20. Home Free by Fern Michaels

Author:Fern Michaels [Michaels, Fern]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2011-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Isabelle wondered if she was the only one who could see the sadness and unhappiness in Abner Tookus’s eyes. She looked around and decided, yes, she was the only one seeing it. Maybe she was seeing it because she was the closest to the stool on which Abner was sitting. Something in her made her get up and walk over to the man. She looked straight at him and said, “I’m Isabelle. I’m an architect, and I want to tell you I have never seen anything as beautiful as this loft and what you did to it. Do you mind telling me who your architect was? I’d like to shake his hand.”

Abner blinked as he focused on the woman standing in front of him. “I did it myself.” His voice was shy, soft, and gentle. “I worked on it for two years at night or when I wasn’t . . . doing other things. I did some of the electrical work, but I had to have a licensed electrician to get me up to code. I’m not a plumber, so I farmed that out. But otherwise, I did it all.”

Isabelle smiled; she didn’t know why. She wanted to reach out and hug this shy, unhappy man and tell him everything was going to be all right. Instead, she said, “Well, anytime you need a job, call me. I’m in the book. I’d like a tour sometime, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

Abner smiled, and the room seemed to suddenly fill with light. When he smiled, he looked just like Brad Pitt, Isabelle decided. Suddenly she felt flustered and didn’t know what to do.

Annie saved the day when she asked, “So, will you help us?”

“And if I don’t agree to help you, are you going to peel the skin off my body or hang me from a tree over a pond of alligators?”

“No. We’ll just leave,” Myra said.

Abner looked straight at Isabelle, who was still smiling self-consciously. “Tell me what you want first. Then I’ll decide if I want to help you or not.”

“That’s fair,” Nikki said.

His eyes still on Isabelle, Abner said, “I’m always fair. It’s always the other side that doesn’t live up to the agreement.”

Myra cleared her throat. She fished around inside her bag and held out a piece of paper. “There are four names on this list. Adam Daniels, who is CIA, Barney Gray, who is FBI, Henry Maris from Homeland Security, and Matthew Logan from the Department of Justice. There is no one on this list from the National Security Agency. We don’t know if that’s important or not. We are not even sure what their job descriptions are in the agencies these men work for. We want a complete background check on them. From the day they were born until the present. All four men spent the Thanksgiving weekend at Camp David, as did Maggie Spritzer. Just so you know, Mr. Tookus.

“We believe these men are involved in or control . . . ‘slush funds,’ for want of a better term, that these agencies use for .

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