The Sunstone Brooch : Time Travel Romance Katherine Logan (no david read aloud TXT) 📖

which was out of alignment with the other books in the bookcase. The third was the train engine I gave James Cullen when he was a kid. He keeps it on a shelf in his office. It had been flipped and was facing a different direction. And before ye ask, it was pointing south.

“The fourth was the MacKlenna Farm table book left open to the history of the farm. And the fifth was a Washington Post article about the development of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota.”

“Ensley’s from North Dakota,” JL said.

Kenzie folded her arms and rested them on the table, leaning forward. “I admit I had a few minutes of advance notice of this situation, and I haven’t had time to form any impressions, but I do have two questions. Do you believe JC went back for Ensley? And if you do, how’d he do it? Did he break into the cleanroom, steal one of the other brooches from the safe, and vamoose?”

“If he did, he’s turned into Houdini,” Braham said. “No one can get into the cleanroom without alerts going off. David has tried to override the system, and I’ve hired others to break in. So far, no one has managed it, but I’m not satisfied with that. I continue to upgrade and test the system. There’s too much to lose if anyone gets in. I can assure ye that no one has been in that room since Elliott and I went down there Tuesday afternoon to inventory the brooches. We do it randomly to be sure they haven’t been disturbed. There was nothing out of order.”

“But you haven’t been down there today,” Meredith said. “So how can you be sure no one has been in there since the last time you checked?”

Braham picked up a remote, pointed it at the big-screen TV, and clicked. He cycled through several menus until he came to a prompt requesting a password. He entered the required information and cycled through several more screens until the door to the cleanroom slid open. He lifted the remote toward his lips and said, “Show the last person who entered the room.”

A video of Braham and Elliott standing in front of the facial recognition scanner popped up. Everyone at the table watched the two men enter the cleanroom. The time stamp indicated it was Tuesday night at nine-fifteen.

“So if our brooches are safe, how’d JC go after Ensley?” Kenzie asked. When no one volunteered an explanation, she continued, “I see three possibilities. JC hasn’t gone after her. Or he used Ensley’s brooch. Or he found one during his recent trip to Asia.”

“For those of ye who haven’t heard, JC was on a business trip in Asia last week. Ye know now. If he located a brooch there, he probably didn’t have time to bring it to the plantation before he left town again,” Elliott said.

“My money,” Kenzie said, “is on Ensley’s brooch. You mentioned that JC went upstairs to search for her and found evidence that she’d showered and changed clothes. If she had a brooch that reacted the same way as Penny’s, then it heated up, and she threw it on the floor.”

“If JC found it,” JL said, “he would assume, based on Penny’s experience, that it got too hot to hold. So he’d plan for that, wear a glove or something.”

“If he has Ensley’s brooch, then James Cullen can come home,” Meredith said. “But how will we know without going back to find him?”

“We?” Elliott said.

“Of course. I’ll insist on going,” Meredith said. “But maybe the brooch didn’t heat up. Perhaps it sparked like the topaz did when Penny reconnected it to the pendant. It could have sent a shock through his hand.”

“And he’d have dropped it,” David said.

Elliott gave David a sharp look and signaled what he was thinking. If James Cullen dropped it, Elliott knew in his gut that Paul had picked it up. David acknowledged the signal, then picked up his phone and sent a text message to his airport contact.

“If JC went back for Ensley, where did he go, and to what year?” JL asked.

Kenzie opened her laptop, and her fingers flew across the keyboard. “Was the Roosevelt book about his entire life? Or did it cover a particular time, like the adventures of the Rough Riders, or when TR was police commissioner, or governor of New York, or president?”

“It was David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback,” Tavis said. David and Elliott both turned and glared at him. He shrugged. “I notice things.”

“We’re looking for something that connects Roosevelt to Ensley, and I think I found it. During the winter of 1884-1885, Roosevelt and his partners built the Elkhorn Ranch on the bank of the Little Missouri River and started a cattle operation there,” Kenzie said. “The ranch is about thirty miles from Medora, and, according to this article, he was in the Badlands off and on from 1884 until he sold the ranch two years later.”

“Ensley told me she grew up on a ranch in North Dakota and was a finalist in the Women’s Rodeo World Championship. If she went back to the Old West and stayed on a ranch, she’d fit right in,” JL said. “I remember thinking at the time that I liked her a lot. She was sweet and loaded with personality, and later, when she was with Lance and Blane, she seemed to take a genuine interest in my kids, and they noticed because they talked about her later.”

“What’d they say?” Kenzie asked.

“They were talking about polo, and she knew the top US players—men and women. They thought she was cool.”

“I know all the players, too,” Penny said. “Lance and Blane don’t think I’m so cool!”

Kenzie laughed. “But Robbie, Henry, and Churchill think you are, and they’re older and harder to impress.” She then turned her attention to Tavis. “What about the guardian of Ensley’s brooch? What’s his role in this?”

“If Ensley traveled without her brooch, the guardian would have stayed to