Lost Legacy

by Dana Mentink

  She nodded her thanks and continued on down until she reached the lobby. Opening the door and peeking out, she was relieved to see no sign of the lady. Trying to appear calm even though her heart was still thundering inside her, she walked to the reception desk and asked the attendant to summon her a taxi. While she waited, her attention divided between looking out the glass doors for the taxi in the bustle of the financial district and watching the elevator and stairwell for any sign of her stalker, Brooke shivered.

  Could be the lady was completely innocent, but Brooke was positive it was the same person she’d noticed the week before in San Diego, watching her from a parked car.

  Brooke positioned herself nearer to the glass doors where she would be easily seen by passersby and the front desk person. Once again she was overreacting. Her fears were silly. She tried to focus her thoughts on the next step. Since Victor had declined, she had to find another way to get access to the tunnels under the college. How? Dean Lock would never allow it, not considering his hatred of her father. The police wouldn’t get involved. Who could pressure the dean into allowing her access?

  No one but Victor Gage.

  She pushed the dark thought aside.

  God will help me through this, she thought. He’d held on to her and her father and brother through a lifetime of struggle. He wouldn’t turn His back on them now. She didn’t need anyone’s help anyway.

  The elevator doors opened. Brooke was startled to see Victor step out, troubled eyes scanning the room until he found hers. There was an intensity in his face she hadn’t seen before.

  He’d changed his mind. Her heart leaped until she saw her jacket in his hand. Merely returning a forgotten item. Disappointment swirled inside, but she held up her chin and plastered a gracious smile on her face.

  A moment later the smile fell away. Brooke watched over Victor’s shoulder as the black-haired woman emerged from the stairwell, her expression grim.

  Brooke gasped and took a step backward.

  In a fog of confusion, she saw a look of horror twist Victor’s handsome features, his eyes rounding over her shoulder as he looked out the glass doors.

  She had no idea what had startled him until the glass shattered around them and Victor pulled her to the floor.

  TWO

  Victor saw the situation unfold, but his head did not believe it. One moment he was heading toward Brooke Ramsey, wondering at the frightened look on her face. The next, he saw a car pull up outside the office, the window rolled down just far enough for him to see a gun thrust through the opening. He had a split second to leap on top of Brooke and carry her to the ground before three shots drilled through the glass. They tumbled along the tile floor, small pieces of the safety glass crackling underneath them. There was a scream from somewhere as the car pulled away and out of sight.

  Her breath came in short pants against his cheek. He pushed away a section of her glossy hair and looked into her eyes, so close he could see his own expression mirrored there.

  “Are you hurt?”

  She tried a few times to answer before any words came out. “I don’t think so. What happened?”

  He took another look to make sure the car hadn’t returned before he rolled off her and moved her away from the glass. “A shooter,” he managed, before he noticed the front desk person sprinting across the lobby, shouting into a radio.

  Victor followed his progress. Brooke must have, too, because he heard her gasp, her hands flying to her mouth. Then his body was moving on instinct, feet crunching over the broken glass, mind running like a mad thing as he raced to the dark-haired woman lying motionless on the floor.

  Mid-fifties, he guessed as he checked her vitals. No breathing, no heartbeat, bullet wound visible on her forehead. He knew the prognosis of a bullet plowing through the frontal lobe of the brain, but he ignored it, tilting her jaw to open the airway and starting chest compressions. Every few cycles he rechecked the vitals without much hope.

  Cold horror seeped into him as he was transported back to the moment when he’d awakened in a wrecked car, Jennifer unconscious and broken next to him. He could still feel the warmth of her body under his hands as he frantically tried to restart her heart. There must have been people there, too, as there were now, standing helplessly, dialing cell phones, calling encouragement to the victims of the awful accident, but he hadn’t heard them. Everything faded into a mumbling haze except the reality of his hands on her ribs, his lips blowing air into her mouth, the fading pulse under his frantic fingertips.

  “Help me, God,” he’d said, because that’s what Jen would have prayed.

  And He hadn’t.

  And Victor couldn’t either.

  Jennifer was gone.

  Victor knew with the same sickening certainty that the black-haired woman was gone, too. He could force her heart to pump, squeeze it into pushing the blood around, but the life, that indefinable force that separates the living from the dead, was gone. He continued the compressions anyway, shoulders burning, until the paramedics arrived and took over the effort. When he finally did move away, he saw Brooke staring at him in shock. An officer took her by the arm and another one escorted him to a nearby hallway, away from the broken glass and the death that lay in awkward display on the cold tile floor.

  He was surprised to find that his hands were shaking, so he stuffed them into his pockets as the officer began to ask him questions. He retold the strange interview with Brooke and her assertion that someone was following her. With a start, Victor remembered why he’d gone to the lobby in the first place.

  “Someone called my office looking for Ms. Ramsey, pretending to be her sister.”

  The officer raised an eyebrow and dutifully recorded the information. “Why don’t you sit down here while we look into some things, Mr. Gage?” The officer moved off and Victor caught sight of Brooke talking to another cop, the freckles standing out strikingly against the paleness of her skin.

  He wished he could settle on one feeling, but a stream of conflicting emotions surged through him. Post-traumatic shock, he figured. He’d just witnessed a murder, and if he hadn’t been there it would have been Brooke on the floor. The thought sickened him.

  Stephanie appeared, eyes wide and scared. She took hold of his arms, squeezing hard. “Are you all right?”

  He reassured her, bringing her briefly up to speed. Stephanie shook her head. “Drive-by shooting? Gang related, maybe?”

  He shrugged, and he read in her face that she didn’t believe it was a random shooting any more than he did. He glanced over at Brooke.

  Brooke nodded at some question from the officer and looked as though she might cry.

  Was this related to the phone call? Or was this a random shooting? He should help her figure it out, dive into the situation with all the zeal he possessed, isolate the problem, cure the ailment.

  He looked again at Brooke as the officer led her to a chair. “It was the woman…the woman I thought was following me back in San Diego.”

  The same woman?

  She avoided looking at him.

  It was just as well.

  Brooke needed help, but he was not the man to give it to her, or to anyone else.

  * * *

  Brooke had to force herself to remain in the chair. She had the insane desire to run, to plow through the ruined front doors and sprint all the way back to San Diego to her father. She’d heard the front desk man say something about gangs and drive-by shootings but she knew in her soul, deep down in the instinctive part, that the bullet had been intended for her, not the black-haired lady who had been wheeled out on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance. She could tell by the expression on Victor’s face when the medics arrived that the lady would not survive. Had the woman been trying to help her? To warn her? Of what? Of whom? Brooke’s head spun.

  After an hour of questioning, waiting and more questioning, she was spent. Blinking back tears, she pulled the phone out of her purse and dialed. It rang once, twice, until someone pi
cked up.

  “Dad,” she breathed, trying to keep her voice steady.

  A woman’s voice answered. “Brooke, it’s Denise. Your father’s taking a nap. Are you okay? You sound funny.”

  Brooke relayed the events as simply as she could to her father’s cousin.

  Denise gasped into the phone. “What? Are you hurt? Who was shot?”

  Brooke reassured her, “A lady I don’t know was killed. I wasn’t hurt, thanks to—” she shot a look at Victor, who had closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall behind him “—the man I was meeting, to look into the situation. He kept me out of the line of fire.”

  “Brooke, this is crazy. You need to come home right now. Tell that man you don’t care about the painting anymore and head home before something worse happens.”

  She sighed. “He didn’t take the case anyway.”

  Denise exhaled loudly. “Then you’ve got no reason to stay. Come home where you’ll be safe.”

  Brooke glanced at Victor, who was now gazing at her with haunted eyes. She wondered for a moment what it would be like to bring someone back from the brink of death. Or fail to. She blinked away the thoughts. “I’m going to stay the night, try to plead my case with Dean Lock myself.”

  “It’s a lost cause. You know that. Way too much past history there.”

  “I know but I’ve got to try. How’s…how’s Dad?”

  “It was a good day. He was very together. We finished up another chapter and he even remembered where he’d put some of the notes he took from our trip to Cambria.”

  Brooke smiled, remembering how excited her father had been, researching Tarkenton’s time in Cambria. It was there, six months ago, that he had purchased the unsigned painting at an estate sale, a painting he was absolutely convinced was the work of Tarkenton. For months he’d been studying it, fussing over it, she thought uncomfortably. She sighed, wondering for a moment if it wouldn’t have been better for him never to have discovered the thing. It seemed to be the root of the strange trouble she found herself in now.

  But recalling the sheer joy on his face when he showed it to her, the clarity of his mind as he took her through each aspect of the painting, the application of color, the emotionally controlled realism, the perfect execution only possible from a master. She would not trade those moments for anything. She tuned back in.

  “Brooke,” Denise was saying, “your father would not want you to put yourself in danger to find out what happened to his painting. You’re more valuable to him that any work of art.”

  “I know, and I’m just going to give it one more try and then I’m on my way home. Don’t tell Dad about the shooting, please. It will just upset him.”

  “I don’t like keeping things from your father. He’s not a child, Brooke.”

  I know that, she wanted to snap. He’s my father, isn’t he? Instead she bit back the frustration. Donald Ramsey was not a child; he was a man of ferocious intellect and voracious curiosity, but more and more the genetic condition was turning him into someone she didn’t know. Each day brought him deeper into that mental fog from which someday he would not be able to escape.

  Denise was helping, too, keeping his mind active, engaging him in finishing his book, making sure he had contact with Tad. Patience, Brooke. “I understand. Maybe you could not mention it unless he asks about me.” She paused. “Has he? Asked about me?”

  She could sense Denise struggling with the truth. “Well…we’ve been really busy here, honey. We visited Tad today, and you know that’s hard on your father.”

  Brooke blinked hard at a sudden wash of tears. It’s hard on everyone. “No problem. I’ll call you soon.”

  She hung up before the emotion got the best of her. Phone gripped in her hand, she tried to take some calming breaths.

  Gotta help Dad. Gotta make things right. Time is running out.

  Victor’s voice made her jump.

  “Are you okay?”

  There was sympathy in his face, probably the kind he gave to any crazy person he came across. “Yes. Okay. Thank you for…what you did.”

  He didn’t respond, just looked at her with those piercing green-gold eyes until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She walked to the nearest officer, feeling as though she’d been in that lobby for a lifetime instead of an hour and a half. “Can I go now?”

  He asked her a few more questions, got her cell phone number and the name of her hotel and offered to call her a taxi.

  “I’ll drive her.”

  Brooke was startled to find Victor standing at her elbow. “I can take a taxi.”

  “My car is around back.”

  Stephanie walked over. “Stay here,” she said to Victor. “We’ve got some things to look into.”

  “No, Steph. I’ll be back soon. I need to take Brooke to her hotel.”

  Stephanie looked unhappy, but she did not attempt to persuade her brother. “Okay. I’ll be waiting for you.” She paused a moment next to Brooke. Her eyes were guarded, but Brooke could see concern buried deep down. “I’m sorry this happened, Ms. Ramsey. Be careful.”

  Brooke felt suddenly exhausted. She only wanted to get to her hotel room, sink into a hot bath and forget the past few hours. Maybe if she tried really hard, she could convince herself it was all a dream, a very bad dream. “Thank you.”

  Victor led the way to the parking lot, where he opened the door to a spotlessly clean Mercedes. She leaned her head back on the leather seat and closed her eyes as Victor eased them through the crush of the San Francisco financial district, suited men and women, bicycle messengers and the constant supply of taxis weaving through the lanes. He didn’t say a word, and that was just fine with her. The sun was low in the sky now, outlining the tall buildings in harsh shadow.

  She shot a peek at his profile, dark hair cut short on the sides, bangs long enough to show the slightest tendency to curl. Thick brows and a strong chin that sported the shadow of the beard that would no doubt emerge if he wasn’t impeccably shaved.

  “I overheard you talking on the phone to your mother.”

  Brooke stiffened. “My mom is gone. That was my father’s cousin. My unofficial aunt.”

  “Is your father ill?”

  The question might have been rude if it hadn’t resonated with a certain compassion. Or was it clinical curiosity? She sighed. “Yes, he’s…he’s not well.”

  “And you’re trying to find the painting because you think time is running out for him?”

  She shoved her hands under her thighs. “Isn’t that kind of a personal question after you washed your hands of my case?”

  A ghost of a smile danced on his lips. “You’re right. Poor bedside manner. I apologize.”

  “Why aren’t you a doctor anymore?” she blurted out, aghast at her own forwardness. What had come over her?

  He didn’t look at her, but she saw his grip tighten on the steering wheel. “I needed a break.”

  “So you went from being a doctor to a treasure hunter?”

  He offered a small smile. “Luca’s idea. He’s always been part Indiana Jones.”

  She brightened. “Do you think he would take my case, then?”

  Victor laughed. “We usually stick together on these decisions. Treasure Seekers is really important to all of us.”

  “Indiana Jones would have done it.” They exchanged a look and both of them laughed until Brooke flopped her head back against the seat. “Well, you did save my life, so I guess I can forgive you for turning me down.”

  “I’m glad,” he said.

  “I think I’ve heard your name before somewhere. Are you an art aficionado?”

  “No, but my wife was.” He cleared his throat. “I took up treasure hunting after she was killed.”

  Brooke felt herself flush. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, not looking at her. “Me, too.”

  They pulled up at the hotel and Brooke got out quickly, hoping Victor wouldn’t offer to walk her in. He did anyway, in spite of her protests.
Something about him made her stomach flutter.

  The hotel carpet was plush, the lobby tasteful with graceful indoor trees and richly upholstered chairs arranged in cozy groups. It all looked so normal, so unbelievably calm compared to the anxiety storming inside her.

  He walked with her to the elevator and they got inside, the silence thickening between them. Brooke could not figure out what to think about the man next to her. She wanted to be angry with him for brushing her off, but those feelings were outweighed by his heroic effort in the lobby and the shadow in his eyes when he spoke of his wife.

  She would have shaken her head to ward off the thoughts if he wasn’t standing so close, close enough for her to catch the faint musky aftershave and see the tiny cut on his cheek, no doubt caused by his dive into the glass.

  A big man wearing dark glasses got into the elevator. She jumped as he dropped the clipboard he was carrying, which fell to the floor with a sharp crack. Victor gave her a reassuring look as the man apologized, and she offered him a shaky smile.

  Victor saw her up to the fifth floor and waited until she slid her key card and opened the door. She turned to thank him again.

  He held up a hand to stop her. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  He’d turned and walked away before she could answer.

  I hope you do, too.

  Brooke closed the door with a deep sigh and leaned her forehead against the cool panel before she turned around to find a man standing next to the bed.

  THREE

  Victor checked his iPhone.

  Message from his brother.

  Steph told me what happened. Don’t take that case. You’re not getting the whole story.

  Victor could picture his little brother’s determined face. He’d seen Luca’s same ferocious resolve to help after Jen died. It was the reason, he suspected, his brother had come up with the Treasure Seekers idea in the first place, a way for Luca to exercise his own constant need for adventure and give his big brother a purpose again.