Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, but do you know how disgusting you two are? Where’s your regard for others? You both have been yapping the whole time, full pitch. So shut up, already.”
    The train started up, juddered to a halt.
    “Bitch,” Ben muttered.
    “Backing up,” the conductor said, grim as he strode through the aisle, both hands hitting the tops of each seat row.
    Henry remembered his clothes smelling like burnt oil. He put his nose near his underarms and sniffed. Slightly sour and they hadn’t even gotten to New Brunswick. “He died six months ago. Ground frozen. It had snowed, and I still see Susan’s shoe prints in the snow. Didn’t feel the cold, she told me. Three months later she was gone. Hasn’t written.” He blinked, remembering.
    Ben muttered his condolences. Henry knew the man hadn’t known what to say. A decent sort.
    But the memory of Ben and their first conversation faded, and Henry was in a different place. “Playing with the truck I brought you, Stuart? I’ll say good night, then.” He bent and kissed his son’s forehead. He smelled disinfectant.
    “Bye, Dad. I love you.”

Chapter 6

    Fina. Evening One, Trisha Liam’s Study Revisited

    After I said good night to Trisha Liam—for the first time, as it happened—I turned on the ignition and sat in my car while it idled. The driver waiting to take my space went ballistic. But something was gnawing at the fringes of my mind. For one thing, Trisha Liam didn’t want to talk about her husband’s death. For another, I just didn’t have a fix on the Liam family, Brandy included. So to the roar of Mr. Impatient, I got out of my car and rang Trisha Liam’s bell again. She looked like she’d been crying for real.
    “I need to ask more questions. I don’t feel like I know your daughter.”
    “How could you? I don’t know her.”
    “That’s not what I meant. I just need a little more time with the books and the pictures in your study. It’s the way I work.”
    “I told you—I don’t have a study, I have a conservatory.” She gestured toward the back of the house.
    In her conservatory or study or whatever the hell it was, I headed for the bookshelf. “Tell me about these people.” I held up the black-and-white photo I’d seen earlier in the evening when Trisha was fetching my water. “I recognize you, and that’s Brandy when she was maybe ten. Is that your husband?”
    She nodded. “He’s dead.”
    “Can you tell me about his death?” I thought she was going to faint any minute, so I suggested we sit.
    When we got comfortable, Trisha asked, “What does Mitch’s death have to do with finding Brandy?”
    “A lot. You’re a smart lawyer. How do you begin preparing a case?”
    “Sometimes maybe you dance around and around the main point.”
    We were seated in front of the bay window, and through the haze, I saw lights moving on the East River. I watched them as she talked.
    “It happened before I knew it. Sometimes sudden things keep on happening. They happen over and over until you think you’re going mad. But you’re doing it to yourself, of course.”
    I nodded, knowing too well what she was talking about. Grief.
    Trisha rubbed her forehead. “The change of seasons, for one thing. A year’s turning. Another spring without him, and I wonder how much is left of him sealed underneath the cold ground. I think of him young and grinning and in court, the first time we met. He was defending a member of the Brooklyn mafia, and I was prosecuting. ‘How can you defend a man like that, obviously guilty,’ I asked him over coffee. Mitch stepped right up to the plate. He was like that.”
    I nodded, not wanting to interrupt her moment of peace.
    “He smiled, and it was such an engaging smile that I forgot to listen to his words about reasonable doubt and the rights of man. I just stared at his bow tie bobbing up and down. And that’s how our friendship started. A cataclysmic meeting of opposites. That was close to