Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [97]
“Didn’t you just talk to him?”
“Yes, but I got cut off before I could tell him.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry. Are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Jesus,” Barbara said under her breath. “If he wants to fire me, you’ll have to find me a job.”
I wished I could laugh, but the impulse only had the opposite effect—I wanted to cry again. I said nothing, made not a sound.
At last, Barbara said, “You know your dad doesn’t have a cell phone. Makes me crazy. And I don’t have hotel information, but I can tell you that he’s going to New Orleans. And I’ve got a phone number. You ready?”
“Yes,” I said.
As she recited the number, I knew I didn’t have to write it down. I already had that number memorized.
“He’s not in,” McKnight’s secretary said. She smiled at me sweetly. “Can I have him call you when he returns?”
I looked behind her to the light maple door of his office. It was closed, a crack of light at the bottom. When I had been there this morning, the door had been open, the office dark.
“No, no message,” I said.
She smiled again and returned her attention to the computer. But instead of leaving, I charged around her, moving fast for his door before she could stop me. I pushed the door open, and sure enough, there was McKnight, ensconced behind a contemporary glass desk, looking up blandly from a stack of papers. Strangely, there was little else on his desktop except for that stack. A neat freak, I thought, apropos of nothing except my growing hatred of the man. Behind him, a huge window showed a skyscraper to the left and the lake behind that, gray now and turbulent with rain.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. McKnight!” the secretary said, bursting into the room. “I told her you weren’t available. I said that—”
“That’s quite all right, Mary,” McKnight said, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Well, I’ll call security.” The secretary sounded nervous. “I’ll have them waiting outside.”
“That won’t be necessary,” McKnight said. “Ms. Sutter has been punishing herself enough, I believe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said loudly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the secretary tiptoe quickly to the door and close it behind her.
“Will you have a seat?” McKnight gestured to a white couch to the right of his desk.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew my father?” I crossed my arms and remained standing.
“You never asked.”
“Did he give you information to blackmail the Fieldings family?”
McKnight drew his head back, a barely perceptible movement. He looked surprised. “Now that you mention it, yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before? Why did you have me working for you if you were going to keep that information from me? Is this some kind of game to you?” I had a million other questions, a thousand other accusations, but I couldn’t get them to form a logical queue in my mind.
“On the contrary.”
“Tell me what is going on here!”
McKnight opened his hands wide, as if to show he was hiding nothing.
“Why did you hire me?” I lowered my voice.
“You’re supposed to be the best, right? All those articles about the cyber-law wunderkind.” He sat back in his chair and folded his hands on his lap. “And I suppose I wanted to meet you. I wanted to see how you’d turned out.”
The personal tone of his voice chilled me. “You have a house in Woodland Dunes,” I said.
He nodded.
“And you knew my parents when we lived there.”
“Bravo, Hailey Belle,” he said.
I coughed involuntarily. Hailey Belle was what my mom used to call me, a shortening of my full name, Hailey Isabelle. “You were involved with my mother,” I said. A trembling in my stomach, spreading throughout the rest of my body. I crossed my arms tighter, fearing I might start shaking all over.
“Yes, I was,” McKnight said.
“Oh, God.” I remembered Walter Fieldings’s comment about my father’s personal vendetta against McKnight. “That’s why my dad hated you.”
“Does he hate me? Too bad.