Читать книгу Formula for Danger - Camy Tang - Страница 11

“So you’re driving Rachel to and from work?” Alex asked his brother.

“And any of her family who needs a lift at the same time,” Edward replied.

“Do you really think she’s in danger?”

Edward navigated the turn out of his farm’s driveway onto the highway. “I’m not sure. But I also don’t want to take any chances.” Regardless of how he felt about her, he couldn’t do nothing.

Alex had wanted to come along with Edward while he picked up Rachel from the spa because Alex wanted to check whether the truck’s engine whined when it went over a certain speed.

A smile as bright as the July sun lit Rachel’s face when she saw Alex in the truck. “Hey, stranger.”

Alex got out to buss her cheek in greeting. “You don’t come to the greenhouse often enough.”

“I get there plenty—you’re just always busy avoiding me,” Rachel said playfully.

“Do your aunt and sister need a ride?” Alex asked as he got into the backseat.

“No, Aunt Becca drove them this morning. Naomi had to get to work early,” Rachel said as she climbed into the truck. “They actually just left. I had to finish an experiment.”

On the drive to her home, Rachel turned in her seat to talk to Alex, who was sitting behind them. As they bantered back and forth, the way they always did, Edward tried to concentrate on the traffic, which was almost nonexistent, and the road, which was smooth.

He and Rachel used to banter together before he’d started distancing himself from her.

And now he was jealous of his younger brother. He snorted in self-disgust and sped up. The faster he got her home, the better.

He pulled up to the front door and reached over to touch her arm before she climbed out of the truck. “I have something to talk to you about.”

Her smooth skin contrasted with the callouses of his fingers. They were too different. He had good reason to keep his emotions in check.

She rubbed at her eyes. “Sure, but could I take my contacts out first? They’re killing me.”

“I’ll walk you to the house.”

“I’ll stay in the truck,” Alex said from the backseat.

“Don’t be silly, Aunt Becca would love to stuff you with whatever our housekeeper baked today.” Rachel shut the truck door and headed inside the Grants’ large home with Edward and Alex following her.

While Rachel hurried up the wide staircase to the second story, Edward and Alex waited in the foyer.

Augustus Grant emerged from one of the doorways flanking the foyer, his wheelchair rolling smoothly on the marble tile. “Edward, Alex. How are you boys doing?”

Alex shook the man’s hand first, then Edward reached out to do the same.

And jumped when he heard the scream.

The house alarm blared a half second after the scream and persisted thereafter.

Edward took the stairs three at a time. He’d never been upstairs to Rachel’s room, so he hoped it was easy to find in this huge house.

It was. She stood in the hallway outside her room, frozen. She turned when she saw him, and seemed to snap out of her shock. She pointed into her room. “A man! He’s escaping out my window!”

Edward glanced inside in time to see a man’s booted foot disappear below her bedroom’s window ledge. The intruder was diving off the sloping roof from the second story to the ground.

“What’s going on?” Alex shouted over the alarm.

“An intruder.” Edward ran back through the hallway, leaped down the stairs in three bounds and pelted out the front door, aware of Alex close behind him.

They rounded the front corner of the house, but Edward lost precious seconds fumbling for the latch in the wooden gate that led to the backyard.

“Never mind that,” Alex said, tugging at him. “He won’t stay in the garden—he’ll be headed for the woods out back.”

Cursing himself for not thinking, Edward followed Alex along the wooden fence that hemmed in the Grants’ extensive rose garden, toward the grove of apple trees that stood on the back end of the property. Sure enough, the man had run through the rose garden and leaped over the fence and was now hurrying toward the grove. He was only a blur—medium height, not large, but quick.

“Hurry!” Edward shouted to his taller brother, who had a longer stride. “There’s a road on the other side of the grove!” Little used and perfect for parking a getaway car.

Alex obeyed and picked up speed, inching away from Edward, although he tried to keep up. They lost time weaving in between the apple trees. Edward stepped on a fallen apple and stumbled, slamming a hand against a tree to right himself, but kept going.

He emerged from the grove seconds behind Alex, just in time to see taillights heading down the road in a cloud of dead leaves and debris.

Her entire bedroom was in shambles.

Rachel had to sag against the door frame to keep herself upright. Her entire body was shaking. She felt violated.

“Oh, my goodness.” Aunt Becca’s voice floated to her. “Rachel, your room…”

“What happened?” roared her father from downstairs, panic and frustration in his tone.

She felt rather than saw her sisters on either side of her. Monica grabbed her arm as if to keep her standing.

“I’ll turn off the alarm,” Naomi said. “Aunt Becca, call the police.”

Rachel rolled around and leaned against the wall outside her bedroom. She didn’t want to see it. No one said anything—they could barely hear over the ear-piercing alarm.

Where was Edward? Did he capture the intruder?

Finally, the alarm shut off. The silence was almost louder.

“How did someone get in the house?” Monica demanded.

“The window’s open,” said Aunt Becca.

The man had pivoted and thrown it open just as Rachel entered her bedroom. She hadn’t seen his face. In her first shocked glimpse of her room, she’d only seen the mess—clothes scattered, mattress upturned and slashed, drawers in splinters, book pages littering the room. She shuddered.

“Rachel!” Edward called.

She reached for Edward automatically, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. He was warm from running, musky with the scent of pine and a thread of orchid. The smell wrapped around her, a shelter in the midst of the chaos she’d seen.

His embrace was tight, protective. She just wanted him to keep holding her. She wanted him to take the ugliness away and make everything okay again.

Except that nothing would ever be okay again.

“Dad! How did you…?” Monica’s shocked voice made Rachel look up.

Her father wheeled toward them, with Alex, Naomi and the housekeeper following. He hadn’t been upstairs since his stroke. “Alex carried me up the stairs, and Evita and Naomi carried my wheelchair,” he said. Then he saw Rachel’s room and paled.

It was the only thing that could have made Rachel move away from Edward. Her father wasn’t going to have a relapse, was he?

“You shouldn’t be here,” Monica said fiercely, reaching her father at the same time as Rachel and Naomi.

He took a few deep breaths. “I’m fine. Just surprised.” He looked at Rachel then, and she thought he might have said something more to her, or maybe might have even embraced her, but then he cleared his throat and the moment was gone.

She straightened and turned away. She shouldn’t have hoped for his comfort. Her father had never been very affectionate.

Evita gasped as she looked in the room. “How could this have happened?”

“We chased a man.” Edward explained what had happened when he took off after the intruder who exited her room. “No one heard him ransacking her room?”

The housekeeper wrung her hands. “I was in the kitchen all afternoon. It’s too far away—I wouldn’t have heard anyone in her room.”

“I was with Evita,” Monica added. “I didn’t hear anything, either.”

“Me, too.” Dad pounded a fist against his wheelchair. “I was in my bedroom for a few hours, then my study. The bedroom’s on the opposite side of the house, and the study’s on the first floor near the kitchen.”

“If you keep the house alarm on, how did he get in?” Edward asked.

Naomi’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, someone coming in the window would have tripped it the same way he tripped it going out.”

“Wait, there was that UPS man,” Monica said. “He dropped off something for Naomi.”

The housekeeper nodded. “I turned off the alarm when I answered the door, but I turned it on again after he left.”

“That’s probably when the intruder came in.” Monica said.

Despite the alarm on the house, someone had violated Rachel’s private bedroom. Despite the security at the spa, someone might have infiltrated her lab and computer and stolen her research formula. And despite the alarm at the greenhouse, someone had tried to destroy her plants, crippling her product launch. She still didn’t know how many of the basil plants would survive.

Her cousin Jane had said she’d finagled her boss to give her some time off from work, and she would come by tomorrow to look at Rachel’s spa computer, but even with that precaution Rachel was taking, it seemed like too little, too late. Security and alarms hadn’t stopped whoever was after her and her research.

She couldn’t stop them.

“Where’s that UPS package?” her father demanded.

“In the kitchen,” Evita said. “I’ll make some Japanese tea…” She eyed Edward and Alex. “And maybe some coffee, too?”

Edward seemed to hold back for a moment as they all trooped downstairs. Rachel glanced up at him, suddenly self-conscious about the way she’d hurled herself into him. “Edward?” Maybe he felt it, too, this awkward aftermath. No, he snatched at her hand.

“Are you all right?” Edward asked.

She shrugged, not wanting him to worry about her. But she also knew him well enough to know that if she didn’t tell the truth, he’d worry even more. “I’m still a bit shaken, I think. It’s hard.” She swallowed and glanced at the open doorway to her room, unwilling to look inside again.

He squeezed her hand, then let go. “A mug of tea will warm you up.” He ushered her downstairs.

When they entered the kitchen, at first Rachel thought something was wrong because everyone huddled around the breakfast table. She peered over Naomi’s shoulder and saw Alex tinkering with a gilded porcelain confection. “What is that?”

“A music box,” said Aunt Becca. “It came in the UPS package for Naomi.”

“Was there a note?” Edward asked.

Naomi nodded. “Just a short typewritten one. ‘From an admirer.’”

Rachel eyed the box with incredulity. “Did they hope we wouldn’t connect the package with the break-in?”

“It might be unrelated,” her father said slowly. “Whoever broke into your room could have simply been waiting for anyone to turn off the alarm so he could sneak in.”

“A bit risky,” Edward speculated. “If no one had showed up all day, the only time the alarm went off would be when Rachel got home.”

Dad shook his head slowly. “I usually go out into the garden in the early afternoon. I didn’t today because I had too much work to do.”

Rachel shuddered. Monica voiced her thoughts. “If you had, the man would have entered sooner, with just you, me and Evita at home.”

“Then praise God,” Aunt Becca said. “At least this way, he tripped the alarm when Edward and Alex were here and could at least catch a glimpse of him.”

“It wasn’t much of a glimpse,” Edward muttered.

“I think I found something,” Alex said.

They leaned in to see. He held out his hand, in which rested some small electronic device that reminded Rachel of a crumpled metallic spider. “What is that?”

Alex shook his head. “Not sure, but it doesn’t belong in the music box.” He gestured to the mess on the table—the porcelain housing, an assortment of gears and screws and other things Rachel didn’t understand.

“Are you sure?” Aunt Becca asked.

“Alex is a whiz at electronic and mechanical things,” Edward said.

Rachel nodded. At the greenhouse, she’d seen him repair both delicate electronics and tinker with his car engine. “I trust his judgment.”

The doorbell rang. Everyone froze for a moment, then Aunt Becca laughed at herself. “That’s probably Horatio. He mentioned he was nearby when I talked to him.”

Rachel gave her statement to Detective Carter, whose gentle gray eyes seemed to understand how terrible she felt about everything that had happened. At one point, he even touched her arm briefly. “I hate to ask this, but have you looked through your room to see if anything is missing?”

“I haven’t even gone inside yet,” she whispered.

He gave a small smile. “After my officers have collected any evidence, try to steel yourself and start cleaning up. And let me know if you notice anything unusual.” He squeezed her forearm. “Buck up, Rachel. It’ll be okay.”

His kindness buoyed her.

“I’ll check on the UPS truck, too,” he promised her.

“Thank you, Detective.”

As he was leaving, he saw Edward hovering nearby. “Edward, I forgot to call you to ask—did you get around to figuring out if any plants were taken from your greenhouse?”

“Actually…” Edward’s face vacillated between pale and red. He placed his hands on Rachel’s shoulders as if to brace her. “I, uh, was going to talk to you about that before…”

Yes, he had wanted to speak to her when they first drove up to the house. She tried to answer, but her throat had dried. She swallowed painfully. “Well?” she croaked.

His eyes were pained—for her. “There are three plants missing.”

“Three? Are you sure?” Detective Carter asked.

“Alex and I cleaned out greenhouse four, and counted all the plants several times. We checked the grounds around the greenhouses, in case the plants were dropped by the intruders or by one of us.” His thumbs rubbed her skin once, twice. “There are three plants gone.”

As the shock wore off, Rachel became aware of a rising sense of hope. “They stole three plants. They needed to steal three plants.” Her breath started to come quickly. “That means they didn’t know what strain of basil it was. That means…”

Edward caught on. “We thought they only intended to sabotage your product launch. They shouldn’t have needed to take samples.”

“If they already had my research notes, they’d already have known the basil strain. Edward, that means they don’t know. That means they might not have stolen my research yet.” Rachel’s hands flew up to grip his forearms. “We still have a chance to save this product launch.”