"Good point."

Brandon couldn't understand Alison's undying need to be thrust into painfully boring domesticity for the rest of her life with a man who was probably equally boring, but who was he to judge?

"Looks aren't all that important to her, but he shouldn't be butt ugly. She has cats, so no pet allergies. Nonsmoker. Preferably a professional man. Solid income, at least."

Tom thumbed through one of the men's files. "I can't believe your grandmother had all these clients. Why wasn't she a gazillionaire?"

"They're not all paying clients. She did a lot of networking at charity events, church functions, just about anywhere she went. She talked to friends of friends, got referrals here and there. Whenever she met people she thought would be a nice match for somebody in the future, she interviewed them and then built a file. Then if they fit one of her paying clients, she made the match."

"So only a small percentage of these people were actually paying her?"

"Yes. But it was only the paying customers who were guaranteed the matches."

"How did your grandmother ever make any sense of all these files?"

"She knew all her clients because she interviewed them in the beginning. I'm just going to have to wing it with the ones already here."

"If all these files were in a computer database, you could search them."

"Yeah, wouldn't that be nice? But it would take me forever to transfer everything myself. If I hired someone to do it, it would cost me a fortune. Can't spend every dime I make keeping a business alive that's going to be dead in six months." He sighed. "This is what I'm stuck with."

As Tom opened one of the files, Brandon pointed out the maybe, no, and hell no stacks. Unfortunately, the no stack continued to grow.

"Here's one," Tom said finally. "He's a dermatologist. Owns his own home. He'd like to start a family."

"Sounds perfect. Let me see."

Tom handed him the file, and Brandon slumped with dismay. "He's fifty-two years old. What kind of man wants to start a family at age fifty-two?"

"I know. Kinda scary. Does this client of yours have an upper age limit?"

"Forty."

"That narrows the field a lot."

"Yeah, I know. Keep looking."

"Aren't these files arranged by something? Age, height, underwear preference? Something?"

"Red for girls, blue for boys. After that, they're alphabetical. That's it."

After a few more minutes, Brandon found a nice-looking guy who owned a string of dry cleaners and had a great income, but he was divorced with kids and didn't want any more. Tom found a guy who was thirty-one and family oriented, but he wanted to raise that family in Costa Rica, and Alison specifically said she didn't want to leave the Dallas metroplex.

"How are you doing finding new clients?" Tom asked.

"Signed a guy this afternoon. Jack Warren. He's forty-eight, well off, and so busy with his computer consulting business that he says he doesn't have time to do a lot of dating in order to find a woman. He's divorced and looking for wife number two."

"How'd he feel about another man finding him a woman?"

"Actually, once he was over the shock of it, I convinced him that a guy knows best what another guy wants."

"One new client a week isn't going to cut it."

"My ad at Dallas After Dark comes out in two days. That should generate quite a bit of business."

Brandon hoped so, anyway. If it didn't, he was going to have to rethink his marketing strategy in a major way.

"Holy shit," Tom said suddenly.

"What?"

"I didn't know your grandmother visited prisons looking for clients."

"What are you talking about?"

"Check out this guy."

Tom handed Brandon the file he'd been looking at. The guy had the craggy face of a street fighter who'd been in a brawl or two, and dark, fathomless eyes that made Brandon wonder exactly what was behind them. His mouth was turned up in something like a smile, but it did little to take away the hardened criminal look.

Then he read his grandmother's handwritten note. Very sweet man. Remind him to smile a lot.

Sorry, Grandma, Brandon thought. The smile's not helping.

Brandon thumbed through the file. "Says here he owns a landscaping company. That's pretty normal."

"Except it also means he owns a whole bunch of razor-sharp gardening tools. Not much of a leap to serial killer, is there?"

Actually, it was a big leap, but Brandon couldn't blame Tom for the fact that it had crossed his mind. But judging from his grandmother's notes, the guy probably used his gardening tools strictly for gardening. Also judging from her notes, she'd never made a successful match for him. Fortunately, he was one of the few who hadn't returned Brandon's call when he was letting his grandmother's clients know he was taking over her business, so maybe Brandon wouldn't have to pick up where his grandmother left off.

"I don't believe it," Tom said, reading from another file. "Here's a guy whose favorite movie is Steel Magnolias."

"So he's sensitive. Women say they like that."

"They say they do, but they really don't. What they really want is a man who'll drag them back to their caves and ravish them, not sit around the campfire and cry. It's in their DNA."

"What tells you that?"

"An article in Psychology Today. There was a copy in my doctor's office. It also said that people who resemble each other physically make the most successful couples. Ones who are at the same level of attractiveness."

"So looking alike means a couple will be happy?"

"That's the theory."

"If that were true, every man on earth would marry his sister."

"No. Think about it. People naturally gravitate toward people who look like them. You never see a really hot guy with an ugly woman. And you never see a beautiful woman with an ugly guy unless he's loaded."

True.

Brandon opened the next file. The guy was thirty-four and never been married. Worked in pharmaceutical sales. The answers on his questionnaire mirrored Alison's pretty closely. And he was definitely looking for a wife. He wasn't champing at the bit for children, but it was an issue he was willing to discuss.

"I think I have one," Brandon said. He handed the file to Tom. "What do you think?"

Tom thumbed through the file. "Not bad. The family thing is there, and where kids are concerned, she could probably talk him into-" Tom's face suddenly crinkled. "Uh-oh. He's a vegan."

"Yeah, I saw that. What is that, exactly?"

"They don't eat animal products. Or wear them, either. And no dairy or eggs. I had a girlfriend once who was a vegan. Try taking her out to dinner."

Brandon couldn't see a guy like that being compatible with Alison. Maybe it was the fact that she was so family focused. Family automatically brought to mind an image of people gathered around a table at Thanksgiving, and they weren't getting ready to slice the tofu.

"Okay," Brandon said. "He's not perfect. But he's the best we've found yet. Put him over there and keep looking."

"I've been through my stack," Tom said. "Got any more?"

Brandon went to where the files were stored, dismayed that he'd been all the way through cabinet number one and was starting in on number two. He grabbed an armful of files, handing half of them to Tom and going through the other half himself. Three files later, he had another candidate.

"Okay," Brandon said. "Here's one who's close. He works as a software engineer for a big tech company. He's interested in having a family, and...well, crap. He has three dogs, and Alison has cats. Think that's a problem?"

"Nope. Cats and dogs aren't natural enemies. They can get along just fine, assuming the adjustment phase is slow and thorough."

Brandon looked at him dumbly. "Is there any dumb little factoid you don't know?"

Tom shrugged. "There was a copy of Dog Fancy on the table in the waiting room when I was getting my tires rotated."

"He has another downside," Brandon said. "He's only five seven. She's five six."

"Is height a deal breaker for her?"

"Her questionnaire says it isn't. But it seems shallow to say it, so I'm betting most women won't admit that it is."

Brandon laid both men's photos on the table in front of him, then put Alison's in between them. "Okay. Which one does she look more like?"

"The guy on the left."

"The short one. Think she'll overlook that?"

"Hard to say. I think she'd have more of an issue with that than the vegan thing, but I don't know." Tom reached into his pocket, pulled out a quarter, and tossed it to Brandon. "Love's a crapshoot, remember? Or should I say a coin toss?"

Brandon didn't like the idea of leaving it totally to chance. He liked Alison, and he really did want to set her up with the right guy. But he didn't see a clear winner here, so what the hell?

He poised the coin to toss it. "Okay, heads I set her up with Vegan Guy, tails Mr. Vertically Challenged." He flipped the coin, caught it in his hand, and slapped it onto the back of his other hand.

"Heads," Brandon said. "Vegan Guy it is. Let's go have a beer."

Chapter 7.

The next afternoon at five o'clock, Alison sat at a table in the basement meeting room with five other board members of the East Plano Preservation League, listening to Judith Rittenaur drone endlessly about their mission statement. Judith was an uptight, sour-faced woman who thought things like mission statements were as critically important as Middle East peace accords. Alison thought they fell somewhere between the list of pool rules at her condo complex and a sticky note reminding her to take out the trash.

She shot Heather a subtle shoot me now look, and Heather returned the sentiment with a barely-stifled yawn. Alison returned to doodling around the edge of her agenda with a black Sharpie. If only that Sharpie had been an ice pick, she could have stabbed it into her brain and put herself out of her misery.

"Read it again with those changes," Bea Bennett said, sounding weary in her role as president of the board. Bea was a sixty-five-year-old retired nurse. Age and experience had given her both the capacity to know what was important and the ability to wade through the crap that wasn't. Unfortunately, protocol prohibited her from leaping over the table and ripping that piece of paper right out of Judith's hands.

Judith cleared her throat, as if she was about to deliver a State of the Union address. "To preserve, promote and serve as an advocate for the irreplaceable historic buildings of East Plano for the economic and cultural benefit of all citizens, as well as foster an appreciation of their historic significance and encourage neighborhood revitalization through preservation, planning, and re-adaptation of the existing cityscape."

All Alison heard was blah, blah, blah. Judging from the looks on the faces of the other board members, serial blahs were all they'd heard, too. Judith had taught eighth grade English in a private Christian school for the past thirty years, which she thought gave her the moral duty to litter their mission statement with indecipherable crap only a linguist could understand.

"Re-adaption of the existing cityscape?" Heather said. "Don't you just mean 'renovation'?"

"Well...yes."

"Then why not just say that?"

"Because dull language is the plague of our civilization, that's why."

"It's already too long even without all that exciting language," Heather said. "A single short, concise sentence should be plenty."

Across the table, Judge Jimmy shifted his considerable bulk until his chair groaned and squeaked, shaking his head with disgust. "She's right. Damned thing's longer than War and Peace."

"Am I the only board member who takes this seriously?" Judith said.

"We're not the freakin' United Nations," Judge Jimmy said. "Whittle it down."

Judge Jimmy Todd had spent thirty years on the bench as a civil court judge, and his claim to fame was cutting to the chase. His hearings and trials were shorter than other judges' by half. Now, get the hell out of my courtroom, he'd say once things were over, and people generally did. Quickly.

Now that Jimmy was retired, his wife had suggested he volunteer for something to get him out of the house. Most people liked it better when Jimmy stayed home and irritated his wife instead. Not Alison. Anybody who kept these board meetings short and to the point was her best buddy.

"But it needs to be long to get our mission across," Judith said. "Mission statements guide an organization on its mission. You don't shortchange your mission statement. If you shortchange your mission statement, then, well...you don't know..."

"What your mission is?" Heather said.

Judith's lips tightened, looking like two slices of salami that had been left out in the sun.

"The way I see it," Heather said sweetly, "it's a mission just to write the mission statement."

Judith was totally humorless, but she did recognize sarcasm when she heard it, particularly when it came from Heather. Last year, Judith had proposed a really dumb change to the bylaws, then tried to strong-arm a couple of the more wimpy board members at the time into voting for it. That had been Heather's first board meeting, and it was her input that swayed everyone back to the side of reason. That had been more than enough to earn her Judith's eternal wrath. Heather left that meeting swearing she'd never come back, and it had taken two martinis at McCaffrey's and a lot of begging before Alison convinced her to stay.

Finally they worked on some of the verbiage until most people seemed to agree on it, only to have Karen the Clueless ask what the difference was between a vision statement and a mission statement, launching another pointless discussion. Karen was a homely little woman in her late thirties, whom Judith had thought would be a perfect board member because she was an interior designer. As it turned out, she'd gotten that interior design degree from an Internet site that specialized in getting gullible people to spend hundreds of dollars to get a piece of paper worth absolutely nothing. She was very sweet, but to date, her chief contribution to the board had consisted of keeping the plants in the room healthy by exhaling carbon dioxide. Alison fingered her Sharpie again, wondering it was pointed enough to penetrate her skull if only she swung it hard enough.

"Judith," Bea said, "why don't you finalize the new statement, e-mail it to everybody on the board for their review, and we'll vote on it at our next meeting?"