Wesley worships the man.”
“He’s probably just starved for a father figure.” He cleared his throat, reached into the Dick’s Sporting Goods bag and pulled out a folder. “Speaking of which, I was hoping you could help me fill in a few gaps regarding your father’s disappearance.”
Her spine stiffened as she sipped from the cup of surprisingly good coffee. “I doubt it, but I’ll try.”
He opened the folder that contained a half-inch sheath of papers, most of them printouts and official-looking reports. “Do you remember the day your father was indicted?”
She nodded and looked into her coffee, recalling the tension that had blanketed the town house, overrun with a constant stream of lawyers and the addition of a bay of file cabinets to keep up with the paperwork. “Everything seemed to be leading up to that day. Wesley and I stayed home, but we heard the news on the radio before my parents returned home.”
“So they did return home?”
She nodded. “My mother was crying and my dad was angry, saying that he’d been framed and that he’d get even with everybody.”
“Did they mention that they were thinking of leaving town?”
“No.”
“You had no idea?”
“No,” she said evenly. “My parents said they wanted to go to dinner alone, to talk about some financial issues. They left about seven o’clock and…they simply never came home.”
His expression darkened. “That was the last time you and your brother saw them?”
She nodded. “When we got up the next morning, their bedroom door was closed. I assumed they’d gotten in late and were sleeping in. I got Wesley ready for school and we left. When we came home from school, Liz Fischer was waiting for us. She’d been looking for my father all day.”
His eyebrows went up. “Liz?”
She squirmed, remembering that he and Liz had history. “You were aware that she was my father’s attorney?”
“Yeah, it’s in the files, but I thought she was simply on the defense team. I assumed she was handling things behind the scenes.”
Her smile flattened. “She was. Liz and my father were—how did you put it? Oh, yes. Friendly.”
He scratched his temple. “Are you saying that something was going on between them?”
“Why don’t you ask her the next time you…see her?”
“I will,” he said smoothly. “So you were saying that Liz was waiting for you?”
“Right. She said she’d been trying to reach my father all day. From the look of my parents’ bedroom, it appeared as if they hadn’t been there since they’d left the previous evening.”
“Did they leave a note?”
She swallowed more coffee. “No.”
“Did they call?”
“No.”
His mouth twitched downward. “Do you remember the date?”
“December second, three weeks before Christmas.” She heard the bitterness in her own voice.
He sipped from his coffee. “Does that have something to do with the little Christmas tree in your living room?”
She looked up sharply.
“I noticed it when I went there to take your brother in. It’s hard to miss.”
She picked at the éclair in front of her. “Yes. Wesley wouldn’t let me take it down.”
“Even after all this time?”
“Even after.”
He made a rueful noise in his throat. “When did you first hear from your parents?”
She looked off into the distance, and tried to make her voice sound detached from the information she conveyed, as if it had happened to someone else. “It was about six months later, in June. We received a postcard from Michigan, I think.”
“Do you have family in Michigan?”
“None that I know of. My mother’s parents were deceased before I was born, and she was an only child. My father’s parents died when I was in grade school. He has a half brother in New Zealand, and a couple of extended cousins somewhere in Utah, but he wasn’t close to them. I believe the police followed up with them, though.”
He scribbled on a piece of notepaper. “Where did your family go on vacations?”
She shrugged. “Where didn’t we go? All along the eastern coastline, north and south, France, Germany, England and Ireland, cruises to the Caribbean. My father liked to live large.”
The only vacation she and Wesley had taken since then were the three days they’d spent at Walt Disney World when he was eleven. It had taken months of saving every dime and had been marred by Wesley’s conviction that Carlotta was holding out on him—that their parents were going to join them in Orlando as a big surprise. Of course that hadn’t happened, and Wesley had cried the entire eight-hour drive back to Atlanta. She straightened. “How much longer, Detective? I’m rather tired, and I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Jack.”
“Hmm?”
“Why don’t you drop the detective stuff? My friends call me Jack.”
She glanced at the notes in front of him and reminded herself that the man was manipulating her to get the information he needed to bring her father home, which would only plow another furrow through her and Wesley’s lives. She stood and smiled down at him. “Goodbye, Detective.”
He nodded. “Ms. Wren, before you go…was there something you wanted to tell me about the Angela Ashford case?”
Her hand moved automatically to cover her neck as she tried to look innocent. “Uh…no.”
His gaze went to her neck. “Really? Because if you know something…”
She knew she had reached the point of now or never. “W-well, it probably doesn’t mean anything.”
He slurped his coffee. “Why don’t you let me decide?”
“Angela was a customer of mine,” she blurted before she lost her nerve. “She purchased a man’s jacket last week. A couple days later I ran into Peter at a party and asked him about the jacket, but he didn’t know anything about it.” She decided to leave out the fact that she’d asked Peter about the jacket again last night and he hadn’t corrected her when she’d said it was brown.
The detective frowned. “I don’t get it.”
“Well, I started thinking that…perhaps
