Yesterday's Scandal

Since it was at least the tenth time he’d asked in the past couple of hours, Sharon had to force herself to answer patiently. “I’m fine, Jerry. Still a little sore, but the doctor assured me that was to be expected.”

Jerry Whitaker didn’t look satisfied. He seemed convinced that her injuries from Friday night’s mishap were worse than the few scrapes and bruises she had told him about.

He’d been out of town for the weekend, and when he’d returned that afternoon, talk of the accident had been all over town—no surprise in Honoria, where rumors zipped from household to household with the frantic speed of a metal ball in an arcade pinball machine. Having lived here since adolescence, Sharon had learned to discount most of what she heard, but Jerry still tended to take the local gossip much too seriously.

“Tell me more about your business trip,” she encouraged him, trying to change the subject. “How was the weather in Charleston?”

Her attempt at diversion failed. “Fine,” he answered automatically, then returned to his questions about her. “Have you talked to Chief Davenport since I called you this afternoon? Have there been any further developments in the investigation of the Porter robbery—any leads on the van that ran you off the road?”

Resigned to rehashing it all again, Sharon looked down at her plate. “Nothing. It’s as if the van disappeared off the face of the earth. If Mr. Cordero hadn’t seen it, I would have wondered if I had imagined it.”

Jerry’s scowl deepened. “Ah, yes. Cordero-the-hero. That’s what they’re calling him around town, you know.”

Sharon wrinkled her nose. “You’re kidding. That’s so corny.”

“Have you heard some of the stories going around about what happened Friday night? Mildred Scott told me you drowned and Cordero brought you back to life with CPR. Clark Foster said you were trapped in the car and Cordero had to break a window to pull you out, nearly drowning himself. And then there’s the version Gloria Capps is spreading—that you cut yourself on broken glass and almost bled to death before Cordero saved you by using his necktie as a tourniquet.”

“That’s ridiculous. He wasn’t even wearing a necktie.” She shook her head. “It’s all ridiculous. I was already out of the car when Mr. Cordero jumped in to help me. I’m sure I could have made it out of the river on my own.”

She didn’t want to sound ungrateful for Mac’s help, but she didn’t like hearing she’d been cast as the hapless victim in so many improbable scenarios. She’d been taking care of herself—and the rest of her family—for a long time. It wasn’t easy to let anyone else take charge, even briefly.

“Of course you would have made it out on your own.”

Sharon didn’t know whether Jerry’s attitude was due more to his faith in her or his jealousy that Mac Cordero had become such a romanticized figure in Honoria. Jerry had lived in this town all his life. He’d taken over his father’s insurance office a few years ago, but an insurance salesman was rarely regarded as dashing or heroic, terms that had been applied to Cordero in the numerous retellings of Sharon’s accident.

She’d been dating Jerry casually for three or four months. They shared several common interests and had passed many pleasant evenings together. She’d been aware from the start that their relationship owed more to circumstance than chemistry—there weren’t many singles their age in Honoria—but she wasn’t looking for romance, only occasional companionship, which Jerry provided without making too many demands in return.

“I really don’t understand all this fuss over the guy,” he muttered, slicing irritably into his steak. “He’s a contractor, for Pete’s sake. Not even a particularly shrewd one, if he thinks he’s going to make a profit on the Garrett place.”

“I’ve heard he specializes in restoring old houses. He must know from experience whether or not the Garrett house is worth renovating.”

Jerry shook his head stubbornly. “That eyesore is going to require a small fortune just to make it livable again. It should have been condemned years ago. The location’s not bad, even if it isn’t close to the golf course, like all the best new homes. Tear it down and start from scratch, that’s what I would do. Maybe even subdivide—it sits on a three-acre lot. That’s enough land to put in quite a few houses and more than pay for the initial investment.”

Just what Honoria needed, Sharon thought. Another tacky subdivision filled with cheaply built, cookie-cutter houses on undersize lots. “Some people love the old, the historic,” she murmured. “The Garrett place was practically a mansion when it was built in the early part of the twentieth century. It must have been beautiful.”

“Maybe it was then, but now it’s just old.” Jerry shook his head in bafflement. “I’ve never understood what people see in beat-up antiques when they can have shiny new things, instead.”

She wasn’t surprised by Jerry’s attitude. He had a taste for flash. He traded cars nearly every year when the new models debuted, and was always upgrading his computers and electronic equipment. The past held little appeal for him—his eyes were firmly fixed on the future. She saw no need to remind him that she had a soft spot for antiques. It was something he just couldn’t understand.

Jerry’s thoughts were still focused on Mac Cordero. “The guy’s just a contractor. I don’t know why so many people around town want to make him into something else. The rumors about him are absurd. Why can’t they just accept that he’s exactly what he says he is?”

The mildest speculation cast Cordero as an eccentric multimillionaire who fixed up old houses for his own hideaways. Some whispered that he was an agent for a Hollywood superstar who wanted a place to escape the press occasionally. The most incredible story she’d heard suggested he was working for an organized-crime family preparing the Garrett house for a mobster who needed to get out of New York City.

“You know how rumors get started around here,” Sharon reminded Jerry. “Because Mr. Cordero chooses not to share information about his personal life, people entertain themselves by filling in the blanks with colorful details.”

“So what do you know about him?” Jerry’s question proved he wasn’t as averse to gossip as he pretended—something Sharon already knew, of course.

“I don’t know anything more than you do. I didn’t exactly have a lot of time for personal chit-chat when I met him. All I can tell you is he seemed very…capable,” she said for lack of a better description.

As much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, she had been in trouble Friday night. Yes, she’d managed to get out of her sunken car on her own, but she’d been shaken and disoriented. She probably would have gotten to the shore on her own—at least, she hoped so—only to find herself stranded on a rarely traveled country road without a car or a phone. As frightened as she had been, there had been something about Mac Cordero that had reassured her. Maybe it was the strength of the rock-hard arms that had supported her until she’d caught her breath. Or the steady way he’d held her gaze when he’d assured her that help was on the way. Or maybe it had been the way her hand had felt cradled so securely in his.

It embarrassed her now to remember the desperation with which she had clung to the stranger who’d pulled her from the water. At the time, she’d simply been grateful to have someone to hold on to.

“Would you mind if we talk about something else now?” she asked, uncomfortable with the feelings those memories evoked. “It seems that all I’ve talked about for the past two days is the accident.”

“Of course. So, what about your car? Have they pulled it out yet? Were you able to salvage anything?”

This time she didn’t bother to hold back her sigh. There appeared to be nothing she could do to distract Jerry. Pushing her unsettling thoughts of Mac Cordero to the back of her mind, she concentrated on her dinner, answering Jerry’s questions with as little detail as possible.

She could only hope something would happen soon to get the town talking about something else.

“I’VE INTERVIEWED everyone I could think of who might’ve seen something suspicious around the Porter place, Wade. We’ve put the word out all over town that we’re looking for the light-colored panel van that was seen leaving the scene of the crime. We’re getting nothing. Apparently, the only two people who saw the vehicle were Sharon Henderson and that Cordero guy.”

Chief Wade Davenport raised his gaze from the accident reports scattered in front of him to the skinny, dejected-looking deputy on the other side of the battered oak desk. “Keep asking, Gilbert. Someone had to see something.”

Ever the pessimist, Gilbert Dodson gave a gloomy sigh. “I’ll keep asking, Wade, but I’ve talked to everyone but the chickens now.”

Wade leaned back in his creaky chair and steepled his fingers in front of him. “Then maybe you should start interviewing chickens.”

Shoulders slumping, Gilbert nodded and turned toward the door. “I’ll get right on that, Chief.”

Wade muttered a curse as his office door clicked shut. He tended to take it personally when anyone broke the law in his town. There’d been a rash of break-ins about a month ago, and the culprits had never been caught. Now there’d been another—the Porter place. They’d been quietly and efficiently cleaned out by whoever had been in the same van that had almost killed Sharon Henderson.

The break-ins were connected. Wade was sure of it, even though he had no evidence to support his hunch. There wasn’t that much crime in Honoria, and there hadn’t been any breaking and entering going on in almost five years. Not since the O’Brien kid and his buddies had thought it would be “fun” to start their own crime ring. Kevin O’Brien was twenty-three years old now and had done his time. The first thing Wade did when the current burglaries began was to check on Kevin’s whereabouts. As far as he could tell, there was no connection this time.

Which meant he had another thief operating in his town, victimizing and endangering his friends and neighbors. And that made Wade mad.

Narrowing his eyes, he picked up the report that had been filed by Mac Cordero, the “mysterious stranger” everyone had been gossiping about. It was interesting that the previous burglaries had taken place while Cordero was in town a few weeks back buying the old Garrett place. Now there’d been another one, only days after Cordero returned to begin the renovation project. Cordero “just happened” to be driving down that back road at the same time the Porter place was being cleaned out. Maybe there was no connection there, but Wade didn’t like coincidences.

Wade’s wife and kids lived in this town. It was his job to keep them—and the other residents—safe. He turned his attention to Cordero’s statement again, looking for anything that resembled a clue.

CHAPTER TWO

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Mac to learn a few things about the woman he’d pulled from Snake Creek. Even though he didn’t mingle much with the townspeople, every busybody he encountered in Honoria during the next few days—and there seemed to be many of them—was anxious to tell him all about her. He found some of the information interesting, but two comments, in particular, caught his attention.

Sharon Henderson was an interior decorator and a good friend of the McBride family.

The motel where he was staying was not so coincidentally located within full view of the McBride Law Firm. From the window of his room, Mac could see the firm’s parking lot. He’d heard that the founder, Caleb McBride, a lifelong resident of Honoria now in his early sixties, had very recently left for a month-long Caribbean cruise with his wife, Bobbie. Their older son, Trevor, was running the law office single-handedly until Caleb’s return.

Mac had watched a steady stream of clients and visitors entering and exiting the office building during the last five days he’d spent in Honoria. Some he could already identify, such as Trevor’s striking, red-haired wife and two young children, and Trevor’s younger brother, Trent, whom Mac had met a month ago in that same parking lot.

Late Monday afternoon, Sharon Henderson arrived at the firm.

Watching from his window, Mac recognized her immediately, though he wasn’t sure how. The attractive, well-dressed woman who slid out of a nondescript sedan bore little resemblance to the wet, shivering waif he’d encountered Friday night. Her hair fell in a gleaming brown sweep to just above her shoulders and she carried herself with poised self-confidence. As she disappeared inside the law office, he told himself he could be mistaken. There was no way he could know for sure the visitor was Sharon. Even if he’d gotten a closer look at her that night, he was too far away to see her clearly now.

Drinking coffee from the coffeemaker provided in the room, he was still sitting in the uncomfortable chair watching the other building when the woman emerged again. Though he’d spent the past hour trying to convince himself he couldn’t possibly have identified her, the sense of recognition hit him again the moment she walked out into the parking lot. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was convinced Sharon Henderson had just dropped in on Trevor McBride.

Interesting. He’d heard she was a friend and her visit proved there was a professional relationship, as well. He wondered just how much she knew about the McBride family history…and if she shared the rest of the town’s passion for idle gossip.