Diana Palmer - The Case of the Missing Secretary

“Okay. Which airline?”

He told her, along with the flight number and time of departure. She thanked him, cutting off the conversation before he could say anything else. She turned her attention to the task at hand. She had no time to wallow in self-pity.

Minutes later, she knew that Tansy Deverell had bought a ticket to Venice. But the woman who boarded the plane wasn’t Tansy. Whoever Logan’s cunning mother had gotten to take her place had forgotten to limp as she walked down the concourse. Tansy limped just temporarily because of an accident while she was hang gliding.

Kit laughed. She had to be a natural, just as Dane had said. She was getting the hang of this in a big way. She went back to talk to the skip tracers. They were masters at the game of invention to get information, and most of them could find a needle in a haystack within five minutes.

Unfortunately Tansy was harder to find than a needle. They drew a blank.

“I’m sorry,” Doris said, shaking her head. “But she’s harder to find than a white bear in a snowstorm. If she paid someone to take her place on that flight, she did it with cash. You’ll have to find a flight attendant to ask for a description, and even then, it won’t be easy. Those flights to Venice are usually full. Individual faces are hard to remember.”

Kit could have ground her teeth. “What do I do?” she moaned. “Dane will fire me!”

“Oh, not yet,” Doris said, smiling. “He never fires anyone before Friday.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I did get you the name of a cabdriver at the airport who remembers an elderly lady with a limp.” Doris chuckled, handing her a slip of paper.

“You angel!”

“No kissing,” Doris said, warding her off. “You’ll give Adams ideas,” she added with a covert glance at the burly Adams, who was playing with a penknife two desks in front of her.

“There’s not a thing wrong with Adams,” Kit said, smiling. “He’s a doll.”

Adams overheard her and perked up. He got up, straightening his tie, and smiled in Kit’s direction.

“He has homing instincts. You’ll be sorry,” Doris said under her breath.

“How about lunch, Kit?” Adams drawled with a hopeful smile.

“I’d love it, Adams,” she replied, “but I have to go track down a cabdriver. Rain check?”

He brightened. He blushed. No woman in the office had ever offered him a rain check. He lost ten years and his morose expression. Doris studied him with renewed interest.

“Rain check,” he agreed.

Doris toyed with her pen. “I’m not doing anything for lunch,” she said to herself.

Adams thought he might have a heart attack. Two women found him interesting in less than two minutes. Maybe his luck was finally changing. Kit was pretty, and petite Doris was adorable, even with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses. “How about a chicken burger, Doris?” he asked quickly. “I’ll buy!”

Doris beamed at him. “I’d love that!”

Kit eased out the door with relief and delight. Doris and Adams were both middle-aged loners with no family to speak of. Why hadn’t anyone ever thought of tossing them together?

That made her think of salads, and she remembered that she hadn’t had any lunch. Thanks to Logan Deverell, she’d probably starve. If she didn’t die of pneumonia from standing around in wet clothes. First, she was going home to change and eat a sandwich. Then she’d find that cabbie.

Kit found the cabdriver without great difficulty. Yes, he did remember an elderly woman with a limp. He’d taken her to the bus station.

With fervent thanks, Kit rushed over to the bus station. One of the ticket agents remembered a silver-haired woman with a limp. She’d taken a bus to San Antonio.

Kit groaned. She shouldn’t have taken time to change clothes and eat lunch. By the time she could get to San Antonio, Tansy would be long gone.

She went back to the office, downcast and gloomy, to tell Dane what she’d found out.

“Chris mentioned a relative in San Antonio named Emmett, but I don’t know if he’s got the same last name as Logan and Chris.”

But Dane only grinned. “No problem,” he said. “I’ve got a contact in San Antonio who owes me a favor. This will be a great time to collect.”

“Will I need to go out there?” she asked hesitantly.

“Of course not. Logan only wants to know where she is. We won’t be obliged to follow her. Not yet, anyway,” he added with a knowing smile.

Kit was given a new assignment, one which wasn’t quite as interesting as trying to find an elderly needle in a haystack. A man wanted his wife followed to see if she was two-timing him. This was relatively easy for Kit to do, especially since the woman seemed bent on a shopping spree.

Staying a little behind the woman, Kit was just congratulating herself on her stealth when Logan Deverell loomed up in her path and brought her to a standstill.

“Where is the Dawson file?” he demanded. “Some private detective you are, you can’t even put things in their proper place!”

Kit could have hit him. The woman she’d been shadowing couldn’t possibly have missed hearing her loud ex-boss denouncing her. Sure enough, the woman gave her a startled glance and dived toward the nearest cab.

“There, look what you’ve done,” Kit cried, exasperated. “I’m on a case! I was shadowing a client, for heaven’s sake…!”

“I want the Dawson file,” he said. “None of those would-be secretaries have any idea how to find it. You’ve got to come back with me. I’m going to lose my most influential client if you don’t.”

“I should care?” she burst out.

He glowered down at her. His dark eyes narrowed with irritation. “You’re costing me time,” he muttered, slamming back the immaculate white cuff of his shirt so that he could see the gold watch embedded in the thick, curling black hair on his muscular wrist.

“I was on a case,” she pointed out. “You hijacked me. Speaking of hijacking—”

He was pulling her along as she spoke. “Can’t you be quiet for two minutes running?” he asked conversationally. “All you need to do is find a file. What’s so difficult about that?”

While she was trying to formulate it in words of one syllable that he might be able to understand, he helped her into his gray Lincoln.

I’m crazy, that’s what I am, Kit thought as he got in under the wheel. He’s blown an assignment for me, fired me, humiliated me and here I am letting him lead me to his office to work for him on my own time! Well, actually, she admitted it was on Dane’s time.

“Have you found my mother yet?” he asked as he pulled away from the curb.

“We’re working on it,” she said.

He cocked a busy eyebrow. “I thought you were in charge of the case?”

“I am. But I lost her at the bus station.”

He chuckled. “My mother wouldn’t be caught dead on a bus.”

“She would and did, to escape surveillance. Doesn’t she have a relative named Emmett in San Antonio?” she persisted, remembering only then that Chris had warned her never to mention him.

“Oh, yes,” he said with a vicious glare. “Emmett lives in San Antonio, as near as not. But I guarantee she wouldn’t go there. Nobody in the family will go near the place. You’d have to be out of your ever-loving mind to want to go and see Emmett, even if you were hiding out from the police!”

The man must be a holy terror, she thought. He was Logan’s cousin, of course. Probably it ran in the family.

“Where does he live?” she asked, and whipped out a pad and pen.

“I told you, she wouldn’t go there!”

“Humor me.”

He shrugged. “His name is E. G. Deverell.” He gave her the address. She jotted it down and stuck the pad back into her purse. Now she had something concrete to go on. She felt like a real detective.

“You can’t really like following people around for a living,” he said. He glanced at her and back at the road. “I’ve bought a new computer for the office. It’s got a sixty megabyte hard drive and all sorts of software, including a user-friendly word processing program. I bought a laser printer, too,” he added. “And the system does forms.”

She’d been begging for that sort of system for over a year. He’d argued that it wasn’t necessary and he had better ways to spend his money.

“How nice,” she said. “For your new secretary. Secretaries, that is,” she added with a spiteful smile. “Three, isn’t it?”

He made a rough sound under his breath. “I don’t see what your problem is!” he raged. “I’ve lost my temper with you before. You never walked out on me!”

“You never allowed one of your women to treat me like an indentured servant before,” she countered.

He shifted uncomfortably. “She asked for a cup of coffee.”

“Excuse me,” she said. “She demanded a cup of coffee, and then threw it at me because it was too strong. When I suggested that she might like to go to the restaurant on the first floor and get a cup there, she flew into a rage and called me several names that I won’t repeat. Then, the minute she saw you coming, she dissolved into helpless tears.”

“She said you threw the coffee at her,” he returned, narrowing one eye. “And you aren’t the most even-tempered of women.”

“Oh, but I am, as long as I’m not within half a mile of you,” she replied venomously.

He had to stifle a smile at the way she was looking at him. How he’d missed these bouts with Kit. The three women he’d had to hire to replace her were frightened of him. Poor Melody was hopelessly intimidated by spelling and her distant cousin Logan. She could type very quickly, though, and she was efficient.

Harriet, the tallest of the three, could file and do payroll accounts, but she hated everyone in the office and smoked like a chimney.

Then there was Margo, who spelled like a dictionary and wanted nothing more than to seduce him.

Logan, though, had eyes for no one except Betsy, who made his blood run hot and wild through his veins. He didn’t want to get married, but it was the only way he was ever going to possess the delectable Betsy. So he’d given in, against his better judgment, and nothing had gone right in his life since he’d proposed. He was no nearer to coaxing Betsy into his bed and he’d lost Kit. Amazing, he thought, how empty the world was without Kit in it. He had no one to talk to anymore. Betsy hardly listened to him, and certainly paid more attention to where they went and who they saw than what they did.

“Betsy was no threat to your job,” he told her. “I don’t combine my personal relationships with my business ones. I thought you knew that.”

She knew that he was going to marry Betsy, and she couldn’t bear it. Not only was she losing the only man she’d ever loved, but she was losing him to a woman who’d cut his heart out and roast it over a pile of blazing hundred-dollar bills. Betsy would take him for every cent he had. She glanced over at him curiously. How, she wondered, could a man with a brain such as his be so terminally stupid when it came to women?

“You aren’t going to be happy working in a detective agency,” he persisted.

“But I am,” she corrected. She smiled smugly. “I’m treated like a person there. When I do something right, I get praised for it. When I do something wrong,” she added with a meaningful look, “nobody rages at me in disgusting language and threatens to feed me my handbag.”

“How boring.”

She smothered a laugh and looked away.