The Ruby Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy) Read Online Free

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