The Father Factor. Lilian Darcy

amongst Gram’s things so far.

      “She wasn’t a very organized person,” Shallis told him.

      “But you forgive that in some people, don’t you? From what I’ve heard, your grandmother was one of them.”

      “She was wonderful. Generous and fun and creative. Wicked sense of humor. Really surprising take on a whole lot of things. Cared a lot about people. Drove us totally nuts, sometimes, especially my dad, but the whole world always seemed that much fresher and more interesting when she was around. I—I actually can’t believe that she’s gone.”

      “No, I bet,” Jared said quietly. “And it’s only been two weeks, right?”

      “Just over.” Shallis couldn’t have said more than two words, at that moment.

      She kind of hid in the coffee for a couple of minutes and Jared didn’t rush her, which she had to be grateful for, even though at some level she didn’t want him to have the slightest clue about how to behave so well. It would really have helped with this crazy nerve-ending problem if he’d been crude, insensitive, obvious and a flagrant con artist.

      Why had she told him so much about Gram in the first place, she wondered. Because he’d paved the way by talking about his father’s death, earlier?

      “Your mother didn’t want to wait a little longer on all this?” he finally asked. “Sorting through a person’s whole life can be very draining and difficult.”

      “I think it’s helping Mom, in some ways. And she had a little time to prepare before Gram died. Gram was eighty, and the stroke was a severe one. We knew she wouldn’t want to linger for a long time without hope of recovery, and her wish was granted. She died in her sleep ten days after she first collapsed.”

      “You said she wasn’t very organized. Did she at least keep all her papers in one room? Did she have any kind of a filing system?”

      “Uh, no.” Shallis smiled a little. “There are boxes and stuffed envelopes and loose file folders all over the house.”

      “Right.” He smiled back. “That kind of a filing system. I know it well.”

      “And then there are all Gram’s wonderful knickknacks and souvenirs, precious memories folded away in tissue paper, bits of jewelry, old evening gowns, so much.”

      “Some hard decisions. You’ll need to put aside anything you want valued. There are a couple of local valuers my grandfather recommends.”

      He reached into a drawer of the desk and took out two business cards. He didn’t hand them to her directly, but reached across to put them down just in front of her. There was never any risk that they’d touch, and Shallis wondered if that was his intention.

      “Thanks,” she said.

      She picked up the cards and slipped them into a pocket inside the lid of the open briefcase, which she’d place on the desk to her left. Then she looked back at Jared and found him with his jaw propped on his two thumbs and his elbows on the desk for support.

      He looked a little tired. Stressed out, even. She wondered what lay behind his decision to take a break from his jet-propelled ascent up the ladder of success in Chicago, but realized she might never know. She definitely wasn’t going to ask any searching questions that might bring the information out.

      “Should we make an inventory as we go?” she asked.

      “It might be better to sort through everything first.”

      “There’s so much. We’re not tackling any of it systematically.”

      “Room by room?”

      “That’s what I’m trying to do, but Mom goes off on a tangent, sometimes. We keep getting distracted, and we still have a lot more to go through. I’m taking next week off work, but it’s not going to be enough.”

      Shallis realized that once again she’d begun to unload a level of detail that Jared didn’t need. She hadn’t expected him to be such a good listener, in his new professional role.

      “Anyway…” she added in a more businesslike tone.

      “Yes, let’s take a look at the papers you’ve found so far,” Jared said. He sat up straight again and started paging through some of the sheets in front of him. “This is the deed to the house.”

      “That’s right, but before you look at that, there’s one thing we found that we don’t understand and I wanted to ask you about it.”

      Leaning forward, she slid a sheet of paper out of the file folder that came next in the pile. It was a property tax bill dated just a couple of months earlier, and it had a line of her grandmother’s distinctive spiky handwriting scrawled across it in the rich, royal blue ink she always used.

      “Paid Feb. 20,” it said.

      “Look at the address that this tax bill relates to, Jared. Chestnut Street. Gram’s never lived in that part of town, and we’re sure she doesn’t own rental property there or anywhere else. We can’t understand why she’d even have this bill in her possession, let alone why she’d have paid it.”

      “Grandpa Abe lives on Chestnut Street.” He looked at the address more closely. “I’m staying there while he’s out of town. Just a half dozen houses down from this place. I’m trying to picture number Fifty-six, but right now I can’t.”

      “It’s a very nice street, the whole length of it, with all those gracious old Victorians.”

      “It’s beautiful,” he agreed.

      “The grounds of the Grand Regency back onto a part of it.”

      “That’s where you’re working now, right?” He looked up briefly from the paper he was still studying. Knowing he would be seeing her today, he must have done some research. “Their events manager? That’s a big job, at a place like the Grand.”

      “See these gray hairs?” she joked.

      “Oh, yeah, hundreds of them,” he drawled in mock agreement.

      Their eyes met for a moment and they were ready to share a laugh, but then memory intervened and both of them looked quickly away—Jared down at the tax bill, and Shallis toward the window.

      Linnie and Ryan had had their wedding reception at the Grand Regency Hotel six years ago. Jared had heard about their impending marriage, flown in from Chicago and gate-crashed the event, five years after he’d dumped Linnie and practically shattered her heart—she’d cried for months. He’d gate-crashed the church ceremony before the reception, also, hot off the airplane.

      In fact, he’d tried to stop the whole wedding, right in front of the minister at the altar and the entire congregation. “You can’t marry him, Melinda Duncan. I know this is my fault. I’m an idiot. I always thought I had plenty of time, through law school and beyond. But you know it, don’t you? You’ve always known it. You have to marry me!”

      Wrong, Jared.

      Bad call.

      You weren’t even serious, were you?

      You were just testing your power.

      Linnie and Ryan were made and meant for each other, but they’d had a whirlwind courtship and they really hadn’t known each other all that well, on the day of their wedding. Made and meant for each other didn’t always mean that things worked out. Ryan had seen Linnie’s flash of doubt.

      “You know what we always had together,” Jared had claimed, and for a few long, horrible moments, Linnie had remembered all those tears she’d shed for him. She’d bought his whole act.

      Jared had grinned at Ryan, already acting as if he’d won. “Sorry, buddy, but this woman belongs to me.”

      Only then had Linnie been able to speak. “No, Jared, you’re wrong. I don’t.”

      You could