Somebody's Daughter Read online

  “When our little sister was stolen, your grandma changed.”

  Cord’s nephew didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally Brock asked, “How?”

  “She cried every day for weeks and months.” Years… “She sort of lost the will to live. One day I heard your dad tell her, ‘You’ve got us, Mom,’ but she just stayed in her room and kept crying.”

  Cord drew in a breath, still feeling that painful moment as if it were yesterday.

  After another minute of silence, Brock turned his head to look at Cord. “I guess you and Dad thought she didn’t love you anymore.”

  “It kind of felt that way at the time. Your father was your age, and the oldest child. He took it the hardest.”

  Brock sat up straighter. “Grandma loves Dad. I know she does. She tells me all the time.”

  Without conscious thought, Cord put an arm around Brock’s shoulders. “Of course she does. She never stopped loving any of us, but at the time she was suffering so much, we thought she shut us all out.”

  “Do you think if she told Dad, it would make him feel better?”

  “She’s already told him, Brock.”

  “Then how come he still feels bad?”

  “Because of guilt.”

  Brock stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. “What do you mean?”

  Dear Reader,

  My house is only five minutes away from the home of Elizabeth Smart, the teen who was abducted in the middle of the night in June 2002 and was miraculously returned to her family a year later.

  During this time, all of Salt Lake City went into mourning. Yellow ribbons were tied on trees and school fences throughout the valley. A pilot friend of mine and his wife went on many searches during his free time, looking for her.

  Young women and couples I knew combed the hills and canyons behind the Smart home looking for any trace of her. Volunteers by the thousands were busy putting up flyers in every conceivable place to make people aware.

  Night after night my family and I, along with millions of families throughout Utah, the U.S. and overseas, prayed for that girl, for that family. The goodness of people united in a worthy cause was awesome to behold. To see Elizabeth returned to a family that never lost faith filled every heart with joy.

  It is because of her story that I was inspired to write two Harlequin Superromance books—Somebody’s Daughter and The Daughter’s Return. Enjoy.

  Rebecca Winters

  P.S. If you have access to the Internet, please check out my Web site at www.rebeccawinters-author.com.

  Somebody’s Daughter

  Rebecca Winters

  Books by Rebecca Winters

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  636—THE WRONG TWIN

  650—A MAN FOR ALL TIME

  697—NOT WITHOUT MY CHILD

  737—STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET

  756—LAURA’S BABY

  783—UNTIL THERE WAS YOU

  808—DEBORAH’S SON

  840—IF HE COULD SEE ME NOW

  875—THE FAMILY WAY

  916—THE UNKNOWN SISTER

  981—ACCIDENTALLY YOURS

  1005—MY PRIVATE DETECTIVE

  1034—BENEATH A TEXAS SKY

  1065—SHE’S MY MOM

  1112—ANOTHER MAN’S WIFE

  1133—HOME TO COPPER MOUNTAIN

  1210—WOMAN IN HIDING

  1233—TO BE A MOTHER

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK AT NIGHT, the Venice Beach Public Library had to be more crowded than the beach itself. Kit Burke had been standing in line twenty minutes waiting to get on one of the computers. There was a ten-minute limit per person for their use, but it seemed to be taking forever.

  She could have gone to the University of Southern California, where she’d been attending night classes. The USC campus library would still be open, but it was always crowded, and her wait might have been longer. This library was more convenient, anyway, since it was close to her apartment.

  Normally she would have grabbed a good book to read, but Kit couldn’t concentrate. Not after what her mother had said to her before she’d passed away less than a week ago.

  If the deathbed confession was true, then neither Rena nor Frankie Burke, the man who’d run off before Kit was a year old, were her birth parents.

  “I was always going to tell you, honey. Your real name is Kathryn McFarland, not Kit. Your great-great-great-grandfather, John McFarland, was the Copper King. He was so famous even President Roosevelt had dinner at his house.

  “There’s a mansion in Salt Lake that is your home. Go to the McFarlands, your real parents. Tell them who you are. You’ve got to do it so God will forgive me. Promise me!”

  Seconds before Rena slipped into a coma, Kit had given her word. She’d been so relieved her mother’s suffering was finally coming to an end, she would have said anything to bring her peace.

  Grief was no stranger to Kit. Her mother had been dying of a diseased liver for years. The doctor had said an early death was inevitable, but that hadn’t stopped her from drinking. Neither had the tactics Kit had learned in the classes she’d attended for family members of alcoholics.

  The obituary Kit had given the newspaper should have read, “Between drinking bouts, Rena Harris Burke, forty-four, abandoned by her pathetic excuse for a husband, Frankie, never knew a moment’s pleasure. Her struggle to feed herself and her daughter by working for other people, doing jobs they wouldn’t dream of doing, robbed her of a long life, took away her freedom from toil and thwarted any pursuit of happiness.”

  Rena had been a wonderful mother to Kit—when she was sober. She’d worked hard to earn a living. During Kit’s adolescent years, she’d seen to it Kit went to church and did her schoolwork. But when she drank, she retreated inside herself. Kit had always believed her father’s abandonment of them had driven her mother to alcoholism. And now…

  To think her mom might have done something so terrible she had to drown out the pain with drink was killing Kit.

  Since the graveside service two days ago, she’d gone straight back to work for A-1 Commercial House and Business Cleaners, where she’d been employed for the past six years. She was thankful for the physical labor, which helped fill the void while she attempted to deal with the pain of her loss.

  It wasn’t until this morning, as she’d been putting cleaning supplies in the back of the van, that she’d talked to her best friend and co-worker, Janene, about her mother’s final words. Even though those words had been haunting her to the point where she couldn’t think about anything else.

  “The last two times Mom went into detox, she had hallucinations. The doctor said it only happens in about five percent of patients. I have to believe she didn’t know what she was saying before she died.

  “But there was an urgency in her voice—she begged me to go to the McFarlands. If you could have seen the pain her eyes… She wanted God to forgive her. Her pleas won’t leave me alone.”

  Before they climbed in the front of the van, Janene, whose fiancé was stationed in the Middle East with the military, turned to Kit. “She probably didn’t know what she was saying. But if it will make you feel better, at least find out if John McFarland even existed, let alone if this McFarland family exists.”

 
Kit’s eyes closed tightly for a moment. “I’ve thought about doing a little research. If they are such a prominent family, then I’d probably be able to find out something about them on the Internet. But it still wouldn’t prove anything. Mom could have read about them in a magazine or a book. Maybe she heard about them through an employer and it made a big impression on her mind.”

  “That’s true. I’m sorry I’m not being any help.”

  “Don’t say that!” Kit implored. “I’d go insane if I didn’t have you to talk to. I’m afraid, Janene.”

  “I know you are.”

  “What if my whole life was based on a lie? Starting with my parents, who weren’t my parents!”

  They stared at each other. “It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened to someone,” Janene reminded her. “If your mom had something terrible on her conscience, it might explain why she couldn’t overcome her drinking problem.

  “Kit—there is one way to know if you’re her biological daughter or not.”

  “You mean a DNA test. But all that might prove is that I was adopted. Maybe Mom felt so guilty she never told me the truth, and it twisted her thoughts at the end.”

  “I think you may have hit on the truth. If that’s the case, you could go to Vital Records. However, from what I understand, adoption cases are sealed. Without a good attorney I fear you wouldn’t get anywhere.”

  “You’re right about that, and they cost a small fortune. Oh, Janene! This is a nightmare….”

  Standing in line at the library, Kit shuddered. No matter how she’d tried to repress her fears, they kept surfacing. She knew she had to do something.

  “Hey—the computer’s free. Are you going to use it or not?”

  Embarrassed to be the one holding up the line, Kit nodded to the person behind her and hurriedly sat down at the keyboard.

  The only name she had to go on was John McFarland. She typed it in and waited. When the results appeared on the screen, every entry contained his nickname. “John McFarland, the Copper King.”

  Kit clicked on the first one. She let out a little groan.

  Son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 3, 1853. Attended law school before traveling to Colorado in 1879. In Denver, he was involved in the freighting business, then moved to South Park, where he ran a hotel. John McFarland acquired mining property and sold it to speculators from France and England for several million dollars.

  He moved on to Utah where he bought property in Bingham Canyon, including several mines, chiefly for their gold. But as high-grade copper ore had been discovered, he established a copper smelter.

  The list of his companies and assets went on and on. The Copper King had amassed a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  The man had existed, all right. She clicked to another article.

  In his lifetime, John McFarland, whose wife loved to travel, acquired four residences: a mansion in London, England; a château in France; a mansion on Long Island, New York; and a mansion he had built on South Temple in Salt Lake City, by European craftsmen in the French château style popular in the early twentieth century.

  That is your home, Kit’s mother had said.

  None of this meant much to Kit. She clicked to the next set of articles, hoping to find something on the man’s family and personal life. Then she found what she was looking for.

  Welcome to the Kathryn McFarland National Foundation, located in the McFarland Plaza on South Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah.

  This Web site is updated daily

  Beneath the heading was a colored photograph of Reed McFarland, the founder, taken when he was a U.S. senator from the state of Utah. Beneath the picture of the recently retired congressman, who’d served four terms in Washington, D.C., Kit read something that made her blood run cold.

  May 3 marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of the abduction of our fourth child, Kathryn McFarland, from the McFarland home in Salt Lake City, Utah. Born April 2, she was only a month old at the time she was taken.

  By now Kit’s hand was trembling on the mouse. On March 14 she’d celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday, with Janene and some friends from school. What kind of a coincidence was that?

  Soon after the kidnapping and community search, the Kathryn McFarland Foundation was founded and now honors Kathryn’s memory by finding missing children, and preventing them from going missing in the first place.

  When Kathryn was kidnapped, our community and many others joined together to help us find her because there was an immediate recognition that she was everyone’s child and that we are all in this together.

  Child abductions across our nation since its beginning have highlighted the need for legislation to enhance our ability to protect our children from predators of all types. When a child is kidnapped, time is of the essence.

  All too often it is only a matter of hours before a kidnapper commits an act of violence against the child. That is why we’re pleased that the U.S. Senate has acted to pass legislation creating a national AMBER Alert system, which galvanizes entire communities to assist law enforcement in the timely search and safe return of child victims.

  Since its inception, the foundation has assisted approximately seventeen thousand families and law enforcement agencies in their searches. We have seen over eighty-five percent of those children returned home safely. This is what continues to give us hope.

  Kit studied the picture of Reed McFarland, the father of the kidnapped baby. Because he was seated behind a desk, with the Utah and U.S. flags on either side of him, she could only see the upper half of his body. He appeared to have large hands, and she thought he might be tall.

  Beneath thinning grayish-blond hair he wore a pleasant smile on his pale face. But in her mind he looked like an exhausted high school teacher on the verge of retiring. If he was her father, then brown-haired, five-foot-three Kit couldn’t see any resemblance except that they both had blue eyes.

  Throughout the month of May, the foundation is honoring Kathryn’s legacy nationwide by offering children from five to twelve years of age personal safety training. With summer almost upon us, children are more at risk, with predators lurking in unsupervised parks and recreation areas.

  As Kit scrolled down she saw two other small black-and-white photos. One showed a full-length picture of a son, Benjamin McFarland—a tall, loose-limbed man who’d inherited the ex-senator’s thin lips and ski jump nose. Besides being a foundation board member, he was the head of MicroVision, an international microchip company based in Utah.

  Kit was prompted to trace the outline of her own retroussé nose before she studied the second picture. A daughter, Margaret McFarland, was an attorney-at-law and foundation board member. She, too, was tall, and had dark blond hair like her brother.

  Beneath their pictures was the mention of a second son, Richard McFarland. As well as sitting on the foundation’s board he ran a Salt Lake women’s shelter for the homeless called Renaissance House, a philanthropic project under the umbrella of the Kathryn McFarland Foundation.

  To Kit’s disappointment, there was no picture of him or of the wife of Reed McFarland that might help her see any physical resemblance to herself. But there was a photograph of Renaissance House—the McFarland mansion Kit’s mother had mentioned before her death.

  She read on, and discovered that President Roosevelt had been a visitor to the fabulous mansion on South Temple. Just as her mother had said.

  The street was called the Champs Elysés of the western states. Only the most prominent of Utah’s mining and railroad magnates had built their extravagant mansions along the wide, tree-lined avenue that went from the city center to the University of Utah, the oldest university in the U.S. west of the Mississippi Ri—

  Kit felt someone tap her shoulder. “Your time’s up.”

  “Just another minute, please….”

  Immobilized by what she’d read, Kit found her only thought now was to call an attorney and order a DNA test to
be done immediately.

  She needed proof that she wasn’t Rena’s birth child before she went any further down a road that might prove the mother she’d loved all her life could have been involved in such a terrible crime….

  GWEN BARBER POKED her head inside Cord’s office door while he was still on the phone with his sister.

  “Cord?”

  He looked up. Though he’d been named Richard Cordell McFarland, his grandfather Wilford had nicknamed him Cord, and it had stuck.

  “We’ve got a problem that needs to be taken care of before the staff meeting starts in the conference room.”

  Gwen rarely interrupted unless it was important. Cord motioned for her to come in.

  “Maggie? I’ll have to call you back.”

  “That’s fine. I’m due in court in a few minutes, anyway. So you’ll meet me in front of Woodruff Elementary School in Magna at two o’clock with the brochures? I can’t believe I don’t have any left in the trunk of the car.”

  “I’ll be there. I have at least twenty cartons of them in my van.”

  “Thanks, brother dear. All three television networks are sending people to get video footage for tonight’s news. With summer vacation starting in two days, this is the last school we’ll be visiting until fall. I want to be sure every child gets one.”

  “Don’t worry. See you later.”

  After he hung up, he eyed the forty-year-old married woman he’d hired a year ago to be the initial screener at Renaissance House. She’d worked as a clinical psychologist at North Avenues Hospital for twelve years before coming here, and was an invaluable member of his staff.

  Like the screener before her, who’d had to leave when his wife was transferred to Texas with her job, Gwen was an innately kind person. Yet she possessed the ability to put distance between herself and the heartbreaking situations of the homeless, while still doing an excellent job assisting them.