Colton Christmas Protector

by Beth Cornelison

  When they found Eldridge, he’d need to have a talk with father about trusting Hugh with family business. If they found Eldridge.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. No. He couldn’t think that way. He would see to it his father was located and brought home, one way or another.

  Pushing back from the desk, he turned his attention to a physical search while Hugh’s computer dumped information onto the flash drive.

  He opened a file drawer and felt the underside, scanned the labels of the drawer contents. Across the room, Penelope pulled a painting down from the wall and pushed at the wood paneling behind it. When she found nothing, she rehung the picture and moved on to the next.

  Reid watched her for a moment, mesmerized by the way the soft stream of sunlight from the office window made her auburn hair shine with coppery highlights. Her Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt was unflattering, too big for her—probably one of Andrew’s—but her blue yoga pants fit snugly and showed off her shapely bottom and long legs. She moved down the wall to the next painting, checking for a hidden safe, a spot of color in the otherwise darkly masculine room.

  A niggling guilt bit him. What right did he have to be ogling his late partner’s wife? Especially when, intentional or not, he’d had a hand in Andrew’s death.

  She glanced his way, caught him staring and tilted her head. “What? Did you find something?”

  Scrubbing a sobering hand over his face, he turned back to the file cabinet. “No. Just...thinking.”

  “Anything you want to share?”

  “Not at the moment.” He moved to the next file drawer, found nothing suspicious, and repeated the process, being careful to replace any file he pulled out in the exact manner he found it.

  Finding nothing behind the pictures, Penelope moved on to the bookcase, pulling books from the shelves and flipping open the covers of larger books. “I heard about your father, that he’s missing, presumed dead. I’m so sorry.”

  Reid paused and jerked his gaze back to her. “So you heard, huh? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve tried to keep it out of the news but...”

  “Actually, Helen mentioned it when we talked last time. She said they found a burned body in a car they think is your father. She said the house staff has been all abuzz about it and the reports that my father thought he’d seen him before the body was found.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks. He is missing, but the burned body they found proved not to be him.”

  “Oh!” She flashed an awkward smile. “Good. That’s... I’m glad.”

  “Yeah, that was a relief.” Reid didn’t really want to talk about the disappearance of his elderly father. The five months of crazy twists and unexpected turns to his father’s case would take more time than he and Pen had and would only renew his simmering frustration. Still...if it opened a line of communication with Pen, he’d indulge her with the abridged version. “Needless to say, it’s been a stressful few months, and we don’t seem any closer to finding him.”

  “The police have no leads?” Pen crossed the floor toward him, her arms folded loosely over her chest. “You’d think, as high profile as his case must be, that there’d be pressure on the cops to find him. To do more. To leave no stone unturned.”

  “You’d think. There’s been no shortage of suspects, but nothing that’s been substantiated. A few clues, and numerous theories, but nothing that’s been proven helpful.”

  “My father’s sighting—”

  “Hasn’t panned out yet. But it’s worth further investigation.” Reid turned to Hugh’s massive desk and began sliding open drawers, searching for a key that might indicate there was a safe in the house or any other indication he’d secreted information somewhere.

  She strolled to a window seat and knelt to lift the pillows and the lid of a storage space. “Well, you have my sympathies and prayers that he’ll be found soon and well.”

  “Do I?” He paused to study her again, wishing he could get past the distance she’d put between them in the past year.

  She sat back on her heels and sent him a puzzled look. “Of course. I may be angry with you, not trust you, feel betrayed by you, but I’m not so uncaring as to wish you or your family ill. I have no grudge against your father.” She dropped her gaze to her lap and frowned. “Not much of one, anyway.” She huffed softly, then added, “But then, my father’s preference of you Coltons over me isn’t your fault, I guess. Coltons are wealthy and powerful clients.” She gave him a bitter smile and waved a dismissive hand. “I’m just family.”

  Reid sighed. “Pen—”

  More hand waving as she pushed back up on her knees and dug into the window-seat storage again. “No, no. Don’t start. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. My troubles with my father aren’t for you to worry about.”

  But he couldn’t write off her feelings of disappointment and jealousy so easily. When Andrew was alive, she’d managed to set aside her feelings toward Reid’s family and enjoy his company at face value. This return of her hostility toward the Coltons showed him just how high the wall she’d built had become. He didn’t want any barriers between them. Especially something he had no control over, like the family he belonged to.

  Having the name Colton was a mixed blessing. Along with the prestige, the wealth and the opened doors, his family connection carried a lot of baggage. The Coltons had made enemies in a variety of ways, unintentionally rubbed some people in the community the wrong way, while some folks disliked them simply because of what they represented. They were a part of the infamous 1 percent. The .01 percent even. Not a popular distinction with the other 99.99 percent these days.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly, “for your prayers and well wishes. I still have hope he’ll be found. A man like Eldridge Colton doesn’t just disappear without someone knowing something. We just haven’t found that someone yet.” He rubbed a thumb along the beveled edge of Hugh’s desk as he pondered the circumstances surrounding his missing father. “Or we haven’t provided the right incentive to make that someone talk.” He opened a desk drawer and rifled through the files, felt the bottom of the drawer for anything suspicious.

  They worked silently for another minute before Pen glanced in his direction. “Do you suspect foul play, or is it possible he left on his own terms, that maybe he doesn’t want to be found?”

  Reid twitched a grin. “Yes.”

  She frowned at his evasive answer, then shook her head and continued her searching.

  “Anything is possible. The truth is we really don’t know.”

  Reid looked on the underside of the desk for a file taped to the unfinished wood. Nothing. He gritted his teeth. Hugh Barrington didn’t strike him as the cleverest man. Devious, perhaps. Intelligent, yes. But the man had a twenty-five-year-old passcode on his house security system. Surely Reid could figure out where Hugh might have stashed incriminating information. If there was any to find.

  And he believed there was. Because despite how things had gone down in the last months of his time on the police force with Andrew, he trusted his partner’s intuition and insights.

  Pen climbed to her feet, abandoning the window seat, and moved down the wall to another bookcase. “But you’re a cop, Reid. Surely you have some gut feeling about what happened to your father. Haven’t you done any investigating on your own?”

  He snorted. “I was a cop. I’m not privy to all the details of the case. The family knows some, but not all of what the detectives have learned. They have to keep a few tricks up their sleeve to stay a step ahead.” He moved on to a bottom drawer, big enough for hanging files. The drawer rattled but wouldn’t open. A locked drawer. Not uncommon, all things considered, but...

  He felt the underside and checked the smaller top drawers for a key. Nothing. The matching file drawer on the opposite side of the desk slid open easily, and Reid walked his fingers through the contents of
the drawer, scanning tab labels. “All that said, I—”

  His gaze snagged on a file with the heading Penelope. He stilled, his line of thought forgotten. Furrowing his brow, he pulled out the file and flipped it open. The file was full of legal documents. A few medical records. A picture or two.

  The last document was a petition for adoption. Hugh and his wife had signed as the adoptive parents and two names were scribbled on the lines for the birth parents. He blinked and reread the opening lines.

  We the undersigned do permanently relinquish all claim and parental rights for our biological child, Lisa Umberton, to Hugh and Constance Barrington of Dallas, Texas...

  His breath snagged in his chest, and the thump of his pulse grew in his ears. With fumbling fingers he flipped back to the front of the file to the first documents. A court order to legally change Lisa Umberton’s name to Penelope Lisa Barrington.

  “You what?” Penelope prompted, dragging his attention away from the file. Her expression shifted when she glanced at him. “Reid, what’s wrong? Did you find something?”

  Uncertainty and shock fisted around his lungs. He swallowed hard and scrubbed his cheek with his palm before stammering, “Uh, no. N-nothing...relevant.”

  Did Pen know she was adopted? He thought back through the many meals he’d shared with Andrew and his wife through the years, game-day parties and birthday celebrations. Had she ever mentioned being adopted? She’d talked about how hard her mother’s death had been on her, how distant she felt from Hugh, how alone and out of place she’d felt in the large, sterile home growing up. She talked about her envy of Reid’s large family, how she’d hated being an only child.

  But she’d never mentioned adoption.

  “Reid,” Pen said, a note of excitement in her tone. “I found a safe.”

  Chapter 5

  Reid hurried over to where Pen stood, anxiety lining her brow.

  Sure enough, behind the row of law manuals, she’d discovered a false wall panel that when opened revealed a safe.

  “Do you think you can get in it?” he asked.

  “I’m sure gonna try.” She rubbed her hands together and twisted her mouth in deep thought. “We’ll start with birthdays.”

  While she began testing different combinations, Reid stuffed the file on Pen’s adoption into the waist of his jeans at his back and pulled his shirt over it to hide it. He moved over to where Pen stood, his gaze riveted on her slim fingers delicately adjusting the safe dial.

  He held his breath, as much from anticipation as so he could listen in the near perfect silence for the snick of the lock’s tumbler.

  When the telltale click came, he touched her arm. “Stop. Did you hear that clink?”

  She cast a quick side glance, then narrowed her eyes on the dial. “Twenty-one. The first number is twenty-one.”

  “Can you think of any significance for that number?” he asked. “Maybe you can come up with the other numbers, if you can think of any relevance for twenty-one.”

  She drew her bottom lip into her teeth and furrowed her brow. “It’s not his birthday or anniversary. Nor my birthday. Or Nicholas’s.”

  “Well, try turning the dial slowly the other way and let’s see if we hear the next tumbler click.”

  She nodded and leaned close to the safe as she turned the combination dial slowly to the left. The dial went completely around without another giveaway snick.

  He gave her shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “Keep trying.”

  She angled her gaze to his hand, then raised a dubious look to him. “Back up. You’re crowding me.”

  He raised both hands, palms out and took a step back. “Sorry.”

  Then, while she worked, he had an inspiration. Turning his back to her, he pulled out the adoption file and cracked it open. With his gaze, he scanned the document on top until he found the date her adoption was finalized. The date she came to live with the Barringtons. August 21, 1987.

  One month and a few days after she was born.

  He hid the file under his shirt again and faced her. “Try eight with the twenty-one. Before or after. Then...” The dial had no eighty-seven. The numbers stopped at 50. “Then eight again and seven.”

  She faced him, her head cocked to the side. “Why? What do you know about those numbers?”

  That the digits meant nothing to her was more evidence she didn’t know about her adoption. He’d have to think long and hard about whether he would tell her about his find. For now he downplayed his suggestion. “Just a hunch. May be nothing.”

  When she continued to question him with her dubious glare, he flicked a hand at the safe. “Let’s go. We need to hurry and get out of here before someone finds us.”

  She huffed her acquiescence and spun the dial slowly to the combination he offered. Nothing happened when she tested the door, and she gave him a so-much-for-your-idea look.

  He returned to her side, nudging her out of the way with his hip. “Let me try.”

  He tested the combination again, turning the dial the opposite direction to start. And heard encouraging clicks as he progressed through the pattern. When he tugged on the safe door, it swung open.

  She made a little grunt of surprise, then moved forward to peer into the hidden lockbox. “You will be telling me the significance of those numbers later.”

  At the front of the deep compartment were the expected jewelry boxes. When they opened the first box they found a diamond and sapphire choker necklace.

  Pen sighed sadly. “That was my mother’s. I remember her wearing it out to big fundraisers and parties with my dad.”

  “It’s stunning.” He passed the jewelry box to Pen, and she swiped gentle fingers over the stones.

  He took out the rest of the jewelry boxes stacked at the front of the safe and set them on a shelf of the bookcase. The back of the safe was dark, but he could clearly see stacks of something. He reached in and drew out bundled cash. He gave a low whistle. “Pen, look.”

  She blinked. “Money? Good gravy! Those are hundred-dollar bills. That’s got to be in the thousands of dollars!”

  “There’s more.” He reached in and withdrew another bundle of cash, an envelope with municipal bonds, more cash in Euro bills and two bank-record booklets of offshore accounts.

  When he turned to Penelope, she was pale and trembling.

  “I don’t understand. Why...” She paused to swallow. “There’s a fortune here. Why wouldn’t he put this in the bank? What—”

  “A getaway fund?” Reid suggested.

  “But getaway from what? Why?”

  “My guess is he didn’t declare any of this to the IRS. Remember the tax records Andrew had?”

  “Tax evasion? A getaway fund?” She shook her head, clearly in shock and trying to process their find. She flipped through the stack of money, then the bonds, with damp eyes and shaking hands.

  Reid reached back into the safe and pulled out a dusty ledger, a file folder with old tax returns and a flash drive. When Pen saw what he had found, her face crumpled in further distress.

  He longed to pull her into his arms and comfort her. Bad relationship or not, learning your father might be breaking the law and cheating people would be hard for anyone to accept. The nail in Hugh’s coffin was the passport with his picture under the name Samuel Morris Griffin. He held the fake passport up for her to see and Pen blanched. “He’s prepared to flee the country at a moment’s notice. But...why?”

  “Good question.” Reid spread the evidence on the shelf, pulled out his phone to snap a picture, then returned the money, files, bank books, passport and bonds in neat stacks to the safe. He slipped the flash drive into his pocket to delve into later.

  “Do you think...” She seemed to be having a hard time breathing. “Andrew knew about this? Is that why he was keeping the.
..” she paused again to rub her hand on her sternum “...the secret file on him? That he was going to turn my father in for...whatever made my dad think he needed a getaway plan?”

  Reid shrugged. “I don’t know, Pen. Andrew was a good cop. If he suspected foul play—”

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  Reid and Pen turned quickly toward the office door, where an older gentleman in a suit and dark tie scowled at them from the hall. Beside him, Pen gave a soft, guilty-sounding gasp.

  “Who let you—” The older man paused, his expression growing more startled and confused than hostile. “Oh, Ms. Penelope. I wasn’t told to expect you.”

  “Stanley!” She fixed a stiff grin on her face and moved to block the butler’s view of the bank books and cash still sitting on a lower shelf. “Gracious! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  “I apologize, ma’am.” The butler’s face remained stern and suspicious. “But I’m equally surprised to see you in your father’s office.” His tone was heavy with judgment and castigation. “Is there something I can do for you?” He raised his chin and narrowed his eyes. “Or would you like me to call your father for his assistance with something?”

  The threat was clear, though delivered in a thinly ingratiating manner.

  Reid tensed, mentally searching for a way to defend their presence when Pen said, “Not necessary, Stanley. I’ve simply come to retrieve my mother’s necklace.”

  She reached behind her without turning and groped for the black velvet jewelry box. Reid surreptitiously nudged it toward her fingers. She grasped it and held it out for Stanley to see.

  With a calmness in her tone that Reid would bet belied butterflies in her gut, she explained, “Daddy has been keeping these here for me, but Mama left it to me. I was thinking I’d wear it next week to a fundraiser for the Fallen Law Enforcement Officers Memorial ball.”

  A muscle in the butler’s jaw twitched, and his suspicious gaze shifted from Penelope to Reid. “And he is with you, because...?”

  Penelope jerked her chin higher and gave a delicate grunt of disgust. “Stanley, really!”