Theresa asked, puzzled.
Maizie went to the heart of the matter. “What kind of a confession?” she pressed.
“She told me she offered to clean the young man’s apartment for free because it was in such a state of chaos,” she explained. “And Olga felt she was betraying me somehow with that offer.”
Theresa still wasn’t sure she was clear about what was going on. “Why did she offer to clean his place? Was it like a trade agreement?” she asked. “She did something for him, then he did something for her?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Cilia quickly corrected, guessing at what her friend was inferring was behind the offer. “She told me that she felt sorry for the guy. He’s a police detective who’s suddenly become the guardian of his ten-year-old niece.”
Maizie was instantly interested. “How did that happen?”
“His brother and sister-in-law were in this horrific skiing accident. Specifically, there was an avalanche and they were buried in it. By the time the rescuers could get to them, they were both dead,” Cilia told her friends. “Apparently there’s no other family to take care of the girl except for Olga’s neighbor.”
Theresa looked sufficiently impressed. “Sounds like a good man,” she commented.
“Sounds like a man who could use a little help,” Maizie interjected thoughtfully.
Maizie took off her glasses and gazed around the table at her friends. Ideas were rapidly forming and taking shape in her very fertile brain.
“Ladies,” she announced with a smile, “we have homework to do.”
* * *
“But I don’t need a babysitter,” Heather Benteen vehemently protested.
“I told you, kid, she’s not a babysitter,” Colin Benteen told his highly precious niece, a girl he’d known and loved since birth. Life had been a great deal easier when the only role he occupied was that of her friend, her coconspirator. This parenting thing definitely had a downside. “If you want to call her something, call her a young-girl-sitter,” he told Heather, choosing his words carefully.
“I don’t need one of those, either,” Heather shot back. “I’ll be perfectly fine coming home and doing my homework even if you’re not here.” She glared accusingly at her uncle, her eyes narrowing. “You don’t trust me.”
“I trust you,” Colin countered with feeling.
Heather fisted her hands and dug them into her hips. “Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is,” he told his niece patiently, “that I know the temptation that’s out there.” He gave her a knowing look. “I was just like you once.”
“You were a ten-year-old girl?” Heather challenged.
“No, I was a ten-year-old boy, wise guy,” he told her, affectionately tugging on one of her two thick braids. “Now, humor me. Olga offered to be here when you come home and hang around until I get off.”
She tried again. “Look, Uncle Colin, I don’t want to give you a hard time—”
“Then don’t,” he said, cutting Heather off as he grabbed a slice of toast.
Heather was obviously not going to give up easily. “I don’t like having someone spy on me.”
“Here’s an idea,” he proposed, taking his gun out of the lockbox on the bookshelf where he always deposited his weapon when he came home at night. “You can get your revenge by not doing anything noteworthy and boring her to death.”
The preteen scowled at him. “So not the point,” she insisted.
He wasn’t about to get roped into a long philosophical discussion with his niece. She had to get to school and he needed to be at work.
“Exactly the point,” he replied. “Olga will be here when I’m not, just as she has been these last few weeks—and we’re lucky to have her. End of discussion,” he told her firmly.
“For there to have been a discussion, I would have had to voice my side of it,” she pointed out, all but scowling at him in a silent challenge that said she had yet to frame her argument.
Colin paused for a moment as he laughed and shook his head. “Sue me. I’ve never raised a ten-year-old before and I want to get this right.”
The impatient look faded from her face and Heather smiled. She knew that they were both groping around in the dark, trying to find their way. Her uncle had always been very important to her, even before she’d woken up to find that the parameters of her world had suddenly changed so drastically.
She gave him a quick hug, as if she knew what was really on his mind. Concern. “We’ll be all right, Uncle Colin.”
“Yes, we will,” he agreed. He pointed toward the front door. “Now let’s go.”
For the sake of pretense, Heather sighed dramatically and then marched right out of his ground-floor garden apartment.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Colin found himself halfway around the city, tackling a would-be art thief who was trying to make off with an original painting he’d stolen from someone’s private collection in the more exclusive side of Bedford.
The call had gone out and he’d caught it quite by accident because his new morning route—he had to drop Heather off at school—now took him three miles out of his way and, as it so happened today, right into the path of the escaping art thief.
Waiting for the light to change, Colin saw a car streak by less than ten feet away from him. It matched the description that had come on over the precinct’s two-way radio.
“Son of a gun,” he muttered in disbelief. The guy had almost run him over. “Dispatch, I see the vehicle in question and I’m pursuing it now.”
Turning his wheel sharply, he made a U-turn and proceeded to give chase. Despite his adrenaline pumping, he hated these chases, hated thinking of what was liable to happen if the utmost care as well as luck weren’t at play here.
He held his breath even as he mentally crossed his fingers.
After a short time and some rather tricky, harrowing driving, he pursued the thief right into a storage-unit facility.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered under his breath. Did the guy actually believe he was going to lose him here? Talk about dumb moves...
He supposed he had to be grateful for that. Had the thief hit the open road, he might have lost him or someone might have gotten hit—possibly fatally—during the pursuit.
As it was, he managed to corner the man. Colin jumped out of his car and completed the chase on foot, congratulating himself that all those days at the gym paid off. He caught up to the thief, who had unintentionally led him not only to where he had planned on hiding this painting that he’d purloined but to a number of others that apparently had been stolen at some earlier date.
