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  Maggie, who had been quiet most of the evening, suddenly piped up, saying, “I’d like to do the due diligence on that guy. I know a few really good reporters in Washington whom I can ask for help. I’d like to go to D.C. undercover and infiltrate the firm. That’s where I think we should start. If that’s okay with all of you, I can have Alexis fix me up so no one will recognize me.”

  “Alone? Maggie, the boys are on assignment. I’m all for it, but you need a partner.”

  “I’ll go,” Nikki volunteered. “The office is slow, no pending cases on my calendar. Alexis can handle the office and anything I would have to deal with.”

  “All right,” Annie said. “But not till after our meeting with Garland.”

  “I wish you girls weren’t driving back to town. It’s so late, and you are more than welcome to stay. Please send a text when you arrive home safe and sound,” Myra said, her face creased in worry.

  “Not to worry, Mom, we’ll be a caravan all the way into the city,” Maggie drawled.

  Lady and her brood followed the girls out to the courtyard parking area and gave the girls a rousing send-off. They waited until the huge iron gates closed before trotting back to the kitchen.

  Pinewood, their kingdom, their domain, was now safe for the night.

  Chapter 2

  It was still full light, thanks to daylight saving time, when the caravan of cars sailed through the open gates at Pinewood. The evening was almost balmy, with a slight breeze wafting through the ancient oak trees that surrounded the farmhouse. Even out here in the large courtyard, the girls could smell delicious aromas coming from the open kitchen door, where Myra and Annie stood waiting for the girls and their special guest to cross the cobblestones and make their way up to the porch. Lady and her pups, tails wagging, furiously barked a continuous greeting.

  “Exactly who lives here, Yoko?” Garland Lee whispered.

  Yoko smiled. “A very special lady named Myra Rutledge. The lady standing next to her is my adoptive mother. She adopted all of us,” she said, waving her arms about. “Her name is Anna de Silva.”

  “Countess Anna de Silva?” Garland asked, obviously in awe. “Damn, I should have gussied up. I look like a bag lady.”

  “The one and only. You look fine. We only dress up for weddings and funerals. Trust me, okay?”

  “If I didn’t trust you, Yoko, I wouldn’t be here.”

  It was pure bedlam as it always was when the women got together at Pinewood. It didn’t matter if they had just seen each other five minutes earlier, they still hugged and giggled and played with Lady and her pups, all the while commenting on the delicious aromas coming from the stove, where Charles presided, along with his right-hand man, Fergus Duffy.

  Introductions were made and hands were shaken, followed by flattering comments on Garland’s music. She blushed and thanked everyone and even hugged the dogs, one by one. “I love animals. They love unconditionally, and they never betray you,” she said, downplaying her personal accomplishments, which endeared her to the others immediately. Yoko was right; Garland was just an ordinary person with a special talent.

  “Amen to that,” the girls chorused.

  Garland looked around expectantly. Charles nodded and said, “We have an hour till dinner. I suggest we go belowdecks and take care of business.” He fixed a steely gaze on Garland, then said, “Yoko has vouched for you, and her word is good enough for all of us. Having said that, we are going to take you down below to an area that only a handful of people know about. It’s where we conduct our . . . business. So, if you follow me, we can get things under way.”

  Garland held up both hands, palms outward facing the girls. “This may surprise you, but I do know who you are. You’re the Vigilantes. Back in the day, I supported you and cheered you on, never dreaming the day would ever come that I would need your help.” She pointed to Annie. “I didn’t know about the countess, though. Someone is missing, though. The plastic surgeon, right?”

  “She passed away,” Myra said softly. “Annie took her place.”

  Garland nodded. “You have no worries where I’m concerned. I’m just grateful for your help. I’m ready to get this show on the road—oops, that’s a show business expression—if you all are ready.”

  There were no gasps, no sign of surprise from Garland, when Charles pressed a rosette on the built-in bookshelves to reveal a steep stone staircase that led to the old dungeon, which had been renovated by Isabelle to make room for what they all called the war room, and where the sisters always conducted business.

  The first one into the room, Charles set about pressing light switches and turning on the various computers and the giant TV that hung from the ceiling. Lady Justice appeared to a muted drumroll. Garland fired off a snappy salute, to the sisters’ absolute delight.

  Fifteen minutes whizzed by as everyone got comfortable. Chitchat was about the beautiful spring weather and the cherry blossom festival, which they had all missed for one reason or another. They were waiting for Charles to call the meeting to order, which he did by stepping down from his perch on the dais and standing behind Myra’s chair. He was rewarded with instant silence.

  “Ms. Lee . . .”

  “Please call me Garland. I feel like I’m among friends, and I’d like you all to consider me one, too.”

  Charles nodded. “Garland it is then. And, of course, you know all of us, so first names are the order of the day. Now, Yoko has filled us in. I’d like to go over what she’s told us to date, and if anything is missing, please feel free to enlighten us, so we can do our best to help you.” Garland nodded as Charles repeated virtually verbatim everything Yoko had shared with the group. “Am I missing anything?”

  “Yes and no. We are coming up to three years from the date Arthur sued me. I’ve had enough. I’ve had to spend several million dollars in legal fees. I want that back. My position is I did nothing wrong. Arthur lied to me, and everything in the suit is a lie. I suppose most defendants say that, but in my case, it is the God’s honest truth. Arthur is the liar. I now know more about the legal system than I ever wanted to know. The fact that Arthur is a lawyer himself puts me at a disadvantage. We had a mandatory meeting, there’s a legal name for it, and it was a disaster. I think the magistrate who oversaw it was on Arthur’s side. Maybe paid off by him. My lawyers thought so, too. Neither side gave in. We still do not have a court date, and settlement talks are a pure joke. Right now, we’re waiting for a judge to rule on a summary judgment that my lawyers requested. He’s had the case for four months.”

  “Sometimes judges do take forever,” Nikki said. Alexis nodded agreement.

  “What would you like us to do for you, Garland?” Myra asked.

  Without missing a beat, Garland leaned forward and spoke quickly and concisely. “I would like you to get all my money back, the monies he stole from me and my charity, my legal fees, and for him not to be able to take another cent from me. I’d like to see that sack of pus living in a tent and pissing in the bushes. I’m sorry for sounding so crude, but that’s what I would like to see happen. Arthur put me through hell these past few years, but mostly I want him to pay for betraying me. Please understand something. It’s not the money. It’s the fact that the man who I thought was my friend and protector put himself before me when it was his fiduciary duty to put me first. If I get all those monies back, I will donate them to the charity. Not just the one I founded, but others as well. I read what you are doing with the veterans, Cou . . . Annie. I’d be happy to donate to those fine men and women who did their service for our nation. And I’d like to donate to animal shelters across the country. Now, is that possible? Whatever you need me to do, you can count on me to do it. Is it possible?” she asked anxiously.

  “Oh, yeah,” Kathryn drawled.

  “All things are possible,” Annie said, and smiled.

  “We just have to make a plan. Maggie has volunteered to go to Washington, along with Nikki, to scope things out. Some things just need to be done in per
son. Then we’ll get back to fine-tuning what has to be done to make you whole again,” Myra assured Garland.

  “For now, we want you to talk to us. Maggie will record it all and transcribe it for us later, so we each have a copy. Tell us everything you know about Arthur Forrester, from the day you met him until this moment. Even if you think it’s silly or not important, tell us, anyway. We need the big picture,” Annie said, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

  “Even the part about my praying for him to drop dead, then asking God to forgive me for my evil thoughts?” Garland grinned. She liked these ladies. Really liked them.

  The sisters laughed. “We don’t kill people. What we do is we make them wish they were dead,” Isabelle said with a smile in her voice.

  “Ladies, if you can do that, then it works for me. Have at it,” Garland said.

  “Now that you ladies have taken control, Fergus and I will go topside to see about dinner.” Charles looked down at his watch. “You have thirty-four minutes, so talk fast, Garland. I’ve found over the years that one has trouble being productive after a heavy meal. If you don’t finish up in your allotted time, we will have to reconvene another day.”

  Garland did as instructed and was only interrupted once by Maggie, who had Googled Arthur Forrester’s old firm for a picture of the lawyer. “Here he is, girls, take a look at what Garland calls a ‘sack of pus.’ Arthur Saul Forrester! He looks like one of the Seven Dwarfs. Grumpy, to be precise.”

  The girls all leaned forward to stare at the picture on Maggie’s laptop.

  “What’s with the rosy cheeks?” Alexis asked.

  “He has rosacea,” Garland said. “You need a more recent picture. He looked awful when I saw him last year at a deposition. It’s not like I saw him a lot. Maybe once a year or so. We mostly sent texts, e-mails, and, of course, had lots of phone conversations. I heard through the grapevine that when a partner retires from that firm, the firm has a big dinner and the departing partner is given a gift of some kind. But nothing like that, I was told, was done for Arthur when he retired. He just walked away and didn’t look back.

  “True or false, I don’t know, it’s just what I heard. I also heard that the firm was going to sue him, but I never heard if that happened.”

  “Okay, okay, here’s one. Taken in a group shot at the firm’s annual barbecue the year he retired. He looks kinda like Dopey in this one. Kind of like a hound dog. He doesn’t appear to be very tall.”

  “He’s only five-one. He also wears lifts in his shoes. I think he suffers from short-man syndrome. Look at all the other partners in that picture. They’re all six feet or so.”

  “I guess that could play into his psyche,” Myra said.

  “What about his family? What do you know about them, Garland?”

  “Not much. He has four kids, two boys and two girls. His wife is a blend of something, Asian and American, I think. I think she’s a nurse or a nurse practitioner. He never really talked about his wife. His children are beautiful. The wife, not so much. She’s small, tiny actually. I remember thinking a good wind would blow her over. I guess she gives off the appearance of being fragile. I only ever met her once, so my memories of her are hazy.

  “She didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her. He never talked about her to me. The kids, yes. Because . . . I was invited to his kids’ birthday parties and graduations, the weddings, the births of the grandkids, the grandkids’ birthdays and graduations. For gifts, obviously. I never went to any of them, but I always sent generous gifts.

  “Arthur once told me how much some wedding he had attended cost, and it boggled my mind that someone would pay a quarter of a million for a wedding. I think it was his niece’s wedding, though I’m not all that sure. Now that I think back, I guess he was bragging. Why he thought he had to brag to me is wild.

  “He paid for the graduation parties for two of his grandsons. And each of them cost almost as much as that wedding. Just for the hell of it, I had my son match up the bills to the dates of those graduation parties, to see how much he was billing me for, and sure enough, it did look like I was the one who paid for his grandkids’ parties,” she said, holding back a guffaw. “I guess I want that money back, too.”

  “Of course you do, dear, and we’re going to see that you get it,” Myra said cheerfully.

  “Anything else we should know?” Yoko asked.

  “He likes to play the stock market, but he admitted he isn’t very good at it. He took some big hits when the economy tanked there for a while. He did talk a lot about how successful his two brothers were compared to him, who was just a plain old lawyer. I sensed some jealousy in that regard. One of his brothers is a world-renowned thoracic surgeon and travels all over the world. The other brother married some French billionaire’s daughter and swims in money. Jealousy just oozed out of Arthur’s pores. That’s just my opinion, now.”

  “So what you seem to be saying is Arthur has no money. No serious money from his profession. Am I right on that?”

  Garland nodded.

  “That means he counted on you to keep him afloat and in the style he wanted to live.” Garland nodded again. “If he has no money, how are we going to get yours back, dear?” Myra asked.

  “He has malpractice insurance. Since this all happened while he was a member of the firm, he was covered under that umbrella. I don’t know the dollar amount. By the way, if I didn’t make it clear before, when we countersued Arthur, we also sued the firm. For the five years he was both my lawyer and, unknown to his firm, my agent, he was a partner in the law firm. They owe me, too.”

  “It would appear so,” Annie said. “I so love going after people and taking their money, then putting it to good use. You, my dear, are in good hands.”

  “And just in time,” Kathryn said as she heard the dinner bell Charles was ringing at the top of the brick steps. If any additional proof was needed that dinner was indeed ready, Lady barked shrilly.

  “You’re going to help me, then?”

  “Of course we are. We will make you whole again. All you have to do is trust us. Can you do that?” Annie asked.

  “Of course I can.” Garland turned to Yoko and hugged her. “Thank you for bringing me here. How can I ever repay you . . . all of you?”

  “By keeping our secret,” Myra said. “And if you ever give another concert, getting us front-row seats.”

  “Deal.” Garland laughed.

  Dinner was a lively affair, with Garland fitting right in. As the sisters said later, it was like she was one of them. She ate like Maggie and Kathryn, and said she no longer worried about her weight and was so glad she didn’t have to stuff herself into a nasty corset to project a tiny waist. She didn’t bat an eye when she held out her plate for seconds.

  The conversation quickly turned to Kathryn, as she knew it would. “Come on, Kat, tell us about your date last night with Jackson Sparrow,” Nikki teased.

  Garland’s eyes went wide. “You had a date with the former director of the FBI? The Jackson Sparrow who told the president to take a hike and now works for Annie with the veterans? That Jackson Sparrow?”

  “The one and only. Okay, you want it, here it is. We went to a Thai place, and the food was out of this world. We then went to a movie and had popcorn and Jujubes and one of those large sodas, which we shared. Two straws. He’s funny, he’s witty, he’s charming. Murphy, my dog, adored him. That’s a plus right there. He kissed me good night, and my toes curled up, and my eyeballs about exploded.”

  Charles cleared his throat as Fergus scrambled to his feet. “Ah . . . ladies, I think Fergus and I will retire to the kitchen while you . . . um . . . discuss whatever is to come next.”

  “Ooh, just one kiss?” Yoko asked.

  “Well, no, there was another one, but neither one of us could catch our breath, so we left it at one and a half.” Kathryn giggled at the expressions on the sisters’ faces. “No, I did not invite him in,” she said between giggles. “That’s for another time.”

&
nbsp; “So how do you think he’ll be in bed?” Maggie asked boldly.

  Kathryn laughed out loud. “I’m thinking spectacular!”

  “Make sure you take notes for your memoirs down the road,” Garland said.

  “When are you going to see Jackson again, dear?” Myra asked.

  “The next time I’m in town. Just enough time for me to buy some . . . you know, some frilly, gossamer nothings.”

  Inside the kitchen, Fergus leaned toward Charles and hissed, “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “You’re asking me?” Charles dithered as he waved a dishcloth around and around.

  The general consensus before the girls called it a night was that they had never seen Kathryn so happy.

  * * *

  Maggie settled herself in the buttery-soft client chair across from Nikki’s desk. “You called, I’m here,” she quipped. “The truth is, if you hadn’t called, I would have called you. I couldn’t sleep last night. All I did was think about Garland Lee and that sack of pus ex-lawyer of hers. I have an idea. Want to hear it?” Maggie said, leaning forward, her eyes sparkling.

  “I’m all ears, girl, hit me!” Nikki said, reacting to what she was seeing on the reporter’s face.

  “Okayyyyy. Last night, we talked about Alexis fixing us up so no one would recognize us when we go to the firm, right? I think we need to give that up and go with who we are. Bear with me now, because we can only do this with Annie’s approval. I think she will give her seal of approval, but with Annie, you never know.

  “You will be Annie’s . . . I don’t know what term to use . . . chief of staff, her front person, her right hand, whatever. You tell whomever we get to speak to at Forrester’s old firm that Countess de Silva is looking for a law firm to handle her real-estate holdings and that she is considering that firm and one other. We need to be up front with that to make them want her business so bad they can taste it. If we have to give a reason as to why she’s doing this, we just say her holdings are so vast she no longer wants to keep everything under one umbrella. You rattle off the amount of one hundred million dollars, and they’ll sit up and take notice.”