“Hi, Flick!” I said, hoping my tone would signal my parents that there’d been a shift in our relationship.
“Hello,” Flick said, his eyes triangulating the table. “Sorry to interrupt. I saw your car out front and . . .” He broke off.
As close as I had been to Flick as a young girl, my parents had been even closer—my dad, in particular. He’d gone on many a weekend fishing trip with his father and Flick, and Flick was a regular at our holiday table because his own family was scattered throughout the country. But in large part because of me and how betrayed I’d felt when Flick refused to see granddad’s death for what I thought it was, my parents had stopped talking to him. If there was one thing you could say about my parents, it’s that they were firmly on my team, for better or worse. (One needed look no further than their shirts as evidence of that.)
“Riley did a hell of a job this week at the Times,” Flick said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his cotton Dockers.
My mom smiled automatically. My dad looked at Flick, then looked to me.
I wanted to show them that it was okay, that my position on Flick was changing. “Thanks.” I smiled at him. “You helped me a ton.”
He shrugged. “Eh, you didn’t need much help.”
An awkward silence settled around us, made more awkward because there was one empty chair at our table. I saw Flick’s eyes dart to the chair. Dad saw it too. He looked at me again and I gave him a small nod.
“Would you like to join us?” My dad’s voice sounded tight but sincere.
I thought I saw some color creep into Flick’s cheeks, but he shook his head. “I was just hoping I could talk to Riley for a minute?”
Surprised, I got up and followed Flick toward the front of the restaurant, where he pushed open the door and walked to a spot far enough away from anyone who might be listening in on our conversation.
“What’s up?”
“Listen,” he said. The tentative, shifty-eyed manner was gone now. He looked directly into my eyes. “Something has come up. Something about Albert’s case . . .”
Albert’s case. My stomach got that swoopy feeling. “What is it?”
“I’m going to be up in DC for a few days looking into some things that Albert was working on when he died.”
“What things?”
He shook his head. “I can’t say. But I wanted you to know that if I—if I’m not able to get back here, there’s a file at the Times. Kay knows where it is. I’ve given her instructions to give it to you and Holman if anything should happen to me.”
“What’re you talking about? What do you mean if anything should happen to you?” This conversation was scaring me.
“It’s just a precaution, I’m sure everything will be fine. But I just wanted you to know . . . it’s just important to me that you know I’ve been working all this time to find out what really happened to Albert. I didn’t tell you before because . . . well, because it felt like I was betraying him. He wanted me to keep you safe, and I thought if you knew what I’m looking into you might—might—”
“Might what?”
“Not be.” His mouth flattened into a thin line.
“I don’t understand, Flick, you have to give me more. You can’t just come here and—”
“As soon as I have something concrete, I will, okay?”
It was not okay. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know exactly what “things” he was looking into, and I wanted to know for sure if he thought my granddad killed himself or was killed by someone else, and I wanted to know that if it was the latter, who did he think was responsible? I wanted to know why he wasn’t working with the police on this, and what was so important up in DC, and why he had a secret file hidden at the Times, and why I couldn’t see it right away.
But I could tell by the steely look in his eyes that he wasn’t going to answer any of those questions.
“Okay,” I agreed.
He looked at me a moment longer. “Thank your parents for the invitation to sit down,” he said. He spoke with more than a twinge of softness in his voice. “And tell them those T-shirts are ridiculous.”
I laughed and then, out of pure instinct, I put my arms around him and gave him a hug. “Be careful.”
It took a moment, but eventually he hugged me back. And then a moment later, without a word Flick turned and walked back toward the parking lot, leaving me as he so often had, with more questions than answers.
CHAPTER 44
The last place you want to be when you’ve just realized your relationship has no future is at a friend’s wedding, but that’s exactly where I found myself a little less than a week later.
When the back patio doors opened and Tabitha St. Simon appeared under the dramatic antler arch, she looked positively radiant. She wore a long ivory dress made from hand-stitched lace with a long train that took two bridesmaids to lift down the stone steps. She looked like a porcelain doll with her big brown eyes and impossibly long lashes, light pink cheeks, and dark hair swept up in a loose chignon. True, she had a rather bulky cast on her left ankle and she had to walk down the aisle using crutches, but she made it work. And by the time the reception came around she had changed into a shorter dress and broken out her wheeled knee-walker, and she was cutting it up on the dance floor without a care in the world.
While it was great to see Thad and Tabitha so happy—especially after everything they’d
