“I’m sorry,” he said, knowing the words were inadequate.
She shrugged and glanced away. “I figured you would hear about it, if you haven’t already. It was quite a scandal. My mother was the town hussy—apparently she dated most of the single men and a few of the married ones before she married my fa
ther, and then she abandoned my father, my brother and me to run off with yet another married man. Ten years later, my brother was accused of murdering that man’s son.”
Her flat, unemotional tone didn’t match the starkly appalling words.
Wade had heard the whispers that Emily McBride’s older brother had gotten away with murder fifteen years ago. After meeting Emily in the bank, he’d gone back to his office and looked up the old files. There hadn’t been much in them. The chief of police at that time had investigated the death of twenty-one-year-old Roger Jennings, who’d fallen—either accidentally or through foul play—from a thirty-foot bluff on McBride land, in the woods behind this house.
There’d been testimony of years of active animosity between Lucas McBride and Roger Jennings, even a witness who’d heard McBride threaten Jennings’s life. There’d been notes about twenty-year-old McBride’s notorious temper, and his two previous arrests for fighting. But there’d been no solid evidence to charge him with Roger Jennings’s death. McBride had had an alibi—a nineteen-year-old girl who claimed he’d spent the entire night with her. But many had suggested that girl would have said anything Lucas McBride asked her to. There had apparently been a few inconsistencies in the girl’s testimony, but not enough to form a basis for an arrest.
Chief Packer had written “Unsolved” on the case file. And two months after Roger Jennings died in that mysterious fall, Lucas left town in the middle of the night. He was the second member of Emily’s family to do so, it seemed. Wade couldn’t help wondering what those desertions must have done to a vulnerable little girl.
Emily McBride wasn’t a little girl now. A woman faced him with shadows in her eyes, hard-won pride in her posture, anxiety and defiance warring in her expression.
She fascinated him. Which wasn’t a good thing, considering that he had a job to do and she was a suspect—no matter that Wade considered her an unlikely one.
“Have you personally had any conflicts with Sam Jennings?” he asked.
“No. He glares at me whenever our paths cross, but he glares at all of us, including my Uncle Caleb and Aunt Bobbie, the only other McBrides still living in Honoria. He just can’t stand our family.”
“And what about the other members of the Jennings family? Do they glare at the McBrides, as well?”
“There aren’t that many of them left around here, either,” Emily admitted. “Sam’s been divorced a couple of times. No kids. His brother, of course, ran off with my mother. The wife Al Jennings deserted moved away with her daughter about a year after her son, Roger, died in an accident that some people tried to blame on my brother. There may be a couple of distant cousins still around, but no one who was as personally involved in all the tragedies as Sam.”
“What about Sam Jennings’s former office assistant? Did she have any reason to dislike you?”
“Tammy Powell?” Emily frowned as she said the name, then shook her head, her blond curls swaying around her face with the motion. “No, not that I’m aware of. I didn’t really know her very well. She was in the bank often, of course, but we usually only exchanged pleasantries, nothing more. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies, either. Just acquaintances.”
“I’ve sent out some inquiries about her. She left no forwarding address when she left town.”
“That’s strange,” Emily mused with a frown. “She lived here for quite a while. Her grandparents still live in the country about fifteen miles out of Honoria.”
“They claim they don’t know where she is, but that she promised to let them know as soon as she settled somewhere.”
“Unlike Sam Jennings, I don’t like blaming someone without evidence, but I did not initial the deposit slips he showed me in Mr. Hayes’s office. If Tammy is the one who signed those slips with my initials, then she obviously took some of her employer’s money with her when she left town.”
Wade privately believed that was exactly what had happened. But he wasn’t prepared just yet to announce that conclusion aloud.
He tried to convince himself that he was not using this investigation as an excuse to spend more time getting to know Emily McBride. That would be unprofessional, and despite his sometimes unorthodox methods, he had always been a professional. But the investigation was ongoing, so he would certainly be seeing Emily again—which, he had to admit, would be a pleasure, as far as he was concerned.
“Maybe you should just put this out of your mind for a few days while I try to locate Tammy Powell,” he advised her.
“Put it out of my mind?” Emily stared at him in disbelief. “I’ve been publicly accused of embezzlement, and you think I should just put it out of my mind?”
He lifted a hand in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m sorry. I know this is upsetting for you....”
“Slightly,” she muttered.
“But,” he continued with a chiding look at her, “I had a long talk with Dr. Jennings and asked him not to repeat his accusations to anyone else without further proof. I reminded him that you could always sue him for defamation of character if he continues to slander you without evidence...and especially if it turns out that his former employee was the embezzler, after all. I think he paid attention to my warning.”
Emily studied Wade’s face for so long that he had to resist the impulse to squirm self-consciously on her sofa. “You really don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?”
He couched his answer carefully. “Obviously, I have to look at all the facts before I draw any conclusions. But if it makes you feel any better, I consider you an unlikely suspect at this point.”
“So why did you come here today?”
Because I wanted to see you again. The truth flashed through Wade’s thoughts so clearly that he wondered for a moment if he’d spoken aloud.