8 Sandpiper Way (25 page)

D
ave Flemming folded his hands in his lap. He sat in Roy McAfee’s office, across from the one man he trusted to help him.

“What can I do for you?” Roy asked. “I have to admit I was surprised to see you’d made an appointment with me.”

Dave had never, ever thought he’d be in this position. He’d promised Emily, though, and he kept his promises. “I have a problem,” Dave said. He didn’t mince words; he felt the best way to clear himself of suspicion was to be as honest as possible.

He was busy, and he didn’t have time to squander on speculation, worry and doubt. He wanted this resolved, preferably by Christmas Eve. If Roy could manage that, then Dave would thank him heartily.

“And you think I can help with this problem?” Roy asked.

“I don’t know. I hope so.” Dave still needed to visit a couple of ill parishioners, check with Cliff Harding about the Nativity scene animals and prepare an agenda for one of his committee meetings. The charity food baskets were being assembled that afternoon and he had to pick up some canned goods and get them to the church before the volunteers
arrived at five. Then he’d head over to the bank for his shift.

“I take it this has to do with Martha Evans’s missing jewelry?”

That question told Dave the rumor mill had been churning at full speed and his name had been bandied about town in connection with the theft. “It does.”

Roy leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms, and his body language caused Dave a moment’s chagrin. He wondered if his friend was attempting to distance himself from him and his problems.

“You don’t want to talk to an attorney?” Roy asked.

Dave had considered this option and rejected it. “Do you think I should?”

Roy shrugged. “That depends. Are you guilty of anything?”

Of being foolish, perhaps. But the question stung his pride. “No.” He didn’t elaborate, didn’t qualify his answer. He couldn’t make it any plainer than that. He had absolutely
nothing
to do with Martha Evans’s missing jewelry.

“What can I do for you, then?”

Enlisting Roy’s assistance had seemed like a logical decision. Now he wasn’t so sure. “I’d like you to hear my side of all this.”

“Your side,” Roy repeated, watching Dave, eyes narrowing slightly. “Is there something you want to tell me that you wouldn’t want an attorney to know?” A frown drew his brows together, and he leaned even farther away. “Listen, Dave. Perhaps—”

“First,” Dave said, interrupting his friend, or the man he’d assumed was his friend, “I need advice.”

If Roy went any farther back in that chair, he was liable to topple right off.

“What kind of advice?”

Dave realized that the detective, along with Troy Davis and possibly Allan Harris, viewed him as a prime suspect. Painful and discouraging as it was to admit, if Dave had been given the same set of circumstances, he’d probably make the same assumption.

“Before I say anything else, I’d like you to return this gold watch to Martha Evans’s heirs.” He removed the watch from his wrist and handed it to the other man. He’d had the clasp repaired, so there was no chance of losing it again.

Roy accepted the watch. “You have it because…” He waited for Dave to explain.

“Martha wanted me to have it. Her husband retired as an executive, and Martha insisted I take the watch.”

Roy didn’t reveal whether or not he believed him. “Do you have any proof of that?”

Admitting he didn’t mortified Dave. “Apparently not…I thought I did but I don’t.”

Roy frowned again. “Perhaps you better start at the beginning.”

Dave wasn’t sure where that was. “Martha attended the church for as long as I’ve been pastor.”

Roy nodded for him to continue.

“She was an encouragement to me, and a strong supporter, generous in nature. I…I thought of her as a second mother.”

“You told her this?” Roy prodded.

“No.” He could almost read the other man’s reaction. “But she was special to me and to anyone who knew her. When she became ill, I visited her as often as I could.”

“How often was that?” Roy reached for a pen and pad, taking notes.

Dave couldn’t tell if that was a good sign. “At least twice a week. She had a visiting nurse and I tried to stop by on days the nurse wasn’t there.”

Roy arched his brows and made another notation. “Any particular reason for that?”

“Well, yes…The way I figured it, someone should check up on Martha the days she was alone. Her daughters live in Seattle and they both work. I didn’t have any nefarious motive, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Roy glanced up from his notepad. “I’m only asking you the questions Sheriff Davis will ask.”

Will ask.
Roy seemed to believe it was inevitable that he’d be questioned by the sheriff. Perhaps he was advising Dave to get his story straight, which made no sense because he’d never changed it.

“Go on,” Roy urged, watching him closely.

“A few days before she died, Martha asked me to get the watch.”

Roy glanced up again. “So you knew where she kept her valuables?”

Once again Dave felt as if he’d already been tried and convicted. “Yes, but I’d never—” He bit off the rest of what he’d intended to say. Verbal protestations weren’t going to help.

“Where
did
she keep the watch?”

“The vegetable bin in her refrigerator.”

Roy lifted one eyebrow. “With the broccoli?”

“Yes. And she kept some of her jewelry in an ice-cube tray in the freezer. She thought that was the last place a thief would look.”

Roy shook his head. “That’s as obvious as hiding your door key under a flowerpot,” he muttered.

Dave merely nodded. “The watch would’ve been
damaged in the freezer so she kept it in a temperature-controlled bin,” he said.

“And she wanted you to have it?”

“She
insisted
I take it,” Dave said, struggling not to sound defensive. He wanted to kick himself ten times over for accepting that watch. From the moment he’d slipped it on his wrist, it had felt like a mistake.

It seemed that every protestation of innocence fell on deaf ears. Even his wife doubted him. Dave went on to explain that Martha had written a letter saying he was to have the watch.

“You actually saw the letter?” Roy asked.

“Yes. Martha showed it to me. Her attorney was coming by later that afternoon and she said she’d give it to him.”

“Did he?”

Dave hadn’t followed up on that. “I…I don’t know. I assume he didn’t, because when Emily went to the attorney’s office to check the file, the letter wasn’t there.”

That instigated another series of questions, which Dave did his best to answer. He told Roy that Emily had visited Allan Harris’s office and been able to look at the file, thanks to Geoff Duncan, Allan’s legal assistant. Dave stressed that Geoff’s action had to remain confidential and that he’d done it as a favor.

“Emily was upset,” Dave said. But not nearly as upset as
he
was when he’d learned that Martha’s letter had never been received.

Roy tapped his pencil against the pad. “I can well imagine.”

“I thought,” Dave said, gazing down at the gold watch on Roy’s desk, “that I was free to wear it.”

Roy made another notation on his pad; Dave wished he could read upside down.

Roy looked up. “You want me to return the watch to Martha’s family?”

“Yes.” Dave met his eyes. “With my sincere apologies for the misunderstanding. I feel sick about this.”

Roy didn’t say anything for what seemed like hours but was probably only a few seconds. “I’m afraid this looks…incriminating.”

Dave was all too aware of that.

“You were probably the last person to see Martha Evans alive,” Roy reminded him.

“Yes.”

“You’re one of a handful of people who knew where she hid her valuables.”

He swallowed uncomfortably. “That seems to be the case.”

“You were seen wearing a valuable gold watch that belonged to Martha’s husband.”

Dave nodded slowly.

“Is there anything else? Anything you haven’t told me?”

He might as well be speaking to the sheriff. Roy’s questions and his own answers made him look—and feel—guilty. Only he wasn’t.

“Dave?”

Unable to remain seated, Dave stood up and walked to the far side of the office. “Yes.” His heart was hammering so wildly, it hurt to breathe. Turning around again, he reached into his pocket and removed the plastic bag that held the diamond earrings. He put it on the desk next to the watch.

Roy gestured at the earrings. “These were Martha’s, too?”

“I believe so…Emily s-saw a picture of them in…in
Martha’s file.” He couldn’t keep the stammer out of his voice.

“You’d better explain.”

Dave went on to tell him about Emily’s discovery of the earrings. As hard as he tried to work out how they’d gotten into his pockets, he couldn’t. Roy was very quiet when Dave finished describing what he knew.

“Do you want me to return these to the family, as well?” he asked.

Dave shrugged helplessly. “I…don’t know what to do. The thing is, I don’t want them in my possession. Anyone who saw them might assume…They’d believe I was guilty, and nothing I said would make a bit of difference.”

Dave collapsed into the chair and covered his face with both hands. “That’s not all.”

“You mean there’s
more?
” Roy asked, lowering his voice.

Dave lowered his hands. “It happened a long time ago.”

Roy waited, and when Dave didn’t immediately speak, he said, “Okay. Tell me what it is.”

Dave felt his chest tighten with dread.

“Come on,” Roy said, not unkindly. “Might as well spill it.”

Dave would rather leave the past buried. But he no longer had a choice. He got to his feet and moved over to the window, turning his back on the detective. He closed his eyes.

“Dave,” Roy said, “it’ll come out sooner or later. You can tell me or not. Up to you. But I suspect that whatever it is, you can bet Sheriff Davis will find out.”

Dave agreed. It would be pointless to even try to keep this a secret. “A month after my eighteenth birthday I was arrested.”

“So you have a police record?”

This nightmare never seemed to end; it only got worse. “I’m…not sure. It was my first offense and I was given a light sentence—three months of community service.” He turned around. “The judge said if I kept out of trouble, my record would be wiped clean.”

“And was it?”

“I think so, but I can’t say for sure.” He obviously had a habit of making assumptions. He did his part and it seemed reasonable to take for granted that others had done theirs. All too often, it seemed, that turned out not to be true.

“You never checked?”

“No.” He’d been too humiliated, too embarrassed. As much as possible, he’d wanted to put that part of his life behind him. “But I assume so because I work part-time at the bank, and they must’ve done a security check when they hired me.”

Roy wrote down something else. Apparently this latest revelation wasn’t welcome news.

“Other than my parents, no one knows about this,” Dave said in a low voice.

“Not Emily?”

Dave shook his head. “I tried not to think about it.” Most people had at least one thing in their lives that they wished they could do over. Some mistake or error in judgment. Some act of selfishness or stupidity.

“You didn’t mention what the crime was,” Roy reminded him.

“You’re right, I didn’t.”

“Any particular reason?”

Dave swallowed. “Theft.”

Leaning back in his chair, Roy stared up at him. “What did you take?”

“It wasn’t me.” A protest rose automatically to his lips.
Dredging up these memories was painful, and he was a different person than he’d been all those years ago.

Roy didn’t press him to continue. Dave started to pace, and after a few minutes, felt ready to explain. “I grew up a preacher’s kid.”

“So your father was a pastor, too?”

Dave ignored the question because the answer was obvious. “As is often the case, there’s a lot of pressure on a minister’s family. We kids were expected to set an example, to behave perfectly so not to embarrass our parents.”

“That’s a pretty high standard to live up to.”

“It was for me. I tried to be the son my father wanted. Still, no matter what I did, my parents found fault.”

“It’s not all that different for a cop’s kids,” Roy told him.

Dave had never considered that the situation in other families might be the same, which was naive of him.

“When I reached my teens, I gave up trying to please my father,” he said.

“In other words, you rebelled.”

That was an understatement, to say the least. Dave had rejected all his father’s values and principles. He’d skipped classes, hung around with a rough crowd, started drinking underage. Because he’d graduated from high school at seventeen he began his first year of college before his eighteenth birthday. That was when he connected with Tom Cummings and his friends.

Dave had never met anyone like Tom. He was a natural leader, and being part of his group had made Dave feel important, included. While it was true that Tom was a practical joker, a guy who always tested the limits, it was all in good fun. Or so Dave had thought. Until, one day, it ceased being fun.

Tom needed money. Dave couldn’t remember why it was so critical that Tom have four hundred dollars. Of course none of them had that kind of money to spare. Although if he’d had the funds—or access to them—Dave would’ve blindly handed over whatever Tom demanded.

Someone came up with the idea. In the beginning Dave had been sure it was a joke. All too soon he discovered how real it was, and by then…

“What were the charges against you?”

“Theft and aggravated assault.” The words sounded foreign to him, as if they were from a different language. One he didn’t speak, didn’t understand.

His admission hung in the air between them, like the dust that follows an explosion.

“What was the age of the victim?” Roy finally asked.

The tightness in his throat made it almost impossible to answer. “Seventy-three.”