“Was Miss McGuinness in a relationship? Was she seeing anyone?”
Charlie didn’t bother to hide his disgust at the FBI agent’s question. “None of my business. She was with the same fella for six years, but they broke up last fall. I don’t stick my nose in my daughter’s personal life, as a rule.”
“His name?” Clearly, FBI Special Agent in Charge Teresa Apodaca wasn’t a warm-and-fuzzy kind of gal. “You know, Mr. McGuinness, we are here as a courtesy to Congressman Wahlman, but we can easily move this conversation to the Boston field office.”
The old guy’s face flushed with anger. “You’re some kind of hotshot federal investigator, aren’t ya? Since I already pay your salary with my tax dollars, I’m sure as hell not going to do your job for ya, too.”
Richard smiled at the old Mainer’s approach to being interrogated. He liked him, mostly because he was an anomaly. Richard didn’t spend much time with the likes of Charlie McGuinness, a guy who had no taste for bullshit. In fact, the opposite was true. Every waking second of Richard’s life was spent in the company of men and women who swam in an ocean of bullshit and sunned themselves on bullshit beach, all while ordering fruity bullshit cocktails from a waitstaff composed of the general public.
No wonder he’d had a fucking heart attack at the age of fifty-four! He was utterly sick of it. All of it.
He just wanted his kid.
Richard took several slow and deep breaths in an attempt to keep his pulse steady and his blood pressure down. He needed to think of something else. Relax. Since this was the first time he’d been allowed inside the McGuinness place, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity, and look around a bit. It certainly wasn’t chic, but the only home his daughter had ever known was sturdy and comfortable. The floors were worn wide-plank pine. Its thick plaster walls were covered with faded wallpaper and its kitchen was right out of Leave It to Beaver.
As Richard had recently learned, the farm had been passed down the generations to Charlie, and both McGuinness girls had been raised here. When Amanda left DC, she came back to her childhood home. And when Evelyn discovered her sister was pregnant, she sold her Augusta condo and moved in again, too. So that’s how the place became the headquarters of the multigenerational McGuinness family.
Richard remembered when his driver had brought him here for the first time a month earlier. It had been a gloomy summer day, the sky heavy with impending rain, but the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse and its surroundings were picture-postcard perfection. The farm lane cut through rolling acres of fields and was framed in a low stone wall. Far off to the right, Richard had been able to see where the land curled up against a large mirror-calm lake.
His driver had parked directly in front of the house. Richard had stepped out of the backseat and evaluated the sprawling yellow clapboard saltbox with dormer windows and white trim. A cedar shake barn was attached directly to the side of the house for easy access during what he knew could be brutal winters here.
He’d decided that if Christina had received half as much attention as this old farm had, then his daughter had been lovingly cared for.
But on that first visit and every visit since, the McGuinnesses refused to open the front door to him. Any contact he’d had with Christina had taken place in a sterile playroom within the offices of the county’s Child Protective Services. The only reason Richard stood inside today was because the FBI had granted him access.
“Excuse me.” He pushed aside the cluster of agents in the farmhouse kitchen, and moved into the light. He pulled out a chair and took a seat across the table from Charlie McGuinness, studying the man in the diffuse glow of the old ceiling light fixture. After a moment of quiet thought, Richard said, “Well, this is a helluvah situation, isn’t it, Charlie?”
The man said nothing.