Threads of Suspicion

by Dee Henderson

  “I am. Her world is contained. I think he entered it and chose her. Whether he was choosing a type—a pretty college student who was vulnerable, reachable—or choosing the person Jenna, I’m not sure yet.”

  “You’ll find him.”

  Evie appreciated his certainty. “I will. Though I’m not yet sure it’s a him. I’m thinking her, as that possibility is probably not something well-explored yet. It’s there somewhere, the thread I need to find and tug.” She pushed back her chair. “Italian, you said? I’ve got a few things I want to gather up to take back to the hotel, but then I’m ready for dinner. Don’t forget, I’d like to hear the story of you and Maggie.”

  He laughed. “Okay, give me twenty minutes and I’ll be ready to head out. We’ll find some good food and then I’ll tell you an interesting story.”

  Four

  David suggested an Italian restaurant near the office complex, and Evie followed his SUV in her car. The crowded parking lot suggested the locals approved of the food and the prices. David requested a table to the side of the room so they would have some privacy, near enough to the kitchen they weren’t going to get a close neighbor until the restaurant was full. Evie settled into the booth with a grateful smile, and the two scanned the menus.

  David lifted his water glass. “To what will become a very long day.”

  She touched her water glass to his. “How much work did you bring along with you for later?”

  “Enough to have me reading until well past midnight—I brought one of his laptops too. You?”

  “I packed all Jenna’s journals.”

  David laughed. “Yeah. The faster we know what’s there, the easier our lives become. So we’ll work twenty-four seven the first few days.”

  “Not sure about your number, but ambition suits us both.”

  “It’s the foundation of an interesting career,” David agreed. He closed the menu. “Lasagna and a house salad, to help me decide how I like their sauce and seasonings, along with the appetizer special and hot bread, because lunch was a long time ago and any leftovers suit the hours of work still ahead.”

  She thought that sounded perfect. “A double on the lasagna and salad.”

  The waiter returned with their soft drinks, took the order, and brought a shared salad bowl and hot-bread basket.

  Evie let David serve the salads while she split the bread loaf. “So start somewhere, David, and tell me about Margaret May McDonald.”

  He smiled at the way she said the full name.

  Evie added, “I have to admit, you really threw me with Maggie’s photo—it kind of scrambled my brain. Jenna Greenhill needs my attention, and I found myself instead wondering about the two of you at odd points throughout this afternoon.”

  David passed her salad over. “You’ll like Maggie. She’s got a thing about famous people too, sort of stammers when she meets other singers for the first time. It’s really rather cute. She’s still very much a fan despite the fact it’s also her profession.”

  “She sells a lot of records.”

  “Vinyl, CDs, streaming audio, radio time—her music is everywhere, which makes for a nice icebreaker when I’m looking to find common ground with someone twenty years younger than me.”

  “How did you two meet?”

  “We’ve known each other since high school.”

  He paused as the waiter brought the appetizer platter of colorful grilled skewers stacked with mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, onions, and pineapple chunks. David nudged the ranch dressing and honey dipping sauce toward Evie, the marinara toward himself. “Are you a Christian, Evie?”

  She deftly slid one skewer of vegetables off the stick and onto a shared plate. “Why do you ask?”

  He sampled one of the mushrooms, nodded his approval. “There are two ways to tell this story, one of which is going to make less sense than the other depending on your answer.”

  “I am.”

  “A Christmas and Easter kind of Christian, or your Bible came packed in your luggage for this trip?”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle at his description. “It’s currently sharing space on the bedside table with a J. D. Robb mystery and a Derek Prince book on biblical prophecy and the Middle East.”

  “Then I’ll give you some of the nuances as I tell this.” David accepted one of the slices of hot bread. “I was twenty-six, had just made detective, was settling into my career, when Maggie and I got engaged.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s . . . unexpected.” She found herself totally unsure of what to say.

  He smiled. “I’ll get to that in a bit.” He buttered the bread and took a bite, settled into the narrative. “But first we’ll back up.

  “I’m older than Maggie by a few years. We actually went to different high schools. Our parents are good friends. Maggie had a talent for singing, wanted to see where it would take her, and the kind of events and places a new singer gets invited to perform can make for late nights. The band hadn’t formed yet, she didn’t want to make it obvious her parents were keeping an eye on her from the crowd, so I made it a point to be her guy, keep the social headaches away from her, be a safe ride home. It began as a good friendship on both sides. But it’s hard not to love Maggie, and I fell for her hard. We were going steady by her senior year in high school.”

  The relationship and romance began with the blessing of both families. Evie could see it. She ate some of the grilled peppers and pineapple as she listened, finding herself glad he was willing to talk about this. She would have been stumbling around otherwise, trying to figure out his history with Maggie and how it had developed.

  “She has talent, wanted a band, and other performers met her and signed on, became her core group. Triple M officially formed after Maggie graduated from high school.”

  David reached for his drink. “She didn’t hit it big right away. It was a steady climb through the ranks, playing everywhere they were invited, starting to travel as an opening band for others, then booking out weekends and beginning to get a following among the college crowd. They were working on their first songs for a recording when she turned twenty-three. That was the turning point. Her own music, some of them lyrics I’d heard her working on since high school—genuine emotion with a powerful voice. Triple M gradually became a featured band after that.”

  “You went to the academy, became a cop,” Evie guessed, “while she’s climbing her way up the music ladder.”

  David nodded. “Maggie would joke that I was her fallback if her career didn’t catch fire. She’d marry me, be a stay-at-home wife, and I could bring home the bacon. We were talking marriage all the way back to the early days when I was in the academy and she was getting her first invitations to perform. But we wanted to wait until she knew how her career was going to go, until I had settled in with my job. We were going to be married when she was twenty-five, have kids by thirty—that kind of plan.

  “So we got engaged. I’d be at her concerts most weekends. We were going to get married, have a long honeymoon during the three-month winter break when Maggie’s concert schedule was clear. We were planning the wedding. Well, she was.”

  They both smiled, and he paused as their entrées arrived. Evie cautiously nudged the steaming lasagna bowl to the center of the plate, the cheese on top lightly browned. Her first bite confirmed her hunch—great lasagna.

  “I was settled in as a cop by that point, while her career was beginning to take off,” David said, picking up the story. “I was so proud of her, how she was handling it all. It was new to the rest of them too, the fame, the growing crowds.” David passed his phone over to share more photos. “Their last concert in New York, backstage. Some of those guys have been around since the first days when it was college venues for the most part.”

  Evie scrolled through the pictures. Maggie looked happy. The ones of Maggie and David—casual shots snapped by someone using his phone—showed a couple very much in love. You couldn’t duplicate that look in Maggie’s eyes, that expression, without a
deep contented love resting behind it. Evie quietly returned David’s phone. What he’d been describing so far was right out of a fairy tale, friends in high school who stayed together as fame and fortune unfolded.

  Evie looked across the table at him, knew the story was going to turn painful. “You and Maggie didn’t get married as planned,” she said quietly.

  David met her gaze, sadly smiled. “No. We haven’t. Yet. A car crash on the way home from a concert late one night shattered my leg, meant hours of surgery, months of rehab. That wreck changed the course of our lives.”

  He turned his lasagna bowl to more easily cut through the noodle layers. “I had dropped Maggie off at her home after that concert,” he continued, his voice reflective, “and headed back to my place. We were both still living in Chicago then. Traffic was heavy, there was a semi in the lane beside me, a car trying to merge in, roads were wet. Police reconstructing what happened concluded the merging car misjudged speeds, came into the lane of the semi, the semi braked hard to avoid smashing into the car, the trailer fishtailed, caught the back passenger-side bumper of my car—I would still probably have been okay at that point—but the van behind the truck came into my lane trying to get more room to slow down and crashed into me at speed. The car and I ended up partially under the truck trailer. It took over an hour for fire and rescue to get me out. I was conscious for most of it, able to actually call Maggie so she’d know I was okay and not to panic when she came to the hospital. I was heading to surgery for my leg but otherwise had my full faculties.

  “Both our lives changed that day,” he said, looking over at Evie. “My daily job was no longer law enforcement, it was rehab. I fell more deeply in love with Maggie than ever, seeing how she handled those months. She pretty much set her career aside to be with me through the process.”

  David spooned himself another helping of salad, then seemed to turn his account in a new direction. “I met a guy named Bryce Bishop while I was in rehab. He had a friend from the military learning to walk again, and Bryce was his rehab buddy, someone to encourage and fill in rest intervals with sports and life outside the world of physical therapy. I’d see them most days, and we three got to be friends. As the months wore on, I didn’t want Maggie putting her career totally on hold for me, so Bryce helped me bridge that gap—be the honest broker about how I was doing when Maggie called from some concert location. We both came to trust him as a good friend.

  “Bryce is a strong Christian. He was comfortable talking about dying and what’s after that, that if God existed it was worth asking the questions and coming to a conclusion about it. I had a lot of time on my hands, I had come awfully close to death, and it’s always in the back of a cop’s mind. I started talking with Bryce about God, reading books he provided, thinking. We weren’t a religious family, and I’d never been to church. Maggie didn’t come from a church background either. So I’d watch videos of sermons with Bryce, talk over the questions they raised. It was a strangely captivating new world, this idea of God and angels and heaven and hell, a life beyond the touch-and-feel reality around me.” He paused a moment, took another bite.

  “I got to know Jesus,” he finally said quietly. “He seemed like such a complex person, joyful one moment, gentle the next, warrior-like when needed, speaking with authority on every important matter in life. Jesus said that to see Him was to see what His Father was like.”

  Evie nodded but didn’t interrupt the moment with a question.

  “When you’re a guy looking at his life,” David went on, picking the narrative up again, “there’s something about Jesus that resonates deep inside. He came to get a job done, to save the world, and He completed that mission even though it meant a painful death on a cross. He valued people without playing favorites, noticed those society overlooked. The ones getting life wrong, He challenged to start doing it right. He treated women with caring respect and was loving to kids. He was authentic. He showed what a man doing life well looks like. The fact He was the Son of God, had never sinned, you could see it in how He lived.” David glanced at Evie, smiled. “I was baptized in the therapy pool five months into my rehab.”

  “Good for you,” she said softly.

  “Best day of my life in many ways,” David agreed. “No one thought about the implications at the time. Things for me evolved, and getting baptized was where I was in that journey. I accepted Jesus was the Son of God, He’d died for me, had risen from the dead, and I wanted to follow Him, go all-in with the God who loved me like that. So I got baptized and publicly declared my faith.”

  He hesitated, then said, “It was assumed because I came to believe rather easily, that Maggie would have the same experience and find faith a step she could take as well, would join me in believing in God. She was with me through those months, listening to the conversations, asking good questions. It wasn’t that this step was something I took without Maggie. We talked about it along with how the rehab was going and our lives and the wedding plans we were moving back because of rehab. It was just part of our lives, my thinking about God and coming to believe in Jesus.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “I can still remember the day it struck me, when I realized I couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t a Christian. It was there in the Scriptures, when Paul tells us we should marry only in the faith, to another believer. To my thinking at the time, it was like ‘Okay, that’s another milestone I need to add to the sequence of things. Maggie will come to believe like I have, I’ll get done with rehab so I can walk again, stand comfortably for the duration of the wedding, and when her concert schedule frees up, we’ll get married, take that long honeymoon.’ Only things didn’t unfold that way.”

  Evie, understanding now where this was going, felt a growing sadness.

  David put down his fork. “Had the car accident happened six months later, we would already have been married—God would have no problem with me believing and my wife would still be considering that step for herself. We would have our good life together. But we were simply engaged. And with that came a roadblock. We’re in limbo. I can’t give her a wedding date.”

  “I’m so sorry, David.”

  “Yeah. You can read the passage in Second Corinthians to mean something different, but that’s stretching it to fit what you want. I’d never felt such an intense battle in my spirit as during those next months. I was stuck between obedience to what God said and the word I’d already given to Maggie. I loved her. I had asked her to marry me. She’d said yes. I was the one who had changed, not Maggie. And it didn’t seem like God was asking me to break the engagement. He was simply saying ‘Wait, wait until she also believes, then have the wedding.’ I finally found peace with the situation as it was. I wasn’t going back on my word to God or my word to Maggie.” He shrugged. “God is going to have to fix this for us.”

  “I hope He will.”

  David nodded. “Maggie’s handled this so much better than me, with such grace. As time passed, I’ve offered to step back, to let her go on with her life. She deserves a good and happy life, the family she wants. She’s wrestled with the question of faith with a sincere heart and hasn’t been able as yet to accept it as hers. And she’s equally wrestled with the question of moving on—at her request we’ve taken several long breaks in the relationship to give her some space—but she isn’t willing to say it’s over unless I too believe it is.”

  “She loves you.”

  “She does,” David said. “Deeply. As I still love her. For me to say it’s over would be to say she’ll never believe in God, and I can’t accept that. Our marriage aside, I can’t imagine eternity without Maggie in heaven too. So we’re still on this journey. Initially, Maggie removed her engagement ring when the innocently asked, ‘When’s the wedding?’ questions began to shred her spirit. She left it off to test what she felt about going on with life without me, and she moved to New York when her career exploded up another level in fame. I thought it best to give her space, stay in Chicago, but Maggie talked me ou
t of that. She asked me to go with her, to be a person she could trust as her inner circle broadened with new faces. We would try life as friends. Being a New York cop would be a good career move for me, so I made the transition too. I enjoyed the work. And I could be there for Maggie, helping behind the scenes with her security, ground her by being a connection to her roots. I took this task-force job because she wants to move back to Chicago. She misses home.

  “Two years ago she put her engagement ring back on. We’re still a couple. Maggie wants that outcome. We may end up having the longest engagement in history if this impasse continues, but we’re committed to each other, to the process. She will have all the time she needs to think about matters, ask questions, and reach the decision that she can believe also.”

  “That sounds like a wise place to be.”

  “It’s what we have. She’s never stopped trying to take that step of faith. She’s never questioned my convictions or the sincerity of my beliefs. She’s said many times I’m a nicer guy now that I’m a Christian than I ever was before. She likes who I’m becoming. But so far she struggles, hasn’t been able to make the step for herself. She can’t get her arms around the fact a man rose from the dead. That’s so easy for me to believe now—Jesus rose from the dead. But for Maggie to accept it . . . she doesn’t yet have the faith to see it as true.”

  “The Resurrection is the pivot point of history for a reason,” Evie said quietly, understanding why Maggie’s struggle would be there.

  David finished his drink, nodded his thanks as a waiter stopped by and offered a refill.

  “When Bryce got married to Charlotte, it helped,” David said, “as Maggie and Charlotte hit it off and became good friends themselves. Charlotte believes, but also has some uncertainties. She struggles with why God lets things happen. That’s helped Maggie, to know it’s a continuum, that doubt is something even a believer can wrestle with from the other side of the belief that Christianity is true.

  “I rest upon this assurance in Scripture, that ‘If you seek me, you will find me.’ Maggie’s searching with an honest heart. She doesn’t believe yet, but she longs to do so. She’ll connect with God one day. And we’ll have our wedding, our good future together.”