Harvestland

ELEVEN

The boy sitting across from Andrew Daly was about twenty years old, gangly yet handsome, preppy clothes and eyeglasses giving off an air of the intellectual. He came from money. He could afford Lehman-Daly Investigations.

Right now he sat restless in the chair on the other side of Andrew's desk, jumpy, unable to keep eye contact for more than a second.

Andrew held out a thin manila envelope over the desk. The boy, Peter Tisdale, hesitated and sighed. He reached forward and took it.

"What's in here?" he asked, hopelessness in his voice like the plague.

Andrew frowned.

Peter nodded, sighed again.

Andrew waited as the young man in front of him slowly opened the envelope and slid out the glossy photographs. He looked away and pushed them back in. His lips quivered, his eyes fighting tears.

"I'm sorry," Andrew said.

Peter was shaking his head. "I love her. I love her so much."

'Her' was Lisa Hall, Peter's fiancé, a young woman Andrew had kept under surveillance the last week and took photographs of during sordid meetings with a gentleman suitor.

A case as old as time. Lisa Hall was a bad boy girl. And Peter Tisdale was a nice guy, the kind every girl claims she wants before she gets bored and fucks around with some well-hung asshole. Andrew didn't have enough fingers to count the number of Lisa Halls he'd run into in his life and on the job.

Poor bastard. He wanted to tell the kid it'd be okay. That this wouldn't happen to him again. That the hurt of the betrayal would pass, that he'd get over it, maybe salvage the relationship or find a new girl as faithful as he.

But he didn't want to lie to him.

"Thank you," Peter said, dropping off a check as he left.

Alas it was the job, but Andrew hated taking money in these cases, felt like a dick getting paid to deliver someone a lifetime of trust issues and sexual insecurity.

When the kid was gone, Eliza looked up from the paperwork on her desk. "These cases flock to you, don't they?"

Andrew shrugged and leaned back, drank more from his second cup of black coffee, loosened further his already loosened tie.

He got personal with cheating cases. His father had been a philandering scumbag who played his mother for years before finally running out on the entire family. As a little kid he swore that he would never do that to a woman. So as an adult he'd only have multiple women at once if that was the understanding. Otherwise he had had girlfriend after girlfriend and had been faithful to them all.

And he had been faithful to his wife. It was she who had cheated on him, and it wasn't something he could forgive. His mother had forgiven his father, time and time again, and it killed her. She died young, Andrew believed, because of it.

"I'll take the next one," Eliza said. "I could use the excitement. Give you one of my background investigations, or this fraud piece right here. Or how about this one? Insurance. Tracking down missing beneficiaries." She fingered a thick file among many atop her desk. Their business was growing. They looked into most cases separately to lessen the work load, bouncing ideas and theories off each other when need be.

When it came to the job, Eliza was at home in the office, running computer searches and scouring through droves of paperwork. Her OCD gave her a gift for the paper trail, picking up the small details and inconsistencies that busted cases open. And at the end she could write a mean report, mail it off to their client, and wait for the check. She worked cases with no illusion of romance or high adventure.