Page 161 of It Happened on the Lake

She’d cleaned them and refilled them, but to no avail.

Still missing, she thought, eyeing the collar she’d left on the kitchen counter when she’d cleaned out her pockets earlier.

And it had been a week since the cat had gone missing.

Not good.

And someone found his collar.

Or had her cat.

That thought made her stomach churn. Surely no one would hurt him. Surely not. Dear God, she prayed so.

As she listened to the next message, she looked out the window, her eyes scouring the bushes for the dozenth time and coming up empty.

“Hello, Harper,” a deep male voice said as the recorder started to play and all the muscles in her body tensed before he identified himself. “This is Lou Arista calling again. I left a message at your number in California, but since I didn’t hear from you, I thought I’d call the old house number and check in.”

“Oh, shut up, you slimy bastard,” she said, though, of course, he couldn’t hear her.

“I think it would be a good idea if we get together. We could set up a meeting at the office, or if it’s more convenient I could visit you at the estate.”

Over my dead body!

“I know the last time we spoke, things got a little off track—”

“You mean fucked-up.”

“So now that the trust is complete, since you’ve reached the age your grandmother chose for it to be disbursed, I thought we should talk things out and I could explain how the final payments will be handled. We could go over the tax bill, then I’ll let you know about the services our firm could offer. There are a few outstanding bills that we’ll handle, but then there’s the matter of your ex-husband’s claim.”

Joel.

So that was his “business” in Portland. Harper should have known. Well, she would deal with him. “Delete,” she said aloud, then erased the lawyer’s message and stopped the recorder. “Jerk-wad!”

Oh, she remembered Arista all right. Gram’s slick attorney. She had visited his offices not long before moving up here and had found him self-serving and patronizing and barely able to hide the fact that he thought he was more knowledgeable, more educated, and well—just damned smarter than she was.

“Bullshit.”

She still held the ace.

Her grandmother’s estate. What was left of it, due to his mishandling. Somehow a good share of the money had been siphoned off for her own care and schooling by her parents, or, as he’d explained, “For taxes, management fees, estate management, and adjustments due to economic downturns,” and blah, blah, blah. She suspected it was all BS.

He was a big man with an even bigger personality. His dark hair was thick and brushed back, his near-black eyes sparked with a calculating intelligence that felt almost sinister.

When his father, Louis, had died in a hunting accident Lou Junior had inherited his father’s business, which included Gram’s account, the estate and trust his father had orchestrated. Within a year of his father’s death, and only six months after Gram was laid to rest, Junior had left the modest office space in a historic Almsville building and joined two other attorneys, Frank Bartlett and Joseph Connors, to become the founding partners of Arista, Bartlett, and Connors, Attorneys at Law,The ABCs of Legal Services, according to their local television ads.

Over the years, the firm had expanded and moved to its current location in a high-rise in downtown Portland. Arista’s glassed-in office offered views of the Willamette River and the city stretching east to Mount Hood in the distance.

She’d been there once, to sign papers that started the process of distributing the remainder of the trust. She told the lawyer that she would be in the market for a new attorney. He’d just nodded, his smile not touching his eyes as he’d tried to convince her to change her mind about dismissing the ABC legal team.

She had assured him she wouldn’t.

He frowned and said something about her being a single woman, as if that were some kind of disability.

She remembered him saying it was a mistake for her to leave.

She hadn’t thought so then, didn’t think so now. As far as she was concerned, Arista had lived off her grandmother’s estate far too long.

She’d walked out of the law firm’s offices that last visit, had her parking ticket validated by the sweet-smiling receptionist who’d tried valiantly to copy Princess Diana’s layered hair style, then ridden the elevator sixteen stories down to the parking garage.