Written in the Heart

by Judith Stacy

  “And you thought you’d distanced yourself from all that,” Caroline said. “But your father came back to haunt you one last time.”

  “He wouldn’t have done that,” Stephen said grimly. “My father was a bad businessman, but he would never have agreed to give that prime piece of real estate to the farmer who’d been nothing but a caretaker. He wouldn’t have!”

  Anger and hurt rolled through Stephen. She saw it in the tightness of his shoulders, the clenching of his fists. Tears welled in Caroline’s eyes. How she wanted to hold him. Comfort him. Take away all his pain and make him better.

  “My uncle is gone,” Stephen said hoarsely. “My little brother. Now Joey—all I have left—is gone, too.”

  “Oh, Stephen…”

  Caroline couldn’t bear it another second. She went to him, tried to embrace him, but Stephen shrugged away from her. He strode out of the room.

  She cried anyway, without him, for him. All of Stephen’s troubles were now hers. All his pain, too. She cried for the little boy who’d tried so hard to be perfect, who’d grown into the man still striving for the same unattainable goal. She cried for herself because she loved him so much, and for Joey, and Brenna and Richard. For everyone in the Monterey home she’d come to love.

  When her tears finally stopped, Caroline washed her face, blew her nose and searched out the Pinkerton detectives. They spared her only one indulgent moment, but that was enough, all she needed. Caroline went to the attic, then to Delfina’s room.

  “Why?” she asked, standing over the older woman still stretched out in her chaise. Caroline held up the ransom note the Pinkerton detective had reluctantly let her have.

  “Why?” Caroline asked again.

  Delfina set her teacup aside calmly. “That brother of mine. Colin. Always insisting on perfection. Everything had to be just so. How could any of us live up to his standards?”

  Caroline waved the ransom note. “But how could you have gone along with this?”

  Delfina turned her attention out the window again. “Some decisions are easily made.”

  Caroline went to her room and tucked all the cash she’d accumulated in her underwear drawer into her handbag. She pinned her hat on and shrugged into a black cape.

  The house had seven entrances. She slipped quietly out through the solarium and down the walkway to West Adams Boulevard.

  A fine mist blew as she boarded the trolley and paid her nickel fare. At Second Street and Santa Fe Avenue she went inside the La Grande Station and bought her ticket. She waited for nearly an hour for the train.

  Unaware the whole time that she was being followed.

  Chapter Twenty

  The train pulled into the station at Redlands nearly three hours later, after stops in Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino. Caroline hadn’t moved from her seat. The train was crowded and she didn’t want to give up her view out the window.

  She’d never seen orange trees before. Hundreds of the trees, which looked more like big green bushes, spread out across the valley and over the foothills. The imposing San Bernardino Mountains loomed over everything.

  The ticket agent in the Redlands station gave her directions to the address she inquired about, and since it wasn’t far, she set out on foot.

  The rain and clouds had been left behind in Los Angeles. Here in this quaint little town, the sun shone and a mild breeze blew. None of which lifted Caroline’s spirits.

  A mixture of houses lined the streets—grand homes with wide, sweeping porches and beveled windows, and smaller homes, modest but clean and well tended.

  Caroline pulled from her handbag the envelope that she’d brought from the attic in the Monterey home, and verified the address one last time. Across the street was a white, two-story home with blue shutters and window boxes, the house she sought. Caroline said a quick prayer, crossed the street and knocked on the door.

  It was quiet inside the house. The drapes were drawn in the front windows. She knocked again.

  Presently, the door opened and a man looked out at her. He was thirtyish, with brown hair and a deeply tanned face.

  The man at the park.

  Caroline gasped. He recognized her at the same stunned moment and tried to push the door closed.

  “No, wait, please.” She braced her arm against it. “I just came to make sure he’s all right.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. Now, get on out of here.”

  “No, please,” Caroline said. “I’ve come alone. No one knows I’m here. I won’t cause any trouble. I swear.”

  Someone spoke from inside the house. Caroline couldn’t hear the words, but the man opened the door and waved her inside.

  A woman about her age stood in the neat little parlor. Dark haired, pretty, a little too thin, she looked drawn and tired.

  “Kellen?” Caroline asked.

  Her shoulders sagged and she crossed her arms across her stomach. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Kellen. And you’re Caroline Sommerfield. Aunt Delfi told me about you.”

  “The whole family is worried sick about Joey.”

  “Yes, I know. And I’m sorry. Really I am,” Kellen said. “But I had to have my baby back.”

  “He’s here, then,” Caroline said. “You do have him.”

  Kellen smiled faintly. “He’s here. Sleeping like an angel. This is my brother, Lyle O’Hara.”

  “You tried to take him that day in the park, didn’t you?” Caroline asked.

  Lyle nodded. “Tried to.”

  “How did you know we’d be there?” Caroline asked.

  Kellen sighed slowly and looked at her brother. He nodded.

  “I guess I have no choice,” Kellen said. She waved toward the back of the house. “We were about to have some coffee. Please sit down. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “You women need to hash this out,” Lyle said, and took his hat from the peg beside the door. “I’ll head on down to the market and get what we need for supper.”

  Kellen led the way down the short hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house. The cupboards and tile floor were neat and well scrubbed. Tall windows let in the sunlight and the view of the large backyard.

  “The house belongs to Lyle,” Kellen said, getting cups from the cupboard. “He has orange groves outside of town that are doing very well.”

  “I heard you’d moved to your mother’s in Georgia,” Caroline said.

  Kellen managed a small smile. “I imagine you’ve heard a lot of things about me.”

  “Not really.” Caroline unpinned her hat and draped her cape across one of the ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table. “You’re something of a mystery. There are no pictures of you in the house, nothing to indicate you’d ever even lived there, except what I found packed away in the attic.”

  “Mr. Monterey did his best to erase my existence.”

  “Stephen?”

  “Gracious, no. Not Stephen. Colin.”

  Caroline sank into one of the chairs at the table. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Kellen placed pink floral china cups and saucers on the lace tablecloth and a tray with the coffeepot, creamer and sugar bowl.

  “Maybe I should start from the beginning,” she said, sitting down. She poured coffee into their cups. “Mr. Monterey—Colin—was less than thrilled when Thomas came back from a business trip with me, his new wife, in tow. Tommy and I fell in love the minute we set eyes on each other.”

  Caroline stirred sugar and cream into her coffee. “Love at first sight? How romantic.”

  “And it never faded. Those years we had together were wonderful. Tommy made me laugh. I made him laugh. We were terribly irresponsible, I’m afraid. But we were so young back then.” Kellen smiled dreamily, then grew solemn. “Funny, it was only a few years ago, but now it seems like a lifetime has passed.”

  “I take it Colin didn’t approve of you,” Caroline said.

  “Colin never approved of anything. Such a fussy old man. More
concerned about appearances than anything else.” Kellen sipped her coffee. “I didn’t come with a pedigree. No family lineage dating back hundreds of years, no powerful connections in government or business, no money. I was just an honest young girl, from an honest, hard-working family.”

  “And that wasn’t good enough for Colin?” Caroline asked.

  “He endured me until…until Tommy died.” Kellen touched her fingers to her eyes.

  Caroline reached across the table and grasped her hand. “I know this is painful for you. I’m so sorry.”

  Kellen gulped down her tears. “When Tommy died, when I was at my lowest, Colin came to me. He told me I was no longer welcome in his home. He wanted me to leave.”

  “That’s despicable,” Caroline said.

  “But he told me I shouldn’t take Joey with me. He said that Tommy would have wanted his son, a Monterey, raised in the Monterey family with all its power, wealth and privilege.”

  “And you went along with him?” Caroline asked.

  “Of course not. I wasn’t about to leave my baby behind.” Kellen squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “But Colin kept at me until I believed him. What could I offer Joey? I had no money, no place even to live. How could I take him away from his home, his privileged life-style, and the future that awaited him? Colin convinced me I was being selfish.”

  “So you left.”

  “I left.” Kellen shook her head. “I was so confused, and so lost without Tommy.”

  Caroline pushed her coffee cup aside, dreading the question she had to ask. “Did the rest of the family go along with Colin?”

  “They didn’t know.”

  “Are you sure? None of them?” Caroline asked. “Not even Stephen?”

  “I’m sure Aunt Delfi didn’t know,” Kellen said. “As for Stephen, I doubt he knew. We never spoke much. He was always busy working. But we had a pleasant relationship. And above all, Stephen wanted Tommy to be happy, and he was happy with me. Stephen had no reason to want me out of the house.”

  “The law was on your side,” Caroline said. “No court in the land would have denied giving you your son.”

  Kellen uttered a bitter laugh. “I didn’t have the kind of money it would take to fight a legal battle with the Montereys.”

  “Then why didn’t you just come back for Joey?” Caroline asked. “When you realized what a mistake you’d made, why didn’t you go to the house and try to make amends with Colin?”

  “I tried,” Kellen said. “He refused to let me in, refused to talk to me, refused even to acknowledge my existence. He said he’d have me arrested for trespassing if I came back.”

  “But after he died? You could have done it then. No one would have stopped you.”

  Kellen sat back in her chair. “You don’t know Stephen Monterey very well.”

  Caroline’s stomach clenched. “He wouldn’t have kept you from seeing your son.”

  “Seeing him? No, he wouldn’t have stopped that,” Kellen said. “But seeing Joey, visiting with him is not what I wanted. What mother could settle for that? I wanted Joey full-time, in my own home, as my own child. No, Stephen would never have allowed me to take Joey.”

  “He might have,” Caroline said, but in her heart she knew Kellen was right.

  “Stephen practically raised Tommy himself. Even though they lived with Colin and had nannies, he looked after Tommy, took care of him, worried about him, watched over him. Stephen would never allow Tommy’s son to leave.”

  “So you kidnapped him.”

  “Yes,” Kellen said, “with my brother’s help.”

  “And Aunt Delfi’s,” Caroline said. “That was you at the back door, wasn’t it? In the green scarf.”

  “Delfina didn’t agree with what Colin had done. She wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him, but she got around him in her own way. She’d telephone me, sometimes. I’d come to the house and she’d tell me about Joey, how he was doing. I’d watch him play in the yard. She told me about your plans to take him to Westlake Park.”

  “Delfina let you into the house last night, didn’t she,” Caroline said.

  Kellen nodded. “She slipped up to the nursery and brought Joey downstairs to us. I left a ransom note thinking the police would believe it was a real kidnapping, and that no one would suspect me. I guess that didn’t work.”

  “Thanks to me,” Caroline said. She would never have suspected Kellen herself if she hadn’t stumbled across those letters in the attic that Kellen had written, if she hadn’t looked at the ransom note and recognized her handwriting, if she wasn’t a graphologist.

  Kellen studied her coffee, which had grown cold. “So, Caroline, now that you know the whole story, what are you going to do?”

  Caroline sat back in her chair. Good gracious, what was she going to do? She couldn’t leave Stephen to worry about his nephew when she knew the child was safe and happy. She couldn’t let Brenna go on blaming herself for his disappearance. The police and Pinkerton detectives couldn’t waste their time trying to solve a crime where one didn’t exist.

  How could she tell them Joey was all right without revealing where he was and how she’d gotten the information? Once they knew, they were bound to come after him.

  But how could she take a child away from his mother? That wasn’t fair to either of them. In fact, it was just plain wrong.

  Caroline gazed across the table at Kellen’s hopeful face. How had the lives of so many people ended up in her hands?

  “Well?” Kellen asked.

  “Well…”

  A brisk knock sounded on the front door, bringing Kellen up out of her chair.

  “Lyle’s back already? I didn’t realized we’d talked so long. He must have forgotten his key.”

  Relieved to have a moment to herself, Caroline rose from the table and carried their cups to the sink. What was she going to do? Who would—

  “You liar!”

  Caroline spun. Kellen stood in the doorway, fists clenched.

  “You liar,” Kellen said again. “You told me you’d come alone. You said you’d told no one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Kellen pointed down the hallway. “Stephen Monterey is on my front porch.”

  “Stephen?” A cup slipped from the saucer and shattered on the tile floor.

  “I won’t give him my baby,” Kellen swore. “I won’t.”

  “Just calm down,” Caroline said, stepping over the broken china. “I don’t know how he found me. I swear, I didn’t tell him where I was going. Just let me talk to him. Please, Kellen, stay here and I’ll handle Stephen.”

  “Can you do that?”

  No, probably not, but she couldn’t tell Kellen that.

  “Just stay here.”

  Caroline hurried down the hallway, wiping her damp palms against her skirt. She peeked out the window as Kellen must have done, and saw Stephen pacing on the porch. He still wore the trousers and shirt he’d had on this morning. No hat or jacket. He’d followed her.

  Pulling in a deep breath, Caroline opened the door. He was in front of her in two long strides, towering over her, glaring at her, angry and confused.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Caroline glanced around. “Please, Stephen, the neighbors.”

  “I don’t give a damn what the neighbors think! I want to know what the hell is going on!”

  A vein bulged in his forehead. She’d never seen that before. But she’d never really seen him angry. Stephen prided himself on his self-control.

  Caroline stepped back from the door. “Come inside. I’ll explain.”

  He strode into the room, his long strides making the little parlor even smaller.

  “Why did you run off like that? If I hadn’t seen you leave I’d have thought—I don’t know what the hell I would have thought. That you’d been kidnapped, too? That you’d run back to your aunt’s? Or maybe Europe?”

  “Stephen, I’m so sorry. It didn’t occur to me that
you’d worry.” Caroline reached for his arm, but he pulled away.

  “What’s this all about, Caroline?”

  “Joey’s safe. He’s here.”

  Stephen caught her arms and held her, staring into her eyes. “Joey’s here? In this house? And he’s all right?”

  She smiled, seeing the relief in his face. He relaxed his hold on her.

  Stephen shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  There was no sense in trying to break the news gently. Impossible, under the circumstances. So Caroline just told him straight out.

  “Kellen took him. Your Aunt Delfi helped. This is Kellen’s home. She wants him back.”

  He just stared at her for a moment until the words sunk in. Then he exploded.

  “She abandoned him! Walked out! Left him! Then she steals him from me, claiming she wants him back?” Stephen shook his head. “No. There is no way in hell she’s getting that boy away from me.”

  Caroline absorbed his anger, then spoke calmly. “She didn’t abandon him, Stephen. Your uncle forced her to leave. He wouldn’t let her take him.”

  “That’s a lie. Uncle Colin wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yes, he would, Stephen. You know it, really, if you’ll just face the truth,” Caroline said, keeping her voice even.

  Stephen paced a moment, and must have realized she was right because he changed the subject.

  “Joey has a good home with me,” he said. “He has everything he needs.”

  “He doesn’t have his mother,” Caroline said gently.

  “Brenna takes care of him.”

  “But she doesn’t love him, Stephen, at least not the way Kellen does. She can’t. She’s not his mother.”

  Stephen turned away, pacing, rubbing his neck. “No. He’s my brother’s child. He belongs in my home. I want him.”

  “So you can make him part of your collection?”

  Stephen rounded on her, glaring. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Her anger stirred. “I’m talking about your music boxes that never play music. Your china figurines that never come out of the cabinet. Your lawn that nobody can walk on. All the perfect little worlds you’ve created, that you can sit back and look at, and not participate in.”