Birthright

was still sneaking in at two in the morning.
    Callie hadn’t been able to settle after Suzanne Cullen’s visit. She hadn’t been able to eat, or sleep or lose herself in work.
    And she had realized she’d go crazy sitting around a dumpy motel room obsessing about a stranger’s lost baby.
    Not that she believed she’d been that baby. Not for a minute.
    But she was a scientist, a seeker, and until she had answers she knew she’d pick at the puzzle like a scab until it was uncovered.
    Leo wasn’t happy with her, she thought as she pulled into the driveway of her parents’ suburban home. He’d blustered and complained and asked questions she couldn’t answer when she’d called to tell him she was taking the next day off.
    But she’d had to come.
    Along the drive from Maryland to Philadelphia she’d convinced herself she was doing the only logical thing. Even if that meant going into her parents’ house when they were away, even if it meant searching their files and papers for some proof of what she already knew.
    She was Callie Ann Dunbrook.
    The elegant neighborhood was quiet as a church. Though she shut her car door gently, the sound of it echoed like a shot and set a neighbor’s dog to barking.
    The house was dark but for a faint gleam in the second-story window of her mother’s sitting room. Her parents would have set the security system, putting the lights on a changing pattern of time and location while they were in Maine.
    They’d have stopped the newspapers, had the mail held, informed neighbors of their plans to be away.
    They were, she thought as she crossed the flagstone walk to the big front porch, sensible, responsible people.
    They liked to play golf and give clever dinner parties. They enjoyed each other’s company and laughed at the same jokes.
    Her father liked to putter around the garden and pamper his roses and tomatoes. Her mother played the violin and collected antique watches. He donated four days a month to a free clinic. She gave music lessons to underprivileged children.
    They’d been married for thirty-eight years, and though they argued, occasionally bickered, they still held hands when they walked together.
    She knew her mother deferred to her father on major decisions, and most of the minor ones. It was a trait that drove Callie crazy, one she perceived as a developed subservience that fostered dependence and weakness.
    She was often ashamed of herself for viewing her mother as weak, and for viewing her father as just a bit smug for fostering the dependence.
    Her father actually gave her mother an allowance. They didn’t call it that, of course. Household expenses. But to Callie’s mind it came to the same thing.
    But if these were the biggest flaws she could find in her parents, it hardly made them baby-snatching monsters.
    Feeling foolish, guilty and ridiculously nervous, Callie let herself into the house, hit the foyer lights, then punched in the code for the security alarm.
    For a moment she simply stood, absorbing the feel. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d been alone in the house. Certainly before she’d moved out and into her first apartment.
    She could smell the faint drift of Murphy Oil Soap that told her Sarah, their longtime cleaning woman, had been there within the last few days. There was the scent of roses, too, strong and sweet from her mother’s favorite potpourri.
    She saw there were fresh flowers, some elegant summer arrangement, on the refectory table that ran under the staircase. Her mother would have told Sarah to see to that, Callie thought. She would have said the house enjoyed flowers, whether anyone was home or not.
    She crossed the unglazed checkerboard of tile and started up the stairs.
    She stopped in the doorway of her room first. Her childhood room. It had gone through numerous incarnations from the little-girl fussiness that was her first memory of it—and her mother’s vision—through the eye-popping colors she’d insisted on when she’d begun to have her own ideas and into the messy cave where she’d kept her collection of fossils and old bottles, animal bones and anything else she’d managed to dig up.
    Now it was an elegant space to welcome her or any guests. Pale green walls and sheer white curtains, an antique quilt on a wide four-poster bed. And all the pretty little whatnots her mother collected on shopping expeditions with friends.
    With the exception of vacations, sleepovers at friends’, summer camp and the