Juliet hung up and grabbed her jacket, quickly telling Tony Cipriani what was going on. He immediately offered to go with her, but she shook her head. They both were tackling paperwork of the dullest kind. She didn’t blame him for looking for an excuse to get out of there, but her partner didn’t need to be tracking down her errant niece with her.
She took the elevator down to the lobby of the nondescript federal building hoping she wouldn’t have to fight traffic to get uptown. Out on the street, Ethan Brooker was just getting out of a cab.
Juliet thought she must have conjured him up and was losing her damn mind. She charged out to the street.
He was real. She hadn’t made him up or mistaken someone else for him.
“Good,” he said. “You’re here. Saves me from having to lure you out here.”
He had on a battered brown leather jacket, a denim shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, and he hadn’t shaved in several days. His eyes were harder, blacker, more piercing even than Juliet remembered. They looked as if they could set fire to the building.
“Man, Brooker,” Juliet said. “Wherever they sent you, it wasn’t a Club Med.”
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
She gave him the basics, and his reaction—as if he, too, was worried that someone had harmed Wendy, or, God forbid, thought she was Juliet—scared the hell out of her. “You’ve seen her? My niece?”
“I saw a teenage girl get out of a cab and drag a backpack and tote bag up the steps to your building. Small, long dark hair?”
“That’s her. When—”
“Over an hour ago. I’ve been sitting in traffic.”
Juliet frowned, trying to think. “We have a new doorman.” She didn’t tell Ethan that letting him sneak up to her apartment in late August was the reason the old doorman was gone. “He should have called me—”
“Water over the dam. Let’s go.”
She didn’t budge. “Wait a minute. You were at my building—and now you’re here?”
“We need to talk.” His tone held no hint that he was thinking about roses and sun-kissed cafés. “I didn’t get your guy.”
Bobby Tatro. Juliet didn’t want him in her thoughts at the same time as her niece. “I supposed I’d have heard if you had. All right. Come with me. We’ll take my truck. We can talk on the way.”
Joshua Longstreet headed outside, Wendy’s note still on the long, scarred pine table where she’d left it. Only by chance was he the first to see it. Everyone else was at landscaping jobs.
The late afternoon air was chilly, the sun low in the sky.
He debated getting into his truck and heading to New York himself. But what good would he do at this point? If Wendy had changed her mind and was on her way back to Vermont, he wanted to be here when she arrived, if only to—What? How did he punish a seventeen-year-old girl who barely acknowledged him as her father?
Matt Kelleher was stacking pumpkins on a wooden trailer that Joshua had pulled out to the edge of the driveway yesterday. Wendy had intended to decorate it with dried cornstalks. Her grandparents had said she could keep the money from whatever pumpkins she sold. But Joshua had said the wrong thing, a lame joke about whether the pumpkins felt pain when they were carved, and they’d argued, and apparently they hadn’t patched things up as well as he thought they had, because first thing this morning, she’d lit out for New York.
“Thought I’d finish up these pumpkins,” Kelleher said, lifting a big one onto the trailer. “I didn’t see you get here. I was up at my trailer.”
“Did you happen to see my daughter this morning?”
“Wendy? No, not this morning. I haven’t seen her all day, in fact. I assumed she was with her grandparents.” His brow furrowed with concern. “Why? Has something happened?”
“She sneaked off to visit my sister in New York.”
“Oh, I get it. That’s not good. She mentioned wanting to see her aunt’s apartment—I guess she’s moving?”
Joshua nodded. “It’s a long story.”
Kelleher set the pumpkin on the trailer. “Wendy seems like a good kid. Levelheaded for seventeen. You worried about her?”
“My sister—Juliet—had no idea Wendy was coming.” Joshua didn’t know why he was telling this man his troubles. “Need a hand with the pumpkins?”
“No, there aren’t many left. I like the work.”
It’d only been a couple of days, but so far, Joshua hadn’t heard any negative reports from his family about Kelleher—they all seemed to like him.
Sam’s truck pulled into the driveway. Joshua filled him in on what was going on with Wendy. Sam’s kids weren’t angels, but they’d never gone traipsing off to New York without permission. They went to public school. They played soccer and field hockey, and they hated carob.
Normal kids, Joshua thought, hated carob.
His daughter loved it.
But he was damn near in tears when he climbed back into his cruiser and headed for town. He glanced at himself in his rearview mirror. He had a hint of gray in his darkish blond hair, and he looked tired and cynical, even for forty. He’d been divorced for a decade and hadn’t remarried. There was no woman currently in his life.
And his only daughter hated him.
It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and Joshua had no idea what to do about it.