Wade shot me a warning look as I started to open my mouth. “We’ll be there,” he answered before hurrying me up the stairs and out of the house.
We reached the front door before I had a chance to say anything more.
“What was that all about?” I demanded. “Couldn’t I speak for myself?”
Wade took me by the elbow and guided me toward the Beetle. He opened my door and practically shoved me into the car. “Meet me at Franklin’s and I’ll buy you lunch.”
Wade walked away before I could agree. His assumption that I’d meet him where he said to was annoying, but there was still that “boyfriend” thing. I needed to set him straight, and fast.
I arrived at Franklin’s ahead of Wade and snagged a table by the window, where I could watch for him. It gave me a tiny edge in the confrontation I was sure was coming.
When Wade slid into the booth across from me, I was ready for him. “What’s with this ‘girlfriend/boyfriend’ thing, Wade? I thought we had agreed to take it slow and see what happens.”
Wade colored and wiggled nervously in his seat. “It was the simplest way to describe you,” he said. “I didn’t want to go into the whole old-friends-who-are-dating-casually thing with Mitchell.” He shrugged. “Besides, I think we’re being exclusive, aren’t we? So, it’s not too far from the truth.”
He waved the subject away. “Anyway, we have more important things to discuss right this minute.”
The waitress chose that moment to interrupt us for our lunch order. I made a random sandwich choice, and coffee. Wade ordered a burger. Neither one of us seemed to care much about what we ate.
“So what’s more important, Wade? What was it we couldn’t talk about in front of anyone?”
Wade still looked uncomfortable, but his lips drew into a determined line and he held my gaze. “What were you doing out there, Georgie?” he asked angrily.
“What was I doing?!?” I shouted. Heads turned from the counter, and I bit my lip. I balled my hands into fists below the edge of the table and forced myself to lower my voice to a conversational level.
“What was I doing? I was doing my job, Wade. I was out there with my boss, working on the plumbing. I was there because that was where the work was. Why are you having difficulty with that concept?” I was having difficulty stopping myself from reaching for his throat.
Wade glanced around as though afraid someone might be watching. The people at the counter had gone back to their lunches, and the waitress was busy at the other end of the room. No one was paying any more attention to us.
“No one’s looking, Wade,” I said. “They all know it’s just Doc Neverall’s nutty daughter. You know, the one that went away to that fancy school and then decided to come back here and be a plumber.”
Bitterness rose in my throat and I washed it back down with a gulp of scalding coffee.
“I’ve heard them. This is a small town, as you remind me. Often. Everybody has an opinion, and a lot of them are quite happy to share it with you whether you want to know or not.”
Wade sighed and stared into his coffee cup. He stirred it idly, even though he had added neither cream nor sugar.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “You’re right, and I didn’t mean to be one of ‘those people.’ ”
Our sandwiches arrived, and Wade sat mute until the waitress left again. He shoved his plate to one side, ignoring the food.
“I’ll be blunt, Georgie. Just listen, okay? Sheriff is an elected position. Like it or not, Fred Mitchell has to get himself reelected every four years if he wants to keep doing the job.”
“This is about politics?” I couldn’t decide if I was confused, or just disgusted.
“It has to be. Mitchell’s a good sheriff. He’s honest, he runs a clean department, and he gets the job done. But there is always the cloud of another election hanging over everything he does.” Wade shrugged, and pulled his plate back in front of him. “It’s just a fact of life for him.”
“So, he didn’t want to think anything bad about Miss Tepper’s leaving because . . .” I let my sentence trail off.
Wade picked up the thought. “Because any kind of major crime is bad for his campaign. Don’t misunderstand,” he went on. “If there’s evidence of anything, he’ll be all over it. The only thing worse than a serious crime, from his point of view, is an unsolved crime.
“When I told him you were my girlfriend, Georgie, I was telling him he should take you seriously. If you came to him with something, I was vouching for you.”
He smiled.
“Besides, I was kind of hoping maybe we were moving in that direction. At least a little.”
Wade took a bite out of his burger and waited for my reaction.
I filed his comment away to examine later.
Right now, though, I had to concentrate on the more pressing problem: the thing we had found hidden in Martha Tepper’s basement.
“Okay. I’ll cut the sheriff some slack. He’s not a bad guy. Blah, blah, blah. And apparently you were just trying to help.” I nodded quickly. “I get it. So what should I do?”
Wade swallowed and I picked up my sandwich. It was my turn to wait, and I took a bite. Egg salad. Somehow, I’d ordered an egg salad sandwich.
I hate egg salad.
“You have to go talk to the sheriff ”—he glanced at his watch—“in about an hour. Tell him everything you know, and then stand back and let him do what he was elected to do. I promise you he’s good, and he’ll get to the bottom of this.”
He picked up his burger and gave me a hard look. “Do you think you can do that?”
I thought about what he’d asked as I forced myself to chew and swallow the gooey, disgusting sandwich.
“I can,” I said softly. “Within reason. I’m not going to tell him anything that’s going to get me in trouble.”
Wade struggled to keep a straight face, and I knew he was thinking about the night he had caught Sue and me outside Martha Tepper’s house.
“Yeah,” I said. “Self-incrimination is so not my style.”
“Good idea,” Wade said. He took another bite of burger, apparently having exhausted his supply of advice.
I shrugged and went back to my lunch. The fries were good, and I found myself taking another bite of the sandwich. It was still egg salad, but for food I hated, it wasn’t too repulsive.
We ate quickly and I managed to finish half the sandwich. I kept looking at my watch as I wolfed down the fries and drained the refill of my coffee cup.
“Dogs?” Wade asked, when I glanced at my wrist for the fourth or fifth time.
“Yeah. I really need to let them out before I go talk to Sheriff Mitchell. No telling when I’ll get back.”
Wade nodded and signaled the waitress over. “Just put this on my tab, would you, Mary?”
“Sure.”
After she left, Wade tossed a few singles on the table for a tip and stood up. “I’ll meet you at your place,” he said. “You let the dogs out and then I’ll drive you over to the sheriff’s office.”
I stood, and led the way out the door. Once we were alone, I turned to face Wade.
“I can get there by myself,” I said. “I’m sure you have things you need to do.”
Wade studied me for a minute, and I thought I might have hurt his pride. Still, I felt like this was something I should take care of myself.
Besides, if he took me to the sheriff’s office, it would cement that boyfriend/girlfriend thing in everyone’s mind, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want that label. Not yet.
“You sure?”
I shook my head. “I promise I’ll go like a good little girl, Wade. Believe me, I can follow orders when I have to.”
Wade agreed, reluctantly, to let me go alone. He made me promise to call him afterward. I just didn’t say how soon afterward.
Which was probably a good idea.
The dogs were happy to see me, but Daisy quickly realized that they were getting only a few minutes in the
backyard, and she gave me a look that clearly said I was committing Airedale neglect.
She was right, too. Since I’d become involved with the mystery of Martha Tepper’s disappearance, I hadn’t been giving them the attention they deserved.
“I swear,” I told them as I brought the dogs in and gave them green treats, “as soon as my visit to the sheriff is done, I am through with this. Then I’ll take you on long walks and we’ll go see Sue for a shampoo.”
I tickled Buddha behind his ears and hugged Daisy. “It’s all over. I promise.”
The sheriff’s office was in a low, brick-and-glass, 1960s-modern building two blocks from Main Street. As a kid I’d been confused when someone referred to it as the “new” sheriff’s office—it had always been there. But as an adult I realized it was decades newer than Main Street.
Sheriff Mitchell was on the phone when I arrived, and the deputy at the counter showed me to a small, sparsely furnished office to wait for him.
I sat in the chair he indicated, an ancient metal frame with a cracked, dark green, vinyl seat and back. The padding had packed down somewhere in the Reagan Administration, and though it still seemed sturdy, it offered little in the way of comfort.
Then again, I don’t think comfort was a high priority.
The only other furniture in the room was a bare wooden desk of about the same vintage as my chair and a spindly looking secretary’s chair in one corner.
I was wondering if the sheriff intended to sit on the secretary’s chair—there wasn’t much else to do in the bare room—when the door opened. Fred Mitchell wheeled in a high-backed executive chair, the kind I’d used to have in my San Francisco office. I remembered that when you have a really good chair, you take the time to drag it with you to meetings.
I supposed this qualified as a meeting of some sort. What it really was, of course, was an interrogation. I just didn’t want to think about that part of it.
The sheriff moved a file folder off the seat of the chair, sat down, and placed the file in the exact center of the desk. He took a small tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the desk, next to the file.
“Do you mind?” he said, pointing at the recorder. “I’m pretty good at notes, but this makes sure I have an absolutely accurate record of what was said.”
Alarm bells went off in the back of my head. “Is this an official interview? Should I have a lawyer?”
Sheriff Mitchell leaned over the desk. His dark eyes were wide and his voice soft and sincere as he replied. “This is unofficial, and the recording is just for my use in the investigation. You don’t need a lawyer, and I’ll tell you if we reach a point where you might.
“For now I just need to find out what you know—anything that might help us discover what really happened to Martha Tepper.”
There it was. What really happened. That didn’t sound like he believed she’d moved to Arizona after all.
“You mean . . . ?”
The sheriff avoided my question. “The bag you found in the Tepper house contained some objects that have aroused our interest. We are doing a preliminary inquiry.
“Mr. Hickey gave us his version of what happened, and I’d like to hear yours.”
I tried to remember all the advice I had ever heard about talking to the police. Answer politely, tell the truth, don’t volunteer information.
I chose my words carefully, giving him the bare facts of our discovery that morning. I didn’t go into detail about how a tool had gone through the wall—it was just an accident.
The sheriff asked if I had seen or heard anything unusual during the last couple weeks while I was working at the house.
I stopped to think, and the miniature recorder stilled. The sheriff saw me look at it, and the corners of his mouth lifted slightly. “Voice activated. Saves on batteries.”
I didn’t tell him I knew a lot about the technology. Samurai Security had used voice activation recording when necessary, and we’d perfected a couple nifty tricks. Tricks that Blake and his buddies were now using, I was sure.
The sheriff cleared his throat, drawing my thoughts back to the present. “Miss Neverall? Anything unusual?”
I decided the arguments between Sandra, Gregory, and the Gladstones didn’t qualify as unusual. In fact, they had sounded pretty much business as usual, if you ask me.
But Janis Breckweth, that was definitely unusual.
“There was this woman,” I said. How could I describe Janis Breckweth without making her sound like a nut case? Then again, maybe she really was a nut case.
I figured it was the sheriff’s job to figure that out.
“She came to the house one day while Barry—Mr. Hickey—and I were working. She said she lived there, and she’d come to get her things.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“She looked kind of, I don’t know, disheveled, I guess. Her hair was a mess and it looked like she’d slept in her clothes. She said her name was Janis, and she was Martha Tepper’s housekeeper.”
The sheriff wrote down each detail as I told him, occasionally going back to underline or circle some particular piece of information.
Watching him take notes was nerve-wracking. My stomach clenched and I fought back the taste of egg salad rising in my throat.
I really hate egg salad.
“This Janis, you say her last name was Breckweth, right? She lived in that house?”
I nodded. “She said she’d lived there six years. A friend of mine, who knows Miss Tepper better than I do, told me Miss Breckweth had been living there for several years, so I guess it’s true.”
“And she said she came to get her belongings? She didn’t take them with her when she left?”
I shrugged. “All I know is what Janis told me. She said a woman came and told her they were selling the house, and she had to leave. Said they wouldn’t even let her wait until morning, or pack her clothes, or anything.
“That’s all I know about her.”
The recorder clicked off and the sheriff waited, as though he expected me to remember something else.
I could hear the clicking of computer keys from the other room, and the occasional muffled squawk of the police radio. Neither sound was loud enough to activate the recorder.
We sat for what felt like several hours in silence. The sheriff reviewed his notes, stopping to scribble things in the margins of the page as though he had all the time in the world.
Or as if he was waiting for something.
As the silence stretched, I found my palms sweating, and my heart beating faster. I had nothing to hide—well, almost nothing, and I’d had a key, so it really wasn’t a break-in—but I was still reacting to the tension. I tried to imagine how nervous I would be if I had something serious I didn’t want to share with him.
It reinforced what I had realized several days earlier: I was not cut out for a life of crime. Even vicarious crime. I wanted to confess to something, anything, just to break the silence.
Of course, I didn’t have much to confess to, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to. I wondered how real criminals handled this kind of treatment. On the other hand, real criminals probably didn’t care.
The thought didn’t help.
I considered telling him about the sabotage at the Tepper house. Was that significant? Would he care, or would I just sound paranoid? Probably the latter.
I kept quiet. No sense destroying what little credibility I had.
I did think of something, though. The sheriff probably wouldn’t take it any more seriously than Barry or Wade had, but at least there was something I could say.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it. “But there was something else. I only just remembered it because it was at the warehouse, not Miss Tepper’s house. She left all her furniture in the house, along with a lot of clothes and things, but this was at the warehouse.”
The sheriff looked up from his notes. “You never know what might be impor
tant. Please, I want to hear anything you know.”
“Well, there was this brooch.” The recorder whirred, and I told him about finding the brooch in the trap of the utility sink at the warehouse.
“She wore that brooch every single day,” I said. “That was why I was worried about her in the first place. She never went anywhere without it.”
I hesitated. There was that whole thing about not volunteering information, but maybe that was just with lawyers, not police. Besides, I’d been worried about Martha Tepper for too long to stop now.
I told him the story of the brooch, the one Paula had told Sue and me, complete with the missing brother, the dead fiancé, and the dream to visit the Wall.
By the time I’d finished, I have to admit, I was a little choked up. I don’t care what Wade said, it was a sad story.
“So,” Sheriff Mitchell said when I ran down, “you don’t think she would have left without that piece of jewelry?”
I shook my head. “Not a chance. I don’t know her as well as some of the people around here, but I can’t imagine any woman leaving a piece like that behind, any more than a married woman would leave her wedding ring.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said, in a tone that implied a lot, but he didn’t say anything more.
I tried to remember if I had heard anything about the sheriff’s current marital state, but my brain refused to cooperate. It was busy with more important things, like controlling the impulse to scream, “Let me out of here!”
“You don’t agree.” It was a statement, not a question. There was no point in asking when his answer was clear.
It was apparently my day to be wrong about everything.
“On the contrary, Georgiana—May I call you Georgiana?—I agree with you entirely. A piece that carries that much emotional and sentimental value does not get left behind except in a life-threatening emergency. And sometimes not even then.
“I have seen people run back into burning buildings or crawl into a smashed-up car, to retrieve a baby’s toy or a favorite sweater. It’s a stupid thing to do, but it happens.”
He leaned back in his chair. “So I agree with you, Georgiana.”
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