“For me?” Charlotte’s mind raced. No one knew she was here. Who could be writing to her?
She took the offering from Abigail and looked down at the return address. Department of Vital Records in Ohio. Part of an address was visible beneath an address label that had been affixed to the outside, along with a handwritten note on the bottom of the envelope requesting the letter be forwarded.
The door opened as she ripped open the envelope addressed to Hannah Thomas at Jake’s address. She skimmed the opening paragraph until four words jumped out at her. Birth certificate not found. She read through the letter again. Someone had requested her birth certificate. Or more precisely, someone had requested the birth certificate for Hannah Thomas, a person who didn’t truly exist.
Jake stepped into the room. “Hey, did you want to go into town with me? Kennedy and her husband are coming to visit today and plan to stay the night. I thought we might be getting low on groceries.”
Charlotte didn’t answer his question but instead held up the letter. “Do you know anything about this?”
He closed the distance between them and took the letter from her. “Oh, I forgot to tell you about that. When you said you’d lost your wallet, I thought I could help by ordering your birth certificate for you.” His eyebrows drew together when he scanned over the words on the page. “They didn’t find it? I thought you said you were born in Ohio.”
A lump formed in her throat as she considered the ramifications of Jake’s actions. Would anyone be able to figure out she was Hannah Thomas? Her decision to combine a random first name with her alias’ last name should protect her, but what if someone had the technology to track such requests? She could do it. With the right equipment, she could set alarms with any number of search parameters: first name, last name, age range. Did her pursuers possess the same abilities? The fact that they had found her family’s farm indicated that they probably did.
She felt the color draining from her face. What had she been thinking giving Jake any information at all about her? “When you requested the birth certificate, did you call or do it online?”
“I called. Why?”
“Did you say it was you requesting it?”
“Kind of.” He looked at her sheepishly. “I didn’t use my real name though. I used my pen name. That’s why it had to be forwarded. I had it sent to my agent in New York, and he sent it here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I figured they might give me a hard time about requesting a vital record for someone else so I told them it was for my assistant and that I needed to get a new copy of her birth certificate to help her get her passport for my next overseas book tour,” Jake said. “The name Jackson Clark holds more weight than Jake Bradford.”
“Jackson Clark?” Her eyes widened. “You’re Jackson Clark?”
“Jackson Clark Bradford the third actually,” Jake clarified.
“You’re Jackson Clark?” she repeated. “New York Times best-selling author. That Jackson Clark?”
“My fans know me as Jackson Clark, but my friends call me Jake.” A touch of humor and nerves hummed through his voice. When Charlotte didn’t respond to either emotion, Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” Charlotte shifted toward the hall, trying to process Jake’s real identity as well as her lack of one. “I’m going to go make a grocery list and see if we need to go into town.”
She could feel Jake’s eyes on her as she left the room, but she didn’t look back. Regardless of Jake’s fame, or rather Jackson Clark’s fame, his attempt to help her could very well have put everyone on this farm in danger.
* * *
Jake sat at his desk, his mind more on Hannah than on his story. The look on her face when he’d told her he had requested her birth certificate confused him. It hadn’t been just surprise reflected there. He had also seen a kind of sick panic.
The questions that followed hadn’t made sense. Why would it matter if the records office knew he’d requested her birth certificate? And why had she run off as soon as he’d told her who he really was?
He had tried to be patient with the lack of information she had given him about herself, but now he was faced with a myriad possibilities he hadn’t wanted to consider before. Could she be on the run from some abusive boyfriend? Or maybe she had committed a crime and was using his house to hide from the authorities.
Questions abounded, but his sister had arrived before he’d had the chance to really talk to Hannah, and they’d only had a brief conversation before dinner when she’d informed him they could wait a few more days before going to the store.
Spending time with Kennedy and Scott had taken priority throughout the evening, and by the time they had headed up to their room, Hannah was nowhere to be found. He could only guess she had gone to bed as soon as his grandmother had settled in for the night.
He tried to push his questions aside and lose himself in the scene he was working on. He quickly noticed the way his own doubts were seeping into his main characters. The secrets between them intensified, creating an internal strife deeper than he’d intended.
His hands moved from his keyboard to his lap. Secrets. Hannah was keeping secrets from him. But why? She had been decidedly vague in his gentle probes into her past, though her uncertainty about her future mirrored his own. Had it been his own ego that had caused him to think her decision about staying might be tied to his own pending decision about where to live permanently?
She had said she needed to meet with her friend before making any definite plans, but he had never considered that the choice might not be hers to make. Could it be that she wasn’t free to determine her own future? And was it possible that her friend was more than a friend?
Leaving his characters to stew in their emotions a bit longer, Jake pushed away from his desk and headed for the door. It was time he and Hannah talked.
* * *
Owen stared at the computer screen, frustration bubbling up inside him. Time was running out, and for the first time since putting his plan in motion, he was starting to question if he could win this race.
The thought of the guardian program continuing and him living in squalor for the rest of his life wasn’t an outcome he was willing to consider. He had spent the past twenty years picking up the pieces of his life, trying to overcome the sacrifices his father had made to put it in place, all to have nothing to show for it.
His father should have been in charge. He should have been compensated for his ingenious ideas and the results that had flowed from them.
Instead, his father had ended up dead on the side of the road, leaving his family the proceeds of a small life insurance policy, the amount of which only paid off half of the family’s debt.
Owen would not live in poverty again, and he was not going to let the guardians continue to hide behind the genius of his father. He would get his due. He just had to make it happen before the men who had hired him grew too impatient.
They had given up their search for Charlotte Martin in the Virginia countryside after weeks of unsuccessful attempts to find her. Instead, Cheng was focusing his efforts on wreaking havoc overseas, where the guardians might be present, and trying to force them into a corner so they would have to reactivate their database.
While that method was likely to give them success in the long run, the lack of a back door into the database made Owen think finding the girl would be their most direct route to success.
The traps he had planted, searches continually working for him, had yielded only modest success so far. The search on the death of Jonah Richardson, another original guardian database designer, was suspect, especially with the way the signal had bounced all over the world. He hadn’t been able to trace it back to its original source.
The last time he’d seen any activity worth mention had been days ago. Now he had been reduced to planting worms all over the Internet and searching through the hundreds of alerts that resulted from his efforts.
He had hoped the facial recognition searches he had planted on various social media sites would have resulted in something to guide him to the Martin girl, but she had been annoyingly adept at staying out of photos. Except for her high school yearbook photo and a handful of pictures of her during college, she had been noticeably absent from the Internet as a whole.
He opened up yet another alert on birth records, and for the first time in days, hope bloomed inside him. A request for the birth record of Hannah Thomas stared back at him, a record that had not been found. The last name Thomas had been one of Charlotte Martin’s aliases. The first name was different, but could this be her?
The age was in the right range for the woman he was looking for, but he was surprised to see the person requesting the record was a man.
Owen did a search for Jackson Clark in New York, finding that he had more results than Owen knew what to do with. The first result told him why. The man was a best-selling author. Emerging on the literary scene at the age of twenty-four, he already had a half dozen novels to his name.
Not sure what to think about the source of the birth certificate request, Owen clicked on the bio. He didn’t get past the first line before his heart started racing with anticipation. Born in Virginia.
He kept reading. According the bio, Jackson Clark lived in Manhattan, which was consistent with the vital records search, but he had been born and raised on a farm in central Virginia.
Owen went back to the search page and continued digging. He discovered a recent news article on an automobile accident that claimed the lives of both of Clark’s parents, followed by a photo of him at the funeral in Virginia.
Over an hour later, he finally found what he hoped was the needle he had been looking for in the haystack. The address to Jackson Clark, aka Jackson Clark Bradford’s, family farm.
He pulled up a map of the area to find the author’s family estate was located a hundred miles away from where Charlotte Martin’s trail had gone cold. Cheng had spent two full weeks searching the little towns around Culpeper, but he hadn’t anticipated that she would have gotten outside the fifty-mile search radius he set for himself.
Perhaps he had been mistaken.
Chapter 33
She couldn’t sleep. Charlotte paced back and forth in her room, unable to settle her thoughts. The possibility of someone finding her through the birth-certificate request was slim, but it was enough to unsettle her. Jake’s revelation that he was really Jackson Clark was yet another thing that put her world in a spin.
Never before had she considered Jake’s level of success in his career. She’d never heard of Jake Bradford before, so she’d assumed he was probably still starting out, trying to build his readership. That scenario had let her dream that she might be able to stay in this general area, where she could maintain the relationships with the people she had come to love. Knowing that Jake was someone people might recognize, that he was someone reporters would write about, made her question the possibility of her remaining here.
Finding her room too confining for her restless energy, she quietly slipped out into the hall and made her way downstairs. She was nearly to the bottom of the stairs when she caught a flash of movement outside. Curious, she stepped to the window beside the door and peered out, expecting to see a deer or some other form of wildlife. What she saw was a beast of a different sort. A man darted from behind a tree to take cover behind the stables.
Her heart raced, and her imagination went wild. He was the same build as the man who had chased her. She froze for an instant, terror consuming her even as she considered her options. She couldn’t run. If she did, there was no way to know what the man outside might do to Jake and Abigail. Not to mention that Jake’s sister and her husband were upstairs asleep too. She looked around the room, her eyes landing on the gun cabinet.
She hurried to it, pulling on the handle to find it locked. Debating whether she should break the glass to reach the weapons or try to pick the lock, she reached her hand up and slid it along the top of the cabinet. Her fingers brushed against something small and metal, and relief flooded through her when she found it was the key.
Quickly she unlocked the cabinet, chose a rifle suited to her size, and dug through a lower drawer for ammunition. As soon as she had the weapon loaded, she hurried across the room and stood to the side of the nearest window in search of the next sign of movement.
The next movement didn’t come from outside but from within.
* * *
“Whoa!” Relying on instinct and his speed, Jake reached out and pushed the barrel of the rifle toward the floor before Hannah could fully round on him. “It’s just me.”
He looked into Hannah’s eyes and saw something he had never seen there before: absolute terror. Jake let go of the gun and gripped both of her arms, fearing she would flee if he didn’t hold her in place. “What’s wrong?”
“Outside.” Hannah nodded in the direction of the window. “He was outside in the barn.”
“Who?” Jake asked, the panic in her voice feeding his own rising tension.
Her eyes were wild with fear, like a caged animal searching for any way to break free.
“Who did you see?” Jake repeated.
Her breathing coming rapidly, she blurted out, “The man who’s after me. The one who killed my dad.”
Jake’s fingers gripped her tighter, shocked by her words. Finding the gun cabinet unlocked, he chose the rifle he had often used as a teenager.
Moving to the door, he said firmly, “Stay here.”
“Don’t go out there. He’s a killer.”
“I’ll be fine. Just stay inside. I’m going to check to see if there’s really anyone still here.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“I don’t want you out there if you think this guy could be after you. Besides, I’ll make sure I’m not alone.” Jake took his phone out of his pocket and called Max. Quickly, he filled him in. Working out some simple logistics, they put together a plan of attack, and Jake went outside through the garage. Less than three minutes later, Max arrived with his rifle in hand, and together they made their way into the darkness.
They were nearly to the barn when they heard the sound of metal against metal, like the clip of a lead rope connecting to a halter. Using hand signals like he had seen cops use on TV, Max held up one finger, then two. When he signaled three, both men moved, Jake shining the flashlight and Max taking aim.
“Hold it right there,” Max demanded.
“Hey! Put that thing down.” The man’s hands went up, and the horse he had been holding by a lead rope startled back into an open stall.
“Toby? What are you doing in here?”
“Nothing,” he said automatically. Jake could almost see Toby’s mind racing as he searched for any plausible excuse. What could the guy say about standing in the middle of Jake’s barn at midnight with Shadow at his side?
“Max, I think we need to call the sheriff.”
“That’s not necessary,” Toby insisted. “I was coming by to see Hannah, and when I realized how late it was, I decided I’d head home instead. I heard something in here and came to check it out.”
“And you decided to take Shadow on a walk?”
“I just wanted to see how he was doing. I did own him once, remember?”
“I do remember.” Jake noticed the peg holding lead ropes was missing more than just the one clipped to Shadow’s halter. “Any other horses you decided to take for a walk?”
“No, of course not.”
“Good,” Jake said. “Then there shouldn’t be any problem with Sheriff Fowler chatting with you while we take stock.”
“There’s no need to wake up the sheriff. Like I said, I was just coming by to check on Hannah. I thought she might want to go to the race with me in Charlottesville.”
“You know, you used to be a pretty good liar, but no one in their right mind would believe that you came here at midnight to see Hannah.”
&
nbsp; “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hannah hasn’t talked to you since she met you at the country club.”
Toby seemed to gather his senses and adopted the cocky look he had perfected over the years. “How would you know? Are you monitoring her calls now?”
“He doesn’t need to.” Hannah’s voice came from the darkness before Jake could respond. She stepped into the light, a weapon still gripped in her hand. “I don’t have a phone.”
Jake pulled his own cell phone out of his pocket and called the sheriff. After he explained the situation, he hung up and told Hannah and Max, “The sheriff is on his way.” Jake shifted his attention to Toby. “Are you going to cooperate, or do I need to get some rope?”
“Oh, I think he’s going to cooperate just fine,” Max said, his rifle now lowered.
Hannah took another step forward, her previous panic attack apparently behind her, her voice now like steel. “Why are you really here? Who sent you?”
He looked at her, stone-faced, but didn’t speak.
Jake motioned to a bench. “The sheriff will be a few minutes. Have a seat.”
Outnumbered, Toby did what he was told.
Jake passed him and led the stallion back into his stall, leaving the lead rope attached for the sheriff’s benefit. He looked around to see his own horse missing. “Where’s Flame?”
Toby didn’t respond, and he kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
Jake’s fury bubbled up inside of him at the sense of violation he had never before experienced. “If you don’t want to talk to me, I guess it is a good thing I called the sheriff.”
Everyone waited in silence until several minutes later, much sooner than Jake would have expected, the sound of sirens cut through the quiet of the countryside.
Chapter 34
“Do you know why he was really here, Sheriff?” Hannah asked, voicing the question the moment he returned to the house after conducting his search of the area.
“We found his truck parked a few miles from here with a horse trailer attached.” Sheriff Fowler said to Jake. He took the seat Jake offered in the living room and waited for Hannah and Jake to sit before adding, “Flame was inside.”
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