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That thought brought her back around to the current discussion, and her immediate worry. “You wouldn't quit, would you?” Tonica had worked at other bars before Mary's, and just because he'd been here for two or three years didn't mean he would stay, always. “I mean, you said this is a good place to work, better than anywhere else in town. You wouldn't leave?”

He tilted his head and looked at her again. Whatever was showing on her face seemed to worry him. “Relax, Gin. I'm not going anywhere. Whatever's gotten into Patrick, he'll settle down eventually and go back to being the absentee boss we all know and ignore.” But his face had lines and shadows that hadn't been there even a week before, and Ginny didn't feel reassured.

He gestured at her drink. “You want that freshened?”

She looked down at her martini, which was only half gone. “No, I'm good.”

She paid for her first drink, then Tonica “refreshed” it, and then she paid for the next, if she had a third. It was one of the little, unlooked-for bonuses to their working together, like having the best table by the window reserved for her, and she didn't feel guilty about it at all.

All right, she admitted, maybe a little.

“Oi, boss!” Seth called from the other side of the bar, bent over something. “Some help, will ya?”

“Excuse me,” Tonica said, and went down to help Seth carry an oversized crate of something out of the back room. She watched for a moment as they discussed something in low tones, the ambient noise of the other customers making it impossible to eavesdrop this time.

One of the things that she liked most about Mary's, besides the staff, was that they didn't have a jukebox, or live music, ever. There was a radio at the bar that sometimes played jazz, just softly enough to be soothing, but you could always hear who you were talking to. If you wanted a noisy pickup joint, there were a lot of other places to go
both locally and downtown. Mary's was where you came to be heard, more than seen. It was where you came with friends, took someone on a third date, came on your own when you didn't want to be alone.

Ginny scanned the bar again, letting her gaze flit over the sparse crowd. This early in the evening—it was barely five o'clock—it was mostly folk who worked out of home offices, like herself. She knew three of the men and one of the women set up at the tables, less for who they were or what they did than what dogs they owned, since she ran into them at odd hours while walking Georgie.

The thought made her check out the front window, to reassure herself that her dog was still comfortable and not needing a walk. The familiar fawn bulk was still hunkered down next to the other dog, exactly where she'd left them an hour ago. Plus, she noted with amusement, the addition of a smaller form, currently draped over Georgie's forelegs. Mistress Penny-Drops: the feline resident-at-large of Mary's, and her dog's best friend, if you could assign animals relationships like that.

Maybe you could, or maybe she was being silly, but there was no denying that they seemed to enjoy each other's company. Dogs were pack animals—so what if Georgie's pack was feline? The rest of it walked on two legs, and that didn't seem to bother Georgie at all.

Dogs . . . just kind of
accepted
things.

Someone came up beside her but didn't call across the bar to get Tonica's attention. They were, apparently, waiting to be noticed. Ginny turned around on her stool to see
who it was, and the woman took that as an invitation to speak. “Hi. You're Virginia Mallard?”

The woman wasn't anyone Ginny knew, either personally or as a seen-around-town local. That of itself wasn't wildly odd—Mary's was a neighborhood bar, tucked into the tail end of a side street—but Ballard, retaining an independent neighborhood vibe separate from the city that had annexed it, had enough local interest that strangers still wandered in occasionally, especially tourists.

This girl didn't look like a tourist, though. She was classic Ballardian: her clothing looked like what Tonica constantly disparaged as “hipster light”—chinos and a dark green pullover just worn enough to be acceptable, but had been very expensive not too long ago. Her hair was done in shoulder-length brown braids, about a dozen of them, with the tips touched with just enough purple to be noticeable but not so much to be flashy.

A new client? Normally they approached her via a phone call or less often an email, not the personal approach, and the woman didn't look like the sort who would normally hire—or could afford—her. Still, it never hurt to be professional.

“Hello, and yes, I am.” Ginny shifted a little, in case the woman was looking to claim the bar stool next to her. It was early enough that the bar itself was empty, except herself—the half-dozen people who had come by after work had chosen tables, instead—but she could understand why a woman alone would sit at the bar. That was what she'd done, too, the first few times she came here.
She'd been new to the neighborhood, hadn't known anyone, and figured that talking to the bartender was better than sitting alone at a table, looking like fresh pickup meat, or worse.

But the woman didn't sit down. Instead she stood in front of Ginny, her head tilted to one side, her eyes squinted half shut as though she were staring into the sun.

Ginny had the sudden, uncomfortable thought that she was about to be hit on.

“You're the woman who did that thing last month?”

Well. That had not been what she was expecting, at all.

“That thing?” Ginny asked slowly, not sure if she should say yes or no.

“The real estate thing. Where the guy went to jail and all.”

The “and all” covered a lot of territory, including fraud, assault, burglary, and a man she'd known, however briefly, dying. Ginny still didn't believe it had been suicide.

“Yeah,” she said, putting down her drink and giving this woman her full attention, trying to figure out what was up. “I am.”

“Oh.” The woman's brown eyes opened wider, and she looked even more nervous. “Oh, good. Um. I, ah, um.”

Ginny waited, wishing that Tonica was here to say something, but not wanting to look away from the woman to see if he was still busy, or if he could be called down. She was the better researcher, totally, but he had the ninja people skills. And right now she really could use those.

“I heard about you. I mean. Everyone's heard about . . . it was, people talk.”

Ginny hadn't known they were being gossiped about. It wasn't surprising, she supposed: they hadn't exactly hidden what they had done, and some of it had gone down right here at Mary's. Had she known, though, she could have used it for cheap advertising . . . assuming that they were saying good things, that was.

“My name's Nora,” the woman said in a rush. “Nora Rees. I work down at LifeHouse. I mean, I'm a volunteer there, I don't have—I'm a student, but I work there, volunteer work.”

The girl was borderline incoherent, but Ginny picked up the essentials. LifeHouse was the name of the local animal shelter where Ginny had gotten Georgie last summer. She'd been innocently minding her own business, doing some window shopping, when they'd ambushed her with a row of animals up for adoption, and she'd ended up going home with a gangly, half-grown, mostly shar-pei puppy.

“I know the place, yeah,” she said now. “I got my dog there.”

“The shar-pei mix outside, yeah, I know. Um, I checked the records, when . . . I mean—”

“When you came looking for me?” Ginny asked.

“Yeah. I mean, when—”

This woman was never going to get to the point. “And?”

“And I want to hire you. To investigate. The shelter, I mean.”

*  *  *

Teddy had been checking the taps when the Greenie-hipster child approached Ginny. He noted it out of the corner of his eye, not really paying attention, the way he kept his eye on everything that happened at his bar, and Stacy monitored the tables during busy evenings. At first he didn't think anything of it—with her curls and curves, Ginny got attention, even if she didn't always notice it. But when she got that look on her face—the one that usually meant her brain was firing on all thrusters—he casually moved back down to that end of the bar, just in case. In case of what, exactly, he didn't let himself think about. He was just listening. That was what bartenders did.

“You think there's something wrong at the shelter?” his sometimes partner was asking the girl.

“Yes. I don't know. Maybe.”

The girl was not exactly inspiring confidence. He took a closer look. Definitely a Ballard Baby, he decided: too crunchy-granola for Downtown, too poor to live in Fremont these days. Mostly harmless.

“Something funny's happening,” the girl was saying now, her hands emphatic. “Not funny hah-hah, funny wrong. Money-funny. Not counterfeiting, um, no. I, it's just. . . .” She took a deep breath and started again. “It's about our finances. We're working in the black—the shelter's founder sank a lot of money to get us started, and donations and adoption fees keep us going, plus all our professionals donates their time, but we rely a lot on grants.”

Ginny nodded, indicating that she was following along so far.

“And I'm not an accountant or anything, I don't handle our books, but we have this one grant, specifically, that funds our ability to offer low-cost neutering. It gets renewed yearly, and all the paperwork has to be just so, you know? We're coming up for renewal, and Este, she's the one who founded the shelter, her and her partner, she wanted me to go over the paperwork, make sure everything was in order.”

“And everything wasn't?”

“I . . . don't know.”

Teddy got the feeling that this girl, Nora, was used to having the answers ready to hand, that people had always told her how to behave to save the earth, be a good citizen, be a good daughter, and it had always made sense to her. This was the first time she was running into something that didn't make sense.

He shook his head. She'd get used to it, eventually.

“There's a lot of paperwork, not just going forward but to back check previous grants,” the girl went on, “and I'm not sure, this isn't my thing, really, but I don't think all the funds this year are accounted for properly. I think someone's been taking it. I thought at first maybe I'd miscounted, or missed a receipt somewhere, one of the payment records, or there'd been a misallocation, but I checked all that, twice. And the only thing left is that someone's been stealing it.” She sounded horrified, and her face twisted in confusion. “Who would do that? Steal from a shelter? Steal from animals?”

“Animals are less likely to call the cops.” He joined into
the conversation now, leaning over the bar, his elbows planted in the standard bartender pose that Ginny joked could convince a hardened felon into spilling their guts. “How much money are we talking about?”

“I don't know. Maybe two thousand?” She didn't seem at all surprised that he had joined them; he didn't know if she'd been expecting him, or her world assumed that everyone was interested in what she had to say. “It's not a lot of money, really, but the grant allows us to fix any animal that's brought in, not just the ones we're hosting. Going to the vet could cost you a hundred dollars or more—we can do it for half that, because the grant covers the rest of our expenses, the supplies our vet uses, all that stuff. But if we run out of money, we have to turn animals away until the grant's renewed. And if we can't account for everything, the grant might not be renewed.”

“The grant money's all been in cash?” Teddy asked.

Nora nodded. “It's set up so that we get a check from a special account every quarter and that gets cashed so we have the money we need on hand, instead of throwing it into the main operating fund and figuring out what goes where every month. That's supposed to allow us to pay for supplies and stuff more easily. Or something?”

Or if someone wanted to muddy their tracks, if you were being cynical. Teddy tried not to be cynical, but money tended to bring it out in him. Penalty of growing up with too much of it, probably. That was one of the reasons he was on this side of the country, and the rest of his family was on the other side.

“So if you think the money's been stolen, why not go to the cops and report it? Why come to us?” Ginny asked. It seemed a logical question to Teddy, too. That would start the official process, and insurance would cover whatever was missing, right?

The girl shook her head, her colored braids twitching slightly with the movement. “Oh, no. We can't afford to. If the cops get involved—if we get any kind of negative publicity at all—never mind the grants, we might lose our permits! There's all this paperwork that you have to get approved before you can run a shelter, and they can yank it if they even think you're doing something wrong. I couldn't risk that!”

“And even if they didn't, I bet you're right: a hint of misused funds, even a small amount, and you could forget about ever getting another nonprofit grant,” Ginny said. “From them, probably from anyone. And there's no way public donations can keep a shelter going.”

Nora's braids practically danced this time as she nodded emphatic agreement. “Este and Roger funded the shelter, to start. It was all their own money that bought the building and got us set up. But there's no way they could keep us going on their own. And if we lose any of the larger grants . . . we'll have to shut down, and the animals will all be sent to a shelter that isn't no-kill.

“Please. Say you'll help? I can't pay much, but . . .”

She included both of them in her plea, looking back and forth between the two with absolute assurance that they would say yes.

“We need to discuss it,” Teddy said, before Mallard could jump in and commit them. “We'll get back to you.”