BRIDAL JEOPARDY

by Rebecca York

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe he’s feeling guilty about my agreeing to marry John to pay his gambling debts—and he’s showing it by acting angry with me.”

  “That doesn’t make perfect sense.”

  She sighed. “And I did accuse him of gambling again, which didn’t go over too well.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “How did you get along with your parents?” she asked.

  “They knew I was devastated by Sam’s death. They tried to make it up to me. I let them think they were succeeding.”

  “But it didn’t really work?”

  “It couldn’t. The other half of me was...gone.”

  When her face contorted, he said, “Let’s not focus on that.”

  “Okay, are your parents both still alive?”

  His features tightened. “Neither of them is alive. Sam’s death did a number on our family. My mom was depressed—like your aunt. But it didn’t develop until after Sam died. She died of a heart attack. And my dad started drinking a lot. He died of cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “I felt like I was on my own a long time before they were actually gone.”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t keep much of their stuff. If there’s information about the clinic, the information is back in Bethesda. Do you think your father will tell you what clinic?”

  “I don’t know. There are probably some old records we could find if he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “We should go over there.”

  She glanced toward the window, then got up and lifted one of the slats. “My bodyguards are still here.”

  “They can sit there all night. We’ll leave your car in the parking space out back, walk to my bed-and-breakfast and get my rental.”

  “Okay.”

  It was strange to be sneaking away from her own house, but she followed Craig out the door, across the patio and into the back alley. Bypassing the car, they headed for his B and B. He checked to make sure they weren’t being followed and kept to the shadows of the wrought-iron balconies that sheltered the sidewalk.

  He stopped down the block and across the street, still in the shadows. “The parking lot is around back. You wait here. I don’t want anyone to see you with me when I get the car.”

  She quickly agreed, pressing back against the building as she watched him cross the street and disappear into the B and B.

  In a few minutes, a late-model Impala pulled up at the curb, and she climbed in, shutting the door quickly behind her.

  “I suppose you know where my dad lives,” she said as he pulled back into the traffic lane.

  “Yeah.”

  As they drove out of the French Quarter, then to St. Charles Avenue, Craig kept glancing in his rearview mirror, making sure that nobody was following them.

  “I guess you’re used to this cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Stephanie murmured.

  “Part of my job description.”

  As he headed up St. Charles, then turned onto St. Andrew Street, her heart started to pound. She hadn’t exactly had a pleasant encounter with her father, and she hadn’t expected to meet up with him again so soon.

  “You get out. I’m going to leave the car around the corner,” he said as he pulled up in front of the house.

  “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  He gave her a critical look. “You really don’t want to be here, do you?”

  “No. And I’m thinking that it’s not so great for you.”

  “Because?”

  “Because he’s given me to John Reynard, and he’s not going to be happy to see me with another man.”

  “Given is a pretty strong word.”

  She shot him a fierce look. “You don’t think I agreed to marry Reynard because I was madly in love, do you?”

  “No. I thought you were interested in his money.”

  She dragged in a sharp breath. “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t know you then.”

  “And now you do?”

  “You can’t lie with your thoughts.”

  “At least that’s something.”

  He turned his head toward her, then looked back to the road. “I’m working my way through this situation—just the way you are.”

  “You’ve had some experience with it.”

  “This is different.” He waited a beat before saying, “To get back to the current problem, tell your father I’m a detective you’ve hired to find out who the men were.”

  “He’ll think John could handle that on his own.”

  Craig shrugged. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “No.”

  Stephanie climbed out of the car and walked up the driveway toward the detached garage. When she looked inside and saw that her father’s car was missing, she breathed a little sigh of relief, then started wondering where he was.

  Because she said she’d be outside, she waited for Craig on the wide front porch.

  “It looks like my dad isn’t home,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “I hope so. He doesn’t like...” She stopped.

  “What.”

  “...me sneaking around.”

  “What the hell does that mean? This is your house.”

  “Not anymore. I moved out.”

  “Your father sounds like a real winner.”

  “He’s had...a hard life.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “He was used to wealth and privilege, and he lost that.”

  “His own fault,” Craig pointed out.

  “Maybe that makes it worse.”

  “Do you always make excuses for him?”

  “Let’s not go on about him,” she snapped, and he pressed his lips together, maybe because he realized he would gain nothing by continuing to focus on her father’s failings.

  After she unlocked the door, she turned to him. “Come inside, but wait in the front hall.”

  “I should check out the house.”

  “For what?”

  “Intruders.”

  “Unlikely.”

  To her relief, he stayed in the hall while she darted into the living room, then circled through the rest of the downstairs before climbing quickly up the stairs.

  Leaning over the balcony, she beckoned to him. “Come on.”

  * * *

  “WHAT ARE WE looking for?” he asked when he reached the top of the stairs.

  “I’m not sure. It was almost thirty years ago, so it’s not going to be on the computer, but Mom kept some boxes with papers and pictures in the top of her closet.”

  Craig followed her into a bedroom where the furnishings were antique and the once-expensive fabrics were dusty and faded.

  “Your dad sleeps here?” he asked.

  “This was Mom’s room.”

  “They had separate rooms?”

  “She told him about fifteen years ago that she needed her own space,” Stephanie answered, embarrassed to be revealing private family matters.

  The room had two large closets, both full of women’s clothes.

  When Stephanie saw them, she caught her breath.

  “Everything’s still right where she left it,” she murmured.

  “I guess he misses her. Or he didn’t feel like making the effort to get rid of her stuff. All he had to do was shut the door.”

  She dragged in a breath and let it out. “I feel funny about poking around in their lives.”

  “Yeah, but we need to do it,” Craig answered. “Are those what you’re looking for?” He pointed to the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on the top shelf. They were old department-store boxes, the kind nobody made anymore.
<
br />   “Yes.”

  He lifted several down and set them on the bed.

  Instead of reaching for them, Stephanie stood unmoving.

  Craig turned his head toward her. “I know this is making you feel...unsettled.”

  She nodded. “And Dad is going to be mad if he comes back and finds me snooping.”

  “I guess that’s tough. But maybe we can get out of here before he comes back. Do you want me to help you look?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  They each opened a box and began checking through the contents. Inside were old photographs of Stephanie and her parents, plus other memorabilia.

  Craig held up a childish crayoned picture of a house surrounded by a flower garden. “You did good work.”

  “I must have been pretty young. It’s a drawing of this house.”

  “I actually can tell.”

  She found a pile of essays she’d written.

  “It’s strange to find this stuff. I wouldn’t have thought she’d kept it.”

  Craig said nothing, only continued searching through papers. When he pulled out a thick folder, she looked at him. “What’s that?”

  He thumbed through the contents.

  “Do you remember anything about a place called the Solomon Clinic?”

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe this is what we’ve been looking for. It was a fertility clinic in Houma. There’s a copy of an application, then instruction sheets for what your mother was supposed to do before going there.”

  He handed her some of the papers, and she went through them. “I guess this is it.”

  “Well, we found out about me. Does the Solomon name mean anything to you?” she asked.

  Craig considered the question. “As a matter of fact, it does.”

  “How?”

  His stomach tightened as he said, “Like you, I used to listen in on conversations. Probably all kids do.”

  “And what did you hear?”

  “It was after Sam died, and my mother was pretty upset. I think I heard her on the phone trying to get some information about the Solomon Clinic.”

  “You really remember that?”

  “Yes, because of the way she was reacting. In her grief, I think she might have been considering trying to get pregnant again, but she found out that the clinic had burned down.”

  “She could have gone to someone in the D.C. area.”

  “Maybe she thought Dr. Solomon was God—and he was the only one who could help her. For all I know, he could have acted that way with his patients.” He dragged in a breath and let it out. “Anyway, she apparently gave up on the idea.”

  “But it sounds like your mother and mine went to the same place,” Stephanie said. “Only she didn’t take you back there for checkups, did she?”

  “You went for checkups?” he asked.

  “Yes. I remembered going somewhere with a waiting room full of kids my age. Now I think it must have been part of the deal—that the parents would bring the kids back to be examined.”

  “And my mom was back in D.C., so she couldn’t do it.” He thought for a minute. “I wonder if she agreed to take me and Sam there for checkups, but then didn’t comply,” Craig said.

  “Was she that kind of woman?”

  He lifted one shoulder. “She was always willing to bend the rules when it suited her.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “I was supposed to have Ms. Franklin for my sixth-grade homeroom teacher. Mom got me into a different class because she thought Ms. Franklin was too lenient with the kids. Another time we moved into an apartment building where you weren’t supposed to have pets, but she brought our cat anyway. Lucky for her it was a well-behaved animal and didn’t mess up the place.”

  They gathered up the papers and put them back into the boxes, then returned the containers to the top of the closet.

  “Your mom found out the clinic closed,” she said.

  “But maybe we can find out something online—or if we go to Houma.”

  Stephanie turned to straighten out the bedspread, where they’d laid the boxes, and he took the other side, pulling to remove the wrinkles.

  “If we get out of here before your dad comes back, he’ll never even know we were here.”

  They hadn’t finished smoothing out the bed when they heard the front door open.

  “What do you want to do?” Craig asked in a harsh whisper.

  “Climb out the window,” Stephanie answered in the same tone.

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want Dad to find me upstairs with you, and I don’t want to get into an argument about what we were doing—not if I can help it. And I sure as heck don’t want him telling John about it.”

  “We’re on the second floor.”

  “But there’s an easy way to get down. We can climb onto the sunroom roof and go down that way.” She hurried toward the window, opened the sash and stepped out. Craig looked around to make sure nothing was out of place in the room, then he followed her onto the roof. When he was outside, he closed the window behind them.

  They moved along the wall toward the edge of the sunroom, and Stephanie pointed to the trellises that were fixed to the walls of the sunroom.

  “Let me go first,” he said.

  “No, I’ve done this before.”

  “You snuck out of the house?”

  “When I was grounded, yeah. The trellis is as good as a ladder.”

  “But you haven’t used it in years, right?”

  She shrugged. Before he could stop her, she stepped over the side, holding on to the weathered wood as she began to lower herself. He watched her going down, thinking that the wood might not be as solid as when she’d tried this last.

  His speculation was confirmed when he heard a cracking sound and she fell several feet before catching herself.

  “Are you all right?” he called.

  “Yes.”

  When she’d made it to the ground, he followed, testing the rungs as he went. The rest seemed solid, and he reached the lawn right after Stephanie.

  They stared at each other. He would have hugged her in relief that they’d made it, but he knew that touching her now was a bad idea. They’d forget what they were supposed to be doing—which was getting away from her father’s house before he discovered them.

  She must have been thinking the same thing. After long seconds, she walked rapidly across the back of the house and turned the corner.

  As soon as she disappeared from sight, he heard her make a strangled sound.

  “Stephanie?” he called in a hoarse whisper.

  She didn’t answer, and he hurried to catch up, then stopped short when he rounded the corner.

  Stephanie was standing rigidly in front of a man who was holding a gun to her head.

  Chapter Eight

  The man was one of the thugs who had threatened Stephanie in her shop. The bald one.

  “If you don’t want me to shoot your girlfriend, do exactly what I say.”

  Craig went still as he looked from the man to Stephanie’s terrified face.

  “Don’t hurt her.”

  “That’s up to you. Play this smart, and everything will be okay.”

  He doubted it, but he asked, “What do you want?”

  Without answering the question, the man said, “Walk ahead of us down the driveway, then turn right.”

  Craig’s heart was pounding as he followed directions. He walked carefully, knowing that any false step could get Stephanie killed.

  As they headed down the sidewalk, he kept searching for a way out. What if a neighbor suddenly appeared? What if someone called the police? Craig prayed that something wo
uld happen. The big problem for him was that Stephanie and the guy were behind him, and he couldn’t see what was going on back there. If he moved on his own, she’d get shot.

  Desperately he tried to reach out to her with his mind, but he couldn’t make the contact across the space that separated them.

  “Stop here,” the guy ordered as they drew up beside a van that could have been a delivery truck. The only windows were in the front and in the back door. The rest of the rear compartment had solid walls.

  The other man, the one with the wavy hair, opened the door at the back of the vehicle. “Get inside,” he ordered.

  Craig hesitated, thinking that if he followed directions, he’d never gain control of the situation.

  “I said get in.” The man behind him gave him a shove, and he flew forward, striking his head against the bare metal floor of the interior compartment.

  His head hit the floor so hard that he saw stars. Behind him, he heard Stephanie cry out.

  “Shut up,” the man with the gun growled.

  Craig fought to stay conscious as the man flipped him onto his back and pulled his hands behind him, quickly securing them with tape. He did the same with his legs, then rolled him back over and banged his head again, sending a wave of pain through his skull.

  “Easy,” the other guy complained. “We’re supposed to deliver them in good shape.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s for mauling me this afternoon,” the curly-haired one answered while he tore off more tape and slapped it over Craig’s mouth.

  He was still trying to clear his mind as the bald-headed man shoved Stephanie into the van.

  She gasped as he pushed her to the floor, then began taping her the way Craig was already taped.

  He was silently screaming, racking his brain for some way out of this, but he could come up with nothing.

  When both of them were secured, the men climbed out of the van and slammed the door closed, leaving their prisoners in the dark.

  Craig struggled to think clearly, struggled to send Stephanie a silent message, but he couldn’t reach her mind.

  As the vehicle lurched away from the curb, he sensed Stephanie moving beside him. Through the fog in his brain, he realized that she was wiggling her body closer to his. Finally her right shoulder and arm were pressed to his left.