“Oh, I definitely will,” she promised with feeling, more than happy to be the one to give Hastings the news. “Do you have anything else for me?” Jordana asked.

  For the time being, he decided to keep the details of his new case to himself. “Not at the moment. Don’t get greedy on me, Jordy.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I told you, don’t call me Jordy.”

  But Brooks merely grinned as he turned to leave. “Can’t hear you,” he told her. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Stay out of trouble, Brooks,” Jordana called after her brother.

  “Don’t I always?” he asked, tossing the question over his shoulder.

  “Unfortunately no,” she murmured to herself because Brooks was already gone.

  Chapter 6

  Gwen just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that someone was following her. This feeling had been going on for most of the morning.

  She was probably being paranoid and there very well wasn’t anyone following her, but all the same, she could have sworn every time she glanced behind her or turned unexpectedly, she saw someone ducking out of sight.

  Just your imagination, Gwen, she upbraided herself. This was something entirely new for her. She wasn’t normally like this. She certainly didn’t usually see people hiding in the shadows as they tried to tail after her.

  She supposed that this was the result of everything hitting her all at once. In a short amount of time she had moved to another town, changed jobs and now she was being told that the man she had only been casually dating had turned out to be a full-fledged stalker bent on having her tailed.

  Had she really been such a poor judge of character? She couldn’t help wondering. And if that was the case, how was she going to change that? Because if she didn’t change that, she was going to be doomed to repeat her mistake in the future.

  Gwen sighed as she took a very roundabout way back to her apartment. No matter how she sliced it, she felt she really needed to adhere to her grandmother’s old adage about it being better to be safe than sorry. That was why, when she left the meeting at school, she drove defensively with one eye on her rearview mirror so that she made sure she wound up losing whoever might be following her.

  To that end, Gwen had already shut off her regular cell phone before she left the apartment this morning. She had also turned off the prepaid cell phone she had used to call Brooks back earlier today. Neither phone was giving off a signal now.

  Even so, she worried that there was still some way she hadn’t thought of for someone to be able to track her. Technology seemed to be twelve steps ahead of her, she thought unhappily.

  Gwen knew she’d told Brooks she would meet him at one o’clock, but it was closer to one thirty by the time she finally pulled up before the apartment she had recently rented.

  As she approached the rental unit, Gwen saw that Brooks was standing outside her door. She had the impression that he had been there for quite a while now. Parking her car, she quickly hurried toward him.

  She was apologizing even before she managed to reach Brooks. “I’m so sorry that I’ve kept you waiting.”

  He didn’t look put out, but that might just have been because he was good at keeping his feelings hidden.

  “I was beginning to think I got the time wrong. Either that, or you changed your mind and decided to go with another private investigator,” he told her, really relieved to see her.

  Was it possible that this woman got better looking every time he saw her? Brooks wondered.

  Gwen shook her head. “No, none of the above.”

  “But?” he asked. He had caught something in her tone that implied there was something else going on that had caused her to be late. He had a feeling it had something to do with the case.

  Gwen stalled as she unlocked her door.

  “You’re going to think I’m paranoid,” she began, walking into her apartment. She wasn’t happy about admitting this, but if he was going to be working for her, he needed to know everything.

  “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not after you,” Brooks said—only to see her suddenly growing pale right before his eyes. “That was a joke,” he told her quickly. He was trying to lighten things up for her, to keep her from being nervous.

  It obviously wasn’t in this case, he thought, but he certainly didn’t want her getting any more spooked than she already was. He’d noticed the way she had glanced over her shoulder—not at him but just at the general area itself. She was looking for someone.

  “I’m a little shaky,” she said.

  Gwen quickly closed and locked her front door. The fact that she treated it like the first line of defense wasn’t wasted on Brooks. This wasn’t an act on her part. She was really frightened, he thought.

  “Did you happen to see anyone following you?” he asked her.

  Gwen shook her head, feeling foolish and at the same time uneasy. “No, it’s just a feeling.”

  He didn’t want her thinking that she had to apologize. “Hey, I’m the last one to knock a feeling,” Brooks assured her.

  Taking a can of soda out of the refrigerator, she popped the top, then paused suddenly. “Can I offer you one?” she asked before taking a sip.

  Brooks smiled as he shook his head. “No, I’m fine,” he answered. “Why don’t you just sit down and catch your breath?”

  Gwen crossed back to the sofa in the living room. She didn’t want Brooks making a big deal out of what she’d just told him or think that there was something wrong with her, for that matter.

  “I’m okay.” Trying to redirect the conversation, she said, “You mentioned something this morning about having some news about that private investigator my grandmother hired.” She waited for him to take it from there.

  Sitting down next to her, Brooks nodded. “The good news is that Crane didn’t just take your grandmother’s money and run off.”

  “Then you did find him,” she cried, making no effort to hide her excitement. This was the first positive information she’d had about her mother’s case since Olivia Harrison had disappeared all those years ago.

  Brooks qualified his statement. “Only in a manner of speaking.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He decided to give her a little background information first. “Colton Construction is currently demolishing a number of old buildings to make way for a new shopping mall that will be built on the same site. When they brought down an old warehouse yesterday, they found a body that had been hidden in one of the basement walls.”

  Without realizing it, she had leaned in toward Brooks and had caught hold of his hand when he told her about the body. Gwen was squeezing it now, all the emotions that were rushing through her managed to manifest themselves as her grip became more pronounced.

  “Was it my mother?” She asked the question in a breathless whisper.

  He should have told her who it was immediately, Brooks thought. He could have spared her this awful moment.

  “No, but thanks to our conversation yesterday, I could tell my sister to try to match the man’s fingerprints to those of Felton Crane. Her department did and they turned out to be a match,” he told her. “The man in the wall was your ‘runaway’ private investigator.”

  But something he had previous said caught Gwen’s attention. “Your sister?”

  “My sister Jordana is a detective on the Braxville police force,” Brooks told his new client. “And, in the interest of full disclosure, I also have another sister Yvette—the youngest one in the family. She works as a lab tech in the crime scene investigative department.”

  Gwen was impressed. “That must come in handy,” she couldn’t help commenting.

  “At times,” Brooks admitted, then added, “But at other times it’s more of a hindrance than anything else. Anyway, finding Crane’s body in that building tells me that he must have stumbled across something about your mother that no one wanted to have become public knowledge—which was why Crane was killed.”

  But Gwen had been disappointed so many times before, thinking that she was close to finding out what happened to her mother, it was hard for her to become enthusiastic about this latest discovery. This, too, could just be nothing.

  “Or maybe some other case Crane was working got him killed,” she speculated.

  He was surprised by Gwen’s negative attitude. Here, at least, he could offer her something positive.

  Brooks shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  More than anything, Gwen wanted to cling to the investigator’s version of things. But it was going to take more than just a PI with a gut feeling to convince her.

  “Why not?” she asked, secretly ready to believe any half-decent theory Brooks could advance that told her otherwise.

  “I spoke to someone yesterday who knew Crane. The guy said that Crane would only work one case at a time. My friend maintained that that was what made him so good at his job, his laser-like focus on a case, seeing it to the end until he found a way to solve it.”

  “So whatever he found that got him killed was connected to my mother,” Gwen summed up, finally giving herself permission to grow hopeful.

  Brooks nodded. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  She sat there, letting the words sink in. They were actually getting somewhere, she thought. Turning her eyes toward Brooks, she asked, “So now what?”

  “Now, with your permission,” he qualified, “I tell my sister about your mother’s disappearance so that Jordana is aware of this piece of the puzzle and the investigation officially has legs.”

  “Does that help?” Gwen asked hopefully, not certain if it did or not. This was a whole new phase for her.

  Brooks nodded. “It’s now considered to be a cold case.” He knew that sounded bad from her standpoint. “A slightly warm cold case,” Brooks qualified. “So, do I have your permission to tell my sister? Keep in mind that my loyalty in this case is to you and you do have a right to privacy. So if you don’t want me telling my sister that Crane was investigating your mother’s disappearance when he suddenly disappeared himself, I’m going to have to find another way to let Jordana know that.”

  Finished with the elaborate statement, Brooks sat back and waited for Gwen’s final say on the matter.

  It was immediate in coming. “By all means, tell your sister. FYI, my grandmother went to the police when my mother initially went missing, but at the time whoever she spoke to at the station just thought my mother didn’t come back because the burden of being a single mother who was also saddled with an aging parent was just too much for her. He didn’t look into the matter any further.

  “That was why my grandmother hired Crane to begin with, because the police weren’t interested. Someone told her about Crane, so she went to him with the story. Crane said he could find my mother, but he wanted to be paid up front.” She had heard the story a number of times. “Somehow, she scraped together the money and she pinned all her hopes on him.”

  Gwen frowned. She’d been a little girl at the time, but certain things left an impression, like the way her grandmother had been devastated by what she believed happened.

  “When my grandmother thought that Crane had run off with her money, she tried going back to the police. But her second attempt to engage them didn’t fare any better than her first attempt had. Since there was nothing to suggest that there had been any foul play—to my mother or to Crane, the investigation into the matter was dropped and we never heard anything further about it.”

  “Until you decided to do some investigating of your own,” Brooks guessed, referring to her reason for being in Braxville.

  Gwen nodded. “I had to see if I could find anything, even if it has been twenty-five years.” She lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “I thought maybe I’d get lucky. After all, this is my mother and there are a lot of unanswered questions involved. I thought my personal stake in the case would make a difference...” Her voice trailed off.

  “No need to explain,” Brooks told her kindly. “In your place, I’d feel exactly the very same way,” he assured her with feeling.

  “I really am grateful,” Gwen told him without any preamble. “About you taking on this case as well as you coming to warn me about Dan.”

  She didn’t want to seem as if she was just taking all that for granted. He didn’t have to put himself out like that for her initially. After all, he had no way of knowing that she would hire him.

  “Hey, no need for thanks. Just common courtesy on my part,” he explained, then told her his own philosophy when it came to life in general. “We all need to look out for one another, otherwise the situation becomes intolerable.”

  That intrigued her. “You really believe that?” she asked.

  “Yes I do. Down to my toes,” he told her in all sincerity. And then he flashed a grin at her. “Now why don’t you tell me everything you can about your mother—unless you don’t have time now,” he qualified. “Then we can do it some other time, but I do need to know anything you can remember.”

  “No, now is fine,” Gwen assured him. “This is why I came to Braxville in the first place, to look for her and see if I could find any sort of a trace of her. Or, barring that,” she said solemnly, “at least what happened to her.” Aware that this meeting was going to take some time, she asked Brooks, “Can I get you anything to eat or drink?”

  “Coffee would be good,” he said, then added a disclaimer, “Unless you have decaf.”

  She picked up on his dismissive tone. “No, no decaf.” Gwen made a face. “What’s the point in drinking something intended to be a stimulant if it doesn’t stimulate?” she asked.

  Right now, he thought, looking at this woman who had just hired him, he felt as if he was definitely stimulated enough. There was something about Gwen Harrison that made his blood rush and the rest of him stand up and come to attention.

  Still, he couldn’t say any of this, even in a kidding manner, because then he could very well wind up spooking her. Just the way Shelton had, even though he intended to be strictly honorable and Shelton’s intentions were most likely the exact opposite.

  “Ah, a woman after my own heart,” he told her, then quickly added, “I’m talking about how you feel about your coffee.”

  She flashed him a quick smile as she made her way into the small kitchen. “I understand what you mean.”

  As her old-fashioned coffee maker went through its paces and prepared a fresh pot of dark roast coffee, Gwen excused herself and disappeared into her bedroom.

  When she emerged, Brooks saw that she had changed into a pair of worn jeans and a comfortable-looking light blue peasant blouse. She had on sandals instead of heels and gave the impression of being more petite than she actually was.

  He couldn’t help thinking that even dressed like that, she looked like a goddess.

  Brooks saw that Gwen had a small covered shoebox in her hands.

  She placed the shoebox down on the coffee table before she returned to the kitchen to pour two cups of coffee.

  “Do you take anything in your coffee?” Gwen asked.

  A glib line flashed through his mind about asking Gwen to stick her finger into the black liquid in order to sweeten it. It was a lame line he recalled hearing someone once say in junior high school, or maybe that was in elementary school. He recalled that it was a know-it-all kid who thought he was being incredibly clever.

  Why that ridiculous comeback occurred to him now was beyond him, but Brooks pushed it out of his thoughts as quickly as it had shown up.

  “No,” he told her, “I like it black.”

  She nodded her approval, oddly content that they thought alike in this minor matter, although she couldn’t have explained why that pleased her. But it did. “I do, too.”

  “No foam, no sweeteners?” Brooks questioned.

  Gwen shook her head. “Just black, like nature intended.”

  That was the moment, Brooks realized, that, odd as it seemed, he began to fall in love with Gwen Harrison.

  Chapter 7

  Rather than bring the two cups of steaming black coffee over to the sofa, Gwen decided that it might be better to have the coffee at the kitchen table.

  Since it made no difference to him one way or the other, Brooks saw no reason to offer any sort of protest. He took a seat opposite his client at the small table for two.

  Taking a sip of his coffee, the private investigator nodded his approval.

  “Strong coffee,” he told her after the sip had ample time to wind its way through his system.

  “It’s not too strong, is it?” she asked, concerned that she might have been too heavy-handed while preparing the coffee. It was the way she liked it, but maybe he didn’t.

  Brooks appeared mildly amused. “I believe this is the part where one of the three bears proclaims their serving to be ‘Just right,’” he told her, adding, “Your coffee is the kind that makes every bone in my body stand up at attention.”

  He took another sip, a bigger one this time, and then placed his cup back down. After a momentary pause, he said, “So, are you going to tell me, or are you going to make me guess?”

  Gwen looked at him, perplexed. “Guess about what?”

  “About what’s in the box,” he elaborated, nodding at the shoebox she had placed on the table.

  Gwen turned to where Brooks’s attention was focused and immediately flushed. In trying to get her coffee just right for her visitor, she had temporarily forgotten all about the box she’d brought out of her bedroom. He needed to see what was inside.

  “I’ll show you,” she answered, getting up from the table.

  Gwen brought the shoebox over to the kitchen table. Removing the lid, she tucked it underneath the box and tilted the shoebox toward him so that he could see the contents for himself.

 

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