“Nobody,” she said. “I live a fairly loner lifestyle.”
Instead of taking that for an answer, Keane dropped a pad of paper in front of her along with a pen. “Write them down,” Keane said. “And hopefully you’re being honest, and the list is damn short because, like you, we’re also tired.”
She winced at that reminder because the two men had been on just as difficult of a return journey as she had, somewhere around thirty hours of it to stay under the radar. The good thing about all that was she regained some of her Saturday, what with the time zone change from Sydney back to San Diego. She nodded and wrote down the few friends she had, and, at the very end, she put down Maggie’s name. “She works here, of course, so she’s another one.”
There were only four names.
“No boyfriends?” Keane asked.
“No,” she said, “not currently.”
“Any past disgruntled boyfriends?” Keane asked.
She shook her head. “No, I still haven’t moved on from my husband,” she said.
“What about his family?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have anything to do with them.”
“And nobody else that’s upset with you outside of the industry that you’re always protesting against?”
She shook her head. “No, that causes me enough stress and strife. I don’t need more.”
“Right.” Nico picked up the pad of paper and marked a line through the middle of them and said to Keane, “Half for you and half for me.” And the two men set up their laptops and got to work.
“It won’t help you,” Charlotte said in exasperation. “Absolutely none of those people would have put bugs in my house.”
“Maybe not,” Nico said, “but somebody close to them might have.”
That stopped her in her tracks.
He glanced over at her and smiled. “You going to crash?” But he could see the restless energy eating away at her. She was tired, restless, and needed something to do that she could jump into. “Why don’t you make some coffee,” he suggested. “For us. I still don’t think you need any caffeine.”
Her quick frown in his direction made his grin widen.
“No, you don’t have to feed us and give us coffee,” he said, “but we do work better that way.’
She raised both hands in frustration, stormed over to the counter, and readied the coffeepot to brew, as he returned to his work.
Nico was much more concerned about this assistant of hers, this Maggie. The fact that Charlotte’s previous assistant had died in a hit-and-run was suspicious as hell. It also had opened up a vacancy. This Maggie person was conveniently on hand to fill it. Yet it could be just luck and timing, if she’d truly needed a job.
“What’s her address?” he called out. Charlotte didn’t even pretend to not know who he was talking about. She spouted it off, and he realized it was just a few blocks away. “So does she walk to work?”
“Usually, yes,” she said. “Lots of times she works from home and then comes here for meetings—or sometimes she comes here, and we do a bunch of work for the afternoon. Then she picks up stuff that she can take home again and returns there.” Charlotte walked to the table and pulled out a chair and flopped down beside him. “It’s an arrangement that works out really well for both of us.”
“I can’t imagine having an assistant in my house,” Keane said.
“I wasn’t a big fan of it at first,” she said. “It works much better this way, when she’s here for part of the time and then back at her place for the rest of the time. I still want privacy and peace just to be alone.”
“There is something very odd about having another person in your space, when it’s not a spouse or family member,” Nico said.
“Not really. Plus, it’s work,” she said with a laugh. “And I’m trying to do my own writing, and it’s hard to do that if she’s here, interrupting me every five minutes.”
“Do you need an assistant?”
“If I reduce a lot of my overseas visits and attending rallies and being a speaker,” she said, “I would need much less help.”
“And would that bother her?” Keane asked.
She looked at him in surprise. “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“Well, maybe you should though,” he said in exasperation. “What you’re saying now is that you’re contemplating removing this person’s way of making a living.”
She stared at him. “So now I have to be responsible for her life too?”
Keane shrugged. “No, but, if you had her only for six months, and she’s looking at this as more of a long-term gig, she won’t be impressed if, all of a sudden, she’s out of a job.”
Charlotte sat here with her arms crossed but her fingers moving, as if playing the piano on her arms. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she announced.
“Which is why a lot of people hire part-time or online assistance,” Keane said. “If you only need them for ten hours a week, then that’s what you pay them for.”
She glanced at him in surprise. “I hadn’t really thought about hiring anybody online before, but I can see the advantages.”
“In this case, Maggie’s personally in your face and in your home. It could be hard for her to withdraw.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t quite understand why though,” she said. “We’re just employee and employer.”
“I thought you were friends,” Keane said quietly. As she turned to look at him, Nico watched the two of them interact. Keane’s gaze was intent, as if searching for something. Nico had a lot of respect for Keane’s assessment of human behavior and personalities.
She looked completely bewildered at the concept. “Of course we’re friendly,” she said. “But I wouldn’t count her as one of my friends. She’s my assistant.”
Keane’s lips quirked. “I wonder how she would describe the way the two of you were.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She pulled out
