Lacy Zephyr?” Val said as much to remind herself as imply a question.
Lacy returned Val’s gaze with a cold, uneasy determination, her knee-length white cashmere coat, fur hat, and Prada handbag clutched between tan leather gloves giving her the look of a haute Russian princess, or maybe Santa Claus’s high-maintenance mistress. Lacy’s bright red, surgically plumped lips pressed together in a tight frown as she lifted her chin under Val’s confused stare, somehow managing to look down at Val even though she stood a couple inches shorter.
“Why are you pretending to be a nanny?”
Lacy sniffed. “I heard you were getting one, finally,” she said, her big mouth twitching on the last word into a split-second sneer.
Val didn’t know Lacy well, having only met her a couple times at Carressa Industries functions. Her husband, Aaron Zephyr, worked for the company as a financial analyst or something. Rumor had it her father had connections to organized crime, though officially he ran a lucrative construction business. Based on their two-sentence conversation so far, if she got any more acquainted with Lacy, the woman might end up with an even fatter lip. “So you’re role-playing as my nanny for shits and grins?”
“I didn’t want to announce my presence. I’d like to talk to you privately.” She craned her neck to look past Val, scanning for any witnesses. “Alone.”
“I know what ‘privately’ means.”
A crash followed by peals of laughter came from above them. Lacy flinched, and intense anxiety peeked through the cracks of her icy façade. So she didn’t want Max to know she was there. Interesting.
“He’s upstairs,” Val said. She stepped aside and held the door open. Might as well hear what secret the woman had to spill. “We can discuss your nanny credentials in the study—by that, I mean privately.”
Lacy’s gaze cut past Val again, looking for Max one last time. Finally satisfied the coast was clear, she stepped into the hallway. Val led Lacy to the study, a comfortable room lined floor to ceiling with books, almost all of which came from her husband’s vast collection. An old-school chalkboard on wheels hugged the corner, equations and strings of numbers in Max’s handwriting scrawled on the top half, stick figures and crude children’s drawings on the bottom half. Val sat on one of the soft leather couches and motioned for Lacy to join her. Lacy took a seat at the opposite end, removing a headless Barbie doll from a pillow with her thumb and forefinger like the toy was a piece of rotting flesh before sitting her butt down. Val crossed her legs and bounced her foot in the air while Lacy sat rigid, purse in her lap like a shield, still in her full winter getup.
Val smiled, enjoying Lacy’s prissy discomfort with a lived-in house a little more than a mature adult should. “So, Lacy, what can I do you for?”
After a long pause where it seemed Lacy might wordlessly get up and leave, she said, “You used to be a private investigator, right?”
“Yeah.” Everybody knew that. Her and Max’s bizarre adventures while she’d been a PI were national news. Hell, if Lacy knew through the bored-housewives-of-King-County grapevine that Val was interviewing nannies today, then she knew all about Val’s past.
“Does that mean you don’t do it now?”
Ah, so that was her angle. “Do you want me to look into something for you?”
“Not if you don’t do it anymore.”
“I’m…considering going back to work. What is it you want investigated?”
Lacy eyed the exit, considering her last chance to bail before the point of no return. When she looked at Val again, the cold determination had returned, along with the anxiety. “I think my husband’s having an affair.”
That was it? Val tried to hide her disappointment at being presented with such a mundane problem. Of course he was having an affair. All those moneyed types did—except Max. He loved her—and his balls—too much for that.
Flexing her old PI muscles a bit, Val asked the first of her standard set of questions. “Have you asked him if he’s having an affair?”
Lacy gasped. “Of course not!”
“Maybe you should ask him.”
“I can’t just ask him. He won’t be honest.”
The standard response. Val could point out a lack of honesty and communication in their relationship was likely the source of their marital problems, but that wasn’t how one landed a client. Lacy didn’t seem like the introspective type anyway.
“What makes you think he’s having an affair?”
Lacy forced the words out as if they caused her physical pain. “For the last three months he’s been coming home late—much later than normal anyway—reeking of booze and cigars, and women’s perfume. He says the senior guys at the company have started going to this exclusive smoking lounge after hours for client meetings, but…he’s acting differently. He’s distant.” Her eyes misted over. “He barely looks at me anymore.”
Damn, now Val felt a little shitty for turning Lacy’s screws earlier. If her husband was in love with another woman and drifting away, Val would’ve been a bitch to be around, too.
Lacy sniffed and pushed back her tears. “If he’s having an affair, I want pictures. I need leverage. I’ll take every penny that no-good son of a bitch bastard has.” Spittle flew from her mouth as she hissed,“We’ll see how horny he is when I threaten to send his mother pictures of her perfect son getting his pipes cleaned by a ten-dollar whore. He thinks he can fuck around on me? Me? My father built half this city—”
“I get it, Lacy.” Val leaned back a hair. Lacy’s vindictiveness could also have been a small speed bump in their happy marriage. “Why don’t you ask your father to set Aaron straight? I hear he can be persuasive.”
“I thought about it, but Daddy would…overreact.”
Made sense. Wanting someone punished for their transgressions didn’t mean you wanted them dead. There was one thing, though, that Val didn’t understand. “Why are you coming to me with this? There are plenty of active PIs who’d be happy to look into your husband’s dirty laundry.”
“I thought, maybe…” She bit her lip. “These ‘work meetings’ Aaron’s always having…I thought maybe your husband went, too.”
Val lifted an eyebrow. “He’s never mentioned it—”
“But he knows about them. He must.”
“So you want me to pump Max for info.”
“No private investigator I hired off the street would have that kind of insider access. It’s a good place to start, isn’t it?”
She was right about that. But if Max knew about these backroom meetings, he would’ve told Val about it. Probably. In any case, he never came home late reeking of booze and women’s perfume…though he was smart enough to get the stink off him before returning to her—oh, come on. She was letting paranoia get to her again. Maybe this case wasn’t such a good idea after all. Secret clubs, free-flowing booze and sex, rich men behaving badly…sounded too much like the Blue Serpent cult for her taste. Finally, her life was mostly stable, mostly normal. Mostly happy. Except for the deep desire for vengeance that still burned inside her like a decades-old subterranean fire. But she’d be damned if she let it consume her again.
“I’ll pay you, of course.” Lacy pulled a manila envelope from her purse and held it out to Val. “Two thousand dollars, cash. I don’t know what you charge for expenses, but I can get you more if you need it. It’s also for your discretion, to keep this matter between us.”
Val almost laughed. Being married to Max, the last thing in the world she needed was money. If she were to take on another case, it’d either be for a noble cause or to kill her boredom. Paranoia about another Blue Serpent nightmare aside, a case of a philandering husband seemed simple enough. Low-threat. An easy chance to learn how to be a PI again, so she could work up to investigating her mother’s future murder.
“Keep your money.” Taking a page from her husband’s playbook, she said, “I’ll take a favor instead.”
Lacy’s brow knotted as she withdrew the money. “What kind of favor?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when I think of something.” A little deal-with-the-Devil-ish, though Lacy could take comfort there were a lot worse people than Val to be indebted to.
“Okay,” Lacy said, though her brow stayed knotted. “But the terms still stand. I expect discretion. My reputation—”
“Sure, Lacy. God forbid anyone should know you’re a human being.”
Lacy sniffed again like she smelled a fart, then stood. She sent a furtive glance to the ceiling. “Is there a back way out of here?”
“No, but I’ll make sure the coast is clear.”
Val walked ahead of Lacy to the stairs. Muffled stomps from above told her Max still kept the twins occupied, or maybe the other way around. Either way, Lacy wouldn’t have to face the shame of locking eyes with someone who knew she’d stooped to hiring a PI to spy on her husband’s roaming dick.
Lacy hurried after Val to the front door. She stopped in the threshold and addressed Val a final time. “When will I hear from you again?”
“When I find something worth telling you—good or bad.” Could be Lacy’s husband told her the truth and wasn’t fucking around. Unlikely, but possible.
Lacy’s lips puckered a hair—she didn’t hold out much hope for good news, either—but she nodded and left without looking back.
“That was quick,” Val heard Max say behind her. She turned and saw him pulling on a V-neck sweater at the foot of the stairs, hair still wet from a shower. “Good nanny or bad nanny?”
“Neither, actually. Where are the kids?”
“Upstairs reading to each other. Pretty impressive you taught them how to read. Our nanny will have to be good to match that.”
“I didn’t teach them how to read.”
“Oh.” He frowned, though it was more of a contemplative frown than a disturbed frown. The oddness of their children didn’t faze him nearly as much as it did Val. He was confident if they provided their kids with a safe, loving environment—something he never had growing up—it would be good enough to keep evil at bay. To say she didn’t share his confidence would be an understatement.
“If that wasn’t a nanny, who was it?”
Val smirked. “Destiny.”