name or die trying. There’d never been any question about it.
Looking around, she rubbed and rerubbed the gold chain, idly wondering if Gabe even had a family. He never spoke of siblings or family members. Neither a wife nor babies seemed anywhere on his priority list. He came across as a self-sufficient loner, but in some quiet corner of her mind, Rebecca sensed that he was a deeply lonely man.
He’d undoubtedly crack up if she dared suggest such a thing, she thought, and then, abruptly, she forgot Gabe. Her eyes shot to her bracelet, then swiftly around the room. Jewelry. That woman had to have a ton of it. Undoubtedly the expensive stuff was stored in safe-deposit boxes—or the lawyers had absconded with it through the whole estate probate thing. But Monica had never been photographed when she wasn’t decked out in trinkets and baubles of all kinds. Surely there had to be some jewelry boxes around here.
There were.
She found two freestanding jewelry chests in the back of one closet—both packed to the gills. Crouching down, she pulled out all the little drawers and started pawing through yards of glittery bangles and cheap baubles.
Her mood picked up anticipation. No, she didn’t know what she was looking for, didn’t know where to look, didn’t even know if there was anything to find. But if there were secrets to find about Monica, Rebecca strongly intuited they were in this bedroom. Maybe a guy hid secrets in his truck or his desk, but a woman always stored her secrets in her bedroom. It was her cache, her stash, her private hideaway, in a way a man would never understand.
In the fourth drawer down, her fingertips hit a bump. She ran over it again. Definitely a bump. Hustling, she upturned the drawer of baubles on the white closet carpet, shook the drawer good and then peered into the bottom. The bump showed up as a ripple in the satin lining.
The satin lining ripped out as easily as a candy wrapper.
Several snips of paper drifted out with it. One was a telegram so old that the yellow paper looked like a wrinkled napkin—some poor misguided dude announcing he loved Monica. Rebecca tossed that, then reached for the next—a love letter from another guy, who’d signed himself “Your faithful hound.” She wondered dryly if the guy had been a dog as a lover, but then studied it more seriously. The love note was dated ten years before, too old to be of any relevance that she could imagine, but she tucked it near her knee anyway. If Monica valued the thing enough to hide it, it might mean something.
Most of the paper scraps were simply personal memorabilia, nothing that Rebecca could imagine having even a remote relationship to the woman’s murder. Rebecca grimaced as she found more evidence of Monica’s perfidy. She found proof that Monica had been behind the attempted theft of the secret youth formula, had encouraged Allie’s stalker, had people break in the lab and had even been behind the threats to deport Fortune scientist Nick Valkov—a threat that had prompted their marriage, the first of the rash of weddings in the Fortune family. At least Monica had done something right. But none of this was any use in clearing Jake’s name.
Until she came to the letter. Adrenaline pumped through her veins as she read, then reread, the last missive.
It was a carbon copy of a letter, written not to Monica, but by Monica. Although the message contained only a few short lines, it was dated ten days before her death, threatening a woman named Tammy Diller about “showing up for their meeting” or risking “more trouble than you ever dreamed of.”
Pay dirt.
Elation thrummed through Rebecca’s pulse. Something about the woman’s name struck a vague chord in her memory, but she couldn’t place it…and that didn’t immediately matter, anyway. The letter itself was enough. Maybe the missive was no proof that her brother was innocent. Maybe it wasn’t proof this Tammy woman had done anything, either. But it was sure proof that another person had been in the picture around the time of Monica’s death…and their relationship hardly sounded amicable.
Ignoring every ache and pain, Rebecca scrambled to her feet. Handling the letter as if it were precious china, she jogged out of the bedroom and into the hall, yelling loudly for Gabe.
Later it occurred to her that her screaming might have aroused his alarm and made him think she’d done something to half kill herself, because she saw him fly up the winding front stairs three at a time. Just then, the only things on her mind were elation and relief and excitement that she’d found something real and concrete that could link someone else to Monica’s murder besides her brother.
When Gabe flew toward her, she flew straight at him.
It was perfectly logical to throw her arms around him. Any woman would have understood the perfectly natural, emotional impulse.
Gabe, though, didn’t quite seem to see it that way.
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