“He’ll be back,” I told her.
She put her head on her paws and ignored me.
“You used to like me best. What happened?”
“He plays with her,” Rachel said.
“I play with her. Just not when I’m here.” I pulled out the notepad where I’d written down everything I knew about Nick Costanza, which wasn’t much. “I’m going to need your help with some research, if you don’t mind.”
“What kind of research?”
“The boring kind. Property records. Business licenses. That sort of thing.”
Rachel made a face. “What are you going to do?”
“Frivolous research. Social media, Google, that sort of thing. See if I can figure out what Nick eats for breakfast and whether Megan is in his photos.”
“If she were, I’m sure Jacquie would have noticed,” Rachel said, and turned back to her computer. “Where would you like me to start?”
I wanted her to start with the Body Shop, and told her so. She started tap-tapping away, and I opened my laptop and pulled up Facebook. Nick had an account, but he hadn’t posted anything to it in a year or more. The same went for Instagram. If he were on TikTok I couldn’t find him, and he didn’t seem to have a Twitter/X or a BlueSky account. There were a couple of pictures of Jacquie in the mix, from before she met David, but there was no Megan. Not in his photos, nor on his list of online friends.
Next, I looked up the Body Shop itself. It had a website, with opening hours and contact information and everything, but there was no employee roster. I had hoped for a nice picture of Megan, with perhaps a handy last name that I could use to do further searching, but no such luck.
“I suppose I could call,” I said idly, and Rachel lifted her head.
“What’s that?”
“I’m looking for Megan’s last name. I suppose I could just call over there and ask. Pretend I’m from the Social Security Registration or something, and make up some reason why I need it.”
“I wouldn’t,” Rachel said. “I don’t think pretending you’re a federal employee is legal.”
Maybe not, now that she mentioned it. I sighed.
“A guy named Salvatore Gomorra owns the Body Shop,” Rachel added. “It’s licensed, bonded, and insured, and has been in business for almost two decades.”
“Can you spell his last name?”
She did, and I wrote it down and stared at it. It didn’t mean anything to me, and I couldn’t think of any reason why it would.
My phone buzzed. I picked it up, expecting it to be Zachary letting me know he had arrived in the Taco Bell parking lot, but it wasn’t.
Back from book tour, the text announced. Dinner tomorrow? I promise not to talk about Italy the whole time.
I stared at the screen, feeling an uncomfortable twist in my stomach.
“What?” Rached wanted to know.
I shot her a distracted glance. “Greg is back in Nashville.”
Greg Newsome was Harold’s younger brother, Heidi’s brother-in-law, and a bestselling fiction writer. We had met over Harold’s dead body, more or less, and had had dinner once or twice before he’d had to leave for Italy. I’d even met his mother once—indecently fast work, if you ask me—and he had been texting sporadically while he was away. Pictures of Italian landscapes and Italian food and Italian ruins. Now he was back, it seemed, and I was going to have to deal with him.
And I don’t mean that the way it sounds. He’s good company: handsome, successful, and interested in me. Everything I should want in a man, theoretically.
I just wasn’t sure I wanted any man, or at least I wasn’t sure I wanted this one.
It was no fault of Greg’s. He was pretty close to perfect. Successful. Solvent. No criminal record, no secret families, no history of embezzlement or extramarital affairs. A few years older than me, and wealthy enough to support me in the style to which I had become accustomed. (I didn’t grow up rich, but eighteen years of being married to David had gotten me used to a certain standard of living.)
Greg didn’t even seem to mind my PI license, unlike certain people I’m not going to mention. In fact, he enjoyed picking my brain about the weird things that had happened to me, perhaps because they fed into what he himself did.
