“Have you done all the renovations yourself so far?” he asked after a minute.
“Yes. That’s why it’s going so slow. I do a lot of things the hard way first.”
“It looks good,” he said.
“You don’t know what it looked like before.”
“Do I need to have seen it to think that it looks good now?”
I rested against the broom handle. “I guess not. But you’d know how far it’s really come even if it feels like it’s taking forever most weeks.”
“Are you on a deadline or something?”
I shook my head and went back to sweeping. “No. I’m just the impatient type, I guess.”
He shuffled a few more steps before asking another question. “Were you close to your uncle?” Puffs of dust rose with each step.
“Not until shortly before he died.” Uncle Fred had been so good to me, giving me a place to live for a little while. When I was young, he’d kept a squirrel feeder in his backyard that had delighted me with its constant traffic on my visit, and each year on my birthday, he’d sent a card with a squirrel on it, a crisp twenty-dollar bill tucked inside with a note to spend it stocking up on nuts.
Maybe that was why I’d thought of him when I’d found myself with a sudden desperate need to escape from DC and the scandal erupting around me. He’d been kind enough to offer me shelter from the storm, no questions asked.
I went back to sweeping, but Ian, unlike Uncle Fred, was chock full of questions.
“He didn’t have any kids?” he asked.
“No.”
“Nice of him to leave his place to you.”
That wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. He reallywasnosy. Must be a job hazard. He drew a breath like he was about to ask another question, but since they all seemed focused on my past and that was my least favorite topic, I decided to change the subject to him.
“So how’d you get into detective work?” I asked. “That’s what you do, right?”
“I guess you could call it that. That makes me think of police though. My work is...messier than that.”
“Messy how?”
“I don’t have to follow the same rules.”
I stopped sweeping again. “That doesn’t sound at all ominous.”
He laughed, revealing straight white teeth. He had Miss Lily’s smile. “I’m one of the good guys.”
“Are you though?” I’d dealt with my fair share of high-powered law firms. “Fair” wasn’t a word I would use to describe their tactics or their results.
“The people I investigate don’t think so. But my work probably wouldn’t bother them so much if I weren’t always catching them misbehaving.”
“You still didn’t say how you got into your line of work. And why do it for a law firm? Why not the FBI or CIA? Don’t most guys with a sense of duty end up working for the intelligence services? Although maybe you’re not that into duty.” It still annoyed me that he made his grandmother pine for his visits so often.
He stopped shuffling. “What makes you say that?”
“I’ve met Landon and the other grandchildren several times, but this is the first time I’ve seen you come around.”
“My job is demanding,” he said, sending up an extra big puff of sawdust. “It’s harder to get away.”
“That’s interesting, because Landon still managed to make it out to spend a Sunday afternoon with Miss Lily, and I think he’s a first-year associate and therefore has no life outside of the firm, right?”
He didn’t say anything to that. Finally, he said, “I went to law school.”
