Overnight Heiress. Modean Moon
Meg’s silent warning to herself echoed Patrick’s. Your prints aren’t on file. They can’t learn anything. Don’t antagonize them. Don’t make them want to look past the obvious.
Meg had a wide and generous smile. She knew: she’d had to work at it. “I’m sorry,” she said, using that smile. “Wisecracks have gotten to be such a part of the job, I sometimes think I put on the personality when I put on the rest of the uniform.”
Meg turned toward her boss, but now her smile was genuine and concerned. “What happened this time, Patrick?”
Meg paced her minuscule living room, stopping sporadically in her marching to look out through the sliding patio door at the vibrant colors on the surviving trees in this older neighborhood—looking for peace in the panorama of changing seasons, finding none. Tulsa was big enough to get lost in, big enough to escape from, but not big enough to hide two persons from a concentrated search.
Three days had passed since the latest theft from Patrick’s upscale bar and grill, three days since her fingerprints had been sent to the FBI wonderland that cops worshiped. She’d never been printed before, but... but, but, but. There were too many unknowns in this equation, and Meg was so tired—tired of running, tired of hiding—exhausted from the effort of making a home that didn’t feel like they were running or hiding.
She glanced at her watch, as utilitarian as everything she wore, and grimaced. Twenty minutes; that’s all she had until the neighborhood filled with the laughter and noise of home-bound school children. Twenty minutes to pace, to wrestle with her conscience, to decide. She wouldn’t be able to use Patrick as a reference if she left—she’d probably never be able to contact him again.
That was what hurt: losing the friend, not the reference. But if she left without notice, would she become a suspect in this string of thefts from Patrick? Would the police look for her for that reason when they might otherwise overlook her if she stayed quietly where she was?
The doorbell squawked out half its two-note warning and crackled into silence. Meg twisted her watch face into view.
Twenty minutes. Damn it! She needed that time to pull her racing thoughts together, to drag her crumbling composure around her. Later she’d have time for the visit with her elderly neighbor, Mrs. Henson, that the woman was beginning to expect, but not now. Please, not now.
Two men stood on Meg’s tiny doorstep. They were dressed in conservatively styled, tailored and colored suits. FBI. Her mind had no trouble making that connection.
“Good afternoon. Miss Wilson,” one said as both men produced identification.
“Good afternoon,” Meg said through a suddenly and agonizingly dry throat. Yes. FBI. And it wasn’t an accident. They weren’t just canvasing the neighborhood. They knew her name.
“What... Is something wrong?”
One of them smiled, and she was sure it had to be a violation of at least one rule. “No, ma’am. But we’d like for you to come to our office with us.”
“Am I—am I under arrest for something?” FBI. Had he filed kidnapping charges? No. Even he wouldn’t do that. Of course he would!
“Oh, no, Miss Wilson. It’s just a problem that was brought out when you were fingerprinted last week. It won’t take long. You should be home—within an hour.”
With the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, Meg thought She opened the door wide and stepped back. “I need to get my purse,” she said. And I need thirty seconds alone in the bathroom. Please, please don’t come in.
Lucas Lambert was waiting in the interrogation room when the woman was brought in. He’d argued that interrogation wouldn’t be necessary, but the Feds seemed to think it would be. The woman was tall, at least five-ten, he suspected, even in the flat-heeled shoes she wore, angular—almost gaunt—with her dark hair cropped in a utilitarian, nocare style, and dark eyes that would have had him questioning her relationship to Edward Carlton even without the fingerprints.
Dark eyes that called too vividly to his mind the memory of another woman facing another roomful of unknown men, another interrogation that had a far different outcome from the one he expected here. With the constant regret that he had not been there for that woman, he forced his attention back to the woman in this room.
She was frightened, although she hid it well. She took the seat she was told to take and looked around the small room, focusing suspicious attention on him.
Hadn’t these idiots told her anything? He’d relayed Edward’s message to them, the same message Edward had given him when he first voiced his own suspicions. “We were rich kids,” Edward had told him. “Nothing was left to chance. We were measured and fingerprinted and tattooed. The fingerprints convinced me, but she might need a little extra persuasion.” And then Edward had given him childhood photographs showing a birthmark and a tattoo.
Scared. She was scared out of her skull, and hiding it well enough to fool most people, but not him. He focused on her hands, long fingered and slender, held loosely in her lap but trembling with the tension of not clenching them.
She visibly relaxed her hands, then lifted her chin in a cocky, do-or-die attitude. “Don’t you think it’s time for someone to tell me why I’m here?”
The two federal agents remained silent. Lucas stepped forward. They might not approve of his tactics later, but they had passed the ball to him. “Miss Wilson,” he said. “My name is Lucas Lambert. I’m sheriff of Avalon, New Mexico.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been in your jurisdiction, Sheriff.”
He met her cautious smile with one of his own. “That isn’t surprising. Few have. But we have a new citizen of Avalon, a man who has become a good friend of mine. I’m here on his behalf.”
He saw the tension return to her hands. Curious. And still more curious.
“His name is Edward Carlton.”
Lucas saw no recognition in her eyes but he did note that once again her tension relaxed. “Actually, it’s Edward Willliam Renberg Carlton IV.”
He watched as she fought back a smile, the same response he had once made to the pomposity of Edward’s name.
“I hope he’s a big man,” she said.
“He is. Six-two, but lean. Dark hair. Dark eyes.”
He watched the confusion in her eyes for only two heartbeats. “Edward is thirty-five now,” he told her. “Twenty-five years ago his father, his mother and his younger sister went on an outing without him. Edward was left at home for some infraction—a punishment that saved his life.
“The family was kidnapped. A ransom note was received but as too often happens, somehow, someone slipped up. The bodies of Edward’s mother and father were found a month later. Nothing was heard from or about his sister Megan until last week when her fingerprints turned up in a routine screening in a burglary investigation.”
The tension whooshed out of her. She sank back in the chair, eyes wide, mouth open in a question she couldn’t seem to speak. Lucas passed an envelope containing two pictures across the table to her. Numbly she opened the envelope and examined the pictures Edward had provided.
“And I—oh. Oh, my.” She closed her eyes and turned the photographs facedown on the table, sitting silently for several seconds before she again looked up at him. For only a moment her eyes pleaded with him for—for what?—for information on who she had been, where she had lived, and what had happened to the brother she never knew?—before they shuttered.
“I suppose you want me to go with a matron or someone to prove I have those marks?”
Lucas shook his head. “No. Those photographs are for your assurance only. I’m sure there will be all sorts of formalities to go through later, but we’re satisfied with the fingerprints. And with your appearance.