All That Glitters. Mary Brady

open with a freestanding work island. Two bar stools sat tucked under the lip of its butcher-block counter. To the right of the kitchen area was a more formal dining space with a table—all wood and with six chairs. In the middle of the back wall sat a fireplace flanked by a couch and cushioned chairs.

      On the right of the room was a large bed covered with a duvet of large burgundy and forest-green squares. The whole place looked woodsy, spare and masculine with the exception of a few touches that said a woman had been here on more than one occasion.

      She put the water on the counter and started to go down for more.

      “I’ll get the rest.”

      She began to protest, but he held up a hand and continued. “In the bedroom with the four-poster bed, there are dry towels and a space heater.”

      She took the dismissal for what it was. He had no idea what to do with the enemy, but apparently even a rat couldn’t throw an intruder, no matter how unwanted, out into a hurricane to fend for herself.

      Not getting any dryer, she hurried down the stairs, through the garage and breezeway and to the kitchen. She plucked her duffel and backpack from the braided rug and headed for the bedroom with the four-poster bed...and a space heater.

      What she was going to do when the electricity went out, and it surely would, she had no idea.

      Worse than the cold, sitting in the cold dark she wasn’t going to get the story from Hale. She needed a plan to put herself in his space where she could glean knowledge from his reactions.

      As she carried her bags up the stairs, she wondered if somewhere in the clattering din of the storm would eventually be the hum of a generator to keep the space heater functioning.

      In the four-poster bedroom, she flipped a light switch. When the dim bulb came on, it was barely better than nothing.

      Part of her wanted to sit down in the semi-dark and write up what she had already learned about Zachary Hale and the other part, the overachiever survival part of her wanted to rush back over to the loft. She would demand Hale tell her all there was to know about his company, Hale and Blankenstock Investments, LLC, and about the partner on which his attorney tried to blame the scandal.

      So close. She was so close to all the answers. If she could get Hale to trust her, to open up...

      When she shivered almost violently, she remembered she was cold, her fleece suit was damp and her underwear wet.

      She put her bag on the old carpeting and flipped on the space heater that stood on the slate floor in front of the old fireplace. Standing in the glow she let it warm her. Well, her ankles. The heat didn’t rise much farther than her kneecaps.

      She didn’t have to lie to Hale. She had already told him she was a reporter. Maybe she had fudged just a bit by telling him she wanted his side of the story. She already knew his side of the story and she wasn’t going to be fooled by the face-of-innocence thing. What she wanted was to build her story, her series of stories, on what made such a man tick. How did small-town Maine’s smiling baby boy get to be a billionaire swindler in Boston in thirty-three short years?

      Still shivering in spite of warming ankles she pulled her bag closer and shed her wet clothing.

      All right, so Hale had only been charged and convicted by her fellow reporters and not a court of law. But as far as that man was concerned, every good reporter knew the percentages on where there’s smoke there’s fire. Where there was the suspicion of huge amounts of misappropriated money, there was some kind of malfeasance committed by someone.

      Dancing in the cold she pulled dry underwear from the bag...

      But no one had interviewed him. The person closest to him, his partner, had been interviewed and she was freely, if meekly speaking out, though only after his attorney had thrown her under the bus.

      How deeply into Hale’s personality did the creepiness penetrate? When one swindled men and women who had worked at hard-labor jobs all their lives, did it take more of a deeply rooted problem than if one swindled fellow white collars?

      ...and soon the primal relief of dry underwear loosened a knot in her stomach. When that happened some of the old courage and determination, each threaded with a touch of recklessness, had her quickly sliding on her last change of clothes.

      She was going to go kick some swindler butt.

      Slow down, she thought as she snapped her jeans. Take some time to think this out. She looked around at her surroundings. The fireplace where the heater sat was in the wall to the left of the door and had been capped, either because it didn’t work well or to keep out the winter cold and errant wildlife. The heavy four-poster bed with its dark blue curtains had been placed against the inner wall to the right of the door and beyond it were matching chests of drawers.

      On either side of the bed was a large braided rug and portraits of, she supposed, family members hung on most of the walls.

      Several feet beyond the end of the bed were two tall windows. Between the windows was a washstand, a commode, with an ewer and bowl sitting on top. Unreasonably she hoped there was no chamber pot in the small cupboard of the stand; she had seen a flush toilet here, after all. The washstand had a granite top and above the towel bar was the picture of a woman.

      She walked away from the heater to read the legend.

      The nightstand, it seemed, was made for Millie Mauston when she first came to the mansion on Sea Crest Hill in 1889 as Mrs. Colm McClure. The Maine granite top of the stand weighed about eighty pounds and the chest was made of black walnut at her request. Millie, a bright young woman with a head of thick dark hair was pictured beside the legend. The birth and death date said she was twenty-four when she died.

      Young. Too young to even get to experience her nightstand for long. Addy turned toward the bed and wondered if Millie had slept there.

      “Well, Millie, I hope I get a chance.”

      Right now it was time to find out some dark and sturdy info about Zachary Hale. Dark because readers and therefore editors liked the juicy stuff and sturdy because the tale of intrigue surrounding her last conquest in Afghanistan turned out to be diaphanous at best.

      The lights flickered out.

      Dark. Why had she used the word dark?

      Didn’t matter.

      If Hale had not locked the door to the loft, she’d take that as a signal she was welcome for a nice fireside chat.

      He would not, after all, expect her to sit up here with only the glow of her computer screen and when that went dead, to sit in the rural Maine blackness.

      She groped around.

      And where was the damned flashlight?

      She stopped for a moment in the pitch black.

      She used to be nice. She had friends once. She held the door for old men. She used to carry her elderly neighbor’s trash to the chute. Though for a while a year and a half ago, the best she could muster was to find a neighbor kid to carry it for her. She had been too busy pursuing a story, too busy trying to gain the status few reporters ever touched. And she had done it, been on the top of the heap, the star news reporter everyone envied, in orbit with those who might be up for a Pulitzer Prize, everyone said.

      Crash and burn would have been a good outcome compared to the embarrassing punishment she had gotten from the press she used to hold so dear.

      She searched again for the flashlight.

      Aha! On the edge of the bed. The room brightened as she flicked on the beam.

      She shrugged into a second tank top and cropped cardigan. When she clutched the sweater around her chest, she cringed at how not warm these clothes were. It was still seventy-five degrees in late September in Boston this year and maybe when the storm passed and the sun came back out, it would be sixty in Maine before the snow started.

      With another shiver, she grabbed her laptop and headed