“What about Bentley?” Elizabeth asked.
“He’s been texting me constantly.”
“Still? Why don’t you just block him?” Elizabeth’s brow furrowed. “You’re not still interested in him, are you? I guess I should have worded that differently. Are you still interested in having a relationship with Bentley?” She hadn’t meant her question to sound so derogatory. If Sheri was still entertaining the notion of mating with him, she needed to let everyone in their new pack know now. It would mean her returning to Yellowknife, to her pack, because there was no way in hell Bentley would come here. And Elizabeth didn’t want him to. He would only cause trouble.
Then again, Bentley was controlling, and if he thought he had a chance to take over a pack whose members were so newly turned, he might just make a stab at it.
“No. I’m not interested in Bentley any longer.” She sounded sincere about it, though Elizabeth wondered if Sheri saw Bentley again, if he might be able to convince her to take him back.
It’d certainly happened before.
“You really did end things with him, right?” Elizabeth couldn’t shake the feeling things weren’t quite as over as Sheri was making them out to be.
“Yeah. But you know how he is. He said I just wasn’t thinking clearly about the situation and I would come around. That I just needed some time off on my own. I told him I was taking some time off, but I wasn’t changing my mind about him. All he heard was I was taking some time off and then returning to him.” Sheri rolled her eyes and shrugged at the same time.
Elizabeth couldn’t be as blasé about it. “Did you tell your parents you broke things off?”
Sheri shook her head, albeit a bit sheepishly.
David had been listening quietly, but at her answer, he set down his fork and said, “Your parents have to know that if you have no plans to return to Yellowknife, you must have ended things with him.”
“I suppose. All right.” She grimaced as if she’d just been asked to swallow a bitter pill. “I’ll text my parents and let them know, if they didn’t figure it out already. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? I mean, I already broke the really bad news to them, so…”
Still, she looked uneasy.
They finished breakfast in tense silence, then cleaned up and headed over to the office.
“You’ll both need criminal justice degrees, and you’ll need to ‘intern’ for a private investigative agency,” David was explaining. “We’ve got you covered on that. We’ll train you, and there’s a great program at a college right here in Ely.”
“Sounds like a plan. It will be fun for us to do it together too.”
“Absolutely,” Sheri said.
Elizabeth asked, “Can we get some plants for the office?”
David smiled. “Yeah, sure. That would be nice.”
She pulled up an office supply website on her phone and showed him the desks she and Sheri had picked out that morning.
“Perfect.” David placed the order. “Looks like they’ll be in on Monday.”
Cameron arrived, and David asked him if he would help him move furniture around to accommodate the new desks.
“This is going to be great.” Sheri was helping move files around, and she suggested moving the file cabinet behind the receptionist desk. “It would make it easier to get to the filing and still answer the phone.”
Elizabeth carried some copier paper into the room where they had the workstation printer they all used. “I can reorganize your supplies in here.”
“You ladies are a godsend.” Gavin came out to help. “We’ve been too busy managing clients to really organize things better.”
“We’ll take care of it.” Elizabeth was glad to be able to offer any services that would lighten the guys’ workload.
Owen finished a call and helped the guys move furniture around to accommodate the new desks.
“We’ll need to get some more phone lines in—” Cameron said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Elizabeth said.
David got her the paperwork for the phone company they used.
***
Perfect. They could handle all the changes without the guys getting bogged down in all this, David thought. “I’ll give you the password to log in to the computers and set you and Sheri up as administrators. You can field calls for the time being.”
“All right.” The phone rang and Elizabeth grabbed up the receiver. “White Wolf Investigative Services, Elizabeth Alpine speaking. How may I direct your call?”
David smiled. Man, they could have used her here when they first set up shop.
“Yes, David Davis is right here.” She handed him the portable landline phone.
“This is David Davis. How may I help you?” He returned to his office and shut the door.
“Have you found my dad yet?”
David recognized the boy’s voice. Jimmy Warner. “Not yet.”
“But you’re looking, aren’t you?”
David tried to keep his voice even. It’d only been about twelve hours since they’d last spoken, but he understood what it meant to fear for someone you loved. “Yeah, still checking airlines, bus stations, train stations, hotels, hospitals, and police reports.” He didn’t usually give a detailed list of his procedures on a case, but to reassure the boy, he wanted him to know what he was doing.
“Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten about him,” Jimmy said, sounding broken up.
“I promise you, I won’t forget.” David had checked Mel’s phone too. It wouldn’t be the first time someone they were looking for purposely ignored calls from loved ones but picked up for random numbers. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Mel. His phone went directly to voicemail. Either the box was full or the phone was dead. Either way, it wasn’t a great sign. The last location they’d had on it was only five miles from the house and then that was it.
“Okay, well, I know you gotta work and I don’t want to bug you all the time, but I just wanted to check to see if you were getting anywhere with the case.”
“Not yet, but we’ll keep looking. You hang in there, okay?” David ended the call with Jimmy, wishing he’d had better news. But it was damn early in the case, and he knew he’d barely scraped the surface.
He went back out to the reception area to see if Elizabeth and Sheri needed him to move anything else.
“A new case?” Elizabeth asked.