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  “She’s been packing!” Regan said aloud, relieved at the sight.

  It was as she knelt to pick up a shoe that she saw the note on the pillow. Jennifer would not be returned unless the sum of fifty thousand dollars was placed at the foot of the old well south of town two days from now.

  Regan’s scream of anguish could be heard throughout the inn.

  Brandy, her hands and apron covered with flour, was the first to reach Jennifer’s room. With an arm around Regan’s heaving shoulders, she led her to sit on the bed, taking the note from her.

  Brandy looked up at the people standing in the doorway. “Someone find Travis,” she commanded. “And tell him to get here immediately.”

  As Regan stood, Brandy caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I have to see how much money I have in the safe,” she said, dazed. “I know it’s not enough. Do you think I can sell something in two days?”

  “Regan, sit down and wait for Travis. He’ll know how to get the money. Maybe he even has some with him.”

  Regan didn’t seem to be aware of what she was doing as she sat back down, clutching the ransom note and one of Jennifer’s shoes.

  Travis burst into the room moments later, and at the sight of him she jumped up and ran to him.

  “Someone has taken my daughter!” she cried. “Do you have some money? Can you get fifty thousand dollars? Surely you can get that much.”

  “Here, let me see the note,” he said, one arm firmly around her. He read it and reread it several times before looking up at the room.

  “Travis,” Regan said. “What do we have to do to get the money?”

  “I don’t like this,” he said under his breath and turned to Brandy. “Have you been in the kitchen all morning?”

  Brandy nodded.

  “And you heard nothing? Did you see any strangers in the hall?” he asked, nodding toward the corridor that led to the kitchen and Regan’s office.

  “No one. Nothing unusual.”

  “Go find everyone on the staff and bring them here instantly,” he commanded Brandy.

  “Travis, please, we need to start getting the money.”

  Travis sat down on the bed and drew Regan between his knees. “Listen to me. There’s something wrong here. There are only two ways to enter your apartment, past Brandy in the kitchen or through the back door. Brandy and her cooks are always in that hall going from the kitchen to the pantry, and no one could have walked out with Jennifer without being seen. So that leaves the back door, which I know you always keep locked. It hasn’t been broken, so Jennifer must have opened it from the inside.”

  “But she wouldn’t! She knows not to do that.”

  “That’s my point. She’d only open it to someone she knew and trusted, someone she knew was a friend. And now my second point, who knows you can get fifty thousand dollars? No one in town knows me, and until yesterday I didn’t know you had any money. Fifty thousand means someone knows a great deal more than the average Scarlet Springs resident.”

  “Farrell!” Regan gasped. “He knows better than I do how much money I have.”

  At that moment Brandy returned with the staff members, all of them quiet, wide-eyed—and behind them was Farrell Batsford.

  “Regan,” he said. “I just heard the awful news. Is there anything I can do?”

  Travis brushed past him as he began to question the staff, asking if they’d seen anything at all unusual this morning, if they had seen Jennifer with anyone.

  While they were thinking, remembering nothing, Travis grabbed a maid’s hand.

  “What is this on your fingers? Where did it come from?”

  Stepping back, the girl looked frightened. “It’s ink. It came off the sheets in number twelve.”

  Expectantly, he turned to Regan.

  “Margo’s room,” she said heavily.

  Without another word, he left the apartment through the back door and headed for the stables, Regan running after him. He was tossing a saddle onto a horse when she caught him.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded. “Travis! We have to get the money!”

  He paused long enough to touch her cheek. “Margo has Jennifer,” he said as he continued saddling the horse. “She knew we’d find the ink, and she knows I’ll come after her. That’s what she really wants. I don’t believe she’ll harm Jennifer.”

  “Don’t believe! Your whore has taken my daughter and—.”

  He put his finger to her lips. “She is my daughter too, and if I have to give every acre I own to Margo, I’ll get Jennifer back safely. Now I want you to stay here because I can handle this better alone.” He swung onto the horse.

  “I’m just supposed to stay here and wait? And how do you know for sure where Margo is?”

  “She always goes home,” he said grimly. “She always goes to where she can be near the memory of that damned father of hers.”

  With that he reined away, applied a kick to the horse’s side, and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  Chapter 21

  IT WAS NIGHT, ALMOST DAWN THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN Travis jerked his horse to a halt before Margo’s door. It had taken several horses to carry him all the way at the pace he’d demanded of them.

  Jumping down, he slammed into her house, knowing exactly where she’d be—in the library, sitting under the portrait of her father.

  “It took you a little longer than I expected,” she said cheerfully as she greeted Travis. Her red hair was a mass of tangles about her shoulders, and there was a dark stain on her dressing gown.

  “Where is she?”

  “Oh, she’s safe,” Margo laughed, holding up an empty whiskey glass. “Go and see for yourself. I rarely harm children. Then come back and join me for a drink.”

  Travis took the stairs two at a time. At one point in his life he’d been a frequent visitor to the Jenkins house, and he knew his way around well. Now, searching for his daughter, he took no notice of the bare places on the walls where once a portrait had hung or an empty table where an ornament no longer stood.

  He found Jennifer asleep in the bed he’d used when he was a boy. When he picked her up she opened her eyes, smiled, said “Daddy,” and went back to sleep. She and Margo must have traveled all night, as the dust on her face and clothes showed.

  Carefully, he put her back down in the bed, kissed her, and went downstairs. It was time he and Margo talked.

  Margo didn’t even look up as he crossed the room and poured himself a glass of port. “Why?” she whispered. “Why didn’t you marry me? After all those years we spent together. We rode together, swam naked together, made love. I always thought, and Daddy always thought—.”

  Travis’s explosion cut her off. “That’s why!” he shouted. “That goddamned father of yours. There are only two people you ever loved: yourself and Ezra Jenkins.”

  He paused to raise his glass in salute to the portrait over the fireplace. “You never saw it, but your father was the meanest, cheapest liar ever created. He’d steal pennies from a slave child. I never cared much what he did, but every day I could see you becoming more like him. Remember when you started charging the weavers for their broken shuttles?”

  Margo looked up, a desperate expression on her face. “He wasn’t like that. He was good and kind….”

  Travis’s snort stopped her. “He was good to you and no one else.”

  “And I would have been good to you,” Margo said, pleading.

  “No!” Travis snapped. “You would have hated me because I didn’t cheat and steal from everybody around me. You would have seen that as weakness on my part.”

  Margo kept her eyes on her drink. “But why her? Why a skinny little, washed-out English gutter rat? She couldn’t even make a cup of tea.”

  “You know she’s no gutter rat, not when you demand fifty thousand dollars ransom of her.” Travis’s eyes began to glaze over as he thought back to that time in England. “You should have seen her when I first saw her—dirty, scared, wearing a