Mackey.
Mackey.
Mackey.
All those years Edward Fortune had spent investigating, until he’d gone nearly mad. Those times he’d shuttled down to the Caribbean to look into the Mackey family’s wealth, their yacht, to follow leads that led nowhere, searching exhaustively for an eighteen-year old kid who’d suddenly vanished on a boating expedition. The Mackeys had never helped. They’d put up walls, treated him like he didn’t belong there. Every time, her father would return with more questions than answers, a little smaller and less hopeful than he’d been before. The doctors probably would never say for sure, but Daisy always felt like those years of mental anguish were what had led her father to be the person he was now—the whole terrible ordeal had taken a toll on his brain, filled it with disease and holes and broken it down until it couldn’t work right anymore.
Mackey. It was a name she’d come to cringe at just the mere mention.
So that’s what she did—she cringed. And when she spoke, it wasn’t in the cordial tone she’d used during the first few moments of the date. She spat out, “What about him?”
“Vernon Mackey is a client of my father’s firm.”
Daisy stared, letting the information sink in. As much as she hated the Mackeys, she knew that part of the reason why they were stonewalling was on advice of their attorneys.
On advice from . . . Zachary Hardy’s father.
When her mouth opened, the words spilled out, bitter. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Her blood started to boil. Maybe Zachary wasn’t to blame for it, but that didn’t matter. The anger that shot through her was red-hot. She couldn’t breathe. She was about to stand up, to rocket out of the place and never talk to him again, when he must’ve sensed it, because he reached over and grabbed her hand. “Wait!”
“Why?” she muttered, sulking like a sullen teenager. “Your father helped protect the Mackeys. How am I supposed to feel?”
“I understand you’re angry. But I looked into the files, and I need to tell you something. It’s . . .” He looked around. “It’s something I shouldn’t be telling you. I could get in a lot of trouble if anyone found out I breached attorney-client privilege. It’s something bad, something I think even your father didn’t know, about the case.”
She crossed her arms and waited, sourly thinking,Doubtful.Her father was the great Edward Fortune. He knew everything about the cases he looked into, had a solve rate better than any other detective in the country. And he’d made Charlie’s disappearance his life’s work. There was nothing left to uncover. She was sure of it.
She sucked in a breath and let it out. “Okay. What?”
He looked like a little boy whose hand had just been caught in the cookie jar. He took a deep breath, and then let it out.
Then he leaned forward, his eyes hot on hers. “What if I told you that your brother wasn’t the first young man who went missing from the Mackeys’ yacht?”
