Blowing Smoke
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Synopsis
An intricately plotted story with red herrings galore. The corking-good plot will keep you turning the pages until the very end. An outstanding addition to a wonderful series. -- Booklist Blowing Smoke Getting involved with the rich and their problems is never a good idea, as far as amateur P.I. Robin Light is concerned. But when the mercury is rising to a steamy level, the bills are unpaid, and the investigation promises real money, the only answer is yes. Robin figures the case to be a no-brainer: the three adult children of an eccentric heiress, Rose Taylor, are convinced their mother is the victim of a scam operated by a psychic named Pat Humphrey, who has just earned a large place in Rose's will. Assuming the woman is a fraud, Robin pays her a visit and is startled to discover that Pat could be the real thing--and that she knows far more about the Taylor family than she admits. . .enough to get her killed. As the air grows thick with the promise of rain, the case takes one shocking turn after another, plunging Robin into the dark secrets and twisted loyalties of a troubled family, where money may not buy happiness, but it can be a powerful motive for murder. Now, Robin's own premonition about the rich is coming true, because a cold-blooded killer is about to turn the dog days of summer into the most dangerous season of Robin's life. "Interlocking mysteries and layered family secrets nudge Block's seventh toward Ross MacDonald territory." -- Kirkus Reviews "This female PI ranks right up there with the tough-guy detectives in taking her lumps and dishing them out as well." -- Library Journal
Release date: October 22, 2013
Publisher: Kensington Books
Print pages: 304
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Blowing Smoke
Barbara Block
I was on my way out to Cazenovia to see a family about a case involving their runaway daughter. I’d just rounded a turn and was daydreaming about renting a place on a beach for a week when I spotted a discarded pile of clothes lying by the side of the road.
As I whizzed by I thought I saw a hand. I told myself I was seeing things, that it was a piece of an old doll someone had thrown away. Or a store mannequin. I told myself it was none of my business. But I couldn’t let it go. Five minutes later, I made an illegal U-turn and went back for a second look. Just to make sure.
Half-hidden in the dried-out grass, the man was lying on his side with his head resting on his arm and his hand out. At first, I thought he was dead, a hit-and-run left on the side of the road along with the discarded soda cans and fast-food wrappers. But there was no blood. Then his hand moved, the fingers faintly motioning me to come near. As I got closer, I could see he wasn’t injured; he was sick. His cheeks were sunken. His eyes were glassy. His brown skin had taken on an ashy undertone. The spot he was lying in must have been as far as he could get before he collapsed.
“Por favor,” he gasped.
The edges of the tall grass scratched my arms as I squatted down beside him. He began coughing. His face went red with the effort as the cough rattled around in his chest. Blood and sputum flecked his lips. I felt his forehead. His skin was dry and hot to the touch. I was about to ask him what was wrong with him when he reached up and grasped my wrist.
“Da este a Dorita,” he whispered, opening his left hand. I noticed he had a small comet tattooed on it as a crumpled piece of paper fell onto the ground. A turkey buzzard sitting on a tree branch a short distance away flew down and hopped toward it.
“Get away,” I cried. Offended, the buzzard pulled in its neck, hissed, and took off.
I picked the paper up and looked at it. It was a Polaroid of a family—a smiling man, woman, and a young child—all in their Sunday best, standing on the steps outside a church in a town square.
“Por favor,” the man repeated. He coughed again, spit blood onto the ground, and closed his eyes.
“Hey, don’t die on me.”
He gave a slight nod.
“I’m going to get you to a hospital.”
A choking noise exploded in his throat. For a moment, until I saw the rise and fall of his chest, I thought he’d died. I looked around for someplace I could go for help. But there wasn’t any. No houses. No stores. No nothing. Just trees and brush. I realized that the nearest house that I knew about belonged to the people I was going to see, about fifteen miles away.
“Hang on,” I told him as I went through his pockets, looking for some identification that would tell me who he was and where he was living. But there wasn’t any. “It’s going to be okay.”
His eyelids fluttered. I stuffed the picture into the pocket of my jeans and half-dragged, half-carried, him over to my car. He was so thin, I could almost circle his wrist with my hand. But even though he was as light as straw, maneuvering him into the backseat of my car took more strength than I’d anticipated, and I was covered with sweat by the time I was done. I rolled up the jacket I’d been carrying around for the last couple of months, slid it under his head, then wiped my hands off on my jeans, got into the front seat of my car, started it up, and took off.
The rattle of the man’s breathing filled the car. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror as I drove. His eyes were closed. His right arm dangled over the seat, moving each time I took a turn.
“Como se llama? De donde viene? ” I asked in my faltering Spanish.
But he just shook his head and began coughing again.
I hit the gas. A couple of minutes later, I zoomed into the driveway of the Petersons’ house. I slammed on the brakes, ran out, and rang the bell. A blonde that had had too much plastic surgery came to the door.
“You must be Robin Light,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
I explained about the man in my backseat and asked her to call 911.
The smile turned to a frown, and she half-turned back toward her house. “Arthur,” she called. “My husband will be here in a minute,” she said, turning back to me.
He must have been just inside the door, because he was with us before I could say anything.
“What is this about, then?”
I explained again.
“Millie, go ring up 911.”
“I’ll take a glass of water for him, too, if you don’t mind.”
She nodded and vanished into the house.
“I still don’t understand why you brought him here,” Arthur Peterson complained as he hurried toward my car. A heavyset man in his early forties, he had pouchlike bags under his eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard.
“I couldn’t leave him on the side of the road, could I?”
“Don’t you have a cell phone?”
“Not on me.” I’d forgotten it.
Arthur Peterson snorted and peered through my car window. “I can tell you where he lives, though. In the trailer park. All the Mexicans around here do.”
“I didn’t know there were any trailer parks in Caz.” Cazenovia was a town where rich people lived.
“Just this one.” He ran a hand through the remaining wisps of hair on the top of his head. “I wish they’d tear the damned thing down.”
“Now, now, dear,” Millie remonstrated as she handed me a glass of water and a wad of paper towels. “Those people have to live somewhere. How’s he doing?”
I glanced into the car. “Not well, I’d say. Not well at all.”
The ambulance and a sheriff’s car rolled in ten minutes later.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked one of the EMTs as they loaded the man I picked up onto the gurney.
“Upstate.” The EMT, a guy who looked as if he should be riding a Harley, paused for a second, then added, “If I were you, I’d check with the county health department in a few days to see if his TB test comes back positive.”
“TB?”
“I ain’t a doc, but that’s my best guess. We’re seeing more and more like him.” He jerked his head in the direction of the ambulance. “They should stay where they belong.”
“Jeez.” I brushed the lock of hair that had fallen into my eyes out of the way and, when that didn’t work, refastened my ponytail. Who was it who had said that no good deed goes unpunished?
“That poor boy,” Millie said, watching the sheriff walk back to his squad car after he’d taken my statement.
Arthur, the corners of his mouth pulled down, waved his hand in the direction of the sheriff’s car as he maneuvered it down their driveway. “They can come out for an undocumented worker, but I have to pay someone to look for my daughter.” He shook his head disgustedly. “No wonder we’re in the shape we’re in.”
“Now, Arthur, you know you don’t mean that,” his wife tittered as he led the way into their house. “Arthur’s just upset,” she explained to me. “We both are. Bethany.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “This has been hard to deal with.”
The husband took me into a pleasant living room that was furnished with expensive wood and leather modern furniture. There was original art on the walls and pieces of pottery sitting on the end tables and the fireplace mantel. A modern brown and orange patterned rug completed the design. I started reaching into my backpack for a cigarette when I noticed there weren’t any ashtrays. I sighed and settled for taking out my notebook and pen.
The moment I sat down on the sofa, Arthur Peterson put a photo of his daughter in my hands. “This is our Bethany,” he said. “She’s fifteen. We took it outside our house this spring.”
I couldn’t tell from the sullen expression on her face whether she wasn’t happy about having the photo taken or she just wasn’t happy, period. She looked about five feet five and was on the plump side, though she might have looked heavier because of the oversized T-shirt and windbreaker she was wearing.
She’d bleached her hair platinum blond and pulled it back off her face and tweezed her eyebrows till there was nothing left but a thin line she’d augmented with black pencil. Even though she was trying to make herself look older, all she’d done was emphasize the baby fat in her cheeks and the softness of her chin. But the thing that caught my attention was her jewelry. She had large gold hoops in her ears and a gold necklace with her name written on it around her neck.
“That’s real gold,” her mother said, following my glance. “We don’t know where she got the money to buy it. When I asked her, she told me it was none of my business.” Millie put her hand to her mouth and blinked back tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just so worried.”
Arthur patted his wife’s shoulder. “It’s been obvious from Bethany’s choice of friends that something has been wrong for a while. We’ve tried being patient. We’ve tried talking to her in a nonthreatening, nonconfrontational way. We’ve tried counseling. It hasn’t made any difference. We did one of those drug tests, the kind where you get a lock of hair and send it off for analysis. It’s come back clean, but her grades keep dropping, and now we’re getting these calls from the principal of her school saying she isn’t there.” He took a deep breath.
“And then, last night, Millie and she had a big fight. Naturally, I stepped in to back up my wife.”
“What was the fight about?”
“A kid I’d never seen before—he was older, maybe eighteen—rang the bell and asked for Bethany. She started out the door, and I told her she couldn’t go; then I told this kid he had to leave. Well, he took off, and Bethany started screaming at me. I told her she had to go up to her room.”
The wife sighed. “I can’t believe some of the things she said to us.”
“Neither can I.” The husband’s voice was grim. “Anyway, I gave her an hour to cool off, and then I went up to speak with her. Only she wasn’t there. She’d climbed out the window. We called her friends. No one has seen her. Or at least that’s what they’re telling us. But I don’t believe them. One of my friends, Matt Rydell, said you were good at finding runaways.”
I’d managed to locate his son for him last spring. I looked up from the “B” I’d doodled in the margin of my notebook. “Finding them is the easy part. The problem is what happens when they come back.”
“I think we’ve got that covered.” Arthur Peterson squeezed his wife’s shoulder. “So you think—”
“Can I keep this?” I lifted the picture up. “I’m going to have to get copies made.”
“Of course.”
I left the Petersons’ house armed with the photo of Bethany, a list of her friends, and a retainer. Now that it had cooled off a bit, the evening was pleasant. I decided that as long as I was out here, I might as well be efficient and call on some of Bethany’s friends and see what I could find out. But as I drove over to Somerset Road, the first address on my list, I wasn’t thinking about Bethany. I was thinking about the man I’d picked up on the road, wondering who he was, who Dorita was, and hoping like hell the EMT guy was wrong about his having TB.
I remembered a story my grandmother had told me about her husband’s family not wanting him to marry her because she was too thin and they were afraid she’d come down with TB. They called it Jewish pneumonia back then. I’d told her we didn’t have that stuff around anymore, and she’d looked at me and said something like things like that would always be around.
Of course, now they had pills to take care of it. Pills you had to take every day for a year. The problem was you couldn’t drink when you were on them because it would stress your liver. That would be a lot of fun. Still, I suppose it beat the sanatorium. Especially since I didn’t have health insurance. One of the perks of being self-employed.
I wondered if the pills were expensive. With my luck they’d probably be five dollars each. That was a little over eighteen hundred dollars a year. I never thought I’d be in a position where eighteen hundred dollars mattered one way or another, but unless things turned around at the pet store I owned, I was going to have to declare bankruptcy. At least that’s what my accountant had told me during our last meeting.
Which brought me back to thinking about Bethany. Here we had these upper-middle-class parents. A father who was a psychologist, a mother who dabbled in interior design, nice house, carefully cut hedges, tended flower beds, the whole schmear—but according to the photo I had, their kid was decking herself out like someone from the projects.
All the CDs in her room were rap. The posters plastered on her bedroom walls were hard-core gangsta rappers. The clothes in her closet seemed to consist of oversized sweats and microminis in equal proportion. I could imagine how pleased Mr. and Mrs. Peterson were at the music she was listening to and the clothes and jewelry she was sporting. Like her parents, I wondered where she’d gotten it from and how she’d paid for it.
The first two of Bethany’s friends on the list her parents had given me weren’t home, but the third one, a Karim Nettanhu, was. He lived in a big, expensive new colonial on a road filled with houses just like it. He was a tall, thin brown-skinned kid with a bad case of acne and the kind of black-rimmed glasses I vaguely remembered people wearing back in the fifities. I wanted to talk to him alone, but his mother hovered right by his side.
“Bethany,” she said carefully, picking a piece of lint off her yellow silk shell. “I already told her parents we haven’t seen her. Isn’t that right, dear?”
Karim bobbed his head obediently, but his eyes told me a different story.
“Perhaps if I could talk to your son alone,” I ventured.
“He doesn’t know anything,” the mother asserted, putting her hands on her son’s shoulders. “Now, it’s late, and he still has homework to do. If you’ll excuse me.” And she closed the door in my face.
I stood there for a few seconds, breathing in the laurel-scented air. Then I got back into my car and drove away. That was that. If the woman didn’t want to let her son talk to me, there was nothing I could do to make her. This wasn’t the slummier part of town. People here not only knew their rights; they were quick to exercise them. Some of them probably had lawyers on retainers.
The fourth kid on my list was a girl by the name of Michelle Morgan. She lived a ten-minute drive away, in a gimcrack development a little bit outside of town. Judging from the look of the houses, I’d be willing to bet that they were a good deal cheaper than the other places I’d been to so far.
“Yes,” she said, opening the door without bothering to see who was there.
A heavy girl, she was dressed in fat-girl clothes. Her face was plain, with too big a nose and a receding chin, and even if she lost the hundred pounds she needed to, she still wouldn’t be attractive. As I introduced myself and explained what I wanted, I couldn’t help noticing that she was wearing the same type of earrings Bethany had on in the photo.
“Nice,” I said, indicating them.
She felt one and smiled. “Thanks. We got them in the city.”
“Syracuse?”
She nodded.
“Where are your parents?”
“They’re out seeing a movie. Do you want me to tell them you came by?”
“Not really. I want to talk to you.”
“Me?” The girl pointed a finger at herself.
“That’s right, Michelle, you. Bethany’s parents have hired me to find her. You know she’s run away, don’t you?”
Michelle nodded, her eyes wary.
“Well, I was hoping you could help me out.”
The girl shook her head and fingered her earrings again. “There’s nothing to tell. The last time I saw her was a week ago.”
“Are you a good friend of hers?”
The girl nodded again, unsure of what was coming next.
“So why do you think she ran away?”
The girl looked down at the ground. “She wasn’t happy.”
“And why was that?”
“You’ve met her mom and dad?”
I nodded, even though the question was rhetorical.
“That’s why.”
“They seem like nice enough people to me.”
Michelle made a face. “You wouldn’t say that if you were their daughter. They’re always watching her. Asking her these dumb questions. Wanting to know how she feels.” She gave the words a sarcastic spin. “They won’t even let her go out at night during the week. That’s so lame.”
Seemed sensible to me, but then what did I know? Once again I gave thanks that I didn’t have children. “How does she like school?”
“She hates it! We all do. That’s another thing. Bethany wants to go to school down in the city, but her parents want to transfer her to private school.”
“Why the city? Usually people pay to keep their kids out of the schools down there.”
“Because that’s where the real people are.”
“As opposed to robots?”
Michelle gave me a sour look. “Everyone in our high school thinks we’re freaks. At least it’s not total white bread down there.”
“You’re probably right.” Syracuse City high schools were like a mini-UN these days. Bosnian, Russian, Vietnamese, white, black. You name it, the schools had it. “So where did she go?”
Michelle shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
I took a cigarette out of my backpack and lit it.
“My mother doesn’t allow smoking in the house,” Michelle said self-righteously.
“I’m not in your house. Listen,” I said taking a puff, “your friend could be in a great deal of trouble.”
“She’s fine.”
“Why are you so sure?”
Michelle folded her hands across her chest. “Because Bethany always is. She knows how to take care of herself.”
I flicked the ash toward the grass. “There are lots of men out there that prey on fifteen-year-old girls who know how to take care of themselves.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Michelle scoffed.
I leaned an arm on the doorframe. “You know why I think you’re not worried?”
Michelle didn’t say anything.
“I think you’re not worried because you’ve spoken to her and you know that she’s fine.”
“That’s not true,” Michelle cried.
“I think it is. Maybe I should just wait till your parents come home.”
Michelle tossed her head defiantly. “Go ahead. Wait as long as you want.”
I reached out and lightly touched one of Michelle’s earrings. “Where did you get the money to buy these?”
Michelle jerked back. “Baby sitting. What do you think?”
“How about Bethany? Does Bethany do much sitting?”
“I have no idea,” Michelle said stiffly. “You’ll have to ask her.”
“Why was it so important for her to go out last night?”
“I told you I haven’t spoken to her.”
“You know,” I continued, swatting at a mosquito that had landed on my hand, “in the last month or so the cops have been picking up a whole group of nice, suburban teenage girls who have been hooking on the streets....”
“Bethany would never—”
I interrupted. “Are you so sure?”
“Yes,” Michelle blurted out. “She’s been taking money...” Michelle put her hand over her mouth.
“From who?”
Michelle developed an intense interest in a copper beech tree off in the distance.
“Tell me. Her mother? Her father? The local convenience store? You started the sentence. You might as well finish it. I’m not going to leave until you do.”
Michelle looked down at the ground, back at the tree, then at me. “She’s been stealing money from the lockers at school.”
“You know this for a fact? You’ve seen her.”
“She told me. The other thing that you said...”
“Yes?”
“That’s a lie.”
“I hope so.” But I wasn’t convinced. “Michelle, if Bethany’s your friend, if you care about her, tell me where I can find her. She needs to be home—even if she doesn’t like it. Her other options are even worse.”
Michelle bit her lip while she thought.
“This is something you need to do for her.”
“But her parents . . .”
“Want her home. Of course they’re upset, but they’ll get over it. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it. Honest.”
It was getting darker now. The streetlights were beginning to come on. I watched Michelle as she struggled to make a decision. “She could die,” I told her. “No kidding around.”
“All right. All right. She’s gonna kill me for telling.” Michelle took a deep breath and let it out. “Bethany’s at Karim’s house.”
“But I was just there,” I protested. “Karim’s mother said she hadn’t seen her.”
“His mother doesn’t know. She’s staying in their attic.”
“The attic?”
“That’s right. She snuck in when Karim’s parents went to work. You won’t tell her I told you, will you?”
I promised her I wouldn’t. Then I turned around and headed for my car. The attic. It figured. All the time Bethany’s parents were going nuts, imagining the worst, Bethany had been at Karim’s house, probably playing video games and talking on the phone. That house was so big, I could see how you could have someone living in it and not know. Actually, a house didn’t even have to be that big for something like that to happen. When I was in high school, one of the kids in my class had run away. They found him two weeks later. He’d been living under his girlfriend’s bed the whole time. And this was in an apartment in the Bronx, unbelievable as it sounds.
I wanted to corroborate Michelle’s story before I called Bethany’s parents. To do that though I had to convince Karim’s mother to let me in the house. At least that’s what I thought as I drove over there. But Michelle must have had a change of heart and gone in and called Bethany the moment I’d left her, because just as I was pulling into the circular driveway of Karim’s house, I saw Bethany dash out from behind a clump of bushes.
“Stop! I just want to talk to you,” I shouted at her.
She looked in my direction, then jumped into the waiting SUV at the other end of the driveway. The car took off.
I cursed and took my foot off the brake of my car, but as I did, Karim’s mother ran out of the house and planted herself in the middle of the driveway. “I demand to know what’s going on,” she said.
I slammed on the brake again and leaned my head out the window. “Why don’t you ask your son?”
“What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Bethany was hiding in your attic.”
She put her hands on her hips. “He’d never do anything like that.”
“Well, he did.”
“You’re lying.”
“Go on. Ask him.”
“Do you know who my husband is? He’s the head of—”
“Lady, I don’t care.” I started maneuvering the car around her.
“My flower beds,” she screeched. “Watch out. You’re driving over my flower beds.”
“Sorry about the daylilies,” I said as I flattened them. The damned things were like weeds. They’d come up next year, anyway.
“I’m going to sue you for this.”
“Go right ahead.” The nice thing about being practically broke is that you have nothing to lose.
By the time I got to the end of the driveway, it was too late. The SUV and Bethany had vanished. I spent the next hour cruising around, looking for them, before I wrapped it up and went home. Zsa Zsa, my cocker spaniel, was waiting to greet me at the door. As I bent down to pet her, I thought once again how much nicer than children dogs are.
To clarify in case you’re wondering, I’m not a licensed New York State private detective. I don’t work for an agency. I don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. My business comes to me strictly by word of mouth. I also don’t carry a gun, although I can shoot one if I have to. And have. I also run a pet store called Noah’s Ark, which specializes in exotics—read reptiles—though these days I seem to be doing more detecting and less pet storing, if I can coin a word.
I started doing investigative work to save my own ass and turned out to be good at it, good enough so that people keep asking me to help them and I keep saying yes. I usually work a handful of cases a year. Mostly, I find lost children and animals and leave the high-end sexy stuff to the big boys.
It was almost eleven-thirty at night by the time I walked through the door of my house, and I was not in a good mood, possibly because I hadn’t had anything to eat since ten o’clock that morning. When I saw the blinking light on my answering machine, I was hoping it was Bethany’s parents calling to tell me their daughter had come home by herself. But it wasn’t. It was someone called Hillary Cisco, wanting to hire me to do a job for her.
Normally, I would have turned her down. I prefer giving people their money’s worth by concentrating on one thing at a time. But with the proverbial wolf at my door in the form of quarterly tax payments to good old New York State, I figured it was time to make an exception to my rule. The next morning, before I went to work, I phoned her back.
“How’d you get my name?” I asked her while I let James in and got a can of cat food out of the cabinet.
“Calli gave it to me.”
Calli was an old friend of mine who’d gone out to California and was now back. At the moment, she was covering the Metro section in the local paper.
“She said you’d be perfect for this.”
“Really?” As I set James’s food in front of him, I told her about my fees and how I worked.
It sounded fine to Hillary, so I said I’d swing by her place later that afternoon. As I hung up, I noticed that James’s ear was torn.
“Fighting again, I see.”
He answered me with a growl. I wondered why I kept him around as I went to get the peroxide. Of course, he’d disappeared by the time I’d come back, and after searching the house for five minutes or so, I gave it up as a bad job and called Calli.
I wanted her to tell me about Hillary Cisco, but either Calli wasn’t home or she wasn’t picking up. I left a message on her machine, got Zsa Zsa, and finally left the house. I was only twenty minutes late.
Tim, the guy who works for me, and I spent the rest of the day restocking shelves, cleaning cages, and feeding the snakes. Bad day for the mice, good day for the snakes. In between, I popped into the back, arranged to go in and have a TB test, and made calls about Bethany while I tried not to listen to the asthmatic wheeze of the store’s air conditioner.
The temperature was in the nineties, and the machine was not happy. It probably wanted a vacation, but then didn’t we all, a fact I was reminded of when I stepped outside. I was drenched in sweat by the time I walked to my car. Which didn’t improve my mood any. If I wanted heat, I’d be living in the Southwest instead of central New York.
On my way to Hillary Cisco’s, I swung by Warren Street, but Bethany wasn’t there, and after about twenty minutes or so, I gave up and drove over to Starcrest, the development in which Hillary Cisco lived. When I saw her leaning against the porch railing, I was reminded of a kid who’d been locked out of her house and was waiting for her mommy to come home. Even though she wasn’t a kid. Not even close. And 113 Wisteria Lane was her house.
Listening to her voice on the machine, I’d pictured her as blond and big-boned, but this woman was as small and brown as a wren. Her gauze dress, incongruously long-sleeved and high-hemmed, fluttered around her thighs as she came down the steps to greet me. She moved with a slow, languid pace, but then, I reflected, it was too hot to move any other way.
Her hair, straight, black, and chin-length, hung like a curtain on either side of her face. But it was her eyes I noticed. They looked as if they belonged to someone else. A pale grayish blue, they were too light for her complexion, casting a vacant expression over her features. Her eyeliner and mascara had run in the heat, smudging into dark circles underneath her eyes. Beads of moisture ringed her hairline. She looked tired, as if she’d been wrestling with something for a long time and lost.
“Robin Light?” she asked. In person, she sounded breathier, less self-assured than she had on the phone.
I nodded. “Hillary Cisco?”
She bobbed her head and nervously plucked at the hem of her dress, trying to make it longer. “You’r. . .
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