by Camy Tang
When they entered the kitchen, at first Rachel thought something was wrong because everyone huddled around the breakfast table. She peered over Naomi’s shoulder and saw Alex tinkering with a gilded porcelain confection. “What is that?”
“A music box,” said Aunt Becca. “It came in the UPS package for Naomi.”
“Was there a note?” Edward asked.
Naomi nodded. “Just a short typewritten one. ‘From an admirer.’”
Rachel eyed the box with incredulity. “Did they hope we wouldn’t connect the package with the break-in?”
“It might be unrelated,” her father said slowly. “Whoever broke into your room could have simply been waiting for anyone to turn off the alarm so he could sneak in.”
“A bit risky,” Edward speculated. “If no one had showed up all day, the only time the alarm went off would be when Rachel got home.”
Dad shook his head slowly. “I usually go out into the garden in the early afternoon. I didn’t today because I had too much work to do.”
Rachel shuddered. Monica voiced her thoughts. “If you had, the man would have entered sooner, with just you, me and Evita at home.”
“Then praise God,” Aunt Becca said. “At least this way, he tripped the alarm when Edward and Alex were here and could at least catch a glimpse of him.”
“It wasn’t much of a glimpse,” Edward muttered.
“I think I found something,” Alex said.
They leaned in to see. He held out his hand, in which rested some small electronic device that reminded Rachel of a crumpled metallic spider. “What is that?”
Alex shook his head. “Not sure, but it doesn’t belong in the music box.” He gestured to the mess on the table—the porcelain housing, an assortment of gears and screws and other things Rachel didn’t understand.
“Are you sure?” Aunt Becca asked.
“Alex is a whiz at electronic and mechanical things,” Edward said.
Rachel nodded. At the greenhouse, she’d seen him repair both delicate electronics and tinker with his car engine. “I trust his judgment.”
The doorbell rang. Everyone froze for a moment, then Aunt Becca laughed at herself. “That’s probably Horatio. He mentioned he was nearby when I talked to him.”
Rachel gave her statement to Detective Carter, whose gentle gray eyes seemed to understand how terrible she felt about everything that had happened. At one point, he even touched her arm briefly. “I hate to ask this, but have you looked through your room to see if anything is missing?”
“I haven’t even gone inside yet,” she whispered.
He gave a small smile. “After my officers have collected any evidence, try to steel yourself and start cleaning up. And let me know if you notice anything unusual.” He squeezed her forearm. “Buck up, Rachel. It’ll be okay.”
His kindness buoyed her.
“I’ll check on the UPS truck, too,” he promised her.
“Thank you, Detective.”
As he was leaving, he saw Edward hovering nearby. “Edward, I forgot to call you to ask—did you get around to figuring out if any plants were taken from your greenhouse?”
“Actually…” Edward’s face vacillated between pale and red. He placed his hands on Rachel’s shoulders as if to brace her. “I, uh, was going to talk to you about that before…”
Yes, he had wanted to speak to her when they first drove up to the house. She tried to answer, but her throat had dried. She swallowed painfully. “Well?” she croaked.
His eyes were pained—for her. “There are three plants missing.”
“Three? Are you sure?” Detective Carter asked.
“Alex and I cleaned out greenhouse four, and counted all the plants several times. We checked the grounds around the greenhouses, in case the plants were dropped by the intruders or by one of us.” His thumbs rubbed her skin once, twice. “There are three plants gone.”
As the shock wore off, Rachel became aware of a rising sense of hope. “They stole three plants. They needed to steal three plants.” Her breath started to come quickly. “That means they didn’t know what strain of basil it was. That means…”
Edward caught on. “We thought they only intended to sabotage your product launch. They shouldn’t have needed to take samples.”
“If they already had my research notes, they’d already have known the basil strain. Edward, that means they don’t know. That means they might not have stolen my research yet.” Rachel’s hands flew up to grip his forearms. “We still have a chance to save this product launch.”
FIVE
She had a chance, and she wasn’t going to waste it.
Rachel approached her research associate, Stephanie, where she was doing quality-control tests on the last batch of scar-reduction cream at her lab bench. “Stephanie, I need to use your computer.”
Stephanie paused in her pipetting and peered up at her through her owl-like glasses. “Jane is still working on yours?”
Rachel nodded and held up a flash drive. “And I have new clinical trial data to sort through that can’t wait.” Especially not now that time seemed to be slipping away like sand in an hourglass. She needed to finish the final verification on the formulation’s efficacy and ready it for mass production soon.
Stephanie gestured toward her computer at her desk. “Go ahead. Although I’ll have this quality-control data ready to download in a couple hours.”
“I’ll be done by then.” Rachel sat at Stephanie’s desk, amazed as always by the Spartan neatness. She could barely see the surface of her own desk for all the papers littering it.
After she’d been working for a little while, she heard the centrifuge fire up. Then a shadow fell across the screen and Stephanie leaned against the desk edge, obviously waiting for the separator to finish its run. “So, how’s the formulation coming along?”
For some reason, the innocent question jangled through her. Don’t be silly. Rachel had worked with Stephanie for two years, now, for goodness’ sake. Everything was making her paranoid. “I’m almost done. It’s hard to scale it up for larger production.”
“I figured.” Stephanie smiled. “This will be the first product launch that I have worked with you. The last formula didn’t make it this far.”
The ill-fated diamond-dust cleanser. Rachel couldn’t help the cloud over her soul at the remembrance of her father’s bitter words after that failure. “This is ten times better than that cleanser.”
“Seems that way. You spent an awful lot of time on the formulation for this.”
Again, that frisson of distrust that ran through her. Rachel glanced up at her assistant, but Stephanie had the same placid smile. Was it just her imagination that there was a faint edge to that smile, some tension around her eyes? Rachel’s hand gripped the computer mouse, her nails scraping the plastic. “The time I put in will be worth it,” she said mildly.
“Did you need any help?” Stephanie asked.
Something inside Rachel stilled for a long moment, her heart seemed to pound harder and faster than before.
Stephanie was a good research assistant, but never proactive or inquisitive about the formulation process. Her background was Quality Control and Quality Assurance, not chemistry or formulation, and certainly not dermatology.
And she had never asked to help before.
Rachel faltered. She should just be polite, tell her no and forget about it. But she didn’t want to forget about it. She wanted to ask Stephanie why she was suddenly so interested. The question bubbled up in her gut until it was almost at her lips. Then her office door opened.
“Rachel? I finished.” Jane’s smiling face peered around the door.
Rachel took the time to remove the clinical data from Stephanie’s computer even though it didn’t have anything critical, but her suspicions were buzzing too loud in her ears for her to ignore.
She closed the office door behind her and sat next to Jane in front of her computer. “So, what did you find?”
Jan
e bit her lip and glanced at Rachel. “I hate to tell you this, but your computer was hacked into two years ago.”
At first, the word hacked seemed to cut into her chest, but then she registered two years ago and breathed easier. “Not recently?”
Jane shook her head, her straight chin-length hair swinging against her jaw, drawing Rachel’s attention to the scars there. Or maybe Rachel was just sensitive to them.
After all, she had caused them.
But this scar-reduction cream would make up for that fire in the playhouse.
“I couldn’t find out who had gained access to the computer,” Jane was said, “and I couldn’t figure out which files.”
“I would just assume the hacker stole all my research notes.” Why else break into her office and her computer? She glanced at the door, guarded only by a doorknob lock. Stupid! Why hadn’t she gotten a dead bolt, or even better, installed a heavy card-key door like the ones guarding the lab area at the back of the spa from the front clientele areas?
“Whoever did it, however, didn’t erase the time stamp. A little over two years ago, September 19, 9:07 p.m.”
Rachel wrote it down, but as she did, each letter and number seemed to burn into the page.
Her greenhouse. Her bedroom. Her office.
Her life.
“This isn’t happening.” She was surprised at how tight her voice was, then realized her teeth were clenched.
Jane’s eyes and mouth softened. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’ve been talking about it, and it hasn’t helped. Because no one can do anything about it.”
“God can do something about it.” Jane touched her hand. “You’re not all alone in facing this.”
Rachel shifted her hand away. “I feel alone in this. My life has been violated and there’s nothing I can do to change how that makes me feel.”
“There is something you can do. You can pray.”
“How would that help anything?” Rachel retorted fiercely. “Why would God even care?”
Jane swallowed. “He does care, Rachel.”
“Well, it certainly doesn’t seem that way.” She firmed her mouth. “If He cared, He wouldn’t have allowed all these horrible things to happen to me.”
“You know that’s not fair.”
“I’m tired of being a scientist, of being logical and practical and fair. Jane, they stole my research!” Her hand whipped out and smacked the computer monitor.
“Hey, hey.” Jane grabbed her hand and held it.
The warmth of her fingers calmed Rachel down some. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to throw a tantrum.”
Jane smiled. “You’re usually so calm, Rach. But this cream has you more upset than I’ve ever seen you. It must be important.”
Rachel’s eyes flickered to Jane’s scars again, and this time her cousin noticed. Jane’s eyes darkened and she seemed to stifle a sigh. “Rachel, why are you still hung up over that fire?”
“Jane, it was a fire.”
“But I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
Jane blinked at Rachel’s harsh tone. “Rach, I’m fine about the scars. Really. I could have had plastic surgery years ago to remove them, but I didn’t want to because I don’t care. You shouldn’t care, either.”
Jane was just being nice about it all. Rachel couldn’t help but see those scars every time she saw her cousin. This scar-reduction cream would make up for the fact that she had inadvertently started that playhouse fire.
It would make up for a lot of things. “This cream is important to Dad and the spa.”
“What does this data have to do with the cream now? Remember, it was two whole years ago. What did they steal?”
Rachel stilled, blinking at the monitor. Jane was right. Two years ago, she hadn’t even started working full-time on the scar-reduction cream. She’d been toying with several different options. “The diamond-dust cleanser. About that time was the tail end of those experiments. They didn’t go well at all—too abrasive no matter what medium I suspended them in.”
“See? The stolen data probably has nothing to do with the greenhouse break-in and everything else.”
“But if the research notes they had were two years old, why steal my basil plants to begin formulation now, when I’m about to launch my scar cream in a few months? They would just be trying to play catch-up—it would take a rival lab eighteen months at least to develop their own formulation and test it.”
Jane shrugged. “Maybe they thought it was worth it?”
Rachel considered, then discarded the idea. “No, it wouldn’t give them a good enough return on the cost for development.” She stared hard at the monitor, although it told her nothing. “I need to find out exactly what they stole. Maybe I’m wrong and I already had preliminary formula notes for the scar-reduction cream. Still…” She frowned.
Jane finished her thought. “If they had a preliminary formula, it doesn’t answer why they needed the basil plants.”
What was it about that basil? Rachel had a murky feeling in her gut that she needed to find the answer.
And fast.
The problem with being high in demand was that occasionally he had demanding clients.
Edward tried to pay attention to the road. He probably shouldn’t be driving while talking to his high-maintenance client, but Jason Witherspoon had called him on his cell phone just as he left to pick up Rachel from the spa. “Jason, you are always welcome to fly into Sonoma, but I can assure you, the orchids are doing very well.”
“Well, that article I just read seemed to imply they need a higher humidity level,” the multimillionaire whined.
Edward had to bite his tongue, preventing him from snapping that the writer had made some other gross errors in the article, so he wasn’t likely to believe the suggestion about proper humidity levels. “I’ve tried different levels, but this species grows successfully at the humidity levels they’re at now.”
“But have you tried what this article is suggesting?” Jason persisted.
Edward sighed as he pulled into the spa parking lot. “Jason, you have only twenty plants of this orchid species. Did you really want me to risk one of them by trying to grow them according to the article? There’s a chance it’ll die.”
The prospect of losing an expensive plant sobered his client. “Well…I’ve already landed at the airstrip. I’ll be at the farm in about half an hour.”
“I might be a little late.” Edward cut the engine and got out of the truck. “Alex will show you around.”
“I’d rather you did, in case I had questions.”
Or complaints. Edward shoved aside the unkind thought. Jason hadn’t become a successful CEO without questioning and pushing for improvements in whatever he worked on. “I’m sorry, but when you called, I was already out on an errand. I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.”
“I suppose I’ll just wait,” he said peevishly.
“Tell you what, I’ll ask Alex to warm up some of Mama’s apricot empanadas. She made some last night.”
Jason loved Edward’s mother and viewed her as a Hispanic version of Emeril. He especially loved her mini fruit turnovers, so this put him in a good mood. “Empanadas?” he asked, his voice sounding twenty years younger. “All right, don’t hurry on my account.” He hung up.
Despite his client’s words, Edward knew he needed to get Rachel home pronto or even Mama’s empanadas wouldn’t be sweet enough for Jason’s mood. He entered the spa through the staff entrance and then the card key area.
“Rachel?” he called as he entered the lab. “I hate to rush you, but…”
She sat in her office in front of the computer, seemingly in thought, but something about her posture—maybe the hunched set of her shoulders, the weak tilt of her head—told Edward she wasn’t all right. His impatience drained away, and he reached out to touch her shoulder, trying to tell her that he was there for her.
“Rachel?”
Her shoulder seeme
d to relax under his touch, but her entire body still heaved in a shuddering breath. Up close, he could see that her hands were faintly shaking. He spun her chair around so he could see her face.
She wasn’t crying, but her pale cheeks and trembling lips told him that she was teetering on the verge of tears. He couldn’t help himself, and he cupped her face in his hand, his fingers tangling in her hair. “Tell me.”
She shook her head, her soft skin rubbing his palm. “I’m just being silly.”
“There’s nothing silly in everything that’s happened to you.”
“It’s worse,” she whispered.
The words made him want to stand over her and fight off her enemies. “What happened?”
She gestured toward the computer. “Jane said someone hacked into my computer about two years ago.”
“So they didn’t get any recent data? That’s a good thing, right?”
She gave him a half smile. “Yes, I suppose so. But it doesn’t explain why they stole my basil plants, why they wanted to ruin the launch.”
“They might have trashed the greenhouse because they’re jealous of your success.” The word made something harden inside him, but he knew her success meant a great deal to her, even if he didn’t agree with her priorities in order to get it.
Rachel, however, gave a short cynical bark. “Is that what you think?”
“What do you mean?”
A tear cascaded down her cheek. Then another. “I’m a failure.”
He brushed the tears away. He’d never heard her speak in such a despairing tone. “What are you talking about? You’re not. You really believe that?” He immediately regretted his raw words, afraid they’d only hurt her more.
But Rachel just shook her head. “I’ve done nothing but fail my father.”
“That can’t be true.” What had Naomi and Becca told him? “The spa is known for the skin-care products you created.”
She bit her lip and shut her eyes, another tear falling onto his fingers.
While she was unaware of his gaze, he stared at her face, delicate, vulnerable, beautiful. He wanted to lean in and press a kiss to her soft cheek, to her lips, to erase the sadness from her mouth.
