Aftershocks

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE SECOND DRIVE up to Acadia Springs was even more gorgeous than the first. She sang along to her favorite CDs, enjoyed the scenery and delighted in being newly in love. Since the retirement community was an hour inland, it was dryer and warmer than the coastal city she’d left.

As Briana drove, she mostly replayed scenes from the night before, warming with a glow of pleasure as she relived what had to be the most remarkable night of her life.

For the second time she pulled up in front of a neatly kept bungalow adjacent to a luscious green golf course. This time, she was pleased to see the drapes open, no papers on the front porch and a late-model Ford sitting in the garage. Having already worried about how she’d approach Joseph Carlton, she’d finally settled on the truth, or some version of it, anyway.

It seemed to her that lies had caused the trouble her uncle was in, and maybe the truth would be a good start for fixing things.

Consequently, when she rang the doorbell of number 233 Palm Avenue at two o’clock that Sunday afternoon, she was ready to come out about who she really was.

A woman in her seventies answered the door, wearing a bright sun-orange baseball cap and tennis gear. “Oh,” she said, looking startled. “I thought you were my doubles partner.”

“No, ma’am,” Briana answered with a smile. “My name is Briana Bliss. I work for the city of Courage Bay. I’m looking for retired officer Joseph Carlton of the Courage Bay police department. Would he be in?”

“Yes, of course. Come right in.”

“Thank you.” As she stepped inside, the nervousness she’d tried to keep at bay on the drive up returned. She had a feeling that, finally, she was going to get the truth.

The woman disappeared down a hall, and a few minutes later Briana heard an older man say, “It’s all right, May. You go on and play tennis.”

A short muffled conversation took place, out of her sight, and then an older man came down the hall toward her. Briana would have guessed ex-military from his stern bearing and upright posture if she hadn’t known he was a former police officer.

His hair was salt-and-pepper and a thin mustache graced his upper lip. Behind his glasses, his gray eyes were wary.

He looked at her a long moment, then, with a small sigh and an infinitesimal slump of his shoulders, he motioned her toward the living room.

“You are the Officer Carlton who served on the Courage Bay police force in the eighties?” Briana asked.

The older man nodded, gesturing her to a floral couch in greens and yellows. The decor was department-store Colonial, and everything was sparkling clean.

“Yes, I served in the eighties. And the seventies. And most of the sixties, too. I retired in nineteen ninety-two.” Before he sank into what was obviously his favorite chair, a green wing chair with a footstool in front and a carefully folded newspaper on the polished side table, he paused. “Would you like some iced tea?”

“That would be wonderful, thank you. I’m a little thirsty after the drive up here.”

“I’ll get it,” came his wife’s voice.

“Then you go play tennis,” her husband called. “This young lady and I will be fine.”

“I…I don’t know what to call you. Retired Officer Carlton doesn’t sound quite right.”

“Call me Joe.”

She smiled. “And I’m Briana. Briana Bliss.”

“Bliss.” He shook his head. “Not a surname I recognize.”

“I just recently moved to Courage Bay, Joe. I work for the mayor. The new mayor. Patrick O’Shea. I’m his administrative assistant.”

A rusty chuckle shook her companion. “Now, O’Shea’s a name I know well. Good kids, but they played their fair share of pranks. I’d heard young Patrick was the mayor down there, after the old one made a fool of himself.”

“Well, it’s sort of the election that I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Never mingled in politics myself.”

“Right. It’s not directly about politics. What I wanted to ask you about involves an arrest you made in the eighties. I don’t know if you’ll even remember any of the details, but I thought I’d ask anyway.” She’d also brought a copy of the article, including the grainy arrest photo from the Courage Bay Sentinel.

May Carlton came into the room with two chilled glasses of iced tea in crystal tumblers. Thin slices of lemon floated on top.

“Thank you,” Briana said gratefully, and sipped the cool drink. May set a coaster on the table in front of her. “There’s more iced tea in the fridge if you want it, dear.” Then, after kissing her husband on the forehead, she left.

“You go on, now,” Joe said to her.

There was a short silence. “I understand you celebrated your fiftieth wedding anniversary,” she said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. How did you know?”

She explained about coming up the week before, when he and his wife were away, and he nodded. “You must have something pressing on your mind to make this trip twice in the space of a week.”

“It’s not urgent, but I believe it’s important.” She took the neatly folded photocopy out of her bag and passed it over. Joe Carlton studied the photo carefully for several long seconds and nodded. Then he raised his eyes to her.

He still had cop eyes, she realized. They missed nothing.

“This is Cecil Thomson. I arrested him in 1984. A misdemeanor.”

She felt as though someone had kicked her. For a long time there was only silence punctuated by muted traffic sounds from the main road and the ticking of a clock.

“How can you remember it so clearly?” She was startled and it must have showed. “That was more than twenty years ago. You must have performed hundreds, thousands of arrests in your time. How can you be so certain you remember this one?”

“Because Cecil Thomson was a prominent man, even then. He wasn’t president of the bank back in those days, but he was already a councilman.”

“Right.” Her stomach was starting to feel funny, as though she might be coming down with something. “What happened?”

“What’s your interest in this?”

How much to tell? How much to withhold? “Some damaging information about Councilman Thomson was leaked to the press during the mayoralty race. There’s been some suggestion…” She looked over at the older man whose eyes had seen so much and decided to trust him. “I’d like to keep this visit, and this conversation, confidential for the moment. There’s been a…suggestion made that the arrest and the photograph were false. That they were planted to ruin Councilman Thomson’s bid to become Courage Bay ’s mayor.”

Joe chuckled, then he laughed out loud. But it wasn’t the kind of laugh that made you want to join in. It had a bitter sound. The feeling in her stomach grew worse.

“Oh, it was real all right. The photo. The arrest. The whole ball of wax.”

“But-but I don’t understand. Why was he never charged? And why did it take twenty years to come to light?”

“You look like a nice young woman, but if you’re involved in any kind of politics, even as the mayor’s secretary, you must know there’s dirty tricks even at the lowest level.”

“I hate to think that’s true, but I suppose you’re right,” she said.

The old man nodded, then settled back to tell his story. “I was out on the beat one summer evening in eighty-four. It was a quiet night. A couple of kids had a few open beers on the beach. I could smell marijuana, but they’d got rid of that before I caught them, so all I could do was give them the usual talking to about drinking underage and then I drove them home to their parents.”

He stopped to sip his tea. Briana was amazed at how clear his recall was of an incident two decades old.

“On my way back to the precinct, I cruised The Lair, which was and still is the meanest part of Victory Park.”

Briana nodded.

“Prostitutes hung out there. Some drug deals went down. There were bar brawls and plenty of petty theft. I was doing a routine drive through and I saw a couple in a car. I might not have noticed them, but the car didn’t belong in the area. It was a new model Cadillac.”

Her heart sank still further. Her uncle had always driven Cadillacs. Always. He got a new model every four years without fail, and Aunt Irene got the four-year-old one.

Joe cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. “Well, I could see inside the car that there was a couple going at it, so I got out the camera and turned on the flash. There was a lewd act happening in a public place, and the woman was a prostitute I knew well enough. I’d arrested her before.”

“And the man?” Her throat felt so dry and scratchy she could barely get the words out. She knew, of course. Realized that on some level she’d suspected this for a while but had refused to believe it.

“It was Cecil Thomson. I knew him pretty well, too. So I snapped their photo, and Cecil, well, he got himself pretty riled up. When I look back on it now, I think I probably would have let him off with a warning-it was a first offense and I’d never seen him down in that part of town before-but he got belligerent on me. I remember I smelled booze, so I guess he’d had a few drinks and wasn’t acting too smart. Anyhow, I arrested the pair of them and took them down to the station, filled out the paperwork and attached the photograph to the file. Cecil Thomson must have sobered up some by then, because he demanded the phone, and guess who he called?”

“His lawyer?”

Joe shook his head and his mouth twisted in a cynical grimace. “No, he did not call his lawyer. He called the police chief. They were great buddies in those days. Old Chief Conway’s gone now. Died of lung cancer. Let me just say, I don’t mourn his passing.”

“So, Un-So, Cecil Thomson called Chief Conway. What did the police chief do?”

Joe gave another humorless laugh. “He let Cecil Thomson go. Told me I’d been too quick to judge, that there was insufficient evidence and we wouldn’t be taking this one to trial. He even let the hooker go free.”

“But…” Briana’s head was reeling. “He was the police chief. Surely it was his duty to support his officers.”

“That’s not the way he saw it.”

“But how could he stop you going above his head, or even to the newspapers if you’d wanted to?”

“I guess he knew I wouldn’t do either of those things.”

“You mean you’ve kept this secret all these years?”

Joe Carlton stared down at his hands, and suddenly she wished she didn’t have to press him for answers. He obviously didn’t want to talk about this, something which he confirmed when he said, “Here’s the part of the story I wish I didn’t have to tell you, but it wouldn’t be right not to. I got a promotion the next week. Now, I was in line for one and sure as hell deserved it, but I always thought the timing was too much of a coincidence. Yeah. I kept my mouth shut, and I probably would have anyway. But I also took the promotion.” He shook his head. “Never felt right about it. But I had a wife and kids to support. And that’s the story.”

Her head was whirling. But one huge piece of the puzzle was still missing. “It’s not quite the end of the story, though. Why did you leak it to the papers twenty years later? Was it for revenge?”

He chortled. “That’s a good one. If I’d ever thought of it, I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to leak information the way they love to do these days. No. The photo from the arrest disappeared very conveniently that same night. I guess the chief figured that if I did try anything, it would be my word against his and the good councilman. But I’d taken a couple of pictures, see? I always did. In case one didn’t turn out.”

He sat back and sipped more tea. “I clipped the clearest one to the file and I kept the backup.”

“Why?”

“I suppose that photograph was a reminder to myself that I wasn’t any better than the next man.”

“So you kept that photo all these years?”

“Sure did. I probably should have tossed it when I retired, but I’d mostly forgotten about it by then. My daughter was up here a few months back. She’s married to a fellow that works for the Sentinel. She was going through some old boxes in the storage locker, looking for I don’t know what, and she found that picture. Like I said, I’d almost forgotten about it. Well, after she got through wondering what I was doing with a picture of two people going at it, I told her the story. I guess maybe it eased my conscience a little.

“I never expected she’d take that picture with her and run straight to her husband.” Joe stopped to rub his jaw and a sly twinkle flickered in his eyes. “At least, I don’t think I did.” He chuckled a little. “Maybe I wasn’t sorry, though, that the truth finally came out.”

Oh, and was the truth ever coming out. She felt ill. Faint and nauseous. Her uncle had always been someone she admired and looked up to. He loved his wife, and he loved her. How could he go to a prostitute in the first place? Then use political influence to get the charge dropped, and then lie to his own wife and niece about the incident? The only truthful thing he’d told them was that he believed Patrick had planted the story.

And he’d jumped to that conclusion because he knew all about political dirty tricks and influence peddling.

And the irony was, that was the only part of the story that wasn’t true.

Her uncle had been wrong on so many levels. Patrick hadn’t set Uncle Cecil up. Patrick hadn’t known a thing about the arrest until he’d read it in the paper. It was the arresting officer’s son-in-law who’d made a timely news story out of an averted scandal.

The only person who’d been set up, she now saw, was her own gullible self.

“Are you all right over there?”

She’d dropped her head in her hand and closed her eyes as the shock of the truth hit her. “Yes. Yes, thank you. I’m fine. I-I’m glad to hear that Mayor Patrick O’Shea had nothing to do with starting false rumors.” That at least was true.

“If that mayor of yours is anything like he was ten years ago, when he was a young fireman, why, he’s as honest as the day is long. He comes from a good family, but he was one of the biggest sticklers for honesty and integrity I ever saw.” The older man leaned forward. “After the scandal with the last mayor, I’m awfully glad you’ve got a good man doing the job now. Especially since you’ve had all that trouble down there.”

“Yes,” Briana said, smiling shakily. “Yes, Mayor O’Shea is a good man.” And she wished the same could be said of her uncle.

Silence stretched between them. “I’m not sure I can tell you any more.”

“You’ve been very helpful,” she said, rising to her feet. “Thank you.”

“I’m not going to tell you it was a pleasure, but it was a duty, and I’m glad I’ve discharged that duty.”

She looked at him and saw a fine man who’d done something he wasn’t altogether proud of, something he’d been forced to do because of her uncle. She felt like crying. “Is there…I hate to ask you this, but do you think I could talk to your daughter?”

“You think I made all this up?” Joe had risen, too, and now he was staring at her as if she were nuts.

“No. Of course I don’t think you made it up, but I have to be sure. A lot is at stake here.”

He glanced at her with those cop’s eyes again. “Knowing my daughter, she’d be more than happy to talk about anything.” He reached for the pencil that perched on top of his newspaper. He’d been doing the crossword puzzle, she saw, and had more than half of the squares filled in. She was sorry she’d had to interrupt such a quiet Sunday afternoon activity with reminders of an incident in the past that he’d rather forget. He tore off a corner of the paper and carefully wrote down a name and phone number. “That’s their home. Joan will talk to you. Tell her I said it’s okay.”

“Thank you, Joe. Thank you very much.”

“Well, I’m ashamed I had any part in that, but I’m glad the truth is finally coming out.”

“It can’t have been easy for you,” she said, sorry he was still beating himself up over something that had happened two decades earlier. “You had a family. I’m sure you needed the job.”

Joe shook his head at her. “Young lady, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that doing the right thing is always the right thing to do. I’ve regretted keeping quiet for a lot of years.” He smiled at her. “One of the nice things about getting old is you’re allowed to give a lot of unwanted advice. But here’s a piece of advice I hope you’ll take to heart. Don’t ever make the mistake of compromising your integrity for someone else.”

She felt tears spring to her eyes at his words.

Too late. She’d already compromised her integrity by agreeing to go undercover in Patrick’s office with the express purpose of destroying his career.

Loyalty and integrity. She’d misplaced the first and compromised the second.

She only hoped she wasn’t too late to act with both.

After saying her goodbyes to Joe, she realized she was going to have to confront her uncle before she did anything else.

Her thoughts were grim on the drive back to Courage Bay. She’d imagined a lot of scenarios, but never had it seemed possible that the uncle who’d helped her so much when she was growing up would use her so despicably.

She was furious on her own behalf, and she was equally furious on her aunt’s. How could he profess to love that woman so deeply and do something so awful behind her back? She could still barely believe he had gone with a hooker. Had it been a regular thing? she wondered. Her poor aunt.

Yes, she needed to see Patrick and come clean about what she’d done, but she had to see Uncle Cecil first.

Then she was going to have to tell Patrick the truth about why she’d applied to be his admin assistant.

She really hoped his love was blind. She needed him to be blind to her faults when she finally told him the truth.