The Unknown Daughter

Her eyes traveled to the dormer windows her grandfather slept behind. Controlling yet distant, Oliver Wilmington had been the only family she’d ever known after her mother had died giving her life, and he’d let her down when she’d needed him the most. Now, seventeen years later, he couldn’t know she was back. No one could. If she was lucky and found what she’d come for, she’d be out of here and back in New York by tomorrow afternoon.

Get on with it, Carrinne.

She pushed open the door and slid out, gritting her teeth against the sick taste of fear.

“Get in, find Mom’s diary, then get out,” she whispered, creeping through the dimness toward the gray brick house. The diary had to be in the attic, inside the trunk that held her mother’s things. “Forget about everything else.”

But the past shimmered in every shadow as she skirted landscaped shrubs and flowerbeds that were exactly where they had always been. She turned the corner toward the back terrace and stumbled to a halt at the base of an enormous cypress tree, her childhood refuge where she’d read fairy tales and dreamed girlish dreams.

Her old friend welcomed her home, its phantomlike branches rustling in the night. She turned her back on the memories, on the dreams she’d finally wised up and stopped dreaming years ago.

The solarium’s angles came into view. The sight of its glass-and-wooden frame kicked the butterflies in her stomach into a frenzied tap dance. Nostalgia she hadn’t expected tugged her lips into a smile even as she panted for breath, winded by the short walk from the car. She struggled against the light-headed, ear-ringing haze, bending at the waist, hands on her knees.

Not now. She straightened and waited for her vision to clear, her lungs to work. This isn’t happening, not now that I’m this close.

Her equilibrium returning, she took in the sight of the one place in her grandfather’s ordered world that had truly belonged to her. Inside the solarium’s sanctuary, she’d nurtured tiny buds and seedlings, watching them burst to life year after year. Oliver had called her obsession folly, but the plants had needed her when no one else had. And the solarium had meant freedom in ways her grandfather had never imagined.

She approached the corner windows, willing strength into her legs. Ivy cascaded like a waterfall from a nearby oak, obscuring all but a few inches of the long, opaque panes of glass. She reached for the screwdriver in her back pocket, but a whisper from the past stopped her. The stone was still there, directly beneath the last window, mostly buried now. She knelt and pulled until the rock shifted and she could feel beneath. When her fingers closed around cold steel, her heart nearly beat its way out of her chest.

Pulling the encrusted screwdriver free, she wiped until streaks of metal gleamed in the pale moonlight. How many nights had she done this, popping the loose latch she’d discovered on the last window and sneaking into a cold, silent house long after curfew? Only, back then she hadn’t been alone. Back then there’d been one last kiss to keep her warm until she could escape and once more find heaven in the arms of the boy she’d thought she’d love forever. Her hand clenched around the tool. An overpowering urge to hurl it into the window brought her to her senses.

Standing, she shoved aside the ivy, using the screwdriver to jimmy the latch free. She pushed against the vertical window, strained when it refused to swing inward. The frame stubbornly resisted, then wrenched open with a wood-splitting moan. Staring at the shattered hinge, Carrinne held her breath and waited. Night sounds continued their hypnotic refrain, unperturbed by the commotion.

No alarm sounded, though she hadn’t really expected one. Her grandfather abhorred newfangled conveniences, no matter how practical. Changing with the times was a sign of weakness. For once, Oliver’s uncompromising certainty that his way was always best would work in her favor.

She pocketed the old screwdriver and slipped through the narrow opening. Back into the one place on earth she’d sworn never to set foot in again.

“WHAT AM I doing here?” Sheriff Eric Rivers cut the headlights and turned into Governor’s Square.

“My question exactly,” his younger brother, Tony, muttered from the passenger’s seat of the squad car. “You could have let me take this one on my own.”

“No way are you going solo on a burglary, kid.” Eric parked in front of the Wilmington mansion and scanned the grounds for signs of trouble. All he saw was the house he’d managed to avoid for the last seventeen years.

“Unit Fifteen, at 2201 Governor’s Square,” Tony barked their location through the hands-free radio attached to his uniform near the shoulder—standard equipment Eric had insisted everyone on patrol start carrying. “Give us five to have a look around.”

“Roger, Fifteen,” Marge replied from dispatch.

Eric walked around the car and waited at the curb for Tony, shaking his head at his brother’s scowl. Tony shoved his nightstick into his belt and adjusted his sidearm with a jerk.

“You’ve been steaming since we left the station. Let it go.” Eric rolled the tension from his shoulders and headed up the driveway. It was almost comical, watching his usually easygoing brother chafe at carving out his own place in Oakwood’s small-town sheriff’s department.

“You treated me like your kid brother in front of the entire station.”

“I was the only one in the station when this call came in, remember? That’s why you’re stuck with me.”

“But this is the third call out here from that security company.” Tony fell in step beside him. “You know as well as I do it’s old man Wilmington’s new silent alarm acting up. You coulda let me take it alone.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Eric paused at the top of the drive, motioning Tony to a stop. Something wasn’t right.

He scanned the front of the house, trying to pin down what had his instincts on edge. Nothing out of the ordinary. Everything looked fine. Oliver Wilmington, Oakwood’s richest and most influential citizen, had been in the hospital for weeks. None of his staff lived in residence anymore. The house was silent and still, just as it should be. But there was something…

Maybe it was the past tripping all over the present making him nervous as hell. Maybe it was the steamy, night-kissed air rustling the leaves overhead. Maybe he was just stir-crazy and it had been too long since he’d been out on a call.

He rolled his shoulders again and switched on his flashlight.

“Besides—” Tony followed him up the marble steps, shining his own flashlight into the enormous windows fronting the porch. “You’re the sheriff now. You never go out on calls anymore.”

“I do if backup is needed.”

“I don’t need backup.”

Eric turned from peering through the front door’s rectangular glass insets. “Any rookie straight out of the academy needs backup.”

“And this has nothing to do with the fact that ten years ago you were the one paddling my ass for skipping school?”

“No.” Eric chuckled and headed back down the steps. Tony had been six when their father died. It had been Eric’s job to keep him in line ever since. “This has nothing to do with your ass.”

At the same time, they both glimpsed the midsize sedan parked halfway down the block. Not that parking at the curb was so out of the ordinary on downtown streets. But the Wilmington place took up an entire block of the square, and the nondescript car was a little too conveniently out of the home’s sight line.

“Run the plates,” Eric said. “When you’re done, meet me around back.”

He didn’t wait to see if Tony followed orders. He didn’t have to. His brother was a good cop, even if he was too green for his own good.

Heading around the right side of the house, he shined the flashlight on the ground, the shrubs, the shadows on either side of the path. Damn if everything didn’t look exactly as it had years ago.

The flashlight’s beam picked up a set of footprints in the soft earth beneath the ancient cypress tree. He stopped. It was Carrinne’s tree. Their tree. A rattle from behind the house shook the memories from his head.

Moving again, only this time keeping to the shadows, he shined the flashlight at each window, looking for signs of forced entry. He unsnapped the clip that held his gun in its holster and reached for the radio at his shoulder.

“Get over here, Tony,” he whispered. “We’ve got company.”

Rounding the back corner of the house, Eric advanced slowly, soundlessly, listening through the darkness. From the direction of the solarium came a crash, followed by another. Sprinting, his hand hovering above his holster, he reached the structure in time to see a blurred figure squeezing out of an all-too-familiar window.

“Freeze!” he barked. “Sheriff’s department.”

The figure scrambled to the ground, rolling and preparing to run.

“Freeze!” He stepped closer and pinned the suspect with the flashlight beam.

Then the summer night, the achingly familiar sights and sounds pressing in around him, and a vision from his past seized him in a moment of déjà vu that rooted him to the spot. Carrinne Wilmington, seventeen years older, but somehow exactly the same, dressed from head to toe in burglar black, stared back at him, her face a mask of fear and shock.

He instinctively adjusted the flashlight’s glare out of her eyes.

“Eric?” She squinted. “What are you doing here?”

Her soft voice had lost some of its southern accent. Still, it swept over his skin like his favorite T-shirt fresh from the dryer. Warm and smooth.

A blink and a deep breath later, she was off. By the time he recovered enough to sprint after her, she’d raced around the side of the house.