The Amber Brooch
The Celtic Brooch Series, Book 8
Katherine Lowry Logan
COPYRIGHT PAGE
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
An original work by Katherine Lowry Logan. The Amber Brooch copyright © 2018 by Katherine Lowry Logan
Kindle Edition
Website: www.katherinellogan.com
THE CELTIC BROOCH SERIES
The Ruby Brooch
The Last MacKlenna
The Sapphire Brooch
The Emerald Brooch
The Broken Brooch
The Three Brooches
The Diamond Brooch
Family Trees
DEDICATED TO THE FOLLOWING SISTERS
Mimi & Kathy
Lorie & Lynn
Julie & Jennie
Molly & McKenzie
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Celtic Brooch Series
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
About the Author
The Celtic Brooch Series
Author Notes
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Alphabetical Order
1. Adams, John: Judge in Leadville, Colorado
2. DeRemer, James Richard: Engineer for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Company
3. Desmond, Pat: Deputy Sheriff of Pueblo County
4. Fraser, Elliott: Chairman of the Board of the MacKlenna Corporation, husband of Meredith Montgomery, father of James Cullen Fraser and Kevin Allen Fraser, former equine vet (appears in all Brooch books)
5. Fraser, Jenny “JL” Lynn O’Grady: former NYPD detective, VP of Development and Operations MacKlenna Corporation, wife of Kevin Allen Fraser, mother of Austin, sister of Connor, Patrick “Rick”, Shane, and Jeff O’Grady, daughter of Retired Deputy Chief Lawrence “Pops” O’Grady (appears in The Broken Brooch, The Three Brooches, The Diamond Brooch)
6. Garland, Annette: landlady in Leadville
7. Grant, Daniel: father of Noah, widower, Pinkerton agent, former Union cavalry officer, member of President Lincoln’s security detail during the Civil War
8. Grant, Noah: 10-year-old son of Daniel
9. Hall, Joshua: sheriff in Leadville, Colorado
10. Hendrix, Leonard: employee of Dr. Marsh
11. Hughes, Craig: Amber and Olivia’s seven-times great-grandfather, owner of Hughes Store in Leadville, Colorado, husband of Lindsey
12. Hughes, Lindsey: Amber and Olivia’s seven-times great-grandmother, daughter of James Thomas MacKlenna II; wife of Craig
13. Kelly, Amber: sister of Olivia, daughter of Matthew and Elizabeth Kelly, mining lawyer, amateur paleontologist, gourmet cook
14. Kelly, Elizabeth: mother of Amber and Olivia, lawyer, managing partner of Hughes & Hughes Law Firm
15. Kelly, Matthew: father of Amber and Olivia, lawyer, managing partner of Hughes & Hughes Law Firm
16. Kelly, Olivia Allison: older sister of Amber, daughter of Matthew and Elizabeth Kelly, Realtor, lawyer, love interest of Connor O’Grady (first mentioned in The Diamond Brooch)
17. Lakes, Arthur: geologist, paleontologist
18. Mallory, Charlotte: surgeon, wife of Braham McCabe and mother of Lincoln, Kitherina, and Amelia Rose, sister of Jack Mallory (appears in all Brooch books except The Ruby Brooch, The Last MacKlenna)
19. Mallory, Patrick: adopted son of Jack Mallory (appears in The Diamond Brooch as Patrick Wilson)
20. McBain, Alice: David’s mother (appears in The Last MacKlenna, The Emerald Brooch, The Broken Brooch, The Three Brooches, The Diamond Brooch)
21. McBain, David: veteran, author, President of MacKlenna Corporation, husband of Kenzie McBain, father of Henry, Robbie, and Laurie Wallis (appears in all Brooch books except The Ruby Brooch)
22. McBain, Kenzie: veteran, West Point graduate, MacKlenna Corporation attorney, wife of David McBain, mother of Henry, Robbie, and Laurie Wallis (appears in The Emerald Brooch, The Broken Brooch, The Three Brooches, The Diamond Brooch)
23. McBain, Laurie Wallis: daughter of Kenzie and David McBain (born during The Three Brooches)
24. McBain, Henry and Robbie: twin sons of David and Kenzie (appear in The Broken Brooch, The Three Brooches, The Diamond Brooch)
25. McCabe, Braham: former Union cavalry officer, lawyer, senator, husband of Charlotte Mallory and father of Lincoln, Kitherina, and Amelia Rose, Jack Mallory’s brother-in-law, Kit MacKlenna Montgomery’s first cousin (appears in all Brooch books except The Last MacKlenna)
26. McCabe, Lincoln: son of Braham McCabe and Charlotte Mallory (appears in all Brooch books except The Ruby Brooch and The Last MacKlenna)
27. Montgomery, Meredith: owner of Montgomery Winery, wife of Elliott Fraser and mother of James Cullen Fraser, breast cancer survivor (appears in all Brooch books except The Ruby Brooch)
28. Murphy, Mrs.: Alec Robinson’s housekeeper in Denver
29. O’Grady, Connor: former NYPD detective, Vice President of Global Security for MacKlenna Corporation, brother of JL, Shane, Rick, and Jeff O’Grady, son of Retired Deputy Chief Lawrence “Pops” O’Grady (appears in The Broken Brooch, The Three Brooches, The Diamond Brooch)
30. O’Grady, Patrick “Rick”: Marine, former NYPD detective, brother of JL, Connor, Shane, and Jeff, Director of Global Security MacKlenna Corporation, son of Retired Depu
ty Chief Lawrence “Pops” O’Grady (appears in The Broken Brooch)
31. Palmer, William Jackson: General, President of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad
32. Price, Henly R.: Pueblo County Sheriff
33. Robinson, Alec: Daniel’s father-in-law, Noah’s grandfather, banker
34. Tabor, Horace: owner of the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Lt. Governor of Colorado
35. Thompson, Ben: gunman, gambler
36. Vilines, Bob: campground host at Turquoise Lake near Leadville
37. Waldron, John: Pueblo County District Attorney
38. Weitbrec, R.F.: Denver & Rio Grande treasurer, onsite commander of hired army during the Royal Gorge War
1
The Present, Hughes Cabin, Colorado—Amber
Dawn didn’t break in the Rockies like it did in the East. Light just seemed to ooze from the eastern skyline until it was day. For Amber Kelly, early morning in the Colorado mountains was where she met Mother Nature face to face; where life was simpler and uncomplicated; where she fell into its rhythm as easily as riding her chestnut gelding.
She clucked to her horse. He obediently picked up the pace and cantered toward Hughes Hill, a ridge lined with fir, spruce, and yellow pine. The ridge fell several hundred feet short of the alpine timberline, the point where the elevation was too high, and usually too cold, for tree growth.
“Come on, Bud. We’re almost home.” The agile horse stretched his muscled legs and crested the hill.
Almost home…
Hughes Cabin wasn’t really her home. That was on a tree-lined street in the historic district of Denver, but the cabin was her heart’s home. The logs had been stacked and chinked in the 1870s by her seven-times great-grandparents, Craig and Lindsey Hughes, hardworking Scottish immigrants. The Hughes family left home to follow their dreams, and through their son, Adam, established a legal dynasty. In the twenty-first century, Amber was part of that dynasty.
And that was her biggest problem.
She had twenty-four hours to decide whether to leave Hughes and Hughes, her family’s Denver law firm, to pursue her own dreams. If a clear answer didn’t emerge by tomorrow, she’d flip a coin. Making decisions for clients came easily. This one, however, was the mother of all decisions and indecision was making her physically sick. If she left the firm, her departure could cause an uproar between her and the managing partners—her parents, Matthew and Elizabeth Kelly.
That was terrifying. But not being true to herself was even more so.
Besides being a lawyer, she was a gourmet cook. She had written a business plan to start an online enterprise selling freeze-dried meals using her self-directed 401(k). All she had left to do was exercise her option on the old Wells Fargo Building in Denver. It was the perfect facility, the perfect location, the perfect price. But…
Was she ready to cross the Rubicon?
She’d given up one dream already—to pursue a career in paleontology. The light on her childhood dream of finding a Stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had lived around one hundred fifty-five million years ago, had dimmed but not blown out completely. She’d never give up her partnership in the firm to hunt fossils, but could she give it up to open Amber’s Kitchen?
A new geological map had arrived the day before. After studying the map key, she’d marked two sites to search for fossils. Her goal for the weekend was to use the solitude to make a career decision and find a bone or two.
The road narrowed as she crested the hill, and the air cooled. Bud trotted across the clearing where the log cabin sat nestled among the aspens. After tending to her horse, she gathered her gear and headed over to the cabin to settle in and eat an early lunch.
The twenty yards or so to the front door was a walk down memory lane. In her mind, the property was full of little yellow markers used at crime scenes, each marking a place she had dug as a kid. She’d never found a fossil there, but she had found an 1877 Proof Liberty Head Double Eagle. The coin was worth over two hundred thousand dollars.
When she reached the wraparound front porch, she scraped her boots on the saw blade sunken in the dirt. The ground around the blade was packed from long use and mixed with mud and muck. As far as she knew, in her thirty-two years, it had never been replaced.
After a quick stomp up the plank steps to shake off any remaining mud, she did what she always did—stopped to take in the view. The mountains were ever changing and the world around them changed too, day by day, sometimes hour by hour. Today, the blue of the sky was graying rapidly as a thunderstorm rolled in. If she was going to do any fossil hunting, she’d better hurry before it was too wet to work outside.
The door to the two-bedroom cabin wasn’t locked. A locked door was an invitation to bust it down or break a window. Instead of trying to secure the cabin, the family left notes asking uninvited guests to treat the property kindly and clean up after themselves. In her lifetime, nothing had ever been broken.
Each time she opened the door, she held her breath, afraid of what she might find, knowing an emptied cabin was a possibility. She stepped in through the yawning doorway, unable to take a full breath until she satisfied herself all was well. The furniture stood upright. There was no odor of decaying animals. The lanterns were lined up side by side on the mantel where she’d left them. The huge two-hundred-year-old loom was…
Broken.
A piece had fallen off the breast beam and left a gaping hole. She knew instantly she had only herself to blame, and mentally kicked herself in the butt. During her last visit, she and her sister Olivia had tried to slide the loom back a few feet, closer to the window for better light. The pressure from pushing on the beam must have loosened the cap.
She picked up the piece and studied it. There were no rough edges on either end of the break and no ridges, so the piece hadn’t come unscrewed. Maybe there was a connector piece. She shrugged out of her backpack and dropped it on the floor. Then she got down on hands and knees and crawled under the loom. But she didn’t find anything else.
It was possible a piece had broken off and rolled inside the breast beam. The interior was too dark to see and sticking her hand in there violated her number one rule—never stick your head or hand into a dark hole where creepy, crawly things could live. She grabbed a flashlight from her backpack and shined the beam into the opening. Something was in there. A box of some kind, but it was too far to reach. There wasn’t anything in her backpack or field kit that would work as a gripper. She needed a coat hanger, but there weren’t any in the cabin.
The fire iron might work. She had to take her time, or she’d push the box back too far to reach. With the flashlight in one hand, the poker in the other, she threaded the fireplace tool into the hole. Then, using the hook at the end, she slowly tugged the box toward her, inch by inch, until it hung over the lip. Once there, she set the flashlight aside, and easily pulled the box out the rest of the way.
The box measured approximately six by four by two inches and was inlaid with dogwood and Cherrywood, creating elaborate geometric patterns. The smooth wood gleamed from years of polish. How long had it been inside the breast beam? The loom had come from Scotland in the late 1870s. Had it been there all this time? Did her parents know about it? When they returned from Africa, she’d be sure to ask them.
She turned the box upside down and sideways searching for the latch. The dang thing didn’t seem to have one. She shook it, and it rattled. Her curiosity was now thoroughly engaged. It was like finding fossils and trying to figure out how to put them together to form a skeleton.
If the box didn’t have a latch, it had to open another way. She’d seen puzzle boxes before and knew they opened by moving a piece at one end, then the other end, and then going back and forth until the lid slid open. Knowing how far to move each piece and in what order was by old-fashioned trial and error.
She was tempted to put the box aside to tackle it later that night when a book would be her only entertainment, but a continuous roll of thunder shoved the temptatio
n aside. The storm wouldn’t hold off much longer, and she didn’t want to be outside with a steady icy sheet driving into her face.
If she was going to do this the right way, she had to do it methodically, and that included taking notes. She retrieved a notebook from the field kit and sketched the box, noting the location and number of sliders. There could be twenty, thirty, forty moves to open the box. It would be tedious and slow going, but if she had one defining characteristic, it was patience.
Another deep bass-note of thunder rumbled across the sky and seconds later a torrential downpour pounded the tin roof. She glanced up, checking for leaks. The roof, like the rest of the cabin, was solidly built and as far as she could remember had never leaked.
She returned her attention to the box. Fifteen minutes ticked by, then another and another. She kept at it, moving pieces here and there. The hour mark was approaching when she moved a slider and the lid opened. The thrill of the accomplishment was heightened by the shock of the contents—an exquisite brooch with a huge amber stone in the center. The distinctive pattern in the metalwork spoke to its age. It was old. Not as old as the fossils she hunted, but old enough.
To meet the humanities requirements for her undergraduate degree in geology, she had taken classes in the middle ages and early modern periods. Based on what she learned in those classes, she believed the brooch was a Celtic work of art. It belonged in a museum, displayed as a standout showpiece, not hidden in an old cabin in the Colorado Rockies.
She didn’t touch the stone directly. Instead, she pulled a white cloth, small brush, and a dental pick from the field kit, and used the brush to remove flecks of velvet and dust from around the stone. Then, gently, using the dental pick, she lifted the brooch from the box and placed it on the white cloth in her hand. The brooch was as mysterious as it was exquisite. Using the dental pick, she clicked a tiny latch on the side of the stone. The brooch heated in her hand. An inscription, written in an unfamiliar language, probably Gaelic, was etched around the circumference of the stone. She sounded out the words…
The Amber Brooch: Time Travel Romance (The Celtic Brooch Book 8) Page 1
