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  Gabe leaned back. “He said Jack talked to him?”

  Nell nodded.

  “Maybe Jack’s upset about Suze working and thinks if you quit, Suze’ll quit.”

  “Jack doesn’t know Suze is working. She tells him she’s going out with me.”

  Gabe was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Thanks for not quitting.”

  “Quitting?” Nell said. “I’m just getting started. I’m tearing apart the basement next.”

  “Oh, good,” Gabe said. “We don’t have enough upheaval around here.”

  But for the first time, he didn’t sound exasperated, and Nell went back to work feeling positively cheerful.

  * * *

  Gabe’s life was not as tidy.

  For one thing, he couldn’t find Lynnie or any evidence of where she’d gone or who had broken into her apartment, and he considered that a personal affront and a professional failure. Riley’s canvassing of the back records of jewelers and pawnshops wasn’t getting anywhere, either. “The damn diamonds could have been pawned anywhere,” Riley told him. “In fact, if the guy who had them had any brains at all, he’d have gone out of town. Give it up.” But Gabe couldn’t, even though he had other problems more pressing.

  Budge Jenkins, for example, called regularly, miserable about Margie taking over The Cup. “It’s not safe for her,” he said, the only man Gabe had ever known who could fidget over the phone. “She could get robbed.” Gabe had said, “Budge, it’s a teashop not a 7-Eleven. She’s closed by six every night,” but Budge continued to fuss and nag until Gabe thought seriously about kicking Margie out just to get Budge off his back.

  Then there was Riley. “Suze is a menace,” he told Gabe after the first decoy with Suze. “She walks in a bar and everybody comes on to her.” “Considering her line of work for us, that’s a plus,” Gabe said. Suze herself was a complete professional, and Gabe saw her in the office most days, either helping Margie close the register at six or aiding and abetting Nell in her ceaseless efforts to transform an agency that didn’t need it. He’d decided to let Nell have her way on the rest of the place as long as she left his office alone, a decision reinforced by her matter-of-fact refusal of Trevor’s offer of a job and a pay raise, but in the second week in November, she made her move.

  “Your furniture needs work,” she told him, facing him down across his desk, blinding him with her red hair and an orange sweater with a bright blue stripe across the bust. “It’ll only be for a day, two at most.”

  “Stay out of my office,” Gabe said, trying not to look at the stripe. “You can have the bathroom and the outer office, but this is mine. I know it’s out of date, but the fifties are due to come back any day now.”

  “This stuff isn’t fifties, it’s forties. And it’s already back. I don’t think you should get rid of it, I think you should have it cleaned and repaired.” Nell sat down, aiming the stripe right at him. “But you’ve got to clean the leather and the wood on the furniture, and some of it’s wobbling and needs to be reglued.” She looked at the ceiling. “There’s even one with a broken arm.”

  “I know,” Gabe said. “You broke it.”

  “And we need to replace the blinds in here—” Nell said brightly.

  “Damn it, Nell,” he said, “could you please leave something here alone?”

  “—but it wouldn’t be a change at all.” She smiled at him. “It’d be a restoration.” She looked cheerful but tense, and he realized she was braced for him to yell.

  He’d been yelling a lot lately. He took a deep breath and waited until he was calmer. “All right,” he said finally. “If it doesn’t cost too much, and you’re not changing anything, go ahead with the furniture.”

  “And the blinds.”

  “And the blinds.”

  “And the rug.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Eleanor.”

  “Thank you,” Nell said and headed back to her desk to start phoning repair people.

  “But you can’t change anything,” Gabe called after her, and she stuck her fiery head back in the door to say, “I’m not changing anything around here. I’m improving it.” Then she disappeared again.

  “Why is that not reassuring?” Gabe said to the empty space that vibrated with her afterimage.

  When he came in a week later, all his office furniture was gone.

  “Nell!”

  “The restorer came,” she said, materializing in his doorway in a violet sweater this time. There was a red heart knitted into the fabric above her left breast. Why doesn’t she just wear bull’s-eyes? he thought. “He said the wood just needed to be cleaned and waxed,” Nell went on, chipper as hell, “but that restoring the leather upholstery and reinforcing the loose joints might take longer.”

  “Restoring the leather? That sounds expensive.”

  “It is, a little, but not like buying new,” Nell said brightly. “And think of what a difference it’ll make.”

  “Nell—”

  “And when that’s done we have to talk about the couch in the reception room—”

  “The couch is fine.”

  “—because it isn’t period, it’s just ugly and falling apart. We—”

  “Nell,” Gabe said, and something in his voice must have gotten to her because she stopped and looked at him warily, a redheaded, wide-eyed Bambi in purple cotton knit. “Stop it,” he said and felt guilty for saying it.

  “A new couch and I’m done,” Nell said. “I swear. That and the business cards and the window, but the new couch first. Somebody’s going to fall through the old one and then where will we be? Sued, that’s where. Really, I know what I’m doing.”

  “I never doubted it,” Gabe said. “I’m just not sure you know what we’re doing. That would be running a detective agency. We do not have the kind of clientele that notices the decor. By the time they get to us, we could be meeting in Dumpsters and they wouldn’t care as long as we got the answers they needed.”

  “The couch will be the end of it,” Nell said and crossed her heart, both of them. “I swear.”

  “No couch,” Gabe said. “I mean it.”

  Nell sighed and nodded and went back to her desk as the phone rang and then stuck her head back in. “Riley’s on one and your phone is over there on the floor by the window.”

  “How many days?”

  “Larry said tomorrow, Wednesday tops.”

  “Who’s Larry?” Gabe said as he picked up the phone.

  “I don’t know,” Riley said on the other end. “Who’s Larry?”

  “The guy doing the furniture,” Nell said. “You’d like him. He liked your stuff.”

  She disappeared back through the door as Riley said, “You did not send me out to find any Larry.”

  “Forget Larry,” Gabe said. “Where are you?”

  “Cincinnati,” Riley said. “The pawnshops here also have no record of the diamonds in 1978. And I’m tired of this. Trevor said he buried them with Helena, and I’ve decided to believe him.”

  “Don’t stop until you’ve hit every damn shop in the city,” Gabe said.

  Riley sighed his exasperation into the phone. “So who’s Larry?”

  “Some guy Nell has redoing the furniture in my office.”

  “You know, you and Nell have a lot in common,” Riley said. “Neither one of you ever gives up.”

  “Maybe I’ll send Nell after Lynnie.”

  “She got her the first time,” Riley said. “I’d give her a shot at it.”

  Nell knocked on the door and came in again. “Client to see you,” she said and then stood back to let Becca Johnson in.

  Becca looked miserable, which was par for her; she hired the McKennas to check the background of every man who came along that she thought might be The One, but unfortunately Becca’s intelligence and common sense were equaled only by her lousy taste in men. Now as she stood in front of him, her breath coming in shudders as she bit her lip, Gabe knew Becca had picked another winner.

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