See No Evil

by Gayle Roper

  With horrified looks they disappeared back inside.

  Hal and I collapsed in a heap on the small porch.

  “Hal!” I screamed again. I could see blood forming a puddle on the concrete.

  A car rounded the line of parked vehicles and screeched to a halt by the edge of the awning. Gray erupted from the driver’s seat, leaving the engine running and the headlights shining.

  “Anna!”

  But I barely heard him. I was too busy staring at the bedraggled vision illuminated by Gray’s headlights.

  Josie Reddick stood in the rain, her little revolver dangling from her hand as she stared wild-eyed at what she had just done. “Hal?” She ran toward the little porch. “Hal!” She fell to her knees sobbing. “Hal!”

  But he never heard her.

  EPILOGUE

  I thought the second Saturday in June would never come, but finally, finally it did. My wedding day.

  Again.

  Stop that, I ordered my unruly self as I stood in the living room waiting for the limousine to take me, Dad, Lucy and Meg to the church. Do not think about before. This is now! This is Gray! This is not Glenn.

  And while I agreed with myself mentally and knew the correct answer to the will-he-show-up question, I found myself feeling very nervous. My hands were clammy as I clutched a handkerchief Mom had carried when she married, and I couldn’t stay still.

  “Anna!” Lucy stood with her hands on her hips, scowling at me. “How are we supposed to arrange your veil if you keep stalking around like some caged animal in a zoo?”

  I looked at my housemate, cute as could be in her bright navy bridesmaid’s dress, her red curls a soft halo under the coronet of daisies and bachelor buttons with the navy streamers falling down her back. Meg stood behind her, staring in a mirror, trying to make her coronet of flowers stay on her glossy black hair.

  “I’m going to need a dozen bobby pins, and it’s still going to slide off,” she moaned.

  “Just don’t move your head all day,” Lucy advised.

  I was going to miss these women who had become such wonderful friends. I didn’t think Gray was going to want to sit up all night in his pj’s and talk about the deep issues of life while munching on cold pizza or Rocky Road ice cream. I was fairly certain he wouldn’t think giving me a manicure was a fun job or spending an hour in Bath and Body Works smelling everything was a good way to spend a rainy Saturday.

  These women had been with me through the whole man-in-black situation, the unexpected finale, and all the legal aftermath. Of course, so had Gray. I guess it came down to the Lord giving me the best of both worlds, something for which I was deeply grateful.

  The night Hal Reddick was murdered revealed much about what was going on below the surface, much that even Sergeant Poole and the Amhearst police didn’t know.

  When Bob Boyes, the accountant from Windle, Boyes, Kepiro, and Ryder, became ill and Dorothy Ryder filled in for him on the Reddick account, Dorothy became suspicious. Like me, she had always admired the beautiful Reddick house and understood its value. She also lived in Amhearst and noted in the paper the amounts of money that Reddick Construction gave to civic and social service organizations and agencies. She knew about the house the Reddicks had at Nag’s Head, North Caroline, a very plush resort. When she saw the figures Hal Reddick was reporting for tax purposes, she became very suspicious.

  Added to these more or less public observations was the fact that Dorothy and Ken Ryder had mutual friends with the Reddicks. Through the unintentionally damning gossip of these friends, Dorothy knew of Josie’s visits to extremely expensive health spas for a month at a time, of her trips to New York for all the spring and fall fashion shows and her costly purchases of designer clothes.

  All it took was her whisper in the ear of the IRS, and Hal and Josie Reddick became subjects of great interest to the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. As one of the WBK and R accountants told the paper, “Cash-based payment and income flourishes in this country, and there’s no way accountants can trace it. We can deal only with the figures we are given.”

  But the IRS can trace such non-compliance, and their agents began a detailed investigation of the Reddicks for tax evasion and tax fraud. Bank records were subpoenaed and assets evaluated. The possibility of offshore accounts and hidden monies was probed.

  Not that Hal and Josie were aware at this point. Neither were the Amhearst police. However it is assumed that Dorothy asked enough questions to somehow reveal that she was suspicious, and her sudden overt interest got back to Josie. Bob Boyes, the Reddick accountant of years’ standing, didn’t live in Amhearst, he had no interest in local goings-on, and he never asked about or suspected assets other than those reported to him. Dorothy was not so obliging.

  Josie became very nervous.

  The News quoted her as saying, “I loved my husband and I loved our lifestyle. I was willing to do most anything to preserve it.”

  On one of the frequent gambling trips she and Hal took to Atlantic City where they were treated like royalty by the casinos, she made contact with the man in black who called himself Dar Jones at the time.

  “I hired him to kill Dorothy Ryder before she learned too much,” Josie freely admitted. “Then that girl got involved and messed everything up!”

  When the reporter from the News called me for a reaction to that quote, I told her, “All I did was look out a window.”

  When Dar Jones couldn’t manage to kill me, Josie decided he had become a liability. The police were chasing him, and what if they caught him? He could implicate her. So she met him at Freedom’s Chase and killed him with her trusty little revolver.

  Sergeant Poole, Natalie and the Amhearst police investigated the murders completely unaware that the IRS was conducting the investigation that provided the motive for the killings. Had Amhearst law enforcement known, perhaps Hal wouldn’t have been shot. Who knows? Certainly if he hadn’t been killed, he would be spending a considerable amount of time in jail, as Josie was doing.

  The night Gray and I bumped into the Reddicks having dinner at the same restaurant we were, Josie was reveling in how easy it had been to take care of the Dar Jones and Dorothy Ryder problems. Maybe she should also take care of the Gray Edwards problem so he could no longer provide the most serious and potentially financially devastating competition Reddick Construction had ever had. The fact that she mistook her husband in his navy pinstriped suit as he stood with his back to her while talking to me on the restaurant porch for Gray in his pinstriped suit is one of life’s ironies. Whenever I try to feel sorry for Josie for killing the man she loved, I remember that if she had hit her intended target, I wouldn’t be getting married today.

  I heard the limousine pull up in front of our little brick house. The next time I entered here, I’d be Anna Edwards. I’d have two first names, but no one would mix mine up as they did Gray’s. I grinned to myself.

  The doorbell rang, and my father hurried to answer. The limo driver slouched there, wearing a tux and a cap pulled low, sunglasses swathing his face. He handed my father a note.

  I thought I might be sick.

  Dad handed me the note. With a trembling hand, I opened it.

  Sugar, I know this is when it all went wrong before.

  It’s not going wrong today, and I’m here to see to it.

  I looked up, and there stood the limo driver, cap and glasses gone as he smiled at me.

  “Gray!” I ran to him and threw myself into his arms.

  “Anna!” Lucy called. “Your veil!”

  “Gray!” Meg sounded appalled. “You can’t see her before the wedding!”

  Like I cared.

  Gray held me close, and I could feel his heart beating against mine. Over his shoulder I could see his silver pickup behind the limo.

  “I’m so glad he never showed,” he whispered in my ear. “But I’ll be here for you always. I promise, Anna.” And he kissed me.

  Society page of the Amhearst News:

&nb
sp; Anna Marie Volente became the bride of Grayson Hamilton Edwards on Saturday, June 12, at Calvary Church in Amhearst. In an unusual twist to the otherwise traditional wedding, the groom drove the bride to the church in his silver pickup while the bride’s father and the bridesmaids followed in the limousine.

  Dear Reader,

  You’re holding in your hands my first book for the Love Inspired Suspense line, though this isn’t my first book. It is my sincere wish that with my titles coming from Steeple Hill Books, I will get to meet many new readers like you.

  Since one of my great loves is reading a good romantic suspense, that’s the pleasure I want to give you. I want you to fall in love with Anna and her friends, drool just a little bit over Gray and root for the dastardly Dar to be caught. Most of all I want you to be aware that though See No Evil is fiction, the characters model for us just how God interacts with us in the crunches of daily living.

  It’s this showing us patterns of living that makes fiction so exciting to me. Sure, nonfiction is good as it tells us how we should live, but stories show us how. We see characters choose certain actions and reactions, and consequences follow.

  “Whoops,” we say. “If I make that bad choice, what happened to that character might happen to me, but if I choose well and follow the Lord, good stuff will happen.” I’m not saying that hard times never come when we make wise choices, but the chances are that life will be less complex and more pleasant. Certainly the presence of the Lord makes all our experiences richer.

  Drop me a line at gayle@gayleroper.com. I’d love to hear from you.

  Warmly,

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  When Anna sees the murderer, her life takes an unexpected turn. Have you ever had surprising things happen to you that have taken you places you didn’t expect to go?

  Anna has the misfortune of being hurt deeply by her former fiancé, and consequently she finds trusting another man difficult. Has someone (not necessarily a man) hurt you badly? Does that situation affect you still? How do you deal with the hurt? How do you think God would have you deal with it?

  Gray struggles with workaholism, and the perks of modern communication help him fall ever deeper into that pit. Colossians 3:23–24 reads, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” What do you think these verses imply about our work ethic?

  Dar Jones has the interesting affectation of making all his aliases almost famous names, e.g., Dar Jones=Dow Jones. What does this show about him as an individual? Is he yearning to be famous like his namesakes? Is he thumbing his nose at them? What are your thoughts on fame, especially from a Christian perspective?

  Anna promises her dying mother that she will always remember that she is an artist. She finds this promise as she interprets it difficult to keep. What is our responsibility when we make promises?

  How does God treat his promises? Jeremiah 29:11–12, the verses found at the beginning of this book, make promises. Is God breaking his word when we have difficulties and pain in our lives? What do you think is God’s ultimate goal for us?

  How do we find God’s specific will for us? One clue: when Anna realizes her fabric mosaics are God’s plan for her, what emotion does she feel? When she makes the mosaics, what does she feel?

  Josie Reddick begins her slide with a combination of ambition and love for her husband. Are either of these emotions wrong? If not, how do they get warped? What marks the difference between her ambition and Gray’s?

  Why does Ken Ryder’s duplicity seem less terrible than Josie’s? What are your thoughts on degrees of sin? Are there always consequences to wrongdoing? What happens to consequences when we go to God in confession and accept his forgiveness?

  If any of these characters could come to life, which one would you pick and why?

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-4715-8

  SEE NO EVIL

  Copyright © 2007 by Gayle Roper

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Steeple Hill Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Steeple Hill Books.

  ® and TM are trademarks of Steeple Hill Books, used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

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