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She stopped off in a restroom at the airport before picking up her rental car, and the mirror showed her a pretty but tired woman with striking features and circles under her wide green eyes. She brushed out her long blonde hair, delicately dabbed powder on her nose and chin, and replenished her lipstick. No wonder she looked exhausted. She had been on the phone with her half brother’s lawyers until the wee hours for several days—since she’d been in Europe she’d had to accommodate the time difference—and once she had returned to New York, she’d booked a flight to Florida immediately.
The problem could not wait.
Her half brother was bankrupt and had run the family business into the ground. A
And now she was in Florida to deal with the crisis.
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The breeze coming in through the car window was heavy with salt, sticky against her skin, but A
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She had some time before her business appointment and she wanted to see her old house again. It had been sold five years earlier when her mother had died, and at the time she had let Tim handle everything and never questioned what he’d done with the money. She hadn’t cared. Now she assumed that the profit from the house had gone into his gambling. She probably should have paid more attention to his dealings, but her grief had been such that she’d wanted nothing to do with the house, the company, or anything else that had issued from her father’s life. Perhaps she had been foolish because she’d always known that Tim was weak, but her emotional survival had dictated that she cut herself off from everything in the past and start fresh. After college she had carved out a career writing historical fiction. She had been content to support herself by living in the fictional past, until the summons from Tim’s lawyer had brought her rudely back to the present.
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Except for the ancient gardener snipping desultorily at a kudzu vine growing along the edge of the crushed stone driveway, it looked like nobody was home.
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She gave the car gas and drove away, recalling how she had lived in that mansion with her father, Henry Talbot, and his second wife, her mother.
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If Tim had managed ScriptSoft profitably, she would never have come back home again.
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She had no idea where he lived now.
Downtown Port Lisbon had changed; there were new high-rises along the main street and a traffic light at the corner by Burdine’s department store. A
She felt like she was about to face a firing squad. As she walked toward the entrance, she concentrated on the lunch she was to have with her old friend Amy later that day and forced herself through the lobby and into the elevator that led up to the lawyer’s office.