Water's Edge

by Robert Whitlow

  Tom sat down at the desk and turned on his computer. Running a search for Tiffany’s name, he scored multiple hits that documented her appearance in horse shows. There were online videos of her riding championship horses in places like Louisville, San Diego, and Kansas City. Seeing how much Tiffany enjoyed herself made Tom smile. Happiness should mark every aspect of her life. And while Rick was a good guy, he’d not matured into the kind of man Tiffany deserved. Better to move on now than stagnate in a dead-end relationship.

  A new e-mail came into Tom’s in-box and interrupted his thoughts with a ping. It was from Nate Becker. Tom clicked it open.

  Tom,

  The partners of the firm met yesterday and unanimously voted to offer you a position with the firm. Attached is a proposed employment agreement. Look it over and let me know what you think. Please keep the terms confidential.

  All the best,

  Nate

  Tom scrolled through the boilerplate language on the first page of the agreement and reached the specific terms that began on page two. When he saw the base salary amount, he stopped and read the figure twice. It was more than he could have reasonably expected to earn as a junior partner at Barnes, McGraw, and Crowther. The other benefits were equally impressive. Sweet and Becker didn’t hold to the archaic law firm philosophy of money trickling down from the senior partners. They turned on the spigot and splashed everyone.

  Tom sat back in the chair and smiled. The possibility of staying in Bethel to practice law had been an entertaining diversion, but his desire was to fight in the legal arenas where the best attorneys crossed swords. Sweet and Becker could make that happen. He quickly typed a reply to Nate Becker.

  Nate,

  Thanks so much for the offer. Everything looks great. I’m moving as fast as I can to close out my responsibilities in Bethel and will be in touch with you soon.

  Tom

  That evening Tom couldn’t suppress his excitement about the job offer. He caught himself smiling for no apparent reason.

  “What’s on your mind?” Elias asked after they finished cleaning the supper dishes. “You seem happy tonight.”

  “I am,” Tom replied.

  Elias sat in his chair with Rover at his feet while Tom told him about the e-mail from Nate Becker. “I can’t tell you any details, but it’s a very generous offer with loads of opportunity down the road. I can practice law in the niche I’m familiar with and develop an even greater level of expertise. Sweet and Becker’s office is closer to my apartment than the old firm.”

  “Sounds good,” Elias said.

  “Better than good. It’s the best news I’ve gotten since coming to Bethel.”

  Elias didn’t reply. Rover moaned and rolled onto his side.

  Before going to bed, Tom spent a few minutes writing down a prayer of thanks. He was a different person from the one who’d driven from Atlanta to Bethel after the farewell lunch at the cheap sushi restaurant. When he returned to the big city, he’d take the new and improved version of himself with him.

  Just before he dozed off, his thoughts returned to Tiffany. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. Living in Atlanta would create the distance needed for the situation to sort out without his direct involvement. If Tiffany ended the marriage, Tom could consider a relationship with a clear conscience. He fell asleep to pleasant thoughts of a happier future.

  ______

  Wednesday morning Tom put on his blue suit, straightened his yellow tie, and went downstairs. Elias was in the front room with Rover.

  “Going to court?” the old man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Your daddy would be proud of you. I’m not sure how and when the great cloud of witnesses is allowed to peer over the edge of heaven, but if your daddy has a front-row seat, he’s enjoying the view.”

  At 8:55 a.m., Tom clicked shut his briefcase. All it contained was the empty folder. He’d not heard from Arthur about service of a subpoena on Pelham Financial. No lawyer had contacted him on behalf of Esther and Rose Addington. Bernice glanced up when Tom came out into the reception area.

  “What’s in the briefcase?” she asked.

  “An empty folder.”

  The morning was overcast, with dark clouds moving across the sky. Tom entered the courthouse and walked upstairs to the main courtroom. Inside, Charlie Williams was talking to Rose Addington. No other lawyers were in sight. Rose, a serious expression on her face, stepped away from Williams and sat in the front row of the spectator area. A court reporter was setting up her machine. Tom shook Williams’s hand.

  “Why a court reporter?” he asked.

  “To record the proceedings.”

  “I know that,” Tom replied curtly.

  Judge Caldwell, wearing his judicial robe, came in through a side door and sat down. The judge nodded to the court reporter, who raised a gray voice mask to her face.

  “Proceed,” the judge said.

  “Your Honor,” Williams said, “we’re here pursuant to a subpoena served upon Thomas Crane as executor of the estate of John Crane. The subpoena required Mr. Crane to produce any and all information related to John Crane’s legal representation of Harold Addington, also deceased.”

  Tom opened his briefcase, took out the empty file folder, and showed it to the judge.

  “This is all I’ve located in response to the subpoena,” Tom said. “I don’t know why it’s empty. I’ve not been able to locate any correspondence between my father and Mr. Addington, and there’s no record of payment of any attorney fees. Perhaps Mr. Williams can inform both of us why he issued the subpoena.”

  “Mr. Williams?” the judge asked, handing the empty folder to the DA.

  “Your Honor, shortly after Mr. Crane and Mr. Addington drowned, it came to my attention that there may have been criminal activity involved.”

  Tom spun around and saw that Rose Addington, her eyes wide, had her hand over her mouth.

  “What kind of criminal activity?” the judge asked.

  “Related to the cause of death.”

  “You mean someone may have murdered them?” Tom asked.

  “No.” Williams shook his head and looked directly at Tom. “As far as I know, there were no third parties involved.”

  “Harold Addington drowned my father?”

  “It’s not clear who may have been the perpetrator.”

  It took Tom a split second to process the implication of the DA’s statement. “That’s crazy!” Tom raised his voice.

  “Did your father have serious financial problems?” Williams asked.

  “You know he owed money to the IRS, but he’d made arrangements for a repayment plan.”

  Williams glanced over his shoulder at Rose. “And I have reason to believe that Harold Addington hired your father and paid him a substantial sum of money as a deposit. If that money isn’t accounted for, it would be important to the investigation.”

  “What evidence for that do you have?” Tom asked sharply.

  Williams looked at the judge. “Your Honor, based on prosecutorial privilege, I’m not going to answer that question. It’s part of an ongoing investigation.”

  “Mr. Williams,” the judge said, his face stern, “you have a duty to fulfill your oath of office, but I’m very concerned that you act in a responsible manner before impugning the reputation of a man like John Crane. I never met Mr. Addington, but the same standard should apply to him as well.”

  “I’m not trying to impugn anyone,” Williams replied. “No one in the media was notified about this hearing by my office. It was my intention to keep this a closed hearing. Ms. Rose Addington, the executrix of Harold Addington’s estate, is here because Mr. Crane contacted her. I can understand Mr. Crane’s reluctance to turn over any embarrassing information—”

  “Are you accusing me of lying?” Tom interrupted.

  “Enough!” Judge Caldwell called out, striking the bench with his gavel. “Mr. Crane, do you have anything else to produce in response to the subpoena
?”

  Tom had second thoughts about withholding information about the designated trust account, but he vigorously pushed them aside. He wasn’t going to be bullied by Williams’s insinuations.

  “No, sir.”

  The judge turned to the court reporter. “I’m instructing you not to transcribe this hearing until further notice and to keep what you heard here confidential.”

  “Yes, sir,” the court reporter said, lowering her mask.

  “Court is adjourned.”

  The judge, his face visibly flushed, left the courtroom. The court reporter followed him. Tom turned angrily toward Williams.

  “Don’t say anything you’ll regret, Tom,” Williams said and held up his hand. “I’m not going to indict a dead man, but if you want this to go away, you need to give me a reason to drop it.”

  “And prosecutorial privilege doesn’t protect you from a civil suit for reckless slander.”

  “You’re on my turf,” Williams said, handing the empty folder back to Tom. “If you find out anything, let me know.”

  Williams picked up his briefcase and left the courtroom. Tom faced Rose from the other side of the bar that separated the gallery from the lawyer’s area. Rose, her eyes sad, remained seated.

  “Well?” Tom asked. “Are you spreading lies to destroy my father’s reputation?”

  “You should know the answer to that. This was as much a shock to me as it was to you. I don’t want to believe either of our fathers—” She stopped. “I can’t even bring myself to say it.”

  Tears rolled from Rose’s eyes down her cheeks. Tom’s jaw loosened. He opened the low gate in the bar that separated the two areas and stood in front of Rose. She took a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes.

  “This is worse than anything I could have imagined.” She sniffled. “I had no idea what was going to happen here this morning, and I’m not sure what to think about it now. All my mum and I wanted to do was find out why my papa hired your father as a solicitor. I don’t know what Mr. Williams was talking about. When I came into the courtroom, he told me what I was about to hear would be painful. I had no idea—” Rose stopped again.

  Tom stared at Rose for a moment. He couldn’t see anything false or feigned about her response.

  “Let’s go to my father’s office,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It will only take a few minutes. I want to show you something that I didn’t bring to court because I didn’t believe I had to and wasn’t sure I should.”

  Rose gave Tom a puzzled look.

  “Or you can go home,” Tom said with a shrug. “It’s up to you. But I don’t want you to be blindsided the way I was this morning.”

  Rose put her tissue in her purse and stood up. “I’ll come.”

  They walked silently from the courthouse and down the hill to the office. Tom held the door open for Rose.

  “Bernice, this is Rose Addington,” he said.

  “What is she doing here?”

  “I asked her to come.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Bernice said. “After what—”

  “Don’t start,” Tom interrupted. “Please hold all my phone calls.”

  Tom escorted Rose into the office and closed the door.

  “Why is she so mad at me?” Rose asked.

  “She’s upset about the questions you asked me the other day about my father. I’ll take care of it later. I have something more important to show you.”

  Tom unlocked the middle drawer of his father’s desk and took out the deposit slip, envelope, starter checkbook, and sticky note from the trust account check register. He came over to Rose’s side of the desk and handed her the sticky note.

  “You already know about this. But the rest of it is new. I didn’t turn it over to the district attorney because I’m not sure that it falls within the scope of the subpoena.”

  Tom told Rose about his discovery of the designated trust account. He handed her the deposit slip; her mouth dropped open when she saw the amount.

  “Is this my papa’s money?”

  “That’s my question to you.”

  Tom waited. Rose shook her head. “No, he would have told my mum about something this large.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t know about it?”

  “Positive. I’ve gone over all the financial records and reconciled everything since his passing. Papa made generous provision for my mum, but she’s not going to be a rich woman. Part of his estate is going to fund a charitable trust.”

  “A charitable trust?”

  “Yes.”

  Tom wasn’t moved by that information. Giving could be motivated by guilt—an effort by Harold Addington to buy his way into heaven.

  “I think the money in this designated trust account may be connected to Pelham Financial,” Tom said, shifting in his chair. “The bank president said the check opening the account came from a bank in Barbados with connections in London and Newcastle.”

  “Newcastle?”

  “Yes.” Tom took a deep breath and exhaled. “Rose, I’ve confirmed from more than one source that your father was in hot water at his job. Your mother said as much when we met the other day. I know it’s hard for you to hear this, but the path the money took through Newcastle and Barbados raises the possibility that the designated trust account contains funds misappropriated from Pelham Financial. If that’s true, the money has to be returned to the company. If it’s not, I have to find out who it belongs to.”

  Rose looked puzzled for moment. “Are you saying my father embezzled money from Pelham and gave it to your father to put in a special account?”

  Tom looked into Rose’s eyes. His resolve wavered. “Maybe.”

  He waited for her to explode. Instead, she stared past him at the bookcase over his left shoulder.

  “Something’s not clear about this money you found,” she said slowly. “We can agree on that. But I’m not sure you have the right idea in mind. I never knew your father, nor you mine. For many years Papa pursued money and success, but five years ago he had a major change in his life. Since then he’s lived as a good, honest Christian man. And everything I hear about your father indicates he was the same way.”

  “For a much longer time.”

  “It’s impossible for us to imagine them stealing or murdering or doing anything illegal. Even hearing the words from my mouth sounds absurd.”

  “What’s your explanation?”

  Rose shook her head. “I don’t know, but I think it’s best to start over, and for the time being assume what we believe about our fathers is true until proven otherwise.”

  Tom thought about Arthur Pelham’s promise to provide evidence of Harold Addington’s embezzlement by the end of the week. Better to wait until proof existed than to hypothesize in its absence.

  “All right,” he replied. “Now that you know what I’ve found, maybe you can look for additional information. What your mother found in the nightstand doesn’t answer these questions, and I’ve run out of rocks to turn over.”

  “Have you gone through all your father’s personal effects and belongings?” Rose asked.

  “There are boxes of stuff in Elias’s garage,” Tom admitted, “but most of it came from the sale of my parents’ home several years ago. Anything relevant to what we’re looking for is going to be recent.”

  “Is that how you investigate a case? By ignoring obvious places to look?”

  “No, I just don’t want to sort through a bunch of junk.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Tom doubted any junk pile at the Addington residence was comparable to the boxes stacked in Elias’s garage, but he didn’t see any use in arguing.

  “I’ll get started this evening.”

  “And what will you be looking for?” Rose asked.

  “Uh, anything that pertains to our fathers.”

  “Especially what was in the empty folder you brought to court this morning.” Rose pointed to the manila f
ile. “It makes no sense to me that a solicitor would open a matter and not have a scrap of paper about it.”

  Tom couldn’t disagree. And the lack of documentation concerning the designated trust account was even more troubling.

  “Are you going to tell anyone what Williams said in court?” he asked.

  “Not even my mum. It would devastate her.”

  “Okay. We’ll keep this between us and talk in the next few days.”

  Rose stood up. Tom held the door open for her. He heard Bernice huff as Rose passed by. As soon as the door closed behind her, Bernice spun around in her chair.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  Tom told her about the hearing in front of Judge Caldwell. The anger Bernice felt toward Rose was instantly redirected.

  “That’s total nonsense. We have enough crime in Etowah County that Charlie Williams has better things to do than make a ridiculous claim about your father killing Harold Addington. Now, if it was the other way around—”

  “Don’t go there,” Tom interrupted. “There are other issues involving Harold Addington.”

  Bernice raised her eyebrows.

  “And I’m still sorting them out.”

  chapter

  NINETEEN

  Tom left work early so he could begin sorting through the boxes in Elias’s garage. The old man joined him outside, not to help but to watch from a chair. Rover sat at Elias’s feet.

  “You keep surprising me,” Elias said as Tom carried out a box and set it on the ground.

  “How’s that?”

  “I never thought you’d tackle those boxes. Are you sure you don’t want me to call the Burk girl?”

  “I need to do this myself.”

  Tom sat opposite Elias. He placed a box between them and opened it. It contained cookbooks from a small antique bookcase that used to sit in his mother’s kitchen. Little strips of paper extended from the sides of the volumes. Tom opened one to a pork loin recipe his mother often prepared when guests came for dinner. He saw her faded handwriting on a slip protruding from another book. When he pulled it out, it read “Tom’s Favorite Cookies.” He didn’t have to open the cookbook to know it contained a recipe for chocolate chip cookies with chopped pecans and a hint of brown sugar. His mother would cut the cookies thin and cook them crisp so they could withstand a dousing in milk and still deliver a sharp crunch.