A Penny for Your Thoughts (26 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked Carlos.

Wide-eyed and excited, Carlos nodded back.

“Callie’s a private eye, Dad,” he said. “Did you know that? She’s here on an investigation!”

Derek looked at me.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I came here to deliver some money to Feed the Need. Then your father was murdered. I
stayed
for an investigation.”

“Okay, take it back a few,” Derek said. “You’ve both caught me totally off guard.”

A waitress appeared then and poured Derek some coffee. Once she was gone, I tried to explain everything in terms that were simple and direct.

“I do investigations for the J.O.S.H.U.A Foundation,” I said. “Programmatic investigations. Verifying the integrity of nonprofit organizations, making sure they do what they say they do, seeing that they spend their money in a responsible way. As you know, I came here to deliver a grant to your organization.”

“A grant? To Feed the Need?”

His question threw me.

“Of course,” I said. “You mean you didn’t know about it? But you’re the CEO.”

He shook his head.

“I knew you were here on some sort of business with my father, but I never thought to ask what it was.”

“But your mother told you that I work for Tom, for the foundation.”

“I guess I just never put two and two together. I’ve been a little distracted.”

“Your father asked us for $250,000. He said it was for a building you all wanted to buy.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Derek said. “There’s no building that I know of. My father never breathed a word of this to me.”

“Is that unusual?” I asked.

“I would say so,” he replied indignantly. “I should know everything that’s going on with Feed the Need.”

“Well,” I continued, “anyway, when your father was killed, Tom asked me to investigate the murder. My background is in criminal work.”

“Is that why you’re staying at the house?”

“Partly,” I answered. “The police won’t let me leave town because I’m a material witness to your father’s murder. But your mother knows that I’m investigating.”

“What does my son have to do with any of this?” he said. “Why have you brought him into it?”

I smiled at Carlos.

“Well, as it turns out, Derek, Carlos has been doing a little investigating of his own. Why don’t you tell him about that, Carlos?”

Suddenly shy, Carlos recounted the story of how he had seen Judith with the black roses and then set about trying to catch her mischief again on videotape.

“I got it on tape this time,” he said, holding up the dark cassette for his father to see, telling him about the damaged car. “Now everybody has to believe me.”

“It’s Judith alright,” I added.

Derek seemed truly stunned, and I felt for him as he looked from me back to his son. I told him that we needed to keep this information to ourselves for just a bit longer. Of course, if he wanted to go ahead and let Sidra know, that was up to him.

“Okay, buddy,” he said, finally reaching out to squeeze Carlos’ hand. “Thanks for telling me. Now Ms. Webber and I need to talk. You want some quarters for the game room?”

“Sure!”

Derek gave Carlos a ten-dollar bill and sent him to the cashier for an entire roll. Then Carlos ran to the little room at the back of the diner where we could watch him playing video games through a glass door.

“Unbelievable,” Derek said finally, resting his head in his hands. “I couldn’t imagine what was going on here this morning, but I can say this was the very last thing on earth I expected. Judith. My gosh, why?”

I wanted to trust Derek, but I still had some reservations.

“I have to ask you a question,” I said, thinking back to the argument that I overheard that first afternoon. “Why did Sidra say that your father’s death would be ‘convenient’ for you?”

He looked at me, confused.

“Your big argument. The day he died?”

“You heard us?”

I shrugged.

“It wasn’t hard,” I said. “You were practically yelling.”

Not to mention the fact that I was hovering right outside the window, straining to catch every word.

The waitress came with more coffee, and Derek paused to order a full breakfast. When she was gone, he shook his head.

“We were about to file divorce papers. My father was going to testify on Sidra’s behalf. No big surprise—he always had a soft spot for Sidra, especially once she took over his dialysis. He thought I was doing all of these nutty things and then trying to make it look like she did them.”

“I see.”

“I guess when he died, she lost the one person in the family who believed in her.”

He looked out of the window, his mind a million miles away. I sipped my coffee, leaving him with the quiet of his thoughts, wondering if he was the murderer, if he had killed his own father.

“How does it all get so far offtrack?” he said finally, softly, more to himself than to me. I didn’t respond, and after a moment, he spoke again, his voice distant and lost.

“The first time I saw Sidra, she was sitting in the doorway of her mother’s
hacienda,
embroidering a shirt collar. She was so beautiful—and only 17. I was 20.”

“In Central America?” I asked. He nodded.

“I went there with my dad,” he said. “I liked going, liked the scenery and the culture. But I was changed after that trip. I wanted to get back. I wanted to get back to her.”

“You finished seminary first.”

“I’d always felt the call to be a missionary despite the fact that Dad wanted me to come into the business with him. Once I met Sidra, my mind was made up. I knew the Lord wanted me to be a missionary to Honduras. Sidra and I started writing, and we fell in love through our letters.”

After graduation, Derek explained, he worked things out with the mission board and headed south, where he and Sidra were soon married. They lived in her small village and built up a church and a school there.

Their life was fulfilling but not always easy. A devout Christian, Sidra was the perfect helpmate for Derek’s ministry. But as a woman of relative privilege who had been educated in Buenos Aires, Sidra found labor conditions in her homeland simply appalling. She often railed against the huge holes in the local labor laws that created sweatshops, holes that allowed children to work 12-hour days and women to spend seven days a week hunched over their sewing machines.

“She verbally attacked my father the first time they met, calling him a capitalist pig,” Derek said, smiling at the memory. “Once he got her to calm down, they had a real conversation. After that, Smythe Incorporated became a humanitarian leader in the clothing industry, a leader in eradicating poor labor practices. My father and Sidra found a common ground, and together they accomplished a lot. They even managed to have some laws made there.”

“Your wife strikes me as a very capable woman.”

To my surprise, tears suddenly filled Derek’s eyes.

“I seem to have lost sight of that lately,” he said.

“So why were you so convinced it was her doing all of this crazy stuff, Derek? What’s the big secret in her past that made you and your mother convict her without even a trial?”

“There’s no big secret,” he said, shaking his head. “Sidra’s manic depressive. When she was pregnant with Carlos, she quit taking her medications and ended up having a nervous breakdown. I brought her up here to Pennsylvania to have her treated.”

“Is that when you moved back to the states?”

“No,” he said. “We took a year’s sabbatical and stayed here until Carlos was born. After that, she was able to go back on her medications, and it wasn’t long before she was fine again. When our year was up, we returned to Honduras. We stayed another six years after that.”

“Has she had any other episodes like that?”

“No. As long as she stays on her medication, Sidra is fine.”

“So what made you finally give up missionary life, Derek?”

He wiped at his eyes and looked off in the distance.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Restlessness. Frustration. To be honest, I think I began to question whether it was
God
who had led me to be a missionary or just my own adventurous leanings. By then, Carlos was of an age where I found myself wishing for him the things
I
had had as a child. Soccer teams and American movies and horseback riding. I realized I didn’t want the life of a missionary any more. I wanted the life I had grown up with. I wanted the life of privilege.”

“So you moved here and bought the Jaguar and the fur coats and all the things you’d been missing out on.”

“Hey,” he said, frowning, “it’s not like I sold out. I’m head of Feed the Need. We’re doing wonderful things all over the world.”

“I know.”

“And coming here permanently gave Sidra the chance to go back to school and get her nursing degree.”

“That’s good.”

“With my father in such poor health, I knew I would be needed here anyway,” he continued, sounding even more defensive. “Just because I happen to prefer indoor plumbing to a hole in the ground doesn’t make me a bad person.”

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

The quiet settled between us as Derek angrily ate his breakfast. After a few minutes, Carlos stuck his head out of the door and called to us.

“Hey, Dad!” he said enthusiastically. “I got the high score on Death Match!”

Derek gave him a thumbs up, and Carlos went back to his video game.

“He’s thriving here,” Derek said, looking after his son.

“Something tells me he’d thrive anywhere,” I replied, wondering if Derek was so deep into reacquainting himself with his “life of privilege” that he couldn’t even see the danger zones for a boy living in modern-day America, the areas where his child needed his father’s guidance and protection—and censorship.

Beyond all of that, though, I couldn’t help but imagine the gulf that had been widening between this man and his wife since they came to the States. As Derek accumulated and experienced the finer things, his wife must’ve felt as though she was looking on from a vast distance, wondering where the selfless, dedicated man she once knew had gone.

Derek looked at me, his fork paused in midair.

“What is it?” he asked. “Obviously, you want to tell me something, something more than just the fact that it’s my sister who’s been ruining my marriage and my life. What is it?”

I sat back, wondering myself. What did I want to say? That his marriage was worth saving? That he was lucky that the person he loved was still alive, still around to patch things up with? I lowered my voice and leaned forward.

“Your problem is solved, Derek. Sidra isn’t the bad guy here, and neither are you. Now what are you going to do about it?”

“Too much damage has been done,” he said, shaking his head, looking down at his plate. “She’s perfectly sane, and I’ve been treating her like she was nuts.”

“You can make it up to her.”

“It’s too late.”

“Why won’t you fight for your marriage?” I demanded, but he wouldn’t reply.

I felt my stomach lurch, and I was angry with him, angry with myself for even caring.

“Three years ago,” I said, my voice a furious whisper, “I watched my husband—the husband I loved and cherished and promised to be with until death do us part—get
killed
. Killed in a senseless accident by a drunken boater who wasn’t paying attention. When it was over, I held my husband’s lifeless body in my arms.”

Derek’s eyes were wide with surprise.

“So don’t look at me,” I whispered, “and tell me ‘it’s too late’ for anything. My husband is
dead,
Derek.
That’s
what you call ‘too late.’ Everything else is just an excuse.”

I picked up my purse, pulled out a twenty, and slapped it onto the table. Then I stood and walked out of the restaurant and to my car as quickly as my trembling legs could carry me.

Twenty-Nine

By the time I reached the house, I didn’t feel like seeing or speaking to anyone. Fortunately, the place was quiet, and I made my way up the stairs and to my room without encountering a soul. Once there, I threw myself across the bed and tried to clear my mind of every thought and every emotion. Instead, all I could see was Bryan. Bryan, grinning at me as we climbed on our bicycles
for a bike ride. Bryan, stepping from the shower and teasing me with a shy smile. Bryan, losing himself in concentration as he studied the paperwork in front of him.

Bryan. Three years might as well have been three days for all my heart had managed to let go. I pressed my hands against my eyes and tried to wrench myself away from the images that filled my head. I wondered, not for the first time, if I would ever get through a single day without thinking of him, without missing him. I told myself, as I always did, how lucky I had been to have him in my life. Better five years in a wondrous, near-perfect marriage than 30 years in a miserable one.
Still,
I thought,
I’m ready to bargain; maybe a little less happiness and a little more time? How about that, God? Do we have a deal?

I sat up, shaking my head. When you try to strike a deal with God, it’s time to change the subject.