So I sat, watching him get a cup of coffee for me and one for himself. The cats watched the bag with the bacon. “I have to tell you something,” I said. “I talked to you father last night.”
“Did he plead his case for why he thought he should be my lawyer and not Brady?”
He thought I meant at the restaurant.
“Here,” I said.
Marcus was holding an egg and the shell smashed in his fingers. He dropped it in the sink and ran water over his hand. “You let him in?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to talk to him. I think he can help.”
I watched Marcus take one deep breath and then another before he spoke. “I don’t want his help.”
I suddenly didn’t know what to do with my hands. I pushed at my messy bun with one hand and it went sideways. I pulled out the bobby pins and elastic and shook my hair loose. It gave me time to get my feelings under control a little more.
“I know you don’t want his help. And I wouldn’t ask you to take it. But I do want it.”
“Kathleen, you don’t know what he’s like,” Marcus said, frown lines carving deeper into his face.
“He’s charming, manipulative, and has no scruples about saying what he thinks you want to hear just so he can do what he was planning on doing all along. And he always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, which he may very well be some of the time, but not all of the time.”
Marcus shook his head. “Okay, so you do know my father. What did he want?”
I leaned my elbow on the table and propped my head on my hand. “He wants to help you.”
“On his terms.” Marcus turned back to the counter and reached for another egg.
I nodded. “Yes, on his terms. Doesn’t mean I agreed to that.”
He glanced at the cookie tin/first-aid kit that I hadn’t put back in the cupboard and then looked at me. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“Merow!” Owen said.
I sighed. “Your father tried to pet Owen. I told him not to.”
“He doesn’t listen well. Is he all right?”
“He’s fine,” I said. “It was just the back of his hand. I cleaned it up and put on a small bandage.”
Marcus cracked an egg into my red mixing bowl. “Thank you,” he said. “But I meant Owen.”
At the sound of his name Owen meowed loudly again just in case we were, say, deciding who was getting bacon and who wasn’t.
I smiled and shook my head. “No, you don’t,” I said.
Marcus grabbed a fork and began beating the eggs. “No, I don’t,” he repeated. “But it’s just typical of the things he does.”
“He loves you.” I shifted in the chair, pulling up both legs so I could lean my chin on my knees.
“I do know that,” he said. “And I love him. I just don’t always like him.”
“So I’ll be careful. I’ll try not to be charmed or conned by your dad. Can you live with that?”
He sighed and then nodded. “I can live with that.”
I smiled. “So maybe you can stop beating the heck out of those eggs.”
Marcus finished our breakfast sandwiches—scrambled eggs, cheese, bacon and fried tomatoes. I was glad I hadn’t changed after all when a bit of egg fell out of my sandwich, bounced off my T-shirt and landed on the floor.
Hercules immediately put his paw on top—not that Owen was going to go after a bit of egg when he could be eating the extra bit of bacon Marcus had slipped him and I’d pretended I hadn’t seen. I had warned Elliot not to try to pet the cat, but that didn’t mean I thought it was okay that Owen had gone all Wolverine on the man.
Herc looked up at me with a slightly pained expression on his furry face. The egg had been sandwiched next to the fried tomatoes, which meant he now had tomato on the bottom of his foot.
I lifted my napkin off my lap. “Hold up your foot,” I said to him, gesturing with my free hand. He dutifully held up his paw, but not the one that was still firmly on top of that bit of egg, because who knew what one’s brother might do if it was uncovered.
“The other foot,” I said, nudging it with one finger.
“Merow,” he said and his green eyes darted in Owen’s direction.
“No, he won’t.” I leaned forward and put my left hand, on its edge, next to the bite of egg, which had to be pretty soggy by now. Hercules hesitated, then lifted the paw and I managed to wipe it with the napkin in my other hand. He turned it over, licked it a couple of times for good measure and then dropped his head to finally eat the scrap of scrambled egg.
I tried to sit up again but my center of gravity was off. I flailed one arm in the air and then I felt Marcus’s hands on my shoulders pulling me upright.
“Thank you,” I said, kissing his mouth and only getting about half of it because I was still slightly off balance.
“You’re welcome,” he said. He got up for the coffeepot.
“You haven’t said what happened last night,” I said, reaching for my sandwich.
Marcus shrugged. “It was just more of the same, the same questions I’ve answered three times now. What kind of a relationship did Dani and I have? Did we stay in touch? What did we talk about the day she died? What did we argue about?” He pulled his hand back through his hair. “I’ve done the same thing myself but only when I had a viable suspect—which I’m not in this case.”
“What did Brady say?”
“He thinks it was a fishing expedition. Right now all they have is what looks to be part of my key chain under her body and a so-called gap in my alibi.” He set down his fork. “There have to be thousands of those key chains out there.”
“Twenty-one thousand, five hundred,” I said around a mouthful of bacon, egg and tomato-soaked toast.
He laughed. “I should have known you’d know that.”
I reached for my coffee. “Would it bother you if I went to talk to Travis and John? They spent more time with Dani in the last few weeks than anyone else. They might know if she’d had any problems with anyone.”
His smile faded and his expression became more guarded. “I’m not sure either one of them will talk to you. Maybe John, but not Travis for sure.”
“But I thought things were better between you two.”
“They were for a while, but as far as Travis is concerned things were good until Dani and I reconnected. He said he knew I didn’t have anything to do with her death but he just couldn’t stand the sight of my face.”
I got up and put my arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry. He’s just saying those things because he’s hurt.” I kissed him and sat back down again. “I keep meaning to ask you: How long did your dad live here when he was a kid?”
“He was about twelve when his family moved here and they were still living here when he left for college at seventeen. I don’t think my grandparents moved until the year after that.”
I took another bite of my sandwich. I could feel two sets of kitty eyes watching my every move even though Marcus had already given both of them a tiny bit of bacon. “He never came back here to live after that?”
Reaching for his coffee, Marcus shook his head. “No. We came here in the summer for a lot of years when I was a kid. If you go past the marina and stay on Main Street there are half a dozen little houses near the water.”
“I know where you mean.”
“You could rent those in the summertime back then. That’s where we’d stay. Always in the very last one.” He smiled at the memory. “There were two little bedrooms under the eaves with a shared closet between them. Hannah and I would open our closet doors and we could lie in bed and talk to each other.”
He got up for more coffee, refilling my cup before he topped up his own. “We’d come for three weeks. My father would take the middle week off but at some point he’d have to go back to the office, maybe for the day, maybe for the rest of the week. It never changed.”
I ate the last bite of my sandwich and then pulled up both feet so I could rest my chin on my knees. “Did you ever actually consider going to law school?”