Water's Edge (40 page)

“Let’s sit at the picnic table,” Tiffany said.

They walked toward the concrete table.

“It’ll be better if I say a few things first,” Tom began. “There’s no way—”

“Wait. Not yet.”

They reached the table. Tom sat on the bench in the spot where he’d wept over the loss of his parents. Tiffany stood in front of him, her lower lip quivering.

“Tiffany, this is going to be hard enough without you saying things that are going to embarrass you after you hear from me. You’ve got to realize—”

“Stop!” Tiffany put her fist to her lips for a second, then pointed toward the far end of the pond.

“What?” Tom asked, mystified.

“Arthur had your father and Harold Addington killed!” Tiffany buried her face in her hands.

A sick, sour feeling hit Tom in his stomach.

“I heard him talking about it two nights ago at the barn. He didn’t know I was checking on a horse in one of the stalls, and he came in with two of his security guys. He told them he’d testified earlier in the day in front of the grand jury, and that you and Rose Addington were going to be arrested. However, if going to jail didn’t take care of the problem, it would be necessary to do to you what they did to your father and Harold Addington. One of the men argued with Arthur and told him two more deaths would bring down too much suspicion from the police. Arthur got mad and told him there might not be any other option. At that point they walked away from the stall. I didn’t hear anything else that was said.”

Stunned, Tom didn’t respond.

“Rick and I have suspected something wasn’t right with Arthur’s business for years,” Tiffany said, “but I had no idea it involved murder.”

“Does Rick know about this conversation?” Tom managed.

“No.”

“And you’re sure about what you heard?”

“Yes.” Tiffany covered her face with her hands again for a moment. “What are you going to do? I can’t stand the thought of you getting locked up in jail.”

Tom eyed her suspiciously. He’d been deceived so many times the past few weeks he wasn’t sure who and what to believe. Tiffany might be exaggerating something she heard in an effort to drive him toward her. But why she would still want him made no sense at all.

“If what you’re saying is true, you’ll have to tell it to the police,” he said.

“If ?” Tiffany asked sharply. “Do you think I’m making this up?”

Tom spoke slowly. “What Arthur is doing makes me believe anything is possible.”

“And if Arthur finds out I overheard—” She stopped.

Tom closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He was completely confused. A moment later he felt Tiffany’s fingers gently touching the back of his neck and jerked his head up. Tiffany pulled away.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I feel so terrible for you.”

“That won’t help. Do you know the names of the bodyguards?”

“Jeff Scarboro and Mitt Crusan. Scarboro is over all the other security guys, but Crusan is the one who scares me the most.”

Tom couldn’t shake the thought that something about Tiffany’s story didn’t add up.

“Trying to prove something like this is very tough,” he said, shaking his head.

“I heard the words with my own ears. What else is needed?”

“There aren’t any details.”

“I don’t have any doubts.” Tiffany wrung her hands. “How am I going to stand being in the same room with Arthur? He’s going to know something is wrong.”

Tom didn’t answer. Tiffany stepped closer.

“What if we got in the car and never came back?” she said. “I’ve got loads of money in an overseas bank account. All we have to do is get out of the country. There are still places that don’t send Americans back to the US. Isn’t Venezuela one of them?”

“No,” Tom said, standing up. “We’d be caught and you’d end up in prison too.”

“Being separated from you is going to be worse than prison.” Tiffany grabbed his arm.

Tom jerked his arm free. “We need to get out of here before anyone knows you came to see me.”

Tom started jogging toward his car. Tiffany struggled to keep up.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m not sure, but you need to forget about me. Forever.”

“I can’t help how I feel,” she called after him.

Tom reached his car first and got in without saying anything else. Tiffany mouthed words outside his window and pleaded with her hands as he put the car in reverse. He spun the tires in the dirt as he turned around and drove away.

Tom had no doubt that Arthur Pelham was a thief, and the financier might be a murderer, but Tom couldn’t rely on Tiffany to prove anything. Her story could easily be part of a plan to get him to run away with her. But more important, nothing Tiffany said convinced Tom that he should continue to live.

When he reached Elias’s house, the old man’s car was in its usual spot beside the garage. Tom got out, quietly shut the car door, and returned to the spot where he’d left the deer rifle.

It was gone.

Looking up at the sky in despair, he slowly walked toward the house and up the front steps. Elias was sitting in the front room with the rifle across his lap.

“How did you find that?” Tom pointed at the rifle.

“I took Rover out for a walk when I got home from church, and he went directly to the last place you’d been. Tom, killing yourself is not an answer to your problems.”

Tom flopped down on the sofa. “What is the answer?”

“Cry out to God for help.”

“Do you realize how hollow that sounds to me? My life went into the toilet after I came back to Bethel and started talking to God.”

“I can’t disagree with you.”

“Then give me that rifle.”

Elias didn’t move. Tom could see that the old man was gripping the rifle so tightly that his knuckles were white.

“I’ve had more failures than successes in life,” Elias said. “But I’m not going to quit because of a mountain of disappointments. What you’re facing is beyond me. All I know to do is call for help.”

“What did you do with the bullets?”

“Put them someplace where you won’t find them. And that includes the other two boxes in the gun case.”

Before Tom said anything else there was a loud knock at the front door.

“You stay here,” Tom said. “I’ll see who it is.”

chapter
THIRTY-THREE

T
om opened the door. Standing on the front porch was an unshaven man in his late twenties wearing overalls and a faded baseball cap.

“Barry Fortenberry,” the man said. “Did I just see your car leaving Austin’s Pond?”

“Yes.”

“I tried to flag you down, but you didn’t see me. I meant to come by the other day to give you something.”

Fortenberry reached in the front pocket of his overalls and took out a brownish lump with a metal chain attached to it.

“I was fishing at the far end of the pond a week ago and saw this in the shallow water. I thought you might want to have it.”

He handed the misshapen lump to Tom. It was a long rectangular wallet. Tom opened it and saw his father’s fishing license.

“Where was it again?” Tom asked.

“Stuck in the mud about two feet from the edge of the water. Your daddy kept notes stuck inside where he wrote down information about how to fish different places. I saw him pull it out many times. He always put it in his back pocket, then chained it to the belt loop on his pants.”

Tom pulled several sodden pieces of paper from the wallet. The writing on the pages was washed away. The steel chain hung down a foot from the edge of the wallet. Tom felt the chain.

“Would the wallet float with this chain on it?”

“Nah,” Fortenberry answered. “The wallet might do pretty good, but the chain has more heft to it than you’d think. It would take it straight to the bottom.”

“I appreciate you bringing this by,” Tom said, looking up at the fisherman. “It means a lot that you’d go to the trouble.”

“No problem. Like I told you the other day, your daddy was always good to me. It made me sad when I realized what I’d found.”

Fortenberry stepped off the front porch and returned to his truck. Tom went inside the house. Elias was in the kitchen. There was no sign of the rifle.

“Where’s the gun?” Tom asked.

“A safe place. And don’t ask any more questions about it. Who was at the door?”

Tom put the wallet on the table. “Do you recognize that?”

“It’s your daddy’s.”

“Right. A fisherman found it at the edge of the pond.” Tom paused. “That’s odd since the boat turned over at least thirty yards from the shore.”

Elias shook his head. Suddenly Tom sat up straighter.

“Do you have the clothes my father was wearing when he died?”

“Uh, they gave me his things in a plastic bag at the funeral home,” Elias responded. “I may have thrown the bag away, but if not, it would be in the closet in his bedroom.”

Tom bolted out of his chair and down the hallway. The gun case was still on the floor beside the bed. He stepped over it and pushed back the sliding door for the closet. On the floor in the right-hand corner of the closet was a black plastic bag. Tom grabbed it and ripped it open. On top was a shirt he didn’t recognize. Beneath the shirt was another, smaller bag containing shoes. In the bottom was a pair of brown crumpled pants, the durable kind preferred by sportsmen. Tom held up the pants and ran his hand along the seam that held the thick belt loops. On the left-hand side of the pants, he felt something metal. It was the ring that attached the wallet to the pants. The chain had been ripped from its connection to the belt loop, leaving a single ring that was partially pried open. He carried the pants out to the kitchen.

“Look,” he said to Elias. “The chain on the wallet was broken off at the link where it connected to his pants. It took some force to do that.”

“What are you saying?” Elias asked.

“There was some kind of fight.”

“Fight?”

“Yes, near the shore. My father didn’t drown because the boat tipped over.”

Elias’s face went pale. He swayed unsteadily in his chair. Tom put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“I feel light-headed,” Elias said.

Elias tried to get up but immediately slumped toward the floor. Tom tried to catch him, but he hit the floor with a thud. Elias’s eyes rolled back in his head. Rover came over and nuzzled the older man’s face. Tom ran over to the sink, moistened a washcloth, and put it on Elias’s forehead. The old man groaned.

“Elias, can you hear me?”

Elias groaned again. Tom picked him up and carried him out of the house. As they walked down the front steps, Elias opened his eyes.

“Where?” he muttered.

“To the hospital.”

Elias nodded slightly and closed his eyes. Tom put him in the passenger seat, then raced around to the driver’s side. The sports car left a boiling cloud of dust as it sped down the driveway and onto the highway. Less than ten minutes later Tom squealed into the hospital parking lot. He stopped in front of the doors where the ambulances brought patients and ran inside. A pair of orderlies scrambled out, put Elias on a gurney, and rolled him inside. Tom moved his car to a regular parking spot and went inside where an intake nurse asked him a series of preliminary questions. After writing down Elias’s name, she asked Tom his relationship to the old man.

“Great-nephew.”

“And your name.”

“Tom Crane.”

The nurse’s eyes narrowed, and Tom saw her glance toward the security guard on duty in the ER.

“You can wait in there,” the nurse said curtly and pointed to the general waiting area.

Tom sat down. No one else seemed to be paying any attention to him. He flipped the pages of a magazine, but the words and pictures were a blur. He was worried about Elias. The old man had been under so much stress, all of it Tom’s fault. He closed his eyes. A moment later he felt a tap on the shoulder.

“Mr. Crane?”

“Yes.” Tom opened his eyes.

It was the same doctor who’d stitched up Tom’s chin.

“We’re admitting your uncle to the hospital and sending him upstairs for additional testing. He appears to have suffered a heart attack, and I want the cardiologist on call to assess the damage.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

“He’s stable now, and we’re going to watch him closely while continuing our evaluation.” The doctor cleared his throat. “How is your chin doing?”

Tom touched the slightly raised line of skin. If he’d pulled the trigger on the rifle, it would have obliterated the doctor’s careful work.

“Better every day.”

The doctor looked around the waiting area. Everyone in the room was staring at them. Several members of the hospital staff were eyeing Tom from across the room.

“Would you consider going someplace else to wait for news?” the doctor asked in a low voice. “Your presence is a distraction, and there’s nothing you can do for your uncle. If you give me your phone number, I promise to notify you as soon as we receive the results of any tests. Once your uncle is in a room, you can stay with him.”

“Nobody was paying attention to me a few minutes ago.”

“Word gets out fast, and I don’t want you to be bothered.”

Tom gave the doctor his cell phone number. As he left the ER, he felt multiple sets of eyes boring holes in his back. He got in his car and started the motor but didn’t have any place to go. He drove slowly down several residential streets, then past the courthouse, the Chickamauga Diner, and his father’s office. It was starting to get dark, and the broken shards of glass on the sidewalk glittered when the headlights of his car hit them. He drove out of town, past Rocky River Church and the country club. Turning back he passed the corporate headquarters of Pelham Financial. The brick building was beautifully lit up. Inside the city limits, he passed a row of older homes. At a stop sign, he looked to the left and saw the Parker-Baldwin house. Rick Pelham’s truck was parked out front.

At the sight of Arthur Pelham’s residence, anger boiled up inside Tom. He drove slowly past the historic home and glared. When he passed Rick’s truck, he had a view of the sunroom on the east side of the house. Through the windows he could see Arthur and Rick sitting in chairs and talking. Tom pulled his car to the curb and turned off the headlights. He wanted to confront Arthur but knew he’d never get inside the front door if he knocked or make it past the guards lurking unseen outside the house.