“You are still there?” Felton asked, sounding more than a little put-out.

“That sounded an awful lot like a royal summons.”

I could almost feel heat radiating from the phone’s fiber optics. Felton couldn’t stand me, and the feeling was mutual. I didn’t think he was used to being challenged, and since the moment we met, that was all I’d been doing. I wondered if Mrs. Ayers ordered him to call, and like the good little family lawyer, he’d been forced to comply.

“It is a request.” His words were clipped and tight, as brittle as desiccated twigs.

I swiveled back and forth lazily, enjoying myself. “What’s she want to talk about?”

Felton sighed. If he hadn’t been under the employ of the Ayers family, he likely would have told me to go to Hell by now, but he was, and he couldn’t, and we both knew it. I grinned, tapping out a jaunty tune on the carpet with my happy PI feet.

“If the time is not convenient—”

I cut him off. “Will you be there, or will I be meeting with Mrs. Ayers alone?”

There was another hesitation. “Against legal advice, Mrs. Ayers has chosen to speak with you alone.”

I hung on the line, taking a great deal of satisfaction in Felton’s discomfort. I let the silence sit there, knowing it was killing him by degrees. I didn’t much like being called for, but if this was the only shot I had at talking to Tim’s mother, I had to take it. I leaned forward in the chair, my elbows on the desk. I could hear Felton working on his next coronary. He couldn’t go back to Elizabeth Ayers without an answer one way or the other. He had been retained to solve problems for the family, not create them.

“Tomorrow. Ten,” I said finally, and then I hung up on him before he had a chance to hang up on me. I took my simple pleasures where I could find them.

* * *