BRIDAL JEOPARDY (7 page)

“I don’t know.”

“What about you and Sam?”

“We always had it—whatever it is.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t have anyone.”

He heard the pain in her voice and asked the question that had been in his mind since he’d first seen her at the reception. “Did you always feel alone—like other people could connect with each other, but you couldn’t?”

Her face contorted. “Yes,” she whispered, and he knew it wasn’t something she was sharing easily.

“I’m sorry.”

“You knew there was something better.”

He nodded.

“Did you have it with anyone besides Sam?”

“No.”

“Then the big question is—why us?”

Chapter Seven

Stephanie waited for Craig’s answer.

“There must be something we have in common.” He shifted in his seat. “We might find out what it is if we touch each other again.”

She stared at him, tempted by the suggestion, heat shooting through her as she remembered where they’d been a few minutes ago. He’d pulled away from her when he realized that what they were building between them was more intense than what he’d had with his brother. Now he was ready to try again, and she was the one who was feeling cautious.

“I think it would be better to do it the old-fashioned way. I mean talking. You researched me. Did you find anything that was similar?”

He shrugged. “Okay, if you want to play Twenty Questions. We’re about the same age. But what else do we have in common?”

“Not our location. You grew up in the D.C. area, and I always lived down here.”

He nodded. “What we’re looking for could be anything. From chemicals in the air to the treatments we got on our teeth, to the medicines we took, to the food we ate.”

She made a low sound. “I suppose neither one of us was near a nuclear test site.”

“I guess not. And it was early for oil spills to contaminate Gulf seafood.”

“Nice of you to think of that, but that wouldn’t have applied to you, anyway. Anything strange about the food you ate? I mean, were your parents on any kind of health-food kick?”

“Actually, they were on a low-carb kick for a long time.”

“But you had gone out for Italian food and take-home pizza,” she said, then regretted the reference to his brother’s murder.

His face clouded. “That was a special treat.”

“I’m sorry.”

He lifted one shoulder. “It will keep coming up.”

She focused on the original question. “Well, it’s definitely not from low carbs. I ate a pretty normal American diet—with Cajun touches because we lived down here. So that’s not it.”

“What about mental illness in your family?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“This has something to do with our brains. Maybe you can only do it if you’re schizophrenic,” he muttered.

“You really think that?”

“No. But something else, maybe.”

“If you dig around enough, you find out that everyone has a relative that was ‘off.’ You have an uncle Charlie who was committed?” she asked.

“When he came back from Vietnam and was never quite right again. What about you?”

“I guess my mother’s sister suffered from depression. They didn’t talk about it much.”

“Okay, what about physical illnesses? Anything unusual?”

“No, what about you?” she asked.

“I had all the vaccinations.”

“I did, too. But people have suspected vaccinations of causing various problems—like autism.”

“I suppose,” he allowed. “I wonder what our moms ate when they were pregnant with us.”

The question made her mind zing back to something she remembered, and she cleared her throat. “There is something else. I once heard my parents talking about how hard it was for my mom to get pregnant.”

He went very still. “And she had some kind of treatment?”

“I think she went to a fertility clinic.”

“That’s interesting. Mine did, too,” he said slowly. “A friend of hers who lived in New Orleans told her about a doctor who was supposed to be very good, and she traveled to Louisiana to see him.”

They stared at each other. “To New Orleans?”

“I don’t know. Do you think that could be it?”

“It’s something unusual,” he conceded.

“What clinic?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would your father know the name of the place?”

* * *

A
MAN
NAMED
Harold Goddard could have given them the answer—if he’d been so inclined.

But he wasn’t the kind of man who did things simply because they were in the best interests of others. His moves were always careful and calculated. He was cautious when it came to his own welfare, yet the quest for knowledge was a powerful motivator. Not just knowledge for its own sake. He wanted information he could use to his advantage.

This afternoon he was waiting for a report from New Orleans regarding a scenario that he’d set in motion a couple of months ago.

He turned from the window and walked to his desk, where he scrolled through the messages in his email. Unfortunately, there was nothing he hadn’t known a few hours ago.

With a sigh, he got up and left the office, heading for his home gym, which was equipped with a treadmill, a recumbent bike and a universal weight machine. This afternoon he stepped onto the treadmill and slowly raised the speed to three miles per hour.

He was in his sixties, and he hated to exercise, but he knew that it was supposed to keep his body fit and his mind sharp, so he made himself do it.

He was retired now, but he kept up his interest in the projects that he’d handled for the Howell Institute, working under the direction of a man named Bill Wellington, who’d operated with funds hidden in a variety of budget entries. Wellington had been interested in advancing America through the application of science. Everything from new ways to fertilize crops to schemes for improving the human race.

Some of the experiments were well thought out, others bordered on lunatic fringe. And all of them had been shut down years ago. Or at least Goddard had thought so—until a few months ago when the news from Houma, Louisiana, had been filled with reports of an explosion in a private research laboratory. The local fire marshal had ruled that the explosion was due to a gas leak, but Goddard had sent his own team down to investigate, and he suspected there might be another explanation—because the clinic had been owned by a Dr. Douglas Solomon. He’d been one of Wellington’s fair-haired boys, until his experiments had failed to pan out.

Solomon had operated a fertility clinic in Houma, Louisiana, where he’d been highly successful in using in vitro fertilization techniques. It was what he’d tried with the embryos that had not been a roaring success. Solomon’s experiments had been designed to produce children with superintelligence, but when his testing of the subjects had not shown they had higher IQs than would be expected in a normal bell curve, the Howell Institute had terminated the funding.

But now the children had reached adulthood, and there might be something important the doctor and Wellington had both missed—as demonstrated by the mysterious explosion in Houma.

Goddard had partial records from the Solomon Clinic, and he’d followed up on some of the children. A number of them had disappeared. Others had died under mysterious circumstances—often in bed together—around the country.

But had Solomon unwittingly created men and women with something special that had previously been latent—until they made contact with each other?

Because he wanted to know the answer to that question, he’d decided to try an experiment. After scrolling through the list of names, he’d found two that looked as if they were perfect for his purposes. Stephanie Swift and Craig Branson.

He’d set in motion a scenario that had propelled them together. Now he was waiting to find out the effects. But he couldn’t afford to leave them on the loose for long. And what he did when he captured them was still up for consideration. He’d like to know what they could do together, but it might also be important to examine their brain tissues.

* * *

S
TEPHANIE
LOOKED
DOWN
at her hands. “I don’t know if my dad remembers the name of the clinic, and I don’t know if he’d tell me if he did. He wasn’t too friendly when I went over there this afternoon.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe he’s feeling guilty about my agreeing to marry John to pay his gambling debts—and he’s showing it by acting angry with me.”

“That doesn’t make perfect sense.”

She sighed. “And I did accuse him of gambling again, which didn’t go over too well.”

“Yeah, right.”

“How did you get along with your parents?” she asked.

“They knew I was devastated by Sam’s death. They tried to make it up to me. I let them think they were succeeding.”

“But it didn’t really work?”

“It couldn’t. The other half of me was...gone.”

When her face contorted, he said, “Let’s not focus on that.”

“Okay, are your parents both still alive?”

His features tightened. “Neither of them is alive. Sam’s death did a number on our family. My mom was depressed—like your aunt. But it didn’t develop until after Sam died. She died of a heart attack. And my dad started drinking a lot. He died of cirrhosis of the liver.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “I felt like I was on my own a long time before they were actually gone.”

She nodded.

“I didn’t keep much of their stuff. If there’s information about the clinic, the information is back in Bethesda. Do you think your father will tell you what clinic?”

“I don’t know. There are probably some old records we could find if he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“We should go over there.”

She glanced toward the window, then got up and lifted one of the slats. “My bodyguards are still here.”

“They can sit there all night. We’ll leave your car in the parking space out back, walk to my bed-and-breakfast and get my rental.”

“Okay.”

It was strange to be sneaking away from her own house, but she followed Craig out the door, across the patio and into the back alley. Bypassing the car, they headed for his B and B. He checked to make sure they weren’t being followed and kept to the shadows of the wrought-iron balconies that sheltered the sidewalk.

He stopped down the block and across the street, still in the shadows. “The parking lot is around back. You wait here. I don’t want anyone to see you with me when I get the car.”

She quickly agreed, pressing back against the building as she watched him cross the street and disappear into the B and B.

In a few minutes, a late-model Impala pulled up at the curb, and she climbed in, shutting the door quickly behind her.

“I suppose you know where my dad lives,” she said as he pulled back into the traffic lane.

“Yeah.”

As they drove out of the French Quarter, then to St. Charles Avenue, Craig kept glancing in his rearview mirror, making sure that nobody was following them.

“I guess you’re used to this cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Stephanie murmured.

“Part of my job description.”

As he headed up St. Charles, then turned onto St. Andrew Street, her heart started to pound. She hadn’t exactly had a pleasant encounter with her father, and she hadn’t expected to meet up with him again so soon.

“You get out. I’m going to leave the car around the corner,” he said as he pulled up in front of the house.

“I’ll wait for you outside.”

He gave her a critical look. “You really don’t want to be here, do you?”

“No. And I’m thinking that it’s not so great for you.”

“Because?”

“Because he’s given me to John Reynard, and he’s not going to be happy to see me with another man.”

“
Given
is a pretty strong word.”

She shot him a fierce look. “You don’t think I agreed to marry Reynard because I was madly in love, do you?”

“No. I thought you were interested in his money.”

She dragged in a sharp breath. “Thanks.”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“And now you do?”

“You can’t lie with your thoughts.”

“At least that’s something.”

He turned his head toward her, then looked back to the road. “I’m working my way through this situation—just the way you are.”

“You’ve had some experience with it.”

“This is different.” He waited a beat before saying, “To get back to the current problem, tell your father I’m a detective you’ve hired to find out who the men were.”

“He’ll think John could handle that on his own.”

Craig shrugged. “Do you have a better idea?”

“No.”

Stephanie climbed out of the car and walked up the driveway toward the detached garage. When she looked inside and saw that her father’s car was missing, she breathed a little sigh of relief, then started wondering where he was.

Because she said she’d be outside, she waited for Craig on the wide front porch.

“It looks like my dad isn’t home,” she said.

“Good.”

“I hope so. He doesn’t like...” She stopped.

“What.”

“...me sneaking around.”

“What the hell does that mean? This is your house.”

“Not anymore. I moved out.”

“Your father sounds like a real winner.”

“He’s had...a hard life.”

“Oh, come on.”

“He was used to wealth and privilege, and he lost that.”

“His own fault,” Craig pointed out.

“Maybe that makes it worse.”

“Do you always make excuses for him?”

“Let’s not go on about him,” she snapped, and he pressed his lips together, maybe because he realized he would gain nothing by continuing to focus on her father’s failings.

After she unlocked the door, she turned to him. “Come inside, but wait in the front hall.”

“I should check out the house.”

“For what?”

“Intruders.”

“Unlikely.”

To her relief, he stayed in the hall while she darted into the living room, then circled through the rest of the downstairs before climbing quickly up the stairs.

Leaning over the balcony, she beckoned to him. “Come on.”

* * *

“W
HAT
ARE
WE
looking for?” he asked when he reached the top of the stairs.

“I’m not sure. It was almost thirty years ago, so it’s not going to be on the computer, but Mom kept some boxes with papers and pictures in the top of her closet.”

Craig followed her into a bedroom where the furnishings were antique and the once-expensive fabrics were dusty and faded.

“Your dad sleeps here?” he asked.

“This was Mom’s room.”

“They had separate rooms?”

“She told him about fifteen years ago that she needed her own space,” Stephanie answered, embarrassed to be revealing private family matters.