“Thank you,” Laura said, so obviously pleased at my compliment that I felt guilty for lying. The color didn’t bother me. After all, this was Florida. It was all the turrets, gables, and gingerbread.

“Are you selling your place here?” I sipped my coffee.

“Yes. We’ve already had several inquiries. You interested?”

“Don’t I wish.” I looked out at the water and the sailboats. Maybe it wasn’t such a farfetched idea. Fred had sounded pretty excited about the Metal Fab merger. But then I remembered that only a few months ago he had been scared the business was going to go belly up. I sighed. “I don’t think so.”

A black-clad figure approached the stile. “That’s the child who lives next to us,” Laura said, pointing. “Look at that outfit. Looks like she’s on her way to a coven meeting.”

I looked down at Sophie Berliner. “Haley says she has an unbelievable figure. Maybe she doesn’t know how to cope with it yet.”

“She knows. She’s just weird. Pops up everywhere and scares hell out of you. Like one day, I went in the laundry room and she came up from behind the washing machine. My heart nearly stopped.”

I grinned. After all those years of popping into the girls’ bathroom at school, I was pretty sure what had been going on. “Did you smell cigarette smoke?”

“Hell, I didn’t wait to find out. I dropped the clothes and went and told her father.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. Laughed.” Laura put her cup on the glass table. Her hands were shaking. “You see, that’s the problem. They let her get away with everything.” She reached in her pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes as if my remark about smoking had reminded her, and lit one. She picked a piece of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, “Millicent thought Sophie was handed down, too. Thought everything she did was amusing.”

I watched the black-robed figure head down the beach. “She’ll turn out fine.”

“The father’s about twenty years older than the mother,” Laura said, managing to talk and exhale smoke at the same time. “Second family.”

Which was what Haley was asking of Philip Nachman, I thought, to father a second family. Jack Berliner might have jumped into the role eagerly, but it was something Philip didn’t want and shouldn’t be forced into. Suddenly I felt very sad and angry. I stood up to leave.

“I don’t need to know the details about why you called, Laura,” I said. “I just want to know if Fairchild is in serious trouble.”

Laura stubbed her cigarette into her coffee cup; it sizzled fiercely. “Oh, God, we all are.” And with that, she got up and walked out of the apartment.