Jessica was scheduled to be out of town only until the end of the week, and if she returned and Maya still had no pictures of Cyrus with his secret girlfriend, she fully expected to be fired.
Maya saw movement inside the house. Cyrus was standing up with his cell phone clamped to his ear. Maya put down her half-eaten roast beef sub.
Maya’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Vanessa, who was sitting next to her, in the passenger’s seat, looked up from her iPad. “Is he on the move?”
“He’s talking to someone on the phone.”
“Do you think it’s Maggie?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t exactly afford to hire some brainiac IT guy to help me tap his phone.”
Vanessa chuckled and went back to her iPad.
“How’s the studying going?” Maya asked, glancing over at her daughter.
Vanessa shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I hate chemistry. I’m never going to use it in life, so what’s the point?”
“You don’t know that. Keep at it.”
“I’m so going to fail this test tomorrow.”
“Positive thoughts.”
Maya watched Cyrus through the house’s big bay windows pace back and forth, looking like he was cajoling someone on the other end of his phone.
It could just be Jessica calling from Chicago, where she was on a business trip. Or, if luck was on her side, it might be Maggie wanting to see him. After a few minutes, Cyrus ended the call and just stood in the middle of the living room, staring into space as the football game, which was in its final minutes, played out on the giant wall screen behind him.
Finally, he sat back down on the couch to finish watching the game.
Maya sighed loudly.
“Not going anywhere?” Vanessa asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Maya said, frowning.
She felt bad dragging her daughter out on a school night to join her on a stakeout. It screamed of bad parenting. But Maya’s partner in her private detective agency, Frances Turner, was nearly eight months pregnant and was so big she was about to burst. In the last two months, Frances had had to scale back dramatically on her workload, leaving Maya to pick up the slack. They couldn’t afford to turn down any clients, so Maya had taken it all on, working fourteen- to fifteen-hour days to cover all their active cases. And this night, after leaving Vanessa home one too many times alone, she insisted they have some mother-daughter bonding time, even if that meant sitting together in her Chevy Volt, spying on a cheating husband.
Maya was incredibly proud of her daughter, who was very social and funny and playful, like her father, but also tough and no-nonsense, like her mother, who had been hardened by her years in law enforcement before she quit and started her own PI firm.
Raising Vanessa had been easy and joyful, that is up until she reached the point where she started gushing with her friends about boys. There had been one who came sniffing around recently, trying to get Vanessa’s attention. He was a badass rocker dude type with a lot of tattoos. Maya had taken an instant dislike to him and, after investigating him a little, found out he had been arrested twice for shoplifting. She managed to put the kibosh on that one. But boys were like ants, once you squashed one, there were bound to be more around.
“Did you hear from Frances? How did her ultrasound go today?” Vanessa asked, bored with staring at numbers and symbols on her iPad.
“Everything looks good apparently. She sounded very upbeat.”
“Good. How long will she be out on maternity leave?”
“We haven’t talked about it, but I assume at least a couple of months.”
Vanessa nodded and quietly gazed out the window.
“What?” Maya asked.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, what?”
“That means you’ll be working weekends for the foreseeable future.”
“Unfortunately yes. We can’t afford to lose any cases. Why?”
Vanessa shrugged.
She didn’t have to answer.
Maya knew exactly what her daughter was hinting at.
“We’ll go see him the minute I get a break. I promise.”
She was talking about her ex-husband, Maya’s father, Max, who at the moment was serving five to ten years in the state penitentiary. Max Kendrick had been a police captain in the Portland division before getting caught up in a widespread corruption scandal. He was indicted on Vanessa’s thirteenth birthday and convicted on his and Maya’s fifteenth wedding anniversary. Max always had good timing.
Maya took Vanessa to see him as much as she could, but it was an hour-and-a-half drive each way to the prison, and it took another hour to be processed and admitted, and then they could visit with him for only thirty minutes, forty-five if they were lucky. It was exhausting, and Maya found it difficult to put on a happy face and pretend everything was peachy keen when they were with him. Since his incarceration, Maya’s life had become topsy-turvy. She had resigned from the force to avoid the judgment and angry faces of her fellow cops, started her own business with Frances, and kept the bills paid and food on the table after their nest egg had been wiped out by legal fees. She was working to make the best of a very bad situation, and she knew her daughter was hanging her hopes on the myriad of appeals that had been filed on behalf of her father, appeals that Maya knew in her gut would be turned down because the cold, hard fact was her ex-husband was guilty of every crime and rightfully convicted. He just needed to keep his head down and serve his time. But she couldn’t exactly say that to her daughter, who even as she saw him in an orange jumpsuit and with his wrists handcuffed, still held him up on a pedestal.
“Mom, he’s leaving!” Vanessa cried.
Maya whipped around to see Cyrus, struggling to put on his coat, halfway to his car, which was parked in the driveway.
She started the Chevy Volt, thankful her choice of vehicle was one that made zero noise, and pulled out behind Cyrus as he drove off down the street.
“You think he’s going to see Maggie?” Vanessa asked.
“Fingers crossed.”
Maya silently prayed that was exactly where he was going because if she got the evidence Jessica Farrow so desperately craved, then her wealthy client would surely cut a nice check for a job well done by early next week.
Vanessa was now caught up in tailing Cyrus and set her iPad down on her lap. When they reached a stoplight, Maya noticed what was on her screen.
“You are not reading your chemistry notes, Vanessa!”
Vanessa looked down guiltily at her screen and then grabbed the iPad and hid it from her mother’s view. “I’m sorry.”
She had been scrolling through the Dirty Laundry website.
“I told you I don’t like you reading that filth.”
“I know, but everyone at school is texting about the latest headline. It’s so juicy!”
Maya didn’t want to ask but couldn’t deny she was just a little bit curious. Luckily her daughter was a gossip, again like her father, so she knew she wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.
“The new PTA president, the wife of that senator, was in the middle of her welcome speech when the news hit that her husband is embroiled in some kind of sexual harassment hush-money scandal.”
“What’s