Looking for Yesterday by Marcia Muller

you weren’t close.”
    “…No, not really. We were until my mom died, but then I asked him to move down here, and he wouldn’t. He wanted me to come home, but he didn’t understand that Southern California is where I make my living. The last time we spoke, we quarreled about that; he said ‘girls’ didn’t need to support themselves. Their ‘upkeep’ was supposed to be provided by their fathers or husbands.”
    “An old-fashioned gentleman; I sensed that.”
    “Old-fashioned, but always a gentleman.” Nina Weatherford was crying now. After a moment she got herself under control and asked, “What’s your connection with him?”
    “I’m investigating a case involving some people who wanted to buy his land. I spoke with him at the Jimtown Store—”
    “Daddy’s hangout.”
    “Yes. He said he had an attorney’s card that might’ve been of help to me, and went home to find it. When I arrived there he was dead.”
    “How was…?”
    “A blow to the head.”
    “Did he suffer?”
    “No. He died instantly.”
    “Oh, God, I should’ve made him move down here. Driven up and collected him and his damn stuff and dragged him to my house. I should’ve known it would come to this. I should’ve…”
    “Should’ve known what, Ms. Weatherford?”
    A long silence, and then Nina Weatherford broke the connection.
    9:14 p.m.
    Hy and I had no sooner finished dinner than he received a phone call from RI’s Denver office requesting his presence in the morning.
    “I’ll call the pilot and ask him to preflight Six-Oh-Six right away,” he told me. “It’s a comfortable ride, I can sleep and be fresh for this new crisis by our eight o’clock meeting.”
    Six-Oh-Six: the Cessna Citation, an eight-seater, luxurious, and the fastest private jet so far manufactured, which RI kept at Oakland Airport.
    I tried not to look disappointed, but he sensed my mood.
    “After I get back, I’ll take some time off and we’ll fly up to the ranch or Touchstone.”
    “If I can take some time off.”
    “You know, if we merged our agencies, we could schedule more compatibly.”
    “There’d still be crises.”
    “Sure. That’s what this business is all about.”
    After Hy threw some things into a flight bag and left, I sat in the parlor for a long time, pondering my resistance to change. If Hy and I merged our agencies, things would work out well, I knew that. So why did I want to cling to the old days, the old ways? It wasn’t that I felt insecure; in many ways I’d never felt so secure in all my life. Secure in my marriage and Hy’s love for me, secure in my profession, secure with my friends and family. It didn’t make sense.
    I got up and went to my home office, where I booted up my laptop. The cats joined me, staring greedily at the fish in the aquarium we’d recently purchased.
    “Don’t even think of it,” I said.
    They ignored me and licked their chops.
    My earlier search on Walden Vineyards had been cursory, but now that I knew Dave Walden had been interested in buying Jethro Weatherford’s small plot of land, I went deeper. I was interested to find out that the backing funds for the not-quite-profitable vineyards came from a trust that Kayla’s late parents had set up for her. I didn’t have the computer skills to get at the terms of the trust, but Mick did.
    I called him at the Millennium Tower condo that he and Alison shared.
    “It’s Sunday night!” he exclaimed. “Are you nuts?”
    “Probably.”
    “We’re watching The Wasp Woman !”
    Whatever that was. “Alison can DVR the rest of it for you.”
    The sound that he made was similar to what came out of Jessie when Alex was deviling her—half growl, half hiss. “So give me the details. I’ll get back to you. And in exchange, I’m taking tomorrow morning off.”
    Now that was a gift: on Monday mornings Mick could make Ebenezer Scrooge seem cheerful.
    11:35 p.m.
    “The terms of the trust are these,” Mick told me. “Kayla Walden—formerly