Love Finds You in Carmel by-the-Sea, California

by Sandra D. Bricker

  She took a moment to write the date at the top of the pad of paper Sherman had been standing on, and she made a few quick notes.

  Davis Armbrewster. Full head of silver hair. Brown pants. Light blue shirt. Brown leather loafers.

  Hey. Brown loafers. That’s not something a man wears to play golf.

  And now that she thought about it, he hadn’t stopped to produce a set of clubs from his car before heading inside, either.

  Annie looked up just as he disappeared through the double glass doors to the pro shop.

  “Stay here, Sherman,” she told her dog. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes. Stay.”

  She rolled down both front-seat windows and patted Sherman’s head before she left him. He’d been pretty dependable about staying put, especially as he’d gotten older. Annie’s guess: he pretty much knew he wouldn’t find a better situation than what he had with her, and he was too old and too tired to go looking anyway.

  She walked casually across the parking lot, up the sidewalk, and through the pro shop doors, but Mr. Armbrewster was nowhere in sight. She scanned the racks inside and then informally searched the faces she found there.

  She hadn’t been inside the shop for thirty seconds when Armbrewster appeared from behind a light pine door, now wearing a square plastic badge with his name engraved above a sunny yellow smiley face and the words, HOW CAN I HELP YOU?

  He greeted a few of the occupants of the shop as if he saw them often; then he set his sights on Annie.

  Be unobtrusive and Keep your distance scampered across her mind. Maybe she could do better with note number three and keep her game face on.

  “How can I help you today, young lady?” Mr. Armbrewster asked her, as his friendly smile practically radiated.

  “Oh, I’m just looking around,” she told him.

  “Something for yourself or a gift?”

  Oh boy.

  “A gift?” she replied, and it popped out in the strange form of a question.

  Over the next fifteen minutes or so, Davis Armbrewster proved helpful to the point of ridiculousness, showing Annie inexpensive possibilities for her father’s birthday such as golf balls and tees and then the more pricy considerations like knit shirts and bags for the clubs he didn’t own. As far as Annie knew, her father hadn’t set foot on a golf course in his entire life.

  “You’re pretty good at this,” Annie commented. “Have you been working here for a long time?”

  “Not too long,” he replied. “A few weeks.”

  Why retire from one job just to go and find another?

  “You must love golf,” she told him. “Working for greens fees?”

  “Oh no, something much more important,” Armbrewster confided in a hushed voice. “An affair of the heart.”

  Annie’s disappointment danced a little jig across the inside of her stomach. This man just didn’t strike her as a cheater!

  “How’s that?” she asked him, trying to mask her disillusionment.

  “The wife doesn’t even know I have this job,” he said. Annie resisted the impulsive urge to take a swing at him with one of the golf clubs in the bag between them.

  Old geezer!

  “I’m saving every cent to surprise her for our fiftieth. She’s dreamed all her life of going to Italy, and I’m going to take her.”

  Oh, good grief. Forgive the geezer remark.

  “You’re kidding,” she said on a sigh. “Well, that’s just… so romantic.”

  “She’s put up with me for half a century,” the geezer-turned-romantic-hero told her. “She deserves a big reward.”

  “I think that’s a beautiful idea. I really do. Congratulations.”

  “What about your father?” he asked. “Decide on anything for him?”

  “Maybe I’ll just get him some slippers,” she replied with a shrug. “Have a good day.”

  “You have a good one too, young lady.”

  Making her way back toward her Taurus, Annie’s heart surged with relief for Marion Armbrewster. And she felt pretty good about solving the mystery too.

  I’m a natural at this stuff. I mean, really. I went in, I got the information, and I’m out. Simple!

  About ten yards from her car Annie whistled for Sherman, but his little head didn’t pop up to the window as usual. She whistled again. Still nothing.

  Closing the gap between herself and the car at a full sprint, she flung open the door and peered inside.

  Oh, no!

  Looking around frantically, Annie began to call his name. “Sherman! Sherman? Here, Sherman.”

  She headed across the parking lot at a full run, still calling his name, her heart pounding against her chest and all the worst scenarios running like movie trailers across her mind as she searched for him.

  At the far end of the clubhouse, she heard someone yelling, and a group of others burst into laughter. Annie ran around the corner, hoping that her inclination to follow the raucousness proved on track.

  A small delivery truck sat idle at the side entrance, and she noticed a half dozen club employees gathered around the back of it, peering inside curiously.

  Something tells me…

  “What’s going on?” she asked as she joined them. She followed one of their nods into the back end of the produce truck.

  And there sat her dog, an entire bin of lettuce leaves scattered on the truck bed around him, happily chowing down on his favorite treat.

  Oh, good grief. He’s in doggie heaven.

  “Sherman!” she exclaimed, and he looked at her, appearing to grin.

  “This is your dog?” an angry man in a dirty white apron bellowed at her. Sherman growled softly as one of the workers made a move toward him.

  “Sherman!” she reprimanded. “That’s enough!”

  Annie climbed into the back of the truck and dragged him by the collar toward the edge until she could pick him up. All the while, her ridiculous dog resisted in one concerted effort to score a few more chunks of the lettuce near him.

  “That’s a thirty-two-dollar bin of produce your dog just ruined,” the delivery man said with a groan as she lumbered off the truck with thirty pounds of disobedient beagle overflowing from her arms.

  “I’ll write you a check,” she promised. “I really will. I’ll pay for it as soon as I get him back to the car. I’m—I’m so sorry.”

  Annie hurried toward the parking lot, loaded Sherman into the front seat of her car like a sack of potatoes, and slid in beside him. Her heart raced as she bit her lip and closed her eyes briefly before reaching for her purse to dig out her checkbook.

  After signing her name to the check, she glanced over at Sherman.

  “You are a very bad dog,” she told him sternly. But then she burst into a spontaneous and breathless stream of laughter as he panted at her, one eye covered diagonally with a pirate’s patch of green leaf lettuce.

  “You did what?!”

  “I know you told me to keep my distance,” she explained to Deke in a calm tone of voice, in direct opposition to the large vein vibrating erratically in his forehead. “But he went waltzing right in, no golf shoes, no clubs. I had to see what he was really doing in there, didn’t I?”

  “See what he’s doing,” Deke repeated, and he inhaled deeply through his nose before continuing. “Not make contact. You never make spontaneous contact!”

  “But it worked out,” she reasoned with him. “He’s not cheating on Mrs. Armbrewster. He’s working there to earn the money to take her to Italy for their fiftieth wedding—”

  “You could have discovered that he worked there without having a conversation with him, Annie. You never—”

  “—make spontaneous contact,” she completed for him. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Deke appeared to be having quite an intense dialogue with himself, looking straight through Annie. But then…something unexpected happened.

  “It’s my fault, really,” he told her. “I should never have sent you out on a case in your first week. No m
atter how uncomplicated it was supposed to be, no one is ready that quickly.”

  Annie suddenly realized she’d positioned herself offensively on the other side of his desk.

  “I’m sorry, Deke,” she said, and she folded into the chair and looked him directly in the eyes. “You gave me a set of rules to follow, and I didn’t. That was wrong. It won’t happen again.”

  After a moment the corner of Deke’s mouth twitched, and Annie saw the dawn of a smile.

  “Let’s call it part of a learning curve,” he said. “For both of us.”

  Relief washed over her as he completed the foreshadowed smile.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to keep Mr. Armbrewster’s secret from his wife,” she suggested—but the way Deke’s eyebrows knit together and all traces of the smile disintegrated told Annie that he wasn’t exactly onboard. “He’s worked so hard to surprise her, Deke.”

  “Look. Marion Armbrewster is our client. She hired us to do a job, which was to find out what her husband was doing when he left the house. You have that information…not that I approve of the method.”

  “How about this,” she offered, hope percolating as she slid to the edge of her chair and leaned toward him. “How about we tell her that we have the information, that he’s not cheating as she thought, but that to tell her what he is doing would ruin a surprise he’s been planning.”

  Deke cocked his head only slightly, enough to let Annie know that he was at least considering her plea. So she dove on it while she had the chance.

  “Then she has the option. If she wants the information, I’ll give her a full report. But if all she wants to know is whether her husband is faithful, I can tell her that without ruining the effort he’s put into surprising her.”

  She paused. Deke’s expression was a blank slate. She waited with no clear idea of how he would respond.

  “All right, then.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. Call the client, invite her in for a meeting, and explain it to her in that way. Let her choose.”

  Annie popped up from her chair, and it took all her resolve not to round the corner of the desk and hug the stuffing right out of him.

  “That’s the right choice, Deke. It really is. You won’t be sorry.”

  “Going forward,” he said, staring her down, “we follow the rules.”

  “Be unobtrusive,” she recited, instinctively raising her right hand in a vow. “Keep my distance. Wear my game face.”

  “All right, all right,” he interrupted. “Go on and call the client.”

  “Thank you,” she sent back as she reached the doorway. “You’re a man among men!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  Mrs. Armbrewster said she could come to the office that afternoon, and Annie made full use of the time until then by writing up a complete report on her findings. She felt so utterly Maltese Falcon-esque as she sat in front of the computer on the reception desk, typing out all the information about her first investigation. She could almost see herself there in black-and-white.

  She planned to go over every paragraph and every letter with a fine-tooth comb to make it the best she could before showing it to Deke, but her concentration broke as the office door flew open and thumped against the wall. She nearly jumped to her feet on sheer instinct.

  “You must be Annie Gray,” said a rugged, dark-eyed man.

  He looked dangerous. And a little wicked. He might have been the result if Colin Farrell and George Clooney had run into one another really hard. Her heart pounded harder when he met her gaze. Any other guy wearing a rumpled sport coat over a wrinkled denim shirt might not be noticed beneath it, but this particular jacket wore the guy. He was…mesmerizing.

  “Yo. Are you mute?”

  Huh?

  “I–I’m sorry,” she managed to sputter. “You are…?”

  “Nick Benchley,” he stated—and a flash flood of their phone conversation came barreling back at her.

  “Oh.”

  “Deke around?” he asked, as he pushed the outer door shut behind him. Before she could respond, he swaggered straight past her desk and into Deke’s office.

  “He–e–ey!” Deke greeted him. “Take a load off.”

  “Why, yes,” Annie announced softly to the four walls around her, “Mr. Heffley is in his office. Let me announce you.”

  Annie watched Mrs. Armbrewster pull her car into a space beyond the window. She gave a friendly wave that Annie returned, as she hoped against hope that she would find the right words to help the woman understand without actually hearing all the facts.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Gray.”

  “Annie.”

  “All right, Annie. How are you today?” she asked, following her lead and sitting across from Annie’s desk.

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “You have some news about my Davis?” she asked. Annie could see the wariness in her eyes, so afraid of the answer she was desperate to hear. Mrs. Armbrewster’s love for her husband of fifty years rocked something deep inside of Annie.

  “Mrs. Armbrewster,” she said, “I met your husband. And I can tell you that he loves you very, very much.”

  “You met him? I don’t understand.”

  “Yes. It was completely innocent,” she reassured her. “He had no idea I was working for you.”

  The tension drained slowly from Marion’s face, like the last of the helium leaving a balloon.

  “Now, I’ve prepared a full report on what we’ve discovered, Mrs. Armbrewster.”

  “Call me Marion.” It came out almost as a whisper, her eyes fixed on Annie, expectation brewing.

  “I’d like to begin, Marion, by telling you that your husband’s activities have absolutely nothing to do with any other woman except you.”

  Marion released the air she’d been holding in her lungs, and she tried to smile. “Where is he going, then?”

  “Before I tell you that,” Annie replied delicately, “can I be so bold as to offer you an opinion?”

  “Of course.”

  “Mr. Armbrewster is keeping a secret, but it’s not the kind of secret you feared,” she told her. “And since you’re the client, I’ll hand over every detail of this report to you, if that’s what you want. But before you ask me to do that, you should know that you’ll be disappointed in the long run. And you’ll be interfering with what I think is going to be a really pleasant surprise.”

  Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Your husband’s activities are a result of something he wants very much to do for you. And if I hand you this file, all his efforts to surprise you will be ruined.”

  “A surprise?”

  “And it’s a good one,” Annie said with a chuckle. “Believe me.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly,” she replied tenderly. “Your husband loves you very much, Marion. Can you trust me on this? You came to us to find out if he’s having an affair, and I can tell you unequivocally that he is not. Can you leave it at that for a while?”

  “I…suppose.”

  “Just until after your wedding anniversary.”

  Marion considered Annie’s words for a moment, and then she brightened so profoundly that Annie almost felt like she needed sunglasses.

  “It’s for our anniversary?” Marion exclaimed.

  “Oh, don’t make me say any more.”

  “You’re sure about this?” The smile on her face broadened even before Annie replied. “That man! He’s such a joy.”

  Annie’s heart squeezed as she watched Marion. She could only imagine the elation—and the relief. She wondered for a moment what it would be like to be with the same man for fifty years, to know him inside and out, to know by heart everything about him: how he took his coffee, whether he freckled in the sun, if he liked shellfish, what he dreamed about as a little boy.

  “Annie, you’ve put my mind at ease more than I can ever tell you. I can’t thank you enough.”


  “No need to thank me,” she told her. “Just take a deep breath and relax. You have the answer you really needed.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Chapter Five

  “Fasten your seatbelts.

  It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  Bette Davis, All About Eve, 1950

  Annie’s Taurus made a bit of a whirring noise when she started it, reminding her about point number five on the list hanging on the refrigerator door in her gram’s kitchen. Perhaps the time had come to go shopping for that convertible before Taurie, as she lovingly referred to the heap, began to exhibit some behavioral problems.

  The girls had already scored a table, and cheese-laden potato skins had found their way to familiar shores by the time Annie made it to T.G.I. Friday’s.

  “Hey, Annie!” Tyra exclaimed, and she tossed her arms around Annie’s neck and smacked a kiss against her cheek. One of the prettiest African-American women Annie had ever met, Tyra’s dark brown eyes glistened as she smiled.

  “I was kind of expecting you to call and cancel.”

  “Are you kidding?” Merideth cried. “She wouldn’t dare!”

  “I should hope not,” Tyra said with a bob of her head. “I got a babysitter for this night out.”

  Zoey plopped half a sour cream–drenched potato on her plate and waved, then animatedly pointed to her very full mouth. Annie gave her best friend’s shoulder a smack as she rounded the table and sat down between her and Merideth, across from Tyra.

  Merideth always outdressed the rest of them, and this night was no exception. Zoey and Tyra had donned their usual casual outfits revolving around jeans; Annie topped off blue jeans and a black shirt with rhinestoned French cuffs by adding a simple black beret; but Merideth looked like a cover girl. Black Cambio velvet jeans and a chestnut-suede-and-woolen-piped UGG poncho that fell slightly off the shoulder to reveal a textured black shell underneath.

  Big hair and big shoes. That was Merideth’s motto on fashion. And the bigger the event, the bigger the streaked and sprayed hair.