Wendy smiled at her, obviously pleased with that small hint of approval. Anne Longstreet was in her early sixties, but looked younger, a fair, strongly built woman whose hard work and worries seemed to have made her stronger instead of wearing her out.
Juliet could see a muscle working in her brother’s jaw; Joshua wouldn’t want his mother or anyone else encouraging Wendy’s, to his way of thinking, weird eating habits. But he kept quiet, and that was something. He loved his daughter. No one, including Juliet, doubted it. He just hadn’t had much say in how she was raised, and now she seemed almost like a stranger to him.
He also hated tea, especially green tea.
When Wendy heaped ratatouille onto her plate, he relaxed somewhat. Juliet understood—they’d all worried that with her mother’s departure and her dog’s death, Wendy would lose her taste for food altogether. She was hard on herself by nature. An eating disorder wasn’t an unreasonable worry.
Talk shifted to autumn landscaping jobs, the apple and pumpkin crops, and Wendy grew animated, telling how she had an idea for arranging pumpkins out front to sell. Juliet didn’t contribute to the conversation but enjoyed it, and pictured herself if she’d stayed—if she came back.
When she got ready to leave, she thought about pulling Joshua aside to tell him about Bobby Tatro, but decided against it. Tatro was her problem. And he wouldn’t look for her in Vermont. With any luck, he wouldn’t look for her at all. Three weeks had to be a good sign.
But Joshua ended up pulling her aside. “You okay, Juliet?”
“Yes, fine.”
“You looked preoccupied all weekend. That business last month with the assassin—”
“It’s over,” she said. “I was never that involved.” In light of Tatro’s release, she’d all but forgotten about her encounter in August with an international assassin.
Ethan Brooker had turned up at her apartment in New York and swept her into his hunt for what turned out to be a clever, dangerous killer with a long list of targets. Ethan was almost killed. It wasn’t the first time—he was a Special Forces officer with a knack, at least lately, for attracting trouble.
“Brooker?” Joshua asked, as if he could read his sister’s mind. “What happened to him?”
“He took off once the dust settled.”
“That’s what he did back in May, too.”
Juliet tried to smile. “No, in May he took off before the dust settled. He’s lucky he didn’t get himself arrested.” Brooker had eventually come back, and he’d told the FBI and the marshals and the Secret Service what he knew about the crazy plot to extort a presidential pardon that he’d helped expose, although not by following the rules. And Brooker had never been that interested in the plot. All he’d cared about was finding out who had murdered his wife and why.
“Juliet, guys like that…should be left alone.”
“Ethan’s gone, Joshua. I have no idea where he is. I couldn’t contact him if I wanted to.”
Her brother gave her a curt nod. “Yeah. Okay. If you ever want to talk, you know where to find me.”
It was as brotherly a comment as he’d ever made, and Juliet had to force herself not to let her jaw drop. “Thanks,” she said, meaning it, “but Brooker and me—well, there is no such thing.”
For once, Joshua didn’t argue with her.
On the five-hour drive back to New York, Juliet kept telling herself that her brother—everyone—was right. For the past year, Ethan Brooker had been a man out of control, willing to do what it took to find his wife’s killers and get the answers to her murder, to satisfy himself that he’d left no stone unturned. Juliet thought back to the time she’d first met Brooker, just before they found the bodies of two thugs in the backyard of the Tennessee boyhood home of the president of the United States. It wasn’t an auspicious start to any kind of relationship.
He hadn’t turned up in her life in August and stayed at her apartment—on her futon couch—out of any romantic pull to her. He’d needed her help.
And when he didn’t anymore, he took off.
Just as well, Juliet told herself, and concentrated on her driving as traffic picked up and the New York skyline came into view.
Four hours after arriving back in New York, Juliet sat at a grime-encrusted table on the back wall of a Bronx bar that smelled of stale cigars and, somewhat less strongly, urine. She hadn’t touched the coffee she’d ordered. Its color didn’t look right, not that she was fussy. She didn’t point out to the bartender that there was no smoking anymore in New York’s bars. There was probably no peeing on the floor, either.