The Ruby Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy) (3 page)

Elliott leaned forward, pressed his elbows into the arms of the chair, gripped the letter between his hands, and continued reading. “I’ve spent over twenty years researching 1852, Independence, and the Oregon Trail but I’ve found no mention of a missing ruby brooch or a disappearing baby. If I had discovered evidence of one or the other, I would have gone back. If a lead existed, it has been lost to history by now.

“I had the bloodstains on the shawl tested. The DNA profile was compared to a sample of your DNA and there is a genetic match. The blood belonged to your birth mother. I’m sorry I can’t offer you more to help you understand where you came from, but I know where you belong, and that’s on MacKlenna Farm.” Elliott’s hands shook as he ended the letter. “Even though you weren’t born a MacKlenna, you are one—the ninth generation.” He dropped the paper on the table next to the chair. Color drained from his face.
“I’ll have that scotch now.”

Kit picked up the letter and slipped it between the pages of the journal. “You and Daddy were friends for over forty years. You believe this is true, don’t you?”

Elliott poured two fingers of scotch and tossed them back in a single swallow. “Sean never lied to me.”

“Well, he lied to me,” she said, her voice cracking. She dropped the journal on the desk next to a photograph of her show jumping at the 2010 World Equestrian Games in Lexington. The tips of Kit’s fingers traced the smooth edges of the frame. “If I had died in the crash too, this information never would have surfaced.” The normal steel in her voice melted into a gray puddle at her feet.

Elliott shuffled to her side and wrapped his arms around her—arms that had held her through boyfriend breakups and broken bones and burials.

“Daddy raised me to believe in a code of honor. Keeping a secret like this goes against everything he taught me.” Her eyes filled with drowning grief. “I hurt, Elliott. I hurt because my parents and Scott are dead. I hurt because my parents didn’t tell me about this. I hurt because I don’t bleed MacKlenna blood. My life has always been about bloodlines and pedigrees. We know our stallions’ dams and sires.” She thumped her chest. “Who sired me? Who?”

The winter wind ceased, and the skeleton branches no longer thrashed against the side of the house. “Damn it,” she said, breaking into the silence. “It would have been so different if I’d known all my life that I was adopted. I wouldn’t have bought into this two-hundred-year-old family legacy if I’d known I wasn’t really one of them.”

Elliott punched his fist into his palm. “You’re wrong, young lady. You’re as much of a MacKlenna as those old men whose pictures are hanging in the hallway.”

She grew quiet as a dozen thoughts bunched up like racing Thoroughbreds along the rail. “You don’t get it, do you?”

His deep brown eyes held a puzzled look. “I get it. I’m not sure you do. You’re still Kit MacKlenna. It doesn’t matter who your birth parents were. You’re now the heart and soul of this farm.”

The wind started up again, blowing hard and swirling around the house with a mournful cry. Kit pushed away from him and faced the window. Her fingers dug into the thick drapery panels. She pulled them aside, allowing a shaft of outside gloom to peek through.

“What’s in the journal?” Elliott asked.

Glancing over her shoulder, she offered him a smile—a tense one, without warmth or humor. “After I read the letter I couldn’t read anything else.”

He swept his hand toward a pair of sofas that faced each other. “Let’s sit and look through it. There might be something in there to make you feel better about this news.”

From her position at the window she could see her mother’s winter garden—stark and bare. “That’s unlikely.”

He put his arm around her. “Come.”

They settled into the thick cushions, a signal to Tabor, a brown tabby Maine Coon, to jump up between them and perch on the back of the couch. “Get down, Tabor,” Kit said. The cat jumped to the floor and sauntered over to a corner of the room.

“Your mom spoiled him. I’m surprised he listens to you.”

“He doesn’t. He’s scared of you. He thinks Dr. Fraser is going to give him another shot.”

“Memory like an elephant.” Elliott gave Tabor a thoughtful glance then flipped to the first page of the notebook where Sean had written
1852 Independence, Missouri.
The next pages contained pencil sketches. Shops on the right, a grid of roads around a town square on the left.

She pointed to one of the buildings. “Look at the woman in that window. Who does she look like?” Kit opened the drawer in the table next to the sofa, rifled through the contents until she found a magnifying glass and then held it over the picture. She gasped. “
Good God.
It’s Mom. Why’d he sketch her there?”

Elliott grabbed the glass and squinted through it, then regarded Kit with narrowed eyes. After a moment he returned his gaze to the drawing and said, “Sean drew Mary’s face when he doodled, just like you draw Stormy.”

Kit turned to the next page and began to read. With a gulp of surprise, she grabbed Elliott’s hand, demanding, “Listen to this. ‘I met Mary Spencer the day I arrived in Independence.’” Kit could barely move, feeling as if her joints had frozen where she sat. “What’s he saying, Elliott? That Mom was from the nineteenth century? But that’s
impossible
.”

He placed his other hand over hers and squeezed. “You’re the one who believes the impossible is possible.”

“Yes, but—”

“If we had told you we’d found you on the porch, you would have wanted to know what steps were taken to find your birth parents. Sean wasn’t going to tell you that he’d found a way to travel back in time. If he had, would you have believed him?”

“An act of omission is still a lie and MacKlennas don’t lie.” The revelations stripped away the bare threads of her self control. She jumped to her feet and whipped her head around so fast her ponytail smacked her in the chin. The room folded in on her. If she didn’t get air she would suffocate. She staggered to the French doors, pushed them open, and stumbled onto the portico.

Elliott stood in the doorway. “Come back in here. Let’s talk about this.”

The fingers in her right hand tensed into a fighting fist. “Go to hell.”

A moment later, the doors clicked shut.

She pounded her fist on the railing as she stared out over the rolling hills covered with frost-tipped Kentucky bluegrass. Her stomach roiled, but she kept down the little bit of food she’d eaten at breakfast.
Why has this happened?
She closed her eyes, but darkness couldn’t halt her father’s words from flashing strobe-like across her brain.

When her eyelids popped open, she spotted her ghost. He stood under the pergola in the garden, rubbing his thumb across the front of his watchcase. A gesture she’d often seen him make. He stretched out his arm, beseeching her to come to him.

“What do you want?” The panic in her voice reminded her of the little girl she had once been, sprawled on the ground after falling from her horse—scared, but not of him. A sob tore from her throat. “There’s nothing you can do.”

He slipped his watch into his pocket, gazed once more into her eyes, then faded away.

Sometimes life is nothing more than a photo album full of goodbye pictures.
She stepped back into the house, an empty house, where unlike her ghost, the hurt and the heartache would never fade away.

THAT NIGHT, BAD dreams woke Kit from a fitful sleep. She flipped on every light switch between her bed and the kitchen where she listened to Bach and made a pot of herbal tea. The cup rattled against the saucer as she walked to the office with Tate, her mother’s golden retriever, leading the way.

“Where were you when I was fighting the bad guys in my dream?” she asked the dog.

He gave a little whine and lowered his head. Drops of tea splattered to the hardwood floor, and he licked them up.

“I don’t like the bad guys any better than you do.”

He barked.

“Okay. I’m glad we’re straight on that.”

When she entered the office, she spotted the trunk still sitting open on the desk—a trunk full of clues to her identity that led nowhere. Could she, like her father, spend twenty years searching historical records? No, she couldn’t. She’d chew off all of her fingernails. Patience was a limited commodity in Kit MacKlenna’s world.

She sat in her father’s chair and opened the journal. There were pages of research notes; tangents he’d followed and later abandoned, others he’d clung to for years. From all of his research, he believed her birth parents had traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, but he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t find that one piece of evidence that linked her to a family. No missing ruby brooch. No missing baby. His exhaustive research had ended five years earlier.

Five years. Did Daddy stop looking before or after the attacks?
She rubbed the scar on the left side of her neck.
Probably afterwards.

Kit sat back, pressed her warm palm against her forehead, hoping the pressure would supplant the tension headache. Wasn’t there more information on the web now than years earlier? Of course there was. Well, if she was going to continue her father’s research then all she had to do was dig into the time period between when he stopped working on the project and now.

How long will it take?
She sighed, unsure of anything other than her losses were wavering at an emotionally dangerous level. What she desperately needed a sense of control and a good working plan. Quickly, feeling ideas germinating, she snatched pen and paper from the desk drawer.

Step One: Send an email to the professors and historians listed as contacts in the journal. They would know of any new diaries or letters. Step Two: Email historical societies. Step Three. She sat straight in the chair.
Forget step three until one and two are exhausted.

After bringing order to her thoughts, she fired off a group email to her father’s contacts then went back to bed, praying she wouldn’t have to outline Step Three.

LATER THAT DAY, Kit checked her email. There was a response from the Oregon-California Trails Association. She held her breath and opened the email.

The Barrett family donated an 1852 Oregon Trail journal to the Portland Historical Society three years ago. To read the online version,
click here
.

She took a deep breath, then clicked the link.

The author, Frances Barrett, wrote in sloppy print as she described the weather, food, and breath-stealing dust. Halfway through the June 1852 entries Kit read:

June 16, 1852 South Pass. Mr. Montgomery found a wagon train full of murdered folks. Mr. and Mrs. Murray’s baby girl is missing.

Kit’s heart pounded in her ears. The monogram on the locket and shawl had the letter M. What were the odds of finding parents with a missing baby and a last name beginning with that letter? Her insides were frantic now, unnerved by information that slashed through her composure.

It took several minutes to rein in her thoughts. Finally, she typed a return email and copied all of her contacts asking for information about the Murray family who had traveled west in 1852. And, she specifically requested information about a wagon train full of murdered people discovered in South Pass in June of that year.

All she could do now was chew her thumbnail and wait.

KIT SLUMPED IN the desk chair, twirling the end of her ponytail around her finger, frustrated that none of her emails two days earlier had provided answers. In her periphery, she spotted Elliott standing in the doorway. She hadn’t spoken to him since telling him to go to hell.

“We need to talk.” He shuffled to the wet bar. “Do you want some coffee?”

“I’m off caffeine.”

“Still having nightmares?”

“Yep.”

He poured himself a cup, then stirring sugar into the brew said, “I know you’re upset, but Sean asked me not to tell you.”

“A course of action you
obviously
championed.”

Elliott’s chest rose with a deep inhale, but his steady gaze never faltered. “I’m your godfather, Kit. Not your father.”

She continued twirling her hair.

“So what’s kept you locked up in here? Research?”

“You know exactly what I’ve been doing. You’ve been here late at night reading my notes.” She pointed to an empty mug on the desk. “You could have cleaned up after yourself.”

He tossed the stir stick onto the counter. “You left the notes out for me to read.”

“So what do you think?

“None of your trail experts have read another journal mentioning murdered people in South Pass—”

“They call the entry an anomaly.”

“I call it possibly fabricated.”

“That makes no sense. Not when the rest of the entries are consistent with what others wrote in their journals. And why—” She straightened to give depth and conviction to her voice. “—would Frances Barrett make it up?”

He arched his brow, seeming to look right through her.

“Stop looking at me like I’m crazy.”

“I’m not—”

“I want
to believe her, dammit, even if no one else does. And because I believe her, I think it’s unfair that people were killed and there’s no historical record. The gold and diamonds in the trunk probably belonged to the Murrays and should go to their heirs.”

“Let’s say the story is true and you’re the Murray’s missing baby. Legally, the treasure would belong to you.”

“I don’t care about it. I just want answers.” She stood and paced the room, stomping her feet on the hardwood floor. Finally, she said, “If I had a picture of Mr. Murray I could compare it to the portrait.”

Elliott took another swallow of coffee, then studied the contents of his cup as if he were reading tea leaves. “Go take one. Sean went. Why don’t you? I’ll even go with you.”