The Last Invitation (12)
She walked toward him, noting how his eyes grew larger the closer she got. “Are you a friend of Baines?”
Present tense. It would take weeks, maybe months, to think of him in the past tense.
“Uh . . . no. I’m a reporter.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” The tenuous hold on control snapped inside Gabby. She couldn’t think of a worse time for some big business angle to a story. “Why are you here?”
“Rob Greene.” He held out his hand.
She stared at it. “Answer the question.”
The last minutes in Baines’s office circled in her head. Not suicide. Maybe this guy had found out and was doing an article. That would be more than Kennedy could handle right now.
“This is the seventh funeral this year,” he said.
Not the answer she expected at all. “What are you talking about?”
“Powerful, very wealthy men in the DC metro area. All killed in strange accidents. The most recent being Alexander Carlisle’s supposed accidental shooting. The one before that, a suicide.”
Gabby’s head started spinning. She could hear Kennedy calling for her from about fifty feet away and caught a brief glimpse of Liam’s concerned expression.
The reporter held out a card. “I didn’t mean to bother you. Not today. This is the wrong time for this talk.”
“No kidding.” But she looked at the card. Just a name and a phone number. No organization or any media identifier that she could see.
“There have been too many deaths, Mrs. Fielding. Too many for this to be a coincidence. It’s a pattern.”
Kennedy called out again. Gabby was torn, fascinated by the nonsense this guy was spewing but desperate to be there for Liam and Kennedy.
She should walk away. Rip up the card and go . . . but she knew Baines didn’t kill himself. Something else happened in that room. That was her only excuse for prodding for more information. “What exactly are you saying?”
He nodded at the card in her hand. “Call me when you’re ready to hear the truth about how Baines really died.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Foundation
The Foundation didn’t hold many emergency meetings. This week they did.
They couldn’t exactly use phones or email to communicate. The Foundation chat group, to anyone outside looking in, read as nothing more than a scheduling tool. But they had a secret code. When someone asked about trying to arrange a book club, they all knew to access their burner phones and prepare to meet.
Little more than a week had passed since their usual session.
After a bit of shuffling, everyone took a seat. Quiet fell over the room as they all looked up, bright-eyed and ready to take on a new challenge. Metaphorically ready for battle while sitting in business suits and sipping coffee.
“I apologize for the emergency session.”
The mumbling and shifting didn’t break informal protocol or any stated rule, but a pulsing feeling of dread descended on the room, and that wasn’t normal.
“We have a problem.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jessa
With the funeral over and behind her, Jessa wanted to concentrate on an impromptu ladies’ night of pizza and wine at home, but Gabby’s outrage still rang in her head. Jessa had attended as part of an obligation. To be nice.
That would teach her.
Jessa didn’t want to admit it, but seeing Gabby had been unsettling. That haughty tone of hers, the voice reeking of disappointment. The biting verbal strikes. Jessa didn’t need any of it. She worked for condescending assholes and had enough crap unloaded on her every day, thanks.
Gabby’s and Jessa’s lives had diverged so dramatically after law school. Gabby, already engaged during second year, chose marriage over a legal career. A man instead of using that great big brain of hers. Those choices, shortsighted and lame to Jessa—a waste of ability and promise—filled her with a silent sense of superiority. Those feelings only grew when she found out Gabby’s marriage was over. Now what? Would Gabby run back to a career track she’d abandoned or relax into the role of rich, pissed-off former wife?
Something about Gabby brought out the worst in Jessa. Neither of them had been graced with an easy upbringing. Both raised without much money or family support. They’d discussed that when they met. Gabby never knew her dad, and her mom died of breast cancer during junior high, leaving her to be raised by a concerned aunt and uncle.
Jessa resented that they were so alike in life history and so different in their goals. She shouldn’t care. Gabby’s life really wasn’t her business, but she did care. It was as if she held up an invisible measuring stick and judged her accomplishments against Gabby’s.
Jessa wanted to be a better person. To not get trapped in the same patterns she’d been using for years—deny, demean, and deflect. But seeing Gabby brought the insecurities and doubts back. One word from Gabby made Jessa forget about her promises to herself and about her progress.
She wasn’t the same person she’d been in law school. She’d made better choices. Concentrated and worked to the point of straining. She shoved thoughts of Gabby out of her head. The woman didn’t know her these days and should just shut up.
Jessa leaned back in the corner of the sectional sofa, letting the cushions and piles of pillows basically swallow her. Wine in hand and her mood starting to lighten, she glanced over at Faith. She sprawled a few feet away, dressed in floral lounge pants and a T-shirt. Totally relaxed, a mood that Jessa never quite accomplished but Faith worked very hard to achieve outside of the office.