Spark

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“What are you, in your mid-forties?”

“That’s what I am,” Carver said, staring at Hattie Evans, wondering if “Hattie” was a nickname. She was wearing quite a hat, a prim and proper red mushroomlike thing with a truncated little stem on top. It was ninety degrees outside and she was wearing a hat. He had to admit, despite her sixty-plus years it made her look jaunty.

“Well, you listen, Mr. Carver, I don’t play games and I won’t be brushed aside.”

“Didn’t intend either of those things,” Carver said. He tried a smile. He was a fierce-looking man but he knew his smile was unexpectedly beautiful and disarming. Used it often. Hattie seemed unimpressed.

As she’d entered Carver’s office on Magellan and sat down before his desk, he’d seen her faded but quick blue eyes flit to where his cane leaned, but she didn’t ask about it. She sat poised with military rigidity in the chair and pressed her knees tightly together beneath the skirt of her navy-blue dress. It was an expensive dress but old and a little threadbare, as was her once-stylish-possibly-hat. She was a whipcord-lean woman, not tall, and she had the look about her of someone who’d endured a lot but was ready for more. Though she’d never been pretty, crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, pain and experience etched like wounds at the corners of her lips, gave her narrow, alert face a kind of character that held the eye.

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