Софи Райан - A Whisker Оf Trouble

Liz arrived at the end of the day to pick up Avery along with Rose and Mr. P.

I gave Charlotte a ride home.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said as she got out of the SUV. “Bring your apron.”

“I’m not so sure I should be cooking anything,” I said. “What if I ruin the gravy?”

“Then everyone can have ketchup instead.” She waved as she started up her driveway. I watched to make sure she made it inside.

Elvis meowed from the backseat. “No, I’m not hanging over the seat to pick you up just so you can sit up here,” I said. I turned to look at him. “If you want to come up here, you’re going to have to jump.”

He meowed again, just a little louder.

I turned the radio on and sat back in my seat, and a tail smacked the side of my head as Elvis landed on the top of the middle section of the split front seat.

“Hello,” I said.

He gave me a look of annoyance, jumped down and moved over to settle himself on the passenger side, craning his neck to look out the windshield. It didn’t matter where he was sitting: The cat was a backseat driver.

I took Elvis home and then collected the pizza I’d ordered before I’d left the shop. The guys had just finished hanging the last sheet of drywall.

Mac brushed dust off the front of his T-shirt. “Thank you,” he said to Liam. “I owe you for this.”

Liam wiped his hands on the front of his pants. “You don’t owe me a thing.” One long arm snaked out and caught me around the shoulders. “You, on the other hand, owe me big-time.”

I reached over and flicked his forehead with my thumb and forefinger. “Really?” I said. “I still have that video of you in the onesie Mom bought you at Christmas, wearing Dad’s hat with the flaps while the two of you sing a rousing chorus of ‘Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.’”

Mac’s lips twitched as he tried not to laugh. Liam let go of me and put one hand over his heart. “We’re family,” he said with mock sincerity. “You don’t owe me a thing.”

I laughed and hugged him.

We ate the pizza and talked more about Liam’s role in the proposed downtown development. Because the previous North by West proposal had fallen apart, it seemed as though the harbor-front revitalization had been the only topic of conversation for close to a year now.

“Do you think this is really going to happen this time?” I asked Liam.

He pulled a long string of mozzarella from his slice and ate it. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “I looked at the financials and the numbers are good.” He nudged me with his elbow. “So I’ll probably be around a lot more, at least for a while.”

I smiled back at him. I liked having Liam around, and not just because he could cook. “You should come running with me,” I said.

“How about tomorrow morning?”

I nodded. “That works for me.”

Half a slice of pizza was on his plate. Liam rolled it up and put the entire thing in his mouth. After he swallowed he stretched and stood up. “I really need to get going,” he said.

“Thanks for the help,” Mac said.

“Not a problem,” Liam said. “Anytime.”

They shook hands and surveyed their handiwork.

When Liam turned to me I wrapped him in another hug. “Thanks,” I said. “I really do owe you.”

He grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll collect.” He pulled his cell out of his pocket, looked at the screen and put it back. “If you see Rose, will you tell her I’ll look for those photos and e-mail them to her later tonight?”

“What photos?” I asked as he leaned forward and brushed dust and bits of paper out of his hair.

“From that wine – and food-tasting thing last fall,” he said.

“Feast in the Field?”

He nodded. “That’s it. She asked if I had any pictures. I was pretty sure I did. I just need to charge my phone and I can send them to her. I forgot to plug it in last night.”

“Rose asked you for photos from Feast in the Field this past fall? Not the year before?”

“Yes. From this past fall. Not the year before.”

I was confused. The brochure Elvis had found wasn’t from the most recent Feast. I was trying, like Mr. P., to trust Rose’s instincts. I just wasn’t sure where they were taking me.

Liam reached for his jacket. “So this detective thing is legit? Alfred Peterson has a PI license and Rose is working on one?”

“It’s legit.”

“Good for them,” he said with a smile. “I hope this helps them find the guy they’re looking for.” He pulled his keys out of his pocket.

I held up one hand. “Hang on a minute. You hope what helps them find who?”

He looked at me as if I was missing something, which I was. “Alfred has some video of a man from somewhere downtown, talking to some older woman. I think I have a photo of the same guy on my phone. He was working at one of the wine-tasting booths this year. If it is the same guy, Nick and I talked to him. He was there the year before, too, one of those stereotypical sales types. That’s the only reason I remembered him.”

I looked at Mac. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

Could Rose actually be right about Feast in the Field? Could she have found the person who defrauded Edison Hall and had Nick, of all people, actually talked to the man? I had an almost overwhelming urge to laugh. I coughed into my elbow instead. “I’ll tell her,” I said.

“Seven too early to run?” Liam asked.

I shook my head.

“I’ll see you in the morning, then,” he said. He raised a hand. “See you, Mac.”

I watched Liam head across the parking lot and rubbed my left shoulder, which had tied itself in knots while Liam was talking.

“Give Rose the message and there’s nothing else you can do tonight,” Mac said.

“I swear I wasn’t going to get involved in this case,” I said, sitting next to Mac on a paint-spattered sawhorse. “Which is what I said last time and the time before that.”

“They’re your family.”

“Yeah, they are,” I said with a smile. “So what’s your excuse?”

“They’re kind of my family, too.” Mac shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve had something like that in my life.”

Mac never talked about family or his past or anything personal. I suspected from a remark he’d once made about commitment that he’d been married at one time.

“Your old life,” I said.

He smoothed a hand over his dark hair. “Something like that.” There was something sad in his expression, in the way he held his mouth.

“You miss it, or at least you miss the people?” The words came out as a question.

“Sometimes I missed the . . . connections,” he said.

Missed. Past tense. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know how I take my coffee. Rose remembers that I don’t like hard-boiled eggs, so she doesn’t put them in her potato salad when she brings it for us.”

Those were the same kinds of things I’d missed when I’d been working away from North Harbor. Now that I was back, it sometimes drove me crazy that Rose and her cohorts knew me so well. Other times it made me feel as if I was truly home, surrounded by people who knew me so well.

“You probably could have picked a little less . . . colorful family,” I said.

Mac laughed. “No way. I like colorful. I don’t want beige and boring.”

I nudged him with my shoulder. “I’m going to remind you that you said that the next time Mr. P. hacks in somewhere he shouldn’t and Michelle and a dozen burly police officers surround this building.”

“Wouldn’t happen,” Mac said. “Mr. P. is not that careless.”

“Have you ever thought about going back to see your old family?” I asked, aware that I was venturing out onto shaky ground.