Legacy Rejected

by Robin Patchen

  He held out his hand, and she took it. But holding her hand wouldn’t be enough, not right now. He pulled her into an embrace.

  She hugged him back, then stepped away, a question in her eyes.

  “I’m so thankful you’re safe.” He took her hand again. “Come on.”

  Inside, she led them to the living room and sat on the sofa. He sat beside her, keeping her hand in his.

  “There was somebody in the basement.”

  She gasped and covered her mouth with her fingertips. “Are you kidding? I’m sorry. I should’ve… You could have been hurt.”

  “You could have been hurt.”

  “Oh.” As if it had just occurred to her, which only irritated him.

  He forced himself to take a deep breath, trying to calm his pounding heart. He had to think clearly now.

  “Did you see him?” she asked. “What did he look like?”

  He recounted the events while she listened silently.

  “Maybe it was just a burglar,” he said. “Except… it didn’t look like anything had been disturbed. Maybe he’d just gotten here.”

  “That would make sense.” The fear in her eyes told him she didn’t believe it.

  And he didn’t either. “No, it wouldn’t, unless he broke in because he was hungry. A burglar would start with the expensive things, not the pantry.”

  She glanced at the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall, then stood and walked into the dining room. “My laptop is here.”

  He followed and stood beside her. “Probably not a burglar, then.”

  “Maybe it was somebody who was hungry,” she said. “A homeless person.”

  “This isn’t San Francisco. How many homeless people have you seen in Nutfield?”

  She said nothing as she walked into the kitchen. When she reached for the pantry door, he said, “Don’t touch. There might be fingerprints.”

  She crossed her arms and wandered from room to room, eventually leading him upstairs. He probably should have waited in the living room, but even now, even knowing the house was safe, he couldn’t leave her side.

  She glanced in each bedroom. When she got to the bathroom, she looked at him with a sheepish grin. “Now you know my secret.”

  “You’re a slob.”

  She smiled, though it was slight. “Not a slob. Just not… compulsively neat. And I was late, so I didn’t have time to clean.”

  “Otherwise you would have?”

  Her smile got a little wider. “Probably.” She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  He chuckled as he followed her to her bedroom. At her bureau, she reached for a jewelry box.

  He clasped her hand in his before she touched it. “Fingerprints, remember?”

  She glanced around the space, then at him. “I’m not going to call the police.”

  “What? You have to.”

  She pulled her hand from his and rifled through the jewelry box. “Everything is here.”

  “You have to call the police.”

  She ignored him and wandered to the closet, where she studied the contents, focusing on the shelf above her clothes.

  “He was in here.”

  He followed her gaze. There were plastic containers of various colors on the shelf. “How can you tell?”

  She pointed. “He put them back in the wrong order. The purple one goes on the end. The red one is next then the orange and yellow.”

  “You have an order for that, but…” He indicated the clothes on the floor and lifted his eyebrows.

  “I’m just saying, he was here. Will you grab them so I can see if anything’s missing?”

  When he hesitated, she stretched on her toes and reached for the purple one. She was just tall enough to reach the bottom and inch it out. When it cleared the shelf, it would probably land on her head.

  Stubborn woman. He took down the boxes and set them on her bed. They were lightweight, about the size of shoeboxes.

  She opened the first, dug around a bit, then did the same with the rest. Though he didn’t look too closely, he saw photographs, some costume jewelry, a few trinkets.

  “Nothing’s missing. They’re a little… wrong. I think he looked through them, but as far as I can tell, he didn’t take anything.”

  “What was he looking for?”

  She touched the pendant that hung from her neck and turned toward her bureau. Over her shoulder, she said, “Could you just…?” She gestured toward the door. “I want to see if he went through my personal things.”

  Kade stepped into the hallway and hoped she wouldn’t discover that even her intimates had been disturbed.

  She stepped out a moment later and started down the stairs.

  He followed. “Well?”

  “No stone unturned.”

  His stomach tightened. “It’s such a violation.”

  She sat on the sofa and pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.

  Her eyes were still wide, avoiding eye contact, and her lips were turned down at the corners and closed tightly, as if she were trying to hold something inside.

  “What are you thinking?”

  She shook her head and swallowed. “It’s probably not related.”

  “At this point, I think we need to assume everything’s related.”

  She took a deep breath and met his gaze. “Kathryn warned me that someone followed me here, that someone’s after me. She told me to run.”

  Kade waited for Ginny to explain, but she said nothing else.

  He finally said, “Who? Who is after you?”

  She shrugged.

  “What do they want?”

  When she said nothing, he stood and paced. “You don’t know who’s after you or what they want? Come on, Ginny. You have to have some idea of what’s—”

  “I don’t, okay?” She stood and crossed her arms. “I have no idea what’s going on. I never knew… anything about anything. Kathryn thinks I’m a liar or an idiot. Since I truly don’t know, I must be an idiot.” She ran both hands through her long hair, then blew out a long breath. “It’s not your problem.”

  “No you don’t.” His voice was louder than he’d intended. He lowered it but kept the vehemence there. “You don’t get to just… just blow me off when you’re obviously in danger. Somebody was in your house. Do you get that? If I hadn’t been here—”

  “I get it, okay? I’m not really an idiot.” She threw her hands in the air as if she’d never been more frustrated. “Scratch that. Kathryn thought I was an idiot. You obviously think so.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.” He took a deep breath, then another, trying to calm himself. Carefully, he returned to his place on the sofa and sat.

  She glared down at him, and he held out his hand. “Please, sit with me.”

  She ignored the hand and sat, arms crossed once again. She gazed past him, staring at nothing. Her eyes were narrowed, her lips pinched tight. Everything about her had shuttered in the last two minutes because he couldn’t control his temper.

  “I’m sorry, Ginny. I’m not angry with you. It’s just very hard to believe.”

  “I know.” Her gaze flicked to him. “I don’t really know anything.”

  She didn’t really know anything. Which meant she knew something.

  “Tell me what Kathryn said.”

  Ginny looked toward the ceiling. “She said she was running, and that I should run too. Change my name, get a new ID, not tell anyone where I was going. She said I wasn’t safe here, that my being here has brought them.”

  “Who’s them?”

  “Kathryn said she saw someone at Dad’s funeral. But I don’t understand… Mom and Dad were business owners in San Francisco. Their work was legitimate… I mean, I had thought it was, but then…”

  Her arms were still crossed as if she were holding herself together. Kade touched her shoulder. “Then what?”

  “It’s all so convoluted. I don’t understand it, and telling you what I know isn’t going to help anything.”

>   He snatched his hand back. “I see.” She clearly had no faith that he could help. Fine, then. He’d leave her alone—if he thought she was safe. But he didn’t think she was safe, so she was stuck with him.

  Her eyes filled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that… I don’t need to drag you into my nightmare. It’s my problem. You don’t need to make it yours.”

  “I’m in it now, Ginny.”

  Her heavy sigh told him what she thought of that. “You don’t have to be. I appreciate you going through the house, but whoever it was is gone for now.”

  “Fine. I’ll leave, but not until we call the police.”

  “We can’t. I can’t do that.”

  “You have to. Someone was—”

  “I know. But the police are…” She slapped her hand over her mouth as if she’d been about to say a bad word.

  “The police are what?”

  “I can’t believe I almost said that. The past is creeping in on me.” She lowered her head into her hands. “I’m so stupid.” The words were muffled against her fingers.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her shoulders shook, and she kept her head tucked where he couldn’t see her tears. But he knew they were there. He was a jerk. She’d just had someone pawing through her things, and Kade was only making it worse.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” He scooted closer and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “I just want you to be safe.”

  She leaned against his chest, her face hidden behind her hands. She felt so small and soft and vulnerable, tucked there against him. He had the urge to lift her and set her across his lap the way his father used to hold Andrea when she cried. Fortunately, Kade knew better than to give in to that particular urge.

  Finally, her tears subsided. She stood and crossed to the bathroom, then walked back, dabbing her tears with a tissue. “I’m sorry. It’s just… I thought my sister was lying or exaggerating or… I don’t know. I didn’t realize…” She gestured to the room vaguely. The tears and tissue had removed most of her makeup, and despite the blotchy skin and red-rimmed eyes, she was still beautiful.

  Beautiful and exceedingly frustrating.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You need to either tell me what’s going on, or I’m calling the police to report what happened here.”

  She met his gaze briefly before focusing back on her lap. “Okay. That’s fair.” She swallowed, seemed to be working to meet his eyes. “I honestly don’t know anything about this. Just what Kathryn told me and what happened today. My parents were drifters. Every place we lived before Reno, we skipped out in the middle of the night. That’s why there was no moving truck or taking anything beyond what we could fit in the van. I knew we lived differently than other people, but I never understood what it meant. As I got older, I assumed they were skipping out on rent, but I think it was worse than that. In Reno, things started to change. They made more money and were settled for a while. I mean, a long time for us—nearly an entire school year. We left there on good terms—we even had a U-Haul trailer with some of our things in it. We moved to San Francisco, and my parents bought a condo. They bought it—in San Francisco. When we’d been living in dumpy rent houses since we’d left New Orleans. Suddenly, my parents had the money to start a business. They opened a restaurant, then another one. Things were better. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I was happy to have settled down. I made friends. I went out for the soccer team.”

  He smiled at that. “Were you good?”

  “I was terrible, but they let me on the team anyway. Said I had a lot of team spirit.”

  “I can see that.”

  Her smile was short-lived. “I wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing. Does that make sense? They were my parents, and I was just so happy that things were… Well, things were never normal at my house, but I liked my school, I liked my new friends. I liked our home. A real home, not a dumpy rental with crappy furniture that smelled like other people’s cats. Can you understand that?”

  “You were a kid.”

  “So maybe I stuck my head in the sand. So what? I had enough to worry about with school and friends and… and all the stuff that goes along with being a teenager without worrying about where my parents were getting the money.” She squared her shoulders as if she expected him to argue with her. “I trusted them. They were my parents. Even with all their faults, I trusted them.”

  “Of course you did. Why wouldn’t you have?”

  Her shoulders drooped, and the challenge emptied a balloon with a leak. “Because I should have known. I should have known Mom and Dad would never live life on the up-and-up.”

  “What were they doing?”

  She shrugged. “Something much bigger than the nickel-and-dime stuff they’d done before San Francisco. Not that I know much about that, either, but, in retrospect, I think they were con artists.”

  “You think they moved on to bigger and better things?”

  “Bigger, anyway, yeah.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  Her head shook slowly. “I have no idea. I never paid attention. Maybe I never wanted to know.”

  “Why would people be after you?”

  Her eye contact slipped, and she shifted slightly away from him. “I don’t know.”

  Except something in her body language told him that wasn’t entirely true.

  “No guesses?”

  She stood and paced. “Maybe if I knew what my parents had been doing…”

  “Your mom is still in California?”

  She shrugged as if she weren’t sure. What would that be like, to not know where your own mother was? “I haven’t heard from her.” And obviously Ginny hadn’t called her—or if she had, she hadn’t reached her. “I don’t want to get her into trouble. I don’t want to be the reason anybody looks into her.”

  “Is that why you’re reluctant to call the police? What were you about to say earlier…?”

  “‘The police are dangerous. Never tell them anything.’ It’s a mantra our parents repeated many times.”

  Wow. What kind of parents…? Ginny was in serious danger, and she was afraid to go to the authorities because of her parents’ twisted desire to protect themselves and their illegal activities.

  “I understand you’re worried about your mother, but right now, your first concern is yourself. You need to call the police.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “Everything you just told me.”

  She was shaking her head. “I can’t do that. If my mother goes to prison… I mean, it could happen. But I can’t be the cause of it. Even Kathryn never did that, and she’s hardly seen or spoken to Mom in years.”

  He looked down at his own hands, clasped in his lap. The frustration showed in the way his skin pulled taut over his knuckles. He focused on relaxing before he faced her again. “Then at least report the break-in. You don’t have to tell them the rest.”

  She held his gaze while she considered it. Finally, she nodded. “Fine. I’ll call them.”

  Chapter Five

  Ginny waited in the living room while two police officers wandered through her house. Because having an intruder violating her space hadn’t been degrading enough, she needed to add two more strangers to the list. Kade’s seeing everything only bothered her because now he knew her secret tendency toward messiness. That was nothing compared to everything else he’d learned about her today.

  So much for the first date that had gone so well. She wouldn’t blame him if he steered clear of her after this.

  But maybe not. He was still there, a steady presence by her side. He hadn’t said much after he’d told the police what happened, just sat beside her, held her hand.

  She could get used to that, get used to him. She knew she shouldn’t. Friday morning, she’d thought her life was simple, all figured out.

  Today, it seemed complex and dangerous. Too dangerous to pull another person into. Still, she couldn’t bring h
erself to ask him to leave.

  She gave the police officers all the information she was willing to share. They searched the house, dusted for fingerprints, and even talked to some of the neighbors—nobody had seen anything unusual. When they were finished, they told her what she already knew—there was nothing they could do. It looked as if the intruder had come in through a back window, but there were no fingerprints on the frame. Though they found lots of others in the house, the cops weren’t optimistic. No prints on the frame meant the guy wore gloves.

  So, probably not a teenager pulling a prank.

  Since the intruder didn’t appear to have taken anything, there were no stolen goods to track. And nobody’d seen him—or her, Ginny supposed—so they had no description to go on.

  When they were finished telling her what they’d found—essentially nothing—she walked them to the door, Kade by her side.

  The older of the two police officers, a tall gray-haired man, faced her after his partner stepped out. “Ma’am, if you were my daughter, here’s what I’d tell you to do. First, replace all the locks and add deadbolts. These locks”—he jiggled the knob on her front door—“aren’t going to stop anyone. And those old window locks are too fragile. You don’t have to replace them. All you need is a board wedged between the bottom sash and the frame to keep it from rising. You know what I mean?”

  A good solution. New windows were far out of her budget. She nodded, and he continued.

  “Install an alarm system. You’d be amazed at how fast a loud siren will run off an intruder. Finally”—he leveled his gaze at her—“buy a gun and learn how to use it.”

  She stepped back. The cop was suggesting she buy a gun? She definitely wasn’t in California anymore.

  “Whoever broke into your house,” he said, “wasn’t looking to steal. I don’t know anything about you or your life, so I’m just throwing this out there, but could it have been an old boyfriend?”

  She glanced at Kade, whose gaze had shifted from the officer to her.

  She focused on the cop. “I’ve never had a serious boyfriend.”

  “You’re kidding.” The police officer shook his head. “Men these days… They have all the brains of boiled shellfish.” He looked at Kade with a slight smile, then returned his focus to her. “If not an old boyfriend, then maybe somebody who has a bone to pick with you. An enemy, a business rival?”