Where's Hansel and Gretel's Gingerbread House?: A Gabby Grimm Fairy Tale Mystery #2 Read Free Page A

out to get information,
he wasn’t coming off as a complete rat. He was beginning to look
like a cop on a case.
    “Who else had his cell phone number?” I asked
her. “Everyone at work?”
    “No. The company provides cell phones for
some of the employees, and Joe had one. But one night when we were
out, he said he often let phone calls go to voicemail after hours,
and he wanted me to have his personal cell number.”
    “Which phone did you use to leave him
messages?” I wondered.
    “Both. I called his work cell during the day
because Mr. Frist wanted to know where that report was. And then,
when I hadn’t heard from him all day, I tried his personal
cell.”
    “And there was no response at all? No missed
calls? No emails that could have been from him, even using a
different name?”
    “I don’t follow you, Gabby. Are you
suggesting he tried to get in touch with me and I missed it?”
    “Don’t know,” I admitted. “He doesn’t come
off as a total bum. Did you check the hospitals to see if he had
been injured, or did you just read the papers?”
    “You think something happened to him?”
    “It’s possible, Nettie, that his
disappearance isn’t what you think.” The more I thought about it,
the more it seemed likely. He kept her at arm’s length, but gave
her his personal cell phone number. He stayed in her guest room,
but didn’t put the moves on her? Right there, that’s highly
suspicious. Either the guy is the last living gentleman on the
planet or he didn’t want to compromise his source of information.
Maybe this was more about those concrete bids and less about the
romance. In a way, that seemed like harsh news to share with
Nettie. If I pointed out the fact that he was a gentleman who
scammed her out of confidential business news, she’d think it was
because she was totally undesirable. But the truth is there is
often an organized crime element in the building trades, especially
in a city like New York. If Joe Fortuna wasn’t working for a
competitor, it was possible he was a cop doing his job, and that
could only mean one thing. He was working undercover on a case.
Maybe he was trying to keep her name out of it. Only one way to
find out.
    “You still have that number?”
    “Gabby, what are you planning to do?” I had a
sudden flashback to the summer Nettie turned twenty-two and she
confided to me that she had a crush on the cute guy from
Poughkeepsie. She didn’t want him to know she thought he was Adonis
in jeans. Me? I was nearly seventeen and full of myself. When she
pointed him out at the coffee shop, I marched right up to him and
asked him why he hadn’t yet asked her out. What did he think was
wrong with my cousin? Put on the spot like that, Paul stuttered
that as far as he knew, there wasn’t any problem. And could I
please tell him who my cousin was? I had pointed to the mortified
Nettie across the room, cringing behind the post. With a grace that
marked their nearly-twenty-year marriage, he crossed the distance,
put out his hand, and introduced himself to her with enough
gallantry to choke a horse. Annette was more than smitten. She was
head over heels. Before that cup of coffee ended, so was Paul.
    You might wonder what brought that up. The
answer is simple. Nettie can be one giant pain in the presidulator,
at times overbearing and pushy, but when it comes to her heart,
she’s not one to take a leap, especially when she thinks a man has
doubts about her. When Paul told her he needed to take a break from
their relationship, she was convinced it was because he didn’t love
her. The truth was the man was steeling himself to make the biggest
decision of his life. Nettie totally freaked out and started dating
every guy who asked her out. She made a big show of moving on, but
I wasn’t buying it. Unfortunately, she was pretty successful at
convincing Paul. When he saw she wasn’t home pining away for him,
he decided that she didn’t care about him after all, so he took a
job in