Stonebrook Cottage by Carla Neggers Page B

left."
    Sam was silent. She knew what answers he wanted.
    "Are you driving?" she asked quietly. "You might want to pull over."
    "Susanna, you have two seconds. Then I'm hanging up and driving over there and letting Jack deal with his damn family. Last time I tried to protect a Galway, I ended up getting shot."
    "Kara broke into Jack's gun cabinet," Susanna blurted. "She told me she was going to the bathroom. I only thought about the plane after I saw she had one of his guns."
    "Jesus Christ."
    "She didn't break in, exactly. She has a key. She must have had it with her. She has copies of all our keys, except the one to the plane."
    "What did she take?"
    "A .45 automatic pistol. His Colt, I think."
    Jack carried a department-issue .357 SIG-Sauer on duty. Sam felt his pulse throbbing behind his eyes. How had he gotten so far down this road? "Does Kara know how to use it?"
    "She took shooting lessons in high school, probably on days she wasn't taking flying lessons and plotting how to get into Yale. Her father—"
    Sam knew all about her father, a man who worked two jobs and tried to give his motherless children every advantage in life. "She has to have a permit to carry a pistol where she's going. She can't just waltz into another state with a weapon and expect—" He broke off, because Susanna already understood the ramifications of what her sister-in-law had done or she wouldn't have lied in the first place. "Hell, she doesn't have a permit for it here. She stole the damn thing. She deserves to get herself arrested."
    "She's afraid, Sam. I could see it in her eyes."
    "Then she should call the damn police."

Seven
    K ara rented a car in Boston and put Lillian up front, Henry in the back, but neither said much on the trip to Connecticut. They were west of Hartford now, off the interstate, driving along a shaded, scenic road. Lillian had just finished reading the first of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for what she claimed was the seventh time and now was staring out her window, preoccupied.
    "What's on your mind?" Kara asked her.
    "Will Henry and I have to go to reform school?"
    Henry, who Kara would have guessed wasn't paying attention, shot as far forward as he could in his seat belt. "We didn't run away, Lil. We did what Mom asked us to do. Reform school's for delinquents."
    And prison, Kara thought, was for people who stole planes and guns and misled Texas Rangers, then gave them the slip with the missing kids of a governor. And that was only a slight exaggeration. She wondered how much of a head start she had on Sam and her brother.
    Probably not much if Susanna talked. She must have found out about the plane and the gun by now.
    "I wouldn't be worrying about reform school right now," Kara said. "Let's just get to the cottage."
    It was early evening, comfortably warm and slightly humid in Connecticut. The farther from Texas Kara got, the crazier her actions of last night and this morning seemed to her. She'd let Henry and Lillian's fear and desperation affect her judgment, feed her own anxiety. She was calmer now. She would follow the instructions in the letter and get them to Stonebrook Cottage and their mother. If she pissed off a couple of Texas Rangers in the process, so be it.
    The kids were calmer, too, their spirits improved now that she'd demonstrated she was unquestionably on their side and had stopped trying to poke holes in their story and pepper them with questions. What was the point? Their mother could deal with what they'd done and why, figure out if something serious was wrong or they simply needed help coping with Big Mike's death.
    The city and suburbs of the state capital had given way to rolling farmlands, then to the wooded hills and small towns of the northwest corner of the state. The air cooled. They passed houses with green lawns and gardens at their peak, hollyhocks and corn standing tall, hammocks strung under shade trees, black-eyed Susans looking as if they were smiling in the small fields.