sound of a television came from a nearby room. The door was half-open, held that way by another stack of packages.
“Bye, Dad. Tell Mom I said hi.” Lacey stepped back, brushing against his side, the connection severed as quickly as it happened as she turned toward the steps. She was down them and walking toward the car before Victor had even caught his breath from their unexpected contact.
He nodded at Mr. O’Connor. Jim. “Goodbye, sir. It was nice to meet you.”
Lacey’s dad watched his daughter walk to the car. “Do you care for my daughter, young man?”
The unanticipated question knocked the breath out of him for a second. “She’s an impressive woman, sir. And very highly regarded.”
“She is. But between you and me, she’s not as tough as she works so hard to make everyone believe. So if you could have her back, I’d mightily appreciate it.” With that, the man picked up the second box and firmly closed the door.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It took everything in Lacey not to bang her head against the steering wheel and scream. The only thing stopping her was Victor loping down the broken weedy path back to the car. And he had already seen enough. Knew too much.
“You okay?” He asked the question before he was even fully in the car.
“I just …” Lacey turned on the engine and put the car into reverse. “I just need to not be here.” She accelerated out of the driveway and into the street, looking back at the front window, hoping to see some sign of her mother’s attention. Any sign. Even a movement of the dingy curtain. Nothing.
Of course not.
Throwing the car into drive, she peeled down the street. Waited for some joke from Victor about how they’d be driving on the rims by the time they returned the car. Nothing.
His steady, silent presence sat in the passenger seat. At least he didn’t offer any trite assurances or advice.
After a few seconds, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Aren’t you at least going to ask me about my sister?”
“Do you want me to ask you about your sister?” She glanced right, and his probing gaze pinned her against her headrest.
She couldn’t answer. Did she? The answer, usually, would have been an automatic no. No, I don’t want you to ask me anything about my family. It’s none of your business. It has nothing to do with my job. I don’t answer personal questions.
“Like I said to your dad, I’m just along for the ride. Wherever it might take me.”
“We can’t go and see Betsy. There’s no way we’ll make it out tonight.” She didn’t even know if flights had been booked. All they’d been told in Ely when they got handed the car keys was that they could pick up their original luggage at the hotel in Duluth, and the rental car had to be returned to the Avis airport counter.
“Do you want to see your sister?”
Lacey pulled into a parking lot and came to a stop in the nearest spot. Without even thinking about it she’d driven to the nearest Krogers. Her subconscious was clearly trying to tell her something.
“Can you pass me my phone? I need to check my email.” If there was a flight itinerary out of Duluth tonight, that was the decision. She already had ground to make up from the disqualification. She wasn’t risking losing more points in whatever this weird merger reenactment of Game of Thrones was keeping score on. Assuming she hadn’t tanked her chances already.
Victor passed her the phone, and she tapped in the password she hadn’t used for days. It felt foreign to her fingers, despite being used thousands of time before.
She tapped the mail icon, waiting a few seconds for it to connect and refresh. Scanned for anything that looked like a travel itinerary. Everything was color-coded exactly as she’d asked Janna while she was on the bus to Ely.
She scrolled back to the morning before, around the time they’d been disqualified. Nothing. Tapped into her travel subfolder, in case it had already been filed there. Still nothing.
It wasn’t a big deal. She had a company credit card. Plus a gazillion points on every frequent flyer program going. “You got a company credit card?”
“I do, but the limit is minimal. They all got reduced to five hundred pounds after the whole bribery thing.”
Lacey did an approximate conversion in her head. No chance that would be enough for a last-minute flight from Duluth to London unless his ticket was