kate, who never failed to have the guts and character to do what she had to do.
This was something Rebecca had to do. There were certainly other people trying to clear her brother of the charge that he’d murdered Monica. But they weren’t getting anywhere. No one outside the family really believed in Jake’s innocence.
Her lips firmed with resolve, she tramped through the wet, spiky grass around the circumference of the house again. There had to be a way in. And, somehow, she had to find it.
A wild, gusty wind tore at her hair. When she lifted a hand to push the hair from her face, spears of lightning caught the sparkle of gold on her wrist. The charm bracelet belonged to her mother, not her, and a dozen turbulent, traumatic memories suddenly flashed in Rebecca’s mind.
She’d almost lost her mom. The whole world had believed that Kate Fortune had died in a plane crash—no one had known she’d fought off a kidnapper and had survived the crash, only to be lost in the jungle for months—and Rebecca’s heart still clenched tight when she remembered the tears, the fear, the love that had colored her recent emotional reunion with her mom. She’d taken the charm bracelet from the sculpted arm that had displayed it in the Fortune’s office the day Kate was discovered missing…. She’d added her own charms once Kate’s will had been read and each family member had received the charm that had represented his or her own birth. Rebecca had needed the connection the bracelet represented, and her mother hadn’t let her give it back once she returned.
For Rebecca the charm bracelet was a talisman, a symbol of what family meant, and the links of love and loyalty that bound them all.
She rubbed those gold links now. Maybe her mother had founded a financial dynasty, but Kate loved children and believed in family before all else. She’d passed those unshakable values on to Rebecca. And right now was a heck of a time to be thinking about babies, but she was thirty-three, and babies pounced in her mind at any excuse these days. Her personal biological clock didn’t seem to care that she was single, with no Prince Charming on the immediate horizon. She wanted a baby. She’d always wanted children and a family. No matter what exotic directions the rest of the Fortune clan had taken, she was a hopelessly nurturing homebody type. And now it seemed she was the last of the family to settle down. Even her nieces had kids!
Rocking a baby came naturally to her. Cat burglary sure didn’t—and a sudden shiver of fear snaked up her spine. The storm didn’t scare her. And she wasn’t spooked by the big old deserted mansion, even if it was a murder site.
The shiver of fear was motivated solely by love. She wanted so badly to come through for her brother, and she was scared of failing. Somewhere in that house, there had to be clues, information, evidence—something that would clear Jake’s name. Dozens of people had had outstanding reasons for killing the old bat, including quite a few in her own family. Monica had been an evil, greedy, selfish woman, and she’d done her damnedest to destroy the Fortune family for more than a generation. A two-year-old could have found suspects with motives.
The problem was that Monica had almost cost Jake everything that mattered to him, so he had a prizewinning motive, too. More to the point, he’d been at the scene of the murder and a ton of physical evidence pointed to him. Neither the cops nor the family’s investigators had turned up another suspect. Neither had the staff of lawyers on her brother’s team. No one seemed to regret that the aging Hollywood film star was dead, but neither did anyone believe in Jake’s innocence.
In her heart, Rebecca knew her brother couldn’t, wouldn’t, kill anyone—no matter what the provocation. But she was afraid that unless she found proof that another suspect had done the deed, no one else would.
So far, she hadn’t run across an alarm system, or any indication that one was turned on. The doors were all locked, and the first windows were not only latched and locked, but built casement-style, with small square panes made of leaded glass. Even if she broke the glass, the panes were too small for her to gain entry. With rain dribbling down her cheeks, she discounted the rose trellis—she was a lightweight 115 pounds, but the trellis looked beyond rickety. A huge silver maple spread a hoopskirt of branches in the yard, but no branches were close enough for her to leap to the east roof—unless she suddenly developed wings.
She could try the trellis if she had to. First, though, she circled the house again, crouching low, battling the bushes in the flower beds to shine a flashlight over one basement window at a time.
The prickers of a flowering almond snagged at her clothes like a witch’s fingers, stabbing and clawing. Mud sucked at her sneakers. She broke a nail on a window frame. A splinter lodged in her finger, and the nuisance thing bled. The deluge finally quit, but she was so damp and cold that miserableness was only a matter of degree by that time, anyway.
Finally, though, her flashlight zoomed on a window frame that appeared both uneven and cracked. She battled a bosomy lilac bush for the space to crouch down, and ran her palm across the uneven frame. The window wasn’t latched. It just seemed to be painted shut.
It opened out, and didn’t look big enough for a ten-year-old to crawl through, but no matter. Rebecca figured this was as close to manna from heaven as she was likely to get.
She reached behind for her backpack, and juggled it and the flashlight to find her crowbar again. Twice she probed and pulled with the crowbar, but it was almost impossible to get leverage in the narrow space between the blasted wet lilac bushes. The muddy, mucky ground refused to help her out with some traction. On the third try, though, she finally managed to wedge the crowbar under the ledge, and the window squeaked and creaked open.
Rebecca hunkered back on her heels and scratched her chin. So. It was open. But the opportunity made her feel as if she were holding a winning lottery ticket without a way to collect the loot. The window opened out, creating an even tinier space to crawl through than she’d first guessed. She was built lean, but not that lean.
Hesitantly she aimed the flashlight through the opening. Spatial relationships weren’t exactly her strength, but it sure looked like a hundred feet down to the concrete basement floor. Nothing to break her fall. Stephen King could have set a book down in those gloomy, eerie shadows. The light didn’t illuminate anything but ghostly corners and dank concrete walls.
She was probably going to kill herself if she tried this.
On the other hand, this appeared to be her only way in—and backing down certainly wasn’t an option. Her bones would just have to squish small enough to fit, and that was that.
She zipped the flashlight into the backpack, and dropped the pack inside.
It fell with a clattering thud. A long way down.
She swallowed a lump of fear thicker than tar, then moved. Shimmying on her back, trying to ignore the mud seeping into her sweatshirt, she poked her feet in first, then her legs, then wriggled her fanny in. Then came trouble. Her hips wedged in the opening, and suddenly she couldn’t move. At all. In or out.
Cripes, there were times she’d groaned about not having