“No,” said Nadine. “At least not past the first draft.”
This time, they started laughing and didn’t stop until they were wheezing. Wes thought Dot might have liked that as well.
Seventeen
Nadine read the email from Daniel one more time.Take the vacation, he’d written.We can cover your role with absolutely no problem. Get the rest you need.
Although it was reasonable to assume Daniel meant no more than he wrote, Nadine couldn’t shake the suspicion that he thought she was expendable. Well, there was nothing stopping her from getting to the bottom of Dot’s story now. She would get this exclusive, and she would show Daniel what she could do.
Although Nadine felt enormously insensitive, as if she’d barely waited for the body to cool, Brent told her the sooner they got to work, the better.
“You saw the boxes,” he’d said in a defeated tone when she’d called to confirm details of their invasion of Dot’s home. “I want to help my aunt, but you’ll have to do what you can in three weeks.”
So the next morning, a holiday Monday at nine o’clock, Nadine met Wes at Dot’s front door, each clutching a coffee. They observed their matching sustainable mugs without comment.
“Four two six seven,” repeated Nadine, looking between her phoneand where Wes stood at the keypad near the door. “That’s what Brent sent to me.”
“I told you it’s not working,” said Wes in an overly calm tone that screamed frustration.
“Try it again.”
“I’ve tried it three times.”
“Did you press pound?”
He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Why would I push pound? So I can get to the customer service agent? It’s a door, not an automated complaint line.”
She shoved her phone in his face. “Brent’s email says four two six seven.Four two six seven.”
He grabbed the phone and scanned the message. Never had a man tapped in numbers more smugly than Wes at that moment. “Four. Two.Five. Seven.” The lock whirred, and he turned to her with an expressively neutral face before taking a long sip of coffee.
“Oh.” Nadine squinted. “Huh. I guess it is a five. How do you like that?”
Wes didn’t dignify this with a response.
Stepping into the foyer with Sir Latimer and Janice the wonky-eyed cheetah, uncertainty engulfed Nadine, and she almost left, overcome with a sense that she didn’t belong in this huge empty house.
Before she could act, cats materialized from all directions. Erma wove around Wes’s legs, purring loudly between head butts, while Octavia meowed piteously from around the corner.
“Someone has a fan,” said Nadine. She could have sworn Erma was the one who avoided people, but she seemed happy enough with Wes. The cat skittered away when Nadine reached down for pets. She didn’t like that. She was a cat person. Cats loved her. She’d be damned if she’d put up with the cat liking Wes better.
Wes eyed the cats. “They want food,” he said. “Not friendship.” He headed toward the kitchen, and the parade of four cats followed him like the Pied Piper.
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Nadine said after him. She lingered in the hall. There was a lot of work to be done in the attic, but if she was living here for three weeks (with Wes!), then she needed to check out the rest of the house to make sure some distant cousin wasn’t camping out unnoticed in one of the wings. Well, no research was ever wasted, and Brent had given them free rein apart from Dot’s bedroom.
She was also nosy as hell.
“Are you coming, or do I have to feed these beasts by myself?” called Wes.
Nadine walked to the kitchen—slowly, to aggravate him, because although they were friendlier, old habits die hard—and found Wes in the middle of a group of incensed felines.
“I can’t find the food, but they’re circling,” he said. “It’s only a matter of minutes until they start chewing on my ankles, the land sharks.”
“Did you check the cabinets?”
“Of course I checked the cabinets. Do you think I’ve been standing here trying to locate the food through clairvoyance?”
Trying to avoid tripping over the cats, the two of them ransacked the kitchen, looking for a bag of kibble or cans of wet food. Nothing.
