“That’s got to be hard on your dad.”
“He wants me to be the face of the future, so MacCorp clients will know the business will continue under the same style of management. I can’t do that. I see too many things that need to be changed. He has to retire first before I step in. If he’s there, clients will continue to call him, not me.”
“You don’t have time anyway. That firm of yours keeps you busy twenty-four-seven and out of the country more than you’re in it. I’ve met your entire family and attended get-togethers in Virginia, Colorado, California, Italy, and the Scottish Highlands, and I’ve seen the way your family treats you. Your parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—”
“See me as a fifteen-year-old. You don’t have to say it,” JC said.
“I was going to say a college kid. Look, if you don’t like the way the company’s run, then change it from the inside instead of fighting against it on the outside.”
“I don’t want to fight at all, inside or out. I don’t want to breed Thoroughbreds, and I don’t want to grow grapes. I’m focusing on international law and human rights.”
“Save the world and make your first billion.”
JC laughed. “In that order, although I think I’ll make the billion first. Saving the world is complicated.”
George flipped on the hall lights and glanced around before yelling, “Ensley, we’re here. Let’s go to dinner. JC is with me.”
JC entered the living room, waiting to hear Ensley yell, “I’m coming.” There was no reply, but something was alarming in the room—an earthy smell that belonged in the Scottish Highlands, not inside a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His ears perked up when George called out again, “Ensley!”
The hairs on the back of JC’s neck stood on end. He scanned the room as he instinctively reached for the Glock snugged against the small of his back. Then he let his hand drop. The hairs on his neck weren’t standing up because of danger to him.
They were standing up because of danger to Ensley.
He walked toward the back of the house and into the kitchen. “She’s been here,” he yelled to George. “Her computer bag and purse are on the counter, along with an open bottle of Montgomery Winery chardonnay.”
George walked in behind him. “What’s that weird smell?”
A sense of dread exploded in JC’s gut, but his training kicked in. He kept his voice neutral, his face relaxed. “Smells like peat.”
“Decayed matter?”
“Have you ever smelled it here before?”
“Never.”
The smell of peat and a missing woman meant only one thing. But why this month? There was too much at stake right now for another brooch to show up. “Phone Ensley,” JC said.
George made the call, and a phone rang in the kitchen. JC pushed the computer bag aside, and they both stared at the ringing phone like it was a tarantula crawling toward them across the granite countertop.
George disconnected the call. “Where is she?”
“Hell if I know,” JC said. And he didn’t, but his best guess was another century.
“I’m not surprised she left her purse behind, but she never goes anywhere without her phone. Maybe she’s in the bathroom and can’t hear us.” George walked down the hall toward the staircase and yelled again, “Ensley!”
JC glanced up at the ceiling as if he could see through the drywall to the room above. “I don’t hear anything up there.” The smell of peat and missing women went together like yin and yang, tea and crumpets, salt and pepper, shoes and socks. But there could be other explanations.
Yeah. Right. Like what?
“When was the last time you talked to her?” JC asked.
George scrolled through his messages. “She sent a text ninety minutes ago. She was at the train station waiting for an Uber.”
If Ensley disappeared an hour or so ago, would the peat smell still be as strong as it was now? Based on stories he’d heard, the stink dissipated slowly. If she disappeared with a brooch, it happened within the last thirty to forty-five minutes.
“So she disappeared while we were at the Porcellian Club,” JC said.
“I don’t think she disappeared,” George said. “I think she’s just missing right now.”
If he and George had arrived sooner, they could have stopped Ensley from whirling away in the fog. If Ensley had a brooch, where’d it come from? Her mother’s family was from North Dakota, and her dad’s family was from Pennsylvania. But Penny Malone-O’Grady’s experience proved that the brooches didn’t have to come down through a Scottish family.
“Maybe she’s downstairs in the exercise room, getting a couple of miles in on the treadmill,” JC said.
“I doubt it, but it’s possible,” George said. “I’ll go downstairs and check. You go upstairs.”
“Yell if you find her.” JC raced up the stairs two at a time. He gained the landing and steadied himself a moment. “Damn.” The peat smell was thicker up here, and there was also a thin layer of misty air. He rubbed his fingers along the stair railing, and the dampness glistened on his fingertips. His nose twitched when he sniffed his fingers—peat.
He glanced inside the room George used when he lived in the house years ago. A carry-on suitcase was sitting on the floor right inside the door. If that was George’s bag, it was apparent he hadn’t gone inside the room since there were no footprints in the vacuum cleaner tracks in the wall-to-wall carpet.
JC chuckled, remembering how Ensley used to leap across her room so she wouldn’t leave footprints in the freshly vacuumed carpet. She must have outgrown the habit because the third bedroom carpet had footprints crisscrossing each other. The peat smell was stronger in here. This room was ground zero.
An open suitcase sat on the luggage rack with a pile of balled-up clothes on top. He entered the bathroom and found the air still thick with steam
