“Is that the reason you left the Army?” My voice was hoarse.

  “For the most part, and Jess is why I’ve been bobbing around the world ever since. He didn’t have any family, but he had money. He invented some sort of app he sold for a boatload of money when he was in college.”

  “And he signed up for the Army after that?”

  “He said he wanted to find a place where he belonged, and the Army was that for him. It was the closest thing to family he had. When he died, he had a good amount of cash socked away. He was a simple guy. You wouldn’t know he was loaded from looking at him. He left it all to me. I thought I would travel around and enjoy life for the both of us, and I did. Or I thought I did, until the police contacted me and told me about Aunt Samantha.” He paused. “It happened again. Someone I’d cared about had died and left me everything.” He met my gaze.

  “Can I ask you something?” I tried to sit up.

  He gently pushed me back down. “Yes, but be careful. You’re still woozy.”

  “Why did you return to Herrington before Samantha died?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I was homesick. My aunt wrote me every month saying I had a job here if I wanted it, and I finally decided to come back. I never thought I would arrive too late to see her. I was going to surprise her. I wish I had gone to the agency instead of her house. Then, maybe, I could have stopped her before she went on that drive.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said and realized I had to either accept his answer or go on considering him a suspect in Samantha’s murder. There was no way to prove he was telling the truth about any of it. I had to trust him like a partner, as I had trusted Samantha.

  “I’m not going to run away this time,” Tate said. “I might not have been able to save Jess or my aunt, but I will find out who killed her.”

  I sat up and held my hand out to him. He stared at it for a long moment, and for some strange reason, my brain went back to that night when Austin had told me about Samantha’s accident, and I’d fallen to the floor. Austin held his hand out to me then, and I was sure I had the same expression on my face Tate that wore now—a mix of suspicion and maybe a little fear about what taking that hand would mean.

  But as I had taken Austin’s hand, Tate reached over and took mine.

  “We are going to do this together,” I said.

  He squeezed my hand. “Together.” He let go of my hand.

  My hand tingled until I fell back asleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I was discharged from the hospital in the middle of the next day, and Tate somehow convinced my mother that he would be the one to pick me up and take me home. She must really like him to let him do that.

  “Careful!” I cried as Tate took a turn down the hospital hall too sharply while pushing me in a wheelchair.

  “Sorry,” he said with a laugh.

  Even though he’d almost run me into the wall, I was glad to hear that his good humor was back. I much preferred carefree Tate to sad Tate.

  “I don’t know why I need a wheelchair anyway,” I complained. “I can walk fine.”

  “Doctor’s orders,” he chimed.

  I ground my teeth and held my breath until we made it to the exit. He stopped the wheelchair, and I hopped out before he could pop a wheelie or pull another move that would likely have me back in the hospital again.

  “Your convertible is waiting,” Tate said.

  I sighed.

  “I really like it. I think I’ll buy one when I settle down here.”

  “You can’t be serious. That’s not the kind of car someone can drive in the New York winter when there’s ten feet of snow on the ground.”

  He grinned. “I could do it. I’m an excellent driver.”

  From what I’d learned of Tate over the last week, he thought he was excellent at everything.

  “Just take me home,” I said.

  He opened the car door for me.

  When I got home, I went straight up to my apartment to shower and change, and when I came back downstairs, I found Tate, Nat, and Matt Billows sitting in Nat’s office.

  I looked around the room. “What’s going on?” I addressed my next question at Billows. “What are you doing here?”

  “My ex-wife told me you came to see her at the resort. I wanted to talk to you.” He scowled at me.

  I should have known that Portia couldn’t keep it a secret that Tate and I had visited Lake Waters.

  “We all want the same thing here. We want to know what happened to Samantha,” Billows continued.

  “Were you dating her?”

  Nat gasped. “I don’t think I should stay to listen to this. Since I won’t be working for the agency any longer.”

  Billows frowned.

  “I got another job,” Nat said. “I know it’s bad timing for Darby, but is there ever a good time for this sort of thing?”

  “You can stay, Nat. You are still a member of the agency until next week.”

  She nodded and sat back at her desk.

  “Portia said you were dating her.”

  “That’s Portia’s jealous talk. I wasn’t dating Samantha. I was trying to convince her to come on as head of security at Lake Waters. She was playing very hard to get. I could pay her more than she made here at the agency and she wouldn’t have the overhead of running her own business.”

  “Is that really true when Lake Waters was falling apart?” Tate asked.

  Billows’ head snapped in Tate’s direction. “Where did you hear that?”

  “From Portia.”

  “It seems to me she gave you quite a bit of misinformation.”

  “I don’t think it was misinformation,” I said as I sat on the arm of the huge couch. “I saw the state that the resort is in. Paint is peeling off of the buildings, and there are no guests to speak of.”

  He pressed his lips together. “That is only temporary. The new rejuvenation center will solve that.”

  “When you were meeting with Samantha, did she ask about her father’s murder?”

  “She did ask about her father a lot. I remember when he was killed, of course, but I was a teenager at the time. I wasn’t paying much attention to the story. She wanted to know if we had anything in the old security office about it, but I said no. His stuff was cleared out years ago. Where the security office was is now part of the spa.” He paused. “She seemed to lose interest in accepting my job offer after that.”

  That made sense to me. If Billows wasn’t going to be able to help her find out who killed her father, he wasn’t much use to her. It made me feel better that Samantha hadn’t seriously been considering leaving Two Girls Detective Agency. I still wished she’d been more honest with me.

  “Maybe you should put the money that you want to give Mrs. Berger for her house into the resort,” Tate suggested.

  It wasn’t a bad idea.

  “You don’t understand how my business works. I can’t just fix what I already have. I have to make something new so they will come back and see it. They aren’t going to come back for something they had before.”

  “Well, make something new on the land that you already have instead of bothering Mrs. Berger,” I said.

  Billows stood up. “We would get it back to where it needs to be if that old bat would sell her land. It makes no sense for her to hold on to it. I am offering her more money than it’s worth.”

  “But,” I said quietly, “it’s her home, and that’s all that matters to Mrs. Berger.”

  “Maybe you can convince her to sell,” Billows said. “I could pay you to help me. I’m desperate for that land.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t do that to her.”

  “Then I think I have nothing more to discuss with you. Stay away from Lake Waters, and mark my words, I will get that property, sooner rather than later.” He stormed out of the house.

  “My word,” Nat said. “If Mrs. Berger shows up dead, we have a suspect.”

  I shivered. “We do, but we aren’t any closer to finding out who killed Samantha.” Or who drugged me.

  “Another dead end,” Tate said.

  I nodded.

  “Darby?” Nat asked. “What was all that about Samantha’s father?”

  Tate lay on the couch. It really was the perfect size for him, which made me miss Samantha even more. How happy would see be to know he was back in Herrington?

  “Tate and I believe she was killed because she was getting close to figuring out who killed her father.”

  “And,” Tate added, “it seems my grandfather had another daughter named Penelope, whom he never acknowledged. I have to say, this has been an enlightening week in my family history.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Nat said. She opened her desk drawer, peered inside, and then closed it. “What happened to Penelope?”

  “Don’t know,” Tate said. “Piper’s mom is on the case at the library, so if anyone finds out what happened to her, it will be Mrs. Piper. She is a fierce librarian.”

  “She is that,” Nat said.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Night came faster with each passing day, and I still wasn’t feeling my best. I was thinking about going to bed early and waking up for my run like normal before jumping into the investigation again the next day.

  Nat and Tate had gone home. I walked around the lower level of the house before going upstairs. It seemed so empty to me now. Samantha’s office was quiet, and now Nat had all but cleared her desk. There was just a pen and blank notepad on the desktop. I walked around the desk and decided to peek in the drawers. I didn’t want to infringe on her space, but I wanted to know if she took everything. She still had a few more days with the agency. I opened the top drawer. It was empty, and so was the next drawer. On the floor by the leg of the desk, I found two pennies. I scooped them up and set them on the desk. She would want to add them to her collection.

  I opened the last drawer in her desk, and a small bottle of aspirin rolled to the front of the drawer. My stomach dropped. “Everyone has aspirin in their desk,” I said, but I couldn’t shake the odd feeling I had. I gaped at the pennies on the desk and the bottle and back.

  Across the room, the coffee maker was clean and the mugs sparkled. Nat had always made sure the office dishes were washed and put away for the night. She had always made the coffee for Samantha and me.

  Pennies. Penny, Penelope, Joshua Porter’s unacknowledged daughter.

  My breathing picked up as I considered the possibility. “This can’t be right,” I whispered to myself. I jumped out of the desk and ran into my office. I brought up the database we used to find public records.

  I couldn’t find a birth certificate for a Natalie Stowe who was in her fifties today. All the Natalie Stowes were either much younger or older. Had she changed her name? Had Nat ever married? I couldn’t remember ever saying she’d been married before. Samantha had hired Nat. Had she ever done a background check on her? It seemed like a major oversight, but at the same time, she had known Nat her whole life. Perhaps she thought it wasn’t necessary.

  I needed to rest. I had a headache left over from my adventure the night before. I wasn’t thinking straight. I would sleep on it and revisit this idea in the morning. I looked down at Gumshoe, who was snoozing on the windowsill in my office. “Are you ready to call it a night?”

  Gumshoe was always for calling it an early night, or a nap, or anything that involved sleeping. He was a world-class sleeper, even for a cat.

  Gumshoe and I were making our way upstairs when my phone rang. I expected it to be one of my parents checking up on me. It was Mrs. Berger.

  I answered the call. “Mrs. Berger. Is everything all right?”

  Gumshoe sat at the top of the stairs with his white plume of a tail wrapped around his feet. He watched me with disdain. He was already disappointed that we weren’t curled up in bed with a book.

  “Darby, Romy has wandered off again. Can you come get him?” Mrs. Berger’s scratchy voice was on the other end of the call.

  “Are you okay? You sound strange.”

  “I think I’m catching a cold. It must be from all the upset with that meeting with Matt Billows, the toad. When will he quit? And now Romy has wandered off again. I can’t sleep until I know he’s all right.”

  “Is he in the tree?” I asked. Ten to one that cat was up there again.

  “I don’t know. It’s too dark to see. I’m worried about him. It’s getting colder out there, and he’s sensitive. I won’t be able to sleep as long as I know he’s out there shivering the night away.”

  Romy was roughly the size of a baby bear; he could take care of himself in the cold. He had fur between his toes, for goodness sakes. Even so, that didn’t mean Mrs. Berger wouldn’t lose sleep over her missing cat. She loved him as much as I loved Gumshoe, who was still giving me the evil eye for disrupting his plans.

  “Do you want me to come over and help you look for him?” I didn’t know why I even bothered to ask. I already knew the answer.

  “Would you?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Thank you.” And she ended the call.

  I texted Tate about Romy as I walked back down the stairs and grabbed my leather jacket from the coat rack.

  His text came back: I’m not going up in the tree again.

  You might have to, I wrote. I don’t think I should after just getting out of the hospital.

  He gave me a crying emoji, quickly followed by Meet you there.

  I looked up at my cat, still at the top of the stairs. “Well, Gumshoe, bed will have to wait. I have to rescue another cat who is not nearly as smart as you about staying inside.”

  He meowed.

  At least I had thought to give him a compliment, which I hoped took some of the edge off my going out again.

  I texted Tate. Would you mind swinging by here to get me?

  Ah, I see. You want to take another spin in the convertible. I understand. Don’t you worry—I have the top down for you.

  Just hurry. I don’t want to keep Mrs. Berger waiting.

  The convertible pulled up in front of the house two minutes later. “Need a lift?” Tate wiggled his eyebrows.

  I climbed in the car. “You might think you’re cool now, but you will be sorry in winter.”

  “Ouch. That hurts, Piper. I do remember what the winters were like around here. Why do you think I was so quick to leave?”

  I sat back in the seat. I had to admit the car was very comfortable. I bit my lip, wondering if I should tell Tate what I suspected about Nat. What if I was wrong? I had known Nat for ten years. Tate and I had just met again. Shouldn’t my loyalty be to her?

  “Are you sure you can’t go up in the tree?” he asked, shaking me from my thoughts. “I just stopped bleeding from the scratches, and my tailbone has a permanent bruise.”

  “We don’t even know for sure Romy is in the tree.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. He’s up there waiting for some fool to rescue him. When I was in the tree, I saw into his eyes. He knew exactly what he was doing. That cat is smart, scary smart.”

  “I think you are being a tad dramatic.” I held onto my seat belt. “And if you really don’t want to go, no one is forcing you. I do need the ride, but you don’t have to hang around.”

  “I’m not going to leave you there alone with a killer on the loose. We should stick together until this case is solved. I was thinking about what Caster said, and I don’t agree with him on almost anything, but he is right. By poking our noses in the case, we we’re putting a large target on our backs, and you have the biggest target of all. So, who’s going up the tree for the cat?”

  “I was just in the hospital…”

  “I’ll spot you when you go up the tree,” he said with a grin.

  “Are you serious?”

  “No,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll do it. Besides, Mrs. Berger will want me to do it again, even if you were in perfect health. I think she gets a kick out of seeing me squirm. There is no talking that lady out of anything when her mind is made up.”

  At least he was aware his charms wouldn’t work on Mrs. Berger. It seemed to me that Tate Porter was finally realizing what it was like to be back in Herrington. I would be lying if I didn’t admit a small part of me wanted him to stay. I feared he wouldn’t, though. He was a wanderer, and Herrington was a town where people planted roots. Was Tate ready for that? I could understand if he wasn’t, now that I knew what he had gone through, but that didn’t change the fact that I wished he would stay. He made a good partner in the agency, and that was my only reason…or so I told myself.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be by yourself right now,” he repeated.

  “Are you trying to protect me, Tate Porter?” I teased.

  “I would do more than try. If you would let me.”

  I looked out the window so that he wouldn’t the surprise on my face. I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but before I could, we arrived at Mrs. Berger’s house.

  The home was completely dark, so dark it was unnerving.

  “You would think she would leave a light on for us,” Tate said.

  “I don’t know.” I unbuckled my seat belt. “Something doesn’t feel right. Maybe we should call Austin and the police.”

  He cocked his head at me. “Over a cat stuck in a tree?”

  “Okay, we’ll check it out first and then call him. I hope Mrs. Berger is all right.”

  Tate patted my arm and nodded. “I’m sure she’s fine. I’m also sure she’s worried about her cat, so we’d better get to it.”

  We got out of the car, and Tate and I crossed the front lawn. The grass crackled under the tread of my boots. It sounded like breaking glass. At the front door, I rang the bell. There was no answer. I raised my eyebrows at Tate.