entire view offended Rebecca Fortune. It was a dark and stormy night—how trite was that? Lightning speared the midnight sky, haloing a big, gaudy, ostentatious mansion that looked like a fake set in a grade B Hollywood movie. Worse yet, she was about to break into the mansion.
Rebecca wrote mysteries. She’d thrown her heroines into every dangerous situation her devious mind could come up with—and her imagination was considerable. But she’d throw her word processor in the trash before forcing a heroine into a stupid, clichéd plot setting like this.
Rain sluiced through her curly red hair, dribbled down her neck and splashed off her eyelashes. She was shivering all the way down to her squishy wet sneakers. March was usually chilly in Minnesota, but the whole day had been unseasonably warm, almost springlike. Before leaving home, she’d heard the storm forecast, but her raincoat was a neon yellow slicker—hardly suitable burglar attire—so she’d dressed for success in a black sweatshirt and black jeans. Both were clinging to her like soggy glue.
She must have been more miserable sometime. She just couldn’t remember when. Her extensive experience with crime—including a wide range of burglary techniques—had been acquired in her nice, safe, warm office, in front of a keyboard and all her research books. Reality was proving to be a teensy bit more difficult than theory.
She’d thought she’d planned this out so well.
The tall iron fence protecting the property was locked, but she’d just vaulted the fence. That was no sweat. Right after Monica Malone’s murder, police and investigators had swarmed around the place. Now, though, there was little chance of anyone discovering her. The house was as closed up and quiet as a tomb, totally deserted—no sign anyone had lived or been around in weeks.
She’d brought a backpack full of helpful tools. The mansion had five outside 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
