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

by Sandra D. Bricker

  There was a time when she’d thought him to be her soul mate. But now, in the glow of her favorite Hitchcock film, Annie grinned as she realized that Sherman was Evan’s match, not her.

  He was an exceptional person, really. Funny and smart—and Annie had never known a man in whose company she felt so completely comfortable. But at the same time, he was dangerous that way. One of those men who wooed a girl into a false sense of security with cups of coffee and blueberry scones, bags of lettuce for her salad-loving beagle, and long talks lasting for hours—talks about hopes and dreams and (of all things!) feelings. It could be very confusing.

  She’d known him for almost five years, and their relationship had broken down, in Annie’s mind anyway, into phases.

  Phase I was still her favorite: the Friendship Phase. Getting to know one another, finding a larger connection out of a simple love of movies, discovering a few more ways in which they complemented one another. There were shared penchants for really good food, all dogs everywhere, jazz singer Stacey Kent, bluffs over the ocean, and, most of all, classic Hollywood films.

  Naturally, there were conflicts discovered in the early stages of the friendship as well, such as his mistaken impression that Lakers basketball was inconsequential. But in Phase I, there had always existed the childlike hope that things could (and would) change.

  They hadn’t with Evan.

  Rounds 1, 2, and 3 of Phase II were pretty much a blurry, bouncing ball of Evan’s neurotic responses to the possibility of commitment and Annie’s subsequent whiplash in trying to recover. Standing out in her mind—

  Breaking her thoughts, Evan stuffed his mouth with popcorn and belted out a groan at Jimmy Stewart’s panic, due to his broken leg preventing his escape from the wheelchair holding him prisoner.

  Annie sighed softly and attempted to refocus. Standing out in her mind was the memory of a secret pact to avoid the equally unbearable idea of spending the day with their families. Evan and Annie had concocted an Anti-Thanksgiving Plan a couple of years back. With Gram out of town for the holiday, there would be meat loaf and chocolate cake rather than turkey and pumpkin pie—and an entire day of old movies starring Humphrey Bogart (Evan’s choice) and Cary Grant (Annie’s). Just the three of them, counting Sherman. And it had been divine.

  As Christmas began to roll out, they scheduled a day off from their jobs in order to shop for the perfect Christmas tree for Annie’s apartment. Once they brought it home, they spent the morning decorating it with painted clay angel ornaments Annie and Gram had made a few years prior during Annie’s let’s-be-crafty stage. The stage didn’t last long, but at least she had those ornaments to show for it.

  Then later that evening they baked three different styles of holiday cookies while singing off-key to Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole Christmas carols, and they took pictures of Sherman in front of the tree wearing jingle-bell antlers and looking extremely disgruntled. On Christmas Day they had an early dinner with Annie’s family and dessert with Evan’s. Afterward, they went for a long walk through his Monterey neighborhood and enjoyed a balmy California breeze. It was ideal. They were settling into the niche of a relationship.

  But the next day, when Annie offhandedly asked if he’d given any thought to what he wanted to do for New Year’s Eve, one might have thought she’d greeted him at the door in a wedding dress with a shotgun in one hand and an open Bible in the other.

  How dare she just assume they were doing something together?

  Annie felt fairly certain that those were the last plans she would ever assume for anyone. After all, she didn’t have to be smacked in the head with a steel beam more than once to get a message—which probably didn’t explain why it took two more rounds to realize that Evan would never introduce her to anyone as his girlfriend.

  Enter Phase III. Can’t live with him, can’t shoot him.

  “Well, I’m going to bed,” Dot announced, jolting Annie with the message that Rear Window had ended. “G’night, children.”

  “Good night, Dot.”

  “Night, Gram.”

  Evan looked at her over the top of his “specs,” his eyebrows knit together and his lips pursed as if he’d just tasted something he couldn’t define.

  “Where are you tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Swimming around where the past meets the future, I guess.”

  He took a long pause and then stated, “A PI, huh?”

  When his expression didn’t evolve, Annie sighed.

  “Does it pay well?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Benefits?”

  “Probably.”

  “And you’re taking this particular job because—”

  “Because if I don’t and I take another no-future call-center job instead, I’ll wither up and die, Evan. There won’t be anything left of me if I don’t start making some changes.”

  “It’s good to see you’re not being overly dramatic.”

  Annie coughed out a laugh.

  “Okay,” he said with a nod, assessing her response. And finally, “Ben Franklin once said that it’s okay to go nowhere as long as there’s an interesting path to get there.”

  They both knew Ben Franklin never said such a thing. Evan had told Annie long ago that people would much more readily accept pearls of wisdom if they were told that Benjamin Franklin said it first. It had become a private joke between them over the years.

  “Wise man, Ben,” she told him.

  “He had a million of ’em.”

  Evan didn’t say much more about the new job over the next hour and Annie felt relieved when he stood up in preparation to be on his way. The true beauty of friendship, after all, stands not in saying the right thing at the right time, she decided, but in leaving unsaid the wrong thing at the most tempting moment.

  Surely Ben Franklin once said something close to that, right?

  But at the door, he asked, “You’re sure about this PI thing?”Annie shrugged in response.

  “That’s my Annie,” he said. “Always meandering to a different drummer.”

  And so my record stands, she thought as she watched him head out the gate toward his car on the other side of the driveway. Aside from Gram, not one person has had anything good to say about my new job since the moment I accepted it. I think I’ll call it a day.

  It didn’t occur to Annie until she sat in the drive-through in Monterey, waiting for her medium Diet Coke, that fewer than thirty minutes separated her from her new job. She began to panic a little bit.

  Deacon Heffley, or “Deke,” as he had instructed her to call him, appeared to be somewhere around fifty, maybe fifty-five, a light-toned African-American man with short salt-and-pepper hair and smooth skin. Somewhere around the eyes and nose, he reminded Annie a little of Morgan Freeman, which, for some inexplicable reason, made her feel comfortable with him.

  “Read through these case files,” he told her as he dropped several dozen messy folders onto her desk a bit later. “Familiarize yourself with the kind of work we do here and then file them in the drawers against the wall in the back.”

  Annie felt certain that getting them filed was the main part of the plan, but she felt eager to leaf through them anyway. By the time most of the morning had passed, she’d read over every sheet of paper in every one of the files.

  Heffley Investigations appeared to specialize in exposing insurance fraud—at least in recent weeks, anyway. Case after case involved surveillance reports regarding supposedly injured workers. Supporting evidence included photographs, DVDs, and affidavits about people lifting groceries, tossing a football, even mowing the lawn. The second specialty of Deke’s house looked to be infidelity. Then there were several background investigations into prospective employees, spouses, and child-care workers.

  Annie neatly tucked the files into their drawers and rearranged some of the others already in the drawers. The phone rang at twelve thirty for the first time all day.

  “Heffley Investigations
.”

  She’d never actually been a receptionist, but Annie imagined this to be her best receptionist voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Annie Gray,” she replied. “And you?”

  “Where’s Becky?” the caller seemed to demand. “Don’t tell me Deke’s run another one off. You must be the third secretary this month.”

  Private investigator’s assistant.

  “Can I tell Mr. Heffley who’s calling?” she asked instead.

  “Mr. Heffley,” he said. “Now that’s a good one. Yeah, Annie Gray, you can. Tell Deke it’s Nick Benchley. I’ll be there in twenty to pick him up, and I don’t have any time to spare today so we’d better make this quick. You got all that?”

  “Yes, sir,” she returned, relying on every bit of the customer service training she’d received at Equity Now. She wanted to tell Nick Benchley that he was a bit of an arrogant jerk and then hang up the phone just enthusiastically enough to make a cracking sound in his ear.

  Benchley hung up without saying good-bye and the cracking sound ended up in Annie’s ear instead. Grinding her teeth, she walked over to Deke’s office.

  “Who’s on the phone?”

  “That was Nick Benchley,” she told him, as sweetly as she could muster. “He says he’ll be here to pick you up in twenty minutes and he’s on a tight schedule today.”

  “Ahh,” he groaned, waving his hand, “Bench is always in a hurry.”

  “I’ve read through all of the files you gave me,” Annie announced. “And they’ve all been placed alphabetically into the filing cabinets. Is there anything else you’d like me to work on?”

  “Why don’t you go get some lunch?” Deke suggested, leaning back in his chair until it creaked. “We’ve got adultery this afternoon.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Wife cheater,” he clarified. “You can sit in and take notes…see how a case goes from start to finish.”

  “Great!”

  It really did sound good to Annie, and she realized that, despite the bets people were no doubt taking, she hadn’t once been sorry for accepting the job in the whole three and a half hours since she’d arrived. “Can I bring you something back? A sandwich—or some soup?”

  “Nah, I’m grabbing something with Bench when he gets here. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  Lunch consisted of an Asian chicken wrap from Jamba Juice, washed down with a Prickly Pear tea made with green tea and pear juice over crushed ice with a splash of lemonade and a wedge of orange. She’d never eaten there before, but it was close to the office. She hadn’t realized until too late that she’d wandered into a foreign world of healthy eaters and caffeine haters. Back in the office with time to spare, she made fresh coffee and scrubbed the circle stains from the ceramic mugs stacked on the counter.

  The 1:30 appointment was nothing like what Annie expected.

  Adultery.

  The word carried with it a certain visual, and Mrs. Armbrewster just wasn’t it.

  “Marion Armbrewster,” she said when she stepped through the door. “I have a one-thirty meeting scheduled with Mr. Heffley.”

  Annie offered her some coffee, but she declined despite the fresh pot and the bright, shining mugs at her disposal. She folded neatly into one of the reception chairs and pressed the skirt of her very proper light blue suit with the palms of her hands. She was sixty-five, if a day.

  Annie used the intercom to buzz Deke. Instead of answering it, he lumbered through the doorway.

  “What was that?”

  “The intercom buzzer,” she told him, struggling to keep a serious expression. “I wanted to tell you that your one-thirty appointment has arrived. Marion Armbrewster, meet Deacon Heffley.”

  Mrs. Armbrewster moved slowly toward Deke and shook his hand with timid grace.

  “Come on into my office,” he told her. “Annie, I have a preliminary case sheet started. Why don’t you come on in and take some notes?”

  Annie followed them inside, and the two women flanked Deke’s desk in chairs angled at each corner. Mrs. Armbrewster’s smile rang tentative, and Annie noticed a slight quiver to it. Annie instinctively reached over and placed her hand on top of Mrs. Armbrewster’s, squeezing it slightly, and the woman released a bumpy sigh.

  “Now, you said on the phone that you think your husband is playing around,” Deke stated, oblivious to the extreme effort it must have taken for Mrs. Armbrewster to have come to this meeting. “What makes you think that?”

  She swallowed hard before peering up at him.

  “Davis,” she stated, and she looked to Annie to clarify. “That’s my husband. Davis Armbrewster.” Annie nodded, and the perfectly coiffed woman turned back toward Deke. “He retired three months ago. In the beginning, his days were filled with gardening and working in his wood shop, all the usual things a retired gentleman does with his new free time. But over the last month or so, he’s taken to getting up early and leaving the house right around the same time, and he doesn’t come home until just before supper.”

  Deke leaned back into his chair. “Forgive me for stating the obvious, but have you asked him where he’s going?”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “He says he’s playing golf.”

  “And?”

  Mrs. Armbrewster turned back to Annie and sighed. “I suppose you’d have to know Davis to know how ridiculous that is. But my husband is not playing golf.” She glanced toward Deke for a quick moment before she continued. “After forty-nine years of marriage, a woman knows if her husband plays golf. And my husband, I assure you, does not.”

  Deke asked her a barrage of questions about her husband’s former career in retail, his general health, and the type of car he drove while Annie scribbled notes from the answers.

  Leaning forward and grimacing, Deke said, “Pardon my candor, Mrs. Armbrewster.” Annie’s heart began to race as she wondered what horribly tactless thing might follow. “You said your husband is sixty-nine years old.”

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  “And he’s in relatively good health.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then, aside from the obvious possibility that he’s just decided to learn how to play golf, there are probably a dozen other explanations that don’t necessarily lead to infidelity.”

  She considered that very carefully, smoothing her flawless silver hair as if it needed smoothing, and then reached into her leather handbag and produced a credit card statement.

  “This is our MasterCard bill from last month,” she said, sliding it across the desk toward Deke. “There are purchases for new clothing and shoes. Davis has bought more new clothes since his retirement than in most of our years of marriage. His gasoline budget has nearly doubled. And he bought four bouquets of flowers in just one month’s time.”

  “Mmm,” Deke rumbled as he inspected the statement. “Mm-hmm.”

  Turning to Annie, Marion added, “And they were beautiful flowers too. My favorite. Gladiolas.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, confounded. “I don’t understand. The flowers were for you?”

  “Oh, yes. Davis hasn’t bought me flowers other than on Valentine’s Day or our anniversary in nearly fifty years, Miss Gray. And now he’s come home with gladiolas four times in a month.”

  Deke began to massage his temples, and Annie had to admit that she felt a bit of a headache coming on herself.

  “I just want you to follow him for a day or so,” Marion declared. “Tell me where he’s going, who he’s seeing. Can you do that?”

  She looked so hopelessly hopeful to Annie. Such a dear, sweet woman should have been fretting over nothing more than the correct time for a garden party or a date with friends for tea. But the concern that colored her steel gray eyes instead cut Annie to the very core.

  Deke quoted her his rates and showed Annie how to draw up the paperwork. She could see that he thought this would be a colossal waste of time, but Annie felt more certain of that fact than ever when he turned
to her the moment Marion left and announced, “Your first case. This will be a good one for you to get your feet wet.”

  You mean a good one for me to take off your hands.

  Chapter Four

  “Do women think it feminine to be so illogical, or can’t they help it?”

  Cary Grant, Charade, 1963

  Deke had prepped Annie for two straight days on the proper etiquette of surveillance, and as usual, she took very detailed notes.

  BE UNOBTRUSIVE. Look common and don’t stand out. A memorable PI is an unemployed PI.

  KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. This isn’t the movies, where people are half blind and don’t notice someone following them for any length of time.

  MAINTAIN YOUR GAME FACE. Learn to pay attention without looking like you’re paying attention. And remember: you’re trying to remain undetected by the people around your marks as well as the marks themselves.

  TAKE NOTES. Unremarkable details may play an important part in the case at a later time.

  WEAR COMFORTABLE CLOTHES. You never know how long you’ll be sitting in a car or what you’ll have to hop over to maintain your surveillance.

  First thing on Monday morning, Annie deemed herself ready. Donning her favorite pink Juicy Couture sweats, pale pink Keds with white laces, and a white Shopaholic baseball cap, she thought she looked pretty average.

  Adding to her averageness: Sherman, everyday American beagle, age eight, just hanging out the passenger window and panting randomly at the passersby. Poor Sherman wasn’t exactly in top form anymore, but Annie didn’t figure he’d be chasing any bad guys that day. And what could look more average and unobtrusive than a woman and her dog?

  She kept a couple of car-lengths between them as she followed Davis Armbrewster’s dark blue Buick Regal straight to the Monterey Hills Golf Club. She pulled into a parking space two rows behind him and remained in the car as he made his way up the walk toward the clubhouse. She figured she’d amble inside in a few minutes’ time and see him meeting up with a golf pro or the rest of a foursome, and the mystery would be solved—that alas, Davis Armbrewster really did play golf!