Fortune 26 – Steel Brothers Saga Read Online Helen Hardt

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Suspense Tags Authors: Helen Hardt Advertisement

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Like perhaps, the letter that precedes it?

God, where to start?

I rise, grab a pad of paper and a pen from a drawer in the kitchen, and come back. I write the letters on the piece of paper.

Darth Morgen.

Then I start playing with them.

What if these letters were rearranged? What if it’s one big word? Or several small words? An anagram?

I play with it for a little while, finding several three-letter words and writing them down, but then I laugh.

“What the hell are you doing?” I say out loud. “If you’re looking for anagrams, find an anagram maker online.”

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I was so overwhelmed with my developing feelings for Brendan and with the cards that were telling me all kinds of horrible things. Plus, I was depending on my mother. My ex-cop private-investigator mother who said she could decipher it.

But she kept putting me off.

I do a quick search, and I come up with something called Dante’s Anagram Maker.

Good enough. I type in all the letters of Darth Morgen.

I close my eyes.

I’m not sure why, except something tells me that if I look, I’ll be faced with even more of a mystery.

So I sit for a moment, eyes closed, and I inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I’m still waiting for some kind of positive feeling about the tower card still sitting on the table.

If I can get something—anything—that isn’t a negative feeling…

Then I can open my eyes.

And I can begin to solve the mystery of Darth Morgen.

So I wait.

I continue breathing.

But it doesn’t work.

Nothing works.

I open my eyes, and I glance at the screen.

And the word I see fills me with hope.

It’s not my mother.

My mother’s not ill. I feel that, and I know it in my heart, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

Because the first word on the list of anagrams for Darth Morgen is…

Grandmother.

Grandmother?

I wrinkle my forehead as I stare at the word.

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born.

My maternal grandmother died when I was a little girl, but I do remember her. She had the worn and wrinkled face of a woman who was once a classic beauty before hardships had taken their toll. Diamond Lee Thornbush, who named her only daughter Ruby. My mother used to make fun of her mother’s—and her own—gemstone name, but I always thought they were pretty.

Grandma Didi—what Gina and I called her—used to read to us in that raspy voice of hers. It wasn’t until later that I learned her voice was the result of decades of smoking. She eventually quit, but the damage was done. She succumbed to lung cancer.

She gave me the pink silk scarf with the daisy pattern that I use to wrap my tarot deck. I glance at it on the side of the table. It helps me feel close to the feminine energy of my ancestors.

My ancestors on my mother’s side, that is. But my other grandmother? Daphne Steel?

I never knew her, so it’s impossible to feel any energy from her. Perhaps if I had more information about her, I could feel something, but my father doesn’t talk about her, and neither do my aunts and uncles. At least not to me.

Dale, Donny, and Henry were all alive when she died, and so was Brad, although he was only a few months old. None of them ever met Daphne Steel, though. She was in the hospital, a mental health facility. She had broken away from reality years before.

Again…that’s all I know. That’s all any of us know.

It’s odd, really. Mental illness. I’ve never understood it, which I suppose is a good thing. Like I said, my father doesn’t talk about it. None of them do, but it must’ve gone through their minds at some point. Might they inherit the mental illness from which their mother suffered?

None of them have, thank goodness. Perhaps what she suffered from wasn’t genetic.

I should ask Aunt Melanie. She’s a retired psychiatrist and therapist, but already I know she won’t go into any detail with me.

Daphne Steel is not someone our family talks about. Funny that it never occurred to me to wonder why.

She is my grandmother. She and Diamond Thornbush.

This message must be referring to one of them. Except that Brendan and his family got the same message.

An anvil settles in my gut.

This can’t possibly mean…

I shake my head vehemently.

No. No way. We’re not related to the Murphys. Not at all. The idea forces nausea up my throat. Brendan and I…

No.

Just no.

The message must have some different meaning. Or it refers to a person other than a grandmother.

I scan the list of words the anagram maker came up with, narrowing my eyes.

grandmother

arm thronged

armed throng

Darth monger

grander moth

grander Thom

mar thronged

marred thong

month regard

I stop. The list goes on for what seems like forever.

Most of the anagrams make no sense at all, but I can’t help a slight giggle at marred thong. Grander moth? No. Darth Monger? Possibly a Star Wars reference. I could ask Dave, but already I know I won’t.

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