Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The door to Ian’s office was closed but not locked. Was it usually locked? Courtney wasn’t sure. Even though the room was in the main part of the house, she almost never had a reason to go down that side hall in the evening. Besides, it was Ian’s domain. He’d always been nice to her, but she got a certain vibe from him. She sensed that he thought of her as an intruder, an interloper in the family business.
In a way, she understood where he was coming from, but his take on it couldn’t be more wrong. She and Dana had created the world of the Rebecca Cavanaugh series together. Left to her own devices, his sister would never have written the first book, much less the whole series. Dana had the ideas and the enthusiasm, but she lacked the discipline. Courtney was the missing ingredient, the one who made it all possible. Without her, Ian wouldn’t have the job of managing all the money from the books they had generated. She had every right to be in the house.
What she didn’t have was the right to be in his office. Knowing this, she felt a sense of foreboding in every bone in her body. If he found her snooping, he’d be furious and she’d be in big trouble. The memory of him slamming the door in her face earlier was reassuring. The finality of it made her think he and his family were home for the night. He rarely worked after dinner. The chances of him returning to his office were slim.
And she would be quick.
Courtney opened the door, flicked on the lights, and made her way to the desk. The desk. The imposing mahogany limited-edition desk that he’d chosen himself. It had cost as much as her first car, but Dana hadn’t balked at the price. She wasn’t generous with praise or credit, but she was financially beneficent.
Courtney pulled the key out of her bag and sat in Ian’s chair, surveying the drawers. There were two on each side. The ones on top were shallow and didn’t have locks. The deeper drawers below had keyholes. She started with the unlocked drawers and found standard office supplies. Sticky notes, writing utensils, paper clips, and the like. Despite having a keyhole, the deeper drawer on the left wasn’t locked. She opened it and found it empty. That left one final drawer. Locked, but the key slipped easily into the opening. With a turn, she heard the mechanism release.
Inside, she found money. Lots and lots of money. Her mouth dropped open as she stared for a second, and then she began pulling it out of the drawer and piling it on the desk. Ten banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She knew without even counting that each stack held a hundred bills.
Mentally, she did the math. Ten bundles of $10,000 each equaled $100,000. She knew this because she’d seen this money before. In fact, she had personally gone with Dana and retrieved it from the bank for fact-finding purposes. If Rebecca Cavanaugh kept this much on hand, she’d thought it important for them to know how much space it occupied, how the bank had bundled it, and how much it weighed. Since she was going to write the scene, she wanted to experience how it would feel in Rebecca’s hand.
Sometimes Dana balked at her insistence on seeking out authentic experiences for the books, but this time around she’d been totally on board. She remembered the two of them passing the bundles back and forth, amazed at how it didn’t seem to be as much as they’d anticipated. She and Dana had laughed on the way home, feeling like they’d robbed a bank. The branch official who’d arranged the transaction had some concerns about them walking out with so much cash, but Dana had assured him they could handle anything that came their way. “I know karate, and Courtney has a stun gun.” She’d lied about knowing karate, but she wasn’t kidding about Courtney’s weapon of choice. When she’d expressed a fascination with the lipstick stun gun they’d gotten for research, Dana had bought her one of her own. “Now we have matching lipstick stun guns,” she’d said with a grin.
Courtney had found that oddly touching. It was now one of her most cherished possessions.
Dana could be a complete pain, but just when she’d pushed a person to their limit, she’d go and do something thoughtful and kind, making it almost impossible to stay angry with her.
She thought about the trajectory of the money. They’d gotten it more than a year ago and had kept it around the house for a few days while they were writing that chapter. When they were done, the stash went back to the bank. Ian himself had offered to handle the deposit. He’d insisted on it. Said, “You girls should concentrate on writing the novel. Let me take care of the financial errands. I was planning on going to the bank today anyhow.” It was supposed to be safely in Dana’s account, yet here it sat in her brother’s desk drawer more than twelve months later.
Courtney looked at all ten bundles lined up on top of the desk. Less than three pounds in total. A person could easily carry all of it in a tote bag.
Or a grocery bag.
She smiled, realizing she’d found the ransom money. The beauty of it was that it belonged to Dana, and it was right here, right now. She left the office and walked quietly to the kitchen. Martha was cleaning up, humming as she loaded the dishwasher. She didn’t see Courtney slip into the pantry closet to retrieve one of the reusable cloth grocery bags used when doing the household shopping. Of course, it was one of their own, a merch item sold on Dana’s website. The Rebecca Cavanaugh book covers imprinted on the side somehow fit that this bag was going to be used to rescue the author, Dana Broderick.
When Courtney returned to Ian’s office, she stuffed the wads of cash into the bag, then closed the drawer and securely locked it. She grinned when imagining Ian finding out his stash was gone. He was going to have a meltdown, and it would serve him right. She couldn’t say he’d outright stolen the money from his sister. It was possible they’d made some agreement she didn’t know about. Or maybe he had a good reason of his own. There was no way to know. Regardless, it was galling that he had it sitting in the house and refused to use it to save his own sister.
He was going to catch hell once Dana came home, and Courtney wanted a front-row seat when that happened.
Getting out her phone, Courtney sent a final text to the kidnappers before leaving the room.