soon as the garage door was open, he pulled inside, parked and leaped up the steps leading to the kitchen.
“Hey, anybody home?” he called.
“We’re here,” Stacy responded. “We’re drawing.”
He tossed his suit coat and tie aside, then rolled up the sleeves of his shirt on the way to the deck. One glance at Sara chilled the warm glow inside him.
Although she was smiling, her eyes were as opaque as the cheap jade sold in tourist shops.
After going through the greeting ritual with his daughter, he turned to their neighbor. She held an artist’s sketch book in her lap. On it was a pencil drawing of Stacy sitting on the deck railing, the city behind her and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond that.
“That’s very good,” he said, pausing beside her. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”
“I dabble,” she said. “I’m not anywhere as good as your sister. I saw some of her work at a gallery today.”
He tried to put all these pieces together and come up with a coherent picture. “Did you take your class on a field trip?”
She shook her head.
“We had a sub’tute,” Stacy told him. “I didn’t like her as much as Sara. None of us did.”
“Substitute,” he automatically corrected. “Sara is Miss Carlton to you,” he reminded the child.
“She said I could call her by her first name since she isn’t going to be my teacher anymore.”
While his daughter gave Sara a disapproving glance for this latter sin, Cade added this information into the mix and still came up with a jumble. “This isn’t making sense.”
“I’m no longer employed at Lakeside,” Sara informed him, her manner casual, her gaze cold.
The icy surety of knowing what was to come hit him like a flash flood in winter. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Apparently the class size wasn’t big enough to sustain an extra teacher. That was the clause invoked to let me go. The good news is they gave me a check for my salary for the rest of this term. Nice, huh?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, giving his neighbor a pointed perusal to assure her he meant to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Sara nodded, her head bent over the sketch as she went back to shading it with pencil strokes.
Stacy looked from one adult to the other. Cade knew his sharp-minded daughter had picked up on the undertones between him and Sara. It was time for a distraction.
“I’m starved,” he said. “Let’s go out for dinner.”
“Sara and I already ate,” Stacy told him, bridging the tense silence between the other two. “We had ice cream after school, and Sara got to meet Mrs. Ling. When Mrs. Ling held Mrs. Chong up next to Sara, their eyes were almost ’xactly the same. Raymond was there, too. He’s in my class. Then we had Chinese.”
Cade sorted through this information. Raymond was Mrs. Ling’s grandson. Mrs. Chong was her cat, whose eyes indeed were as green as Sara’s. The cat was also as aloof as Sara appeared at the moment.
“We got Chinese take-out,” Sara clarified. “There’s plenty left in the refrigerator for you.” She stood. “I have some work to do. I’ll see you in the morning, Stacy.”
“Okay,” Stacy said.
“Wait a minute.” Cade tried to suppress his frustration while Sara gazed at him as if they were perfect strangers. Aware of his daughter taking every word in, he changed his mind about an interrogation at the moment. “I can drop Stace off on my way to work. There’s no need for you to go to the trouble.”
“As you wish.”
With a nod to each of them, she sailed into her side of the mansion and closed the door.
“Do you think Sara is mad?” Stacy asked.
“I suspect she’s tired. Come on, you can keep me company while I eat. Then it’s bath time for you.”
They went inside. By the time Stacy was in bed and sleeping like the angel children are purported to be, Cade was chomping at the bit to go next door and see what the hell was happening.
Sara thought of staying in her bedroom and not answering the door when she heard Cade’s knock at the back of the house later that night. Reviewing her feelings as she went downstairs, she decided she was fine, all emotion bottled up and locked away.
“Come in,” she said, standing back from the door after opening it at his impatient second knock.
She noticed he had the receiver for the monitor he kept in Stacy’s room hooked to his belt. A thoughtful father, she scoffed. He looked after his own.
She sat in one of the chairs. He took the other.
The space between them, where the coffee table resided, was as wide as a canyon.
“What’s happened?” he asked quietly.
“Nothing.” At his ominous frown, she shrugged. “I was fired this morning. My services are no longer needed was the way it was put to me.”
He regarded her with narrow-eyed scrutiny, then a light dawned in his eyes. “You think I had something to do with it.”
She ignored the disbelief in his voice. “I’m positive of it.” She wrapped her arms tightly across her middle as a shield from the tremors that had invaded her.
“Sara—”
“Was it your idea or your father’s?” she asked, letting the glacier that had formed inside her penetrate her entire being, allowing icicles to coat each word.
Cade observed her without answering.
“It doesn’t matter. I know where we stand now. I was distracted over the weekend,” she admitted, the bitterness of the previous winter entering her soul. “But that won’t happen again.”
He rose. She did, too.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“The mighty Parks family,” she said scathingly. “You can have me fired, but nothing will stop Tyler and me from finding out the truth. We’re not helpless children anymore, and we have friends in the city. You had better not try the same tactics on my brother.”
The pleasant room filled with raging silence as they studied each other like opponents in a boxing ring. It would be a bare-knuckle battle to the finish, and only one of them would be standing at its end. That survivor would be her.
“What truth are you searching for?” he asked with a deadly calm that might have frightened her had she not been sure of her ground.
“The one involving my father, Jeremy Carlton,
