Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
ALEX
It was still very early when Alex descended the stairs the next morning.
He headed straight for the peace and quiet of the kitchen, knowing that soon, the rest of the house would rouse with the excitement of Christmas morning.
His inability to sleep came not from the holiday, but from Noah and his mysterious companion.
After starting the coffee, he set up his laptop and began digging.
By the time others smelled the coffee and started filing in, he hadn’t found much. Hopewell Ranch had nothing for her—no employment record, no tax forms. With nothing more than a first name that might or might not be real, his options were limited.
The seats around the table filled up one by one as the morning progressed.
His eyes were on the screen in front of him, but his ears were on the conversations taking place around him.
Unsurprisingly, the hot topic was Noah’s return and the woman he’d brought with him—a woman that no one had heard of until thirty-six hours ago, when Noah had called from a rest stop and said not only that he was bringing a plus-one, but that they’d be staying in the cabin.
Which raised red flags for Alex. His twin was steady, organized, and polite to a fault. He was neither impulsive nor impetuous.
Then again, Noah hadn’t been the same since that last patrol in the Helmand Province, when a routine patrol had gone tits up. They lost good men that day, and Noah had taken it hard. His twin had always had a softer heart than he did. The light to Alex’s darkness, born to heal, not to hurt.
And Teagan—if that was her real name—that woman had secrets. Noah had enough shit to deal with without adding her issues to the mix.
Alex wondered, not for the first time, if he should broach the subject of Sanctuary with Noah.
The place was just over the mountain, and they did amazing things with vets who had trouble reconciling the “over there” with the “back home.” Alex knew that firsthand.
And they’d partnered with a local hippotherapy place, which would be right up Noah’s alley.
“Are you talking about Noah and Teagan?” Kinsey asked brightly, padding into the kitchen in fuzzy slippers. She looked tired, and with her slight frame stretched to capacity, her usual graceful stride had become a waddle.
“Yes,” his sister Hannah answered. “I didn’t see that one coming.”
“I don’t think anyone did,” Daniel said, “especially not out of the blue like that.”
“Funny how Noah ended up with a local girl, isn’t it?” Kinsey let out a groan of relief as she sat down carefully at the table.
Alex glanced up from behind his laptop. Eli and Adam looked up from their plates, piled high with homemade pastries.
Daniel paused in the middle of turning a page in the sports magazine he was perusing.
Kinsey seemed unaware of their sudden interest, beaming at Hannah as she slid a cup of decaf and a pastry her way.
Eli was the first to speak. “What are you talking about? Teagan is from Kentucky, isn’t she?” He looked around the table, seeking confirmation.
“Yeah,” Adam said. “Mom said she worked at the same ranch as Noah.”
“Maybe that’s where they met, but she’s no more from Kentucky than he is.” Kinsey took another sip of her coffee, inhaling deeply. “I can’t wait until I can drink the real stuff again.”
“Where is she from, Kinsey?” Alex asked, his voice deceptively casual.
Kinsey’s eyes popped open.
“Saughannock, of course,” Kinsey said. At their shocked expressions, she said, “Wait. You didn’t know that?”
Eli shook his head slowly. “No, no one mentioned that. How do you know?”
“I went to school with her,” Kinsey said, shifting uncomfortably.
“I didn’t know her well. I don’t think anyone did really.
But after what happened and all …” A shadow passed over her face.
“Well, I’d recognize her anywhere. Hard to forget those eyes once you’ve seen them.
They kind of haunt you, you know? Made us all feel—I don’t know—guilty or something.
Like we should have known what was going on and done something about it.
” One hand smoothed over her extended belly protectively.
“But she’s back now, so I guess everything worked out. ”
“Kinsey, what the hell are you talking about?” Alex asked.
Kinsey shifted under the intensity of their attention, her eyes widening as the truth began to dawn on her. “You mean, you guys really don’t know?”
“Know what?” Adam said in exasperation.
“Oh, man, is that the time?” Kinsey pushed back from the table, abandoning her coffee and pastry. “I’d better call my parents and wish them a merry Christmas before I forget.” Kinsey beat a hasty retreat, leaving them speechless.
“Did you know anything about this?” Daniel asked Alex.
Alex shook his head. His fingers began flying across the keys. Funny how he’d been pondering the best way to find out more about his twin’s mystery woman only a few minutes ago.
“How old is Kinsey?”
“A year younger than Brandon, I think,” said Eli with growing interest. “So, twenty-six.”
“That means she must have graduated in … ah, here we go.” A couple more clicks, and Alex was paging through the online yearbook from Kinsey’s senior year of high school. “No Teagan listed in Kinsey’s class.”
“Maybe she didn’t graduate from Saughannock,” Adam suggested. “If Noah met her in Kentucky, her family might’ve moved before then.”
“Or maybe she wasn’t in the same grade,” Daniel supplied thoughtfully. “Kinsey said same school, not same class.”
Alex tapped a few more keys and found who he was looking for among the pictured juniors. A small girl in the front row with wavy black hair and those unmistakable eyes, nearly invisible among the others.
“Gotcha,” Alex murmured. His eyes roamed the names beneath the picture. “Teagan McKenna.”
“Why does the one side of her face look blurry, like the photo is smudged or something?” Adam asked, peering over Alex’s shoulder.
Alex’s eyes narrowed as he looked closer, zooming in and digitally enhancing that section. “Looks like bruises.”
Adam leaned closer and pointed. A blur of white extended from beneath her sleeve and wrapped around her hand. “Looks like something’s wrong with her wrist too.”
“Maybe she was in an accident or something,” Eli suggested.
Alex’s jaw flexed. His gut told him those injuries weren’t the accidental kind.
Opening a new window, he did a search with the keywords Teagan, McKenna, and Saughannock, and was rewarded with several pages of hits.
He started with the oldest link, which took him to an archived obituary for Margaret “Maggie” McKenna.
The picture showed a stunningly beautiful woman with the same large, blue eyes as Teagan.
According to the write-up, Maggie had been twenty-three when she died, the result of a tragic accident, and listed Teagan as her only surviving child, five years old.
The next link showed a grainy photo of a little girl standing alone at a burial. She stood apart from the crowd, looking lost and scared, while everyone else’s eyes were focused elsewhere.
Alex peered more closely. Her feet were bare, yet from the picture and the heavy coats everyone was wearing, it was winter. Bandages covered the little girl’s legs, just barely visible beneath … was that a hospital gown?
“What does it say?” Daniel asked, straining to read the print.
Adam, who was closer, scanned the words quickly. “It says that Teagan sneaked out of the hospital to be at her mother’s funeral.”
“She was five!” Adam said in amazement. “How does a five-year-old do that?”
“According to this, she overheard the nurses talking about the burial service and slipped out.”
“Why was she in the hospital? Does it say?” That was from Eli.
“Injuries sustained from a two-story fall from a barn loft,” Alex quoted. He didn’t believe it for a minute.
The next page had a slew of articles dated from about ten years previous.
“Oh, man,” Daniel said on an exhale. He read the titles over his brother’s shoulder: “Spring Break Bash Almost Turns Deadly,” “Teen Nearly Beaten to Death by Stepfather,” “Local Girl Missing, Presumed Dead.” The list went on and on, each article more horrifying than the one before it.
The tension around the table grew thicker with each one, the silence more profound.
“What the hell’s going on?” Brandon asked, striding into the kitchen. “Kinsey’s upset, and she won’t tell me why. She’s due in two weeks, guys. She doesn’t need the stress.”
“You have to see this, man,” Adam said, lifting his eyes from the laptop.
Scowling, Brandon moved closer to Alex, skimming the articles.
“Ah fuck,” he muttered a few minutes later.
The back door opened, and Noah entered, bringing a blast of cold air with him. He took one look at them gathered around Alex’s laptop and said, “Did Eli download porn onto Alex’s PC again?”
No one laughed. Several pairs of eyes looked at him, their shell-shocked expressions clueing him in to the tension in the room.
“What’s going on?”
Alex closed the lid of his laptop and stood. “We need to talk.”