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“No, no,” he said, waving the thought away. “I came here to see you. Besides, if I have coffee I’ll have to use the loo on the way home.”
She winced. Somehow, in some way, every conversation she ever had with him was so hopelessly awkward. He was like a pre-teen and she couldn’t say she was much better. He’d asked her to dinner, and she knew that was a romantic overture. She’d intended to say yes, especially since she didn’t have much going on in the romance department at all. But every time she was with Zachary Hardy, romance was the last thing on her mind.
If there was a connection, she couldn’t see it.
“Okay,” she said. “So how are you?”
“Ah, pretty good. It’s been busy. You know.” He leaned in, never taking his eyes off her. “What about you? You working on any exciting cases?”
“Oh, not really. Mostly just wives, concerned their husbands are cheating. That’s about all I’ve gotten the past few weeks.”
“I saw your ad in the papers. Looked good. Professional.”
“Thanks. I didn’t renew. Wasn’t worth the return on investment,” she said with a small smile.And I don’t have any money to pay for next month.
“Ah. You know, you can get plenty of free advertising online. And you should consider moving out of this neighborhood.”
He motioned out the window at what was probably a drug deal going on, right outside—two men hunched together, casting surreptitious looks all around. It was a regular scene here in East Plainfield. Real customers were probably unwilling to make the trip into the city, on the chance that they’d get mugged—or worse.
The problem was, where would she go that had cheaper rent than here?
“Yes, that’s a possibility, but I really can’t. My father’s in a nursing home, not far from here. So I have to stay local,” she lied.
His eyes lit up. “Your father? Edward Fortune? I’d wondered what happened to him.”
It sent a flash a pride through her that her father’s renown had spread far and wide. “You know him?”
“Who doesn’t know of the great Edward Fortune? I used to follow his cases when I was a young attorney. I think he handled a big one in the UK when I was at university there.”
She nodded. It sounded like him. In his heyday, Edward Fortune had jetted all over the world, solving and consulting on cases. She and Charlie would often be left with a kind, elderly neighbor, and yet, whenever he came back, he’d always have some kind of souvenir for them—a keychain or stuffed animal or t-shirt. He’d been incredibly busy, but his mind had always been on his children.
She found herself gritting her teeth and realized that Zachary had asked her another question. “I’m sorry?”
His eyes flooded with sympathy. “He’s not doing well, then?”
“No. Unfortunately. He’s in a home because the doctors don’t know exactly what’s wrong with him, but he has bouts of weakness and forgetfulness.”
“That’s a shame. He’s a great mind.”
“He is,” she said, pulling her coffee to her lips. “I wish he could help me. That was his dream, the two of us working the business together. I’m sure if he was there, his name alone would bring clients in. If I had a dime for every time a potential client hangs up on me when they find out that Edward Fortune’s retired . . .”
“Really?” His brow knitted. “He did retire, once before? About a decade ago, from what I remember?”
She nodded. “Longer than that. That was because of my brother. Charlie.”
“Right. What happened there? It was some kind of international incident, right?”
Her father never liked to talk about it, in his lucid moments. It brought too much pain. But there was so much about it that had been swirling in Daisy’s head. The files on the subject filled an entire file cabinet in the office—several years’ worth of digging down rabbit holes that had gotten him nowhere.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, surprised at how easily the words came now. “He’d just graduated from high school. The schools in East Plainfield weren’t the best so my dad sent us to a private school. Charlie was on a yacht with some friends in the Caribbean, and he went missing.”
“Missing? How?”
She shrugged. “My father got the call, dropped everything, and went down there. Apparently, they docked, and at one point, they noticed he wasn’t there.”
“Bloody hell. How did that happen?”
She wished she knew. It was the question that had plagued her family for most of her life. “I think it had to do with a bunch of underage boys drinking too much and thinking they were invincible.”
