“Dear God, don’t let today be another learning experience.”

--Dying To Laugh

I sat in my car, parked right across the street from Nolan-Volz, a large travel mug of coffee in my hand and a handgun in my purse. I watched as workers trickled in through the front door. Some in jeans, some in suits. It was just a little after seven forty am so these were the early birds looking to impress the powers that be. I was never out of bed by this time of day, but this was a worthy cause to sacrifice both sleep and tradition for. 

She didn’t show up until eight twenty-five and my coffee mug was empty and my bladder uncomfortably full. I spotted her when she was still half a block away and immediately got out of my car, impatiently waiting for a few cars to pass before jaywalking across the street to greet her. 

“Charity!” I called out, just in time before she went inside. 

She turned, surprised. But when she saw me her face lit up. “What are you doing here?” she asked but before I had time to answer her hand went to her head. “Look at my hair!” she squealed. “All this time I’ve been trying to blow out my curls or pull them into a braid or a bun and then your brilliant friend gives me the perfect cut and hands me some products and look! My curls are gorgeous! Aren’t they gorgeous?” 

“They’re gorgeous,” I confirmed. “Hey, do you have a minute? I need to ask you something.”

“Um,” she looked back at her place of work. “I really need to get in there. Gun likes me to arrive before he does to get everything ready for him and he always arrives before the other executives…”

“He’s not in there yet,” I assured her, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I tried not to think about how much I needed to pee. 

“How can you be sure?” She asked, now glancing at the time on her phone.

“I’m sure because I’ve been watching.”

Immediately she looked up, now with a new level of curiosity, and maybe a little wariness. “Why?” she asked as a car drove by, Sergeant Pepper blasting from its speakers.

“Look, I told you I knew Aaron London and that I had met his wife, the thing is, I didn’t meet his wife until a few days ago.”

“But…” she shook her head, indicating that was impossible.

“Yeah, I know what you told me,” I said, still bouncing. “She’s supposed to be dead. But the thing is, I met their daughter.”

Charity shook her head again. “Someone’s messing with you. I’m telling you, his wife was Ann and she’s dead.”

“What did she look like,” I pressed.

“Blonde…well, not naturally. She had these great, dark eyebrows. She wore her hair past her shoulder blades and it was always kind of wild…like I just-had-sex hair.”

I thought about Anita London. She probably wasn’t naturally blonde either although her eyebrows were a light brown, not really dark. But that could be a dye job too. 

“She had tan skin,” Charity went on. “Well, maybe not tan exactly, she had an olive complexion.” 

I wouldn’t call Anita’s complexion olive, but it was sort of a subjective term. 

“And of course she was tiny, barely above five feet. And that British accent really set her apart. It sounded almost sexy when she was on the phone.”

And now there was no doubt. We were not talking about the same person. “This woman, Aaron’s…wife, did she go by the last name London?”

“No,” Charity said, with a little laugh. “I was told she thought a British woman living in America with the last name London would be a little too on the nose. She kept her maiden name.”

“It wasn’t Jaynes, was it?” I asked.

“Not even close,” Charity said, tilting her head to the side. “Her last name was Keller.”

Anne Keller. The woman London lived with. The woman he loved. But not his wife.

“Charity, what would have happened to London if he had given Anne samples of Sobexsol before the clinical trials had begun?”

“Are you serious?” Charity asked. “You could go to jail for that. Hell, if he was caught? He could bring down this entire company.”