Birthright by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

it.”
    â€œMaybe she is.” Roger rose, ran his hands up and down Suzanne’s arms. “And Doug is your son. Don’t push him, honey. Don’t lose one child trying to find another.”
    â€œHe doesn’t want to believe. And I have to.” She stared at Callie’s face on the TV screen. “I have to.”
    S o, she was the right age, Doug thought as he scanned the information from his search. The fact that her birthday was listed within a week of Jessica’s was hardly conclusive.
    His mother would see it as proof, and ignore the other data.
    He could read a lifestyle into the dry facts. Upper-middle-class suburban. Only child of Elliot and Vivian Dunbrook of Philadelphia. Mrs. Dunbrook, the former Vivian Humphries, had played second violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra before her marriage. She, her husband and infant daughter had relocated to Philadelphia,where Elliot Dunbrook had taken a position as surgical resident.
    It meant money, class, an appreciation for the arts and for science.
    She’d grown up in privilege, had graduated first in her class at Carnegie Mellon, gone on to get her master’s and, just recently, her doctorate.
    She’d pursued her career in archaeology while compiling her advanced degrees. She’d married at twenty-six, divorced not quite two years later. No children.
    She was associated with Leonard G. Greenbaum and Associates, the Paleolithic Society, several universities’ archaeology departments.
    She’d written a number of well-received papers. He printed out what he could access to wade through later. But from a glance he assessed her as dedicated, probably brilliant and focused.
    It was difficult to see the baby who’d kicked her legs and pulled his hair as any of those things.
    What he could see was a woman who’d been raised by well-to-do, respected parents. Hardly baby-napping material. But his mother wouldn’t see that, he knew. She would see the birthday and nothing else.
    Just as she had countless times before.
    Sometimes, when he let himself, he wondered what had fractured his family. Had it been that instant when Jessica disappeared? Or had it been his mother’s unrelenting, unwavering determination to find her again?
    Or was it the moment when he himself had realized one simple fact: that by reaching for one child, his mother had lost another.
    None of them, it seemed, had been able to live with that.
    He would do what he could, as he had done countless times before. He attached the files, e-mailed them to his mother.
    Then he turned off his computer, turned off his thoughts. And buried himself in a book.
    T here was nothing like the beginning of a dig, that time when anything is possible and there is no limit to the potential of the discovery. Callie had a couple of fresh-faced undergraduates who might be more help than trouble. Right now they were free labor that came along with a small grant from the university. She’d take what she could get.
    She would have Rose Jordan as geologist, a woman she both respected and liked. She had Leo’s lab, and the man himself as consultant. Once she had Nick Long pulled in as anthropologist, she’d be in fat city.
    She worked with the students, digging shovel samples, and had already chosen the two-trunked oak at the north-west corner of the pond as her datum point.
    With that as her fixed reference they’d begin measuring the vertical and horizontal location of everything on the site.
    She’d completed the plan of the site’s surface the night before, and had begun to plot her one-meter-square divisions.
    Today they’d start running the rope lines to mark the divisions.
    Then the fun began.
    A cold front had dumped the humidity and temperatures into the nearly tolerable range. It had also brought rain the night before that had turned the ground soggy and soft. Her boots were already mucked past the ankle, her hands were filthy and she smelled