names.”
“Let me guess. You couldn’t find him?”
“At the time, I thought I’d just missed it somewhere.”
Ian said, through a mouthful of fries, “What do you bet she made it all up? What’d she say the guy’s name was?”
“Richard Boyle the Fourth.”
He wiped his hands on a paper napkin and pulled out his phone. “Let’s see who he really is.”
He poked at the screen for a few minutes and frowned. “Richard Boyle, fourth Earl of Shannon. British politician of the Whig party in the 1800s. Doesn’t sound like our guy.”
“She left a message on a little card that was attached to the flowers,” I said. “I’m trying to remember it.”
Ian looked up, disgusted. “You waited all this time to tell me she wrote something on a card she left for a bogus guy she claimed was her father?”
“Something about ‘the absent.’ Forgiving them, I think. I’ll bet it was Pope.”
Ian typed some more on his phone. “‘Never find fault with the absent’?”
“That’s it.”
He snorted. “That’s code, all right. ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ ‘Never find fault with the absent.’ Rebecca did something and she doesn’t want to be blamed for it.”
“And the fools rushing in would be us,” I said.
“Story of my life. I’m always rushing in to something I regret.”
I smiled. “So what doesn’t she want to be blamed for? Betraying her boss by helping you? Her way of asking Tommy Asher to forgive her?”
Ian set his phone on the carved-up table as a rambunctious group of soccer players in muddy uniforms piled into the semicircular booth opposite us. Our waitress showed up with a fistful of pitchers for them and the volume went up. I had to lean closer to Ian to hear above the din.
“Maybe she was the fool rushing in,” he said. “She knew that what she was doing was dangerous.”
“But who does she want to forgive her?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I think that should be sort of obvious. She wrote it to you, didn’t she? Bringing you back into her life after so many years.”
He sat back and watched me, letting the words sink in. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
“I wondered why she called me out of the blue.”
“My guess would be that she trusted you. Knew you’d see it through.”
The noise receded and the room blurred. Rebecca had said just that: I’d stuck by her through the scandal of the affair with Connor and hadn’t judged her—the reason she wanted to see me was to thank me after all these years.
What she’d left out was that she was about to ask me to do it all over again. This time in absentia. Good old loyal me. I didn’t know whether to mourn a friend who was killed while trying to right a wrong or to be furious with her for running away and hiding, leaving me to finish what she hadn’t.
Ian covered my hand with his. “Let’s go back to my place.”
I tried to extract it from his grip. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”
He laughed and squeezed my fingers.
“Give me a break, will you? I’d be much smoother if I was asking you to go to bed with me.” He threw some money down on the table and polished off the beer in his glass. “My eyes are crossing trying to type on my phone. I need to use a proper computer. And you and I still have work to do.”
He waited for me to slide out of the booth before leading the way through the packed restaurant. On the jukebox, Toby Keith crooned about wishing he didn’t know now what he didn’t know then. Perfect exit music. When I met Rebecca last Saturday I had no clue about the tangled web she’d woven me into before she disappeared. Part of me wished I’d never gotten involved. The rest of me wanted to know where this was going.
Ian stopped in the doorway and I stumbled against him. I heard him say, “Well, well, look who’s here.”
We stepped outside to a small patio where a wrought-iron fence corralled half a dozen empty bistro tables with chairs around them.
“Lucie, let me introduce you to Summer Lowe,” Ian said. “Summer, meet Lucie Montgomery. Didn’t think this was your kind of place, sweetheart.”
We were blocking the entrance to the restaurant, forcing people to maneuver around us as Summer Lowe, a tall, slender woman with a tawny mane of hair like a lion and patrician features, regarded Ian with the grace and favor of something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe.
Her eyes slid over me, before fixing on Ian. “You smell like beer. You’d better not show up hungover on Thursday, got that, hotshot?” She glanced around at the passersby on the street. “I can’t be seen with you.”
“Lucie’s a friend of Rebecca Natale’s.” Ian’s tone made it clear he’d ignored everything she just said— probably deliberately to infuriate her. “We both think she might have been trying to help me with my testimony before she disappeared. You’ve been watching the news, haven’t you? See you Thursday.”
He took my elbow and steered me through the open gate onto Pennsylvania Avenue.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Summer called after him.
He turned around and hollered back at her. “Thursday. You’ll find out then.”
“What’s going on and who is Summer Lowe?” I asked as we walked to my car.
“The staff director of the subcommittee I’m testifying before. She thinks this hearing is a load of crap and that I’m some disgruntled ex–fund manager with an axe to grind. My, uh, old man’s a good friend of Cameron Vaughn’s.” He reddened but shrugged like it was no big deal. “Summer thinks this is my way of settling scores with some people in New York.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“No.” He kept his voice level. “It’s not. If it was, we’d probably be having drinks with Rebecca tonight, wouldn’t we?”
I let him open my car door for me without answering. Whatever I was getting into, there was no turning back anymore.
Chapter 12
Ian lived in a town house on North Carolina Avenue not far from the Tune Inn. He directed me to an alley paralleling the street and showed me where I could wedge the Mini into a gravel bay next to the high wooden fence surrounding his postage stamp backyard. The padlock on the back gate groaned when he unlocked it and pulled it open. Inside, a pretty garden looked like someone cared for it. Off a wooden deck on the back of the house a large covered hot tub had prominence under a vine-covered pergola.
“An old classmate from Wharton owns the place,” Ian said. “She’s on sabbatical for a year, teaching at LSE. Some guy takes care of the yard for her.”
“That’s generous. What’s LSE?”
“London School of Economics.” He waved his thumbs. “Give me a plant, I’ll kill it within weeks. Two brown thumbs.”
“Looks like you and that gardener are doing okay so far.”
He opened the back door—double locked—and flipped on the lights. We were in a compact, attractive kitchen small enough that I could almost stretch out my arms and touch both walls. Mexican-tiled floor, glass-fronted maple cabinets, granite bar with bar stools for dining. Next to a cappuccino maker was the untidy exception to the neat- as-a-pin room—a large collection of bottles of booze.
“Want a drink?”
“I’m all set, thanks.”
He reached for a half-empty bottle of Laphroaig and waved it at me. “You sure?”
“Nothing hard. I’ll take some water, please.”
He opened the refrigerator and shoved aside a six-pack, reaching for a bottle of Perrier. I didn’t see much
