Chapter 24
Eager to talk to her mate, Sheri answered Slade’s call. “Hey, what are you up to?”
“I had a couple of tours of the pristine winter scenes over the BCWA after making more of a mess of my stuff in your apartment, but I’m done for now and it’s lunchtime. Do you have some free time so you can have a bite to eat with me?”
“Oh, absolutely.” The good thing about Sheri’s job was that she could take calls while she was anywhere, if Gerard happened to get back with her.
“Good. How does the Boathouse Brewpub and Restaurant sound?” Slade asked.
“That’s the place where you were going to take me before you had the flight to drop off the momma dog and puppies before the cabin stay.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, yes. I wanted to have one of their fresh burgers with mushrooms and Swiss cheese.”
“You’ve got it! I’ll be right over to pick you up.”
“See you soon.” Sheri waved to Cameron and Owen and said, “I’m having lunch out with Slade. See you later.”
“Enjoy it for us,” Cameron called out.
“Yeah, enjoy,” Owen said.
“We will.”
Then Sheri heard Slade’s vehicle drive up. He must have been on the way to the office when he had called her. She pulled on her parka, gloves, and hat and went out to meet him. He got out of his vehicle and gave her a warm hug and kiss.
Then he got her door for her. “If you couldn’t have gone out to eat, I was going to bring you something.”
“You’re so sweet and totally spoiling me,” Sheri said, loving the attention.
“I’ll be busier during the other seasons, so for now, I want to make this special for us. Besides, we missed our dinner date at the restaurant, so I wanted to make sure we still had time to do it, and I’m serious about the mess in the apartment. I didn’t have time enough to do a lot of sorting and putting stuff away before I had the missions to fly.”
“We’ll get it done,” she said. How hard could it be?
Then they arrived at the brewpub and went inside to see it all decorated for Christmas. “I know you’re still working. I don’t have any scheduled trips for this afternoon, so—”
“You’re going to have a drink.”
Slade smiled. “I’ve been wanting to try the blueberry blond.”
She laughed as they took their seats and started looking at the menu. “It’s a good thing we’re mated. I might worry about you being interested in some blond otherwise. I’m getting the chocolate rye porter. And of course the mushroom burger and fries.”
“I’m getting the bacon Gouda patty melt.”
After they ordered their food and drinks, Slade asked Sheri, “So how is your investigation into Gerard coming along?”
Sheri got a call on her phone and saw it was from Jessica, not Gerard. She sighed. “Hold that question,” she said to Slade, then answered the call. “Jessica?”
“Yeah. Gerard wants to know what you know about me.”
“You’re his daughter,” Sheri guessed, “and he trained you to be a pilot. He has been taking care of you as much as he can, seeing you as much as he can. Caring for you.”
“He has. I guess you could say he has been leading somewhat of a double life. He truly loves Betty. He always has and he doesn’t want to lose her. I know people—his brother too—say that Gerard only stayed with her because of her money, but it isn’t true.”
“Because of the prenuptial agreement?”
“Yeah.”
“So Fitz knew about the affair,” Sheri said.
“Yeah. Fitz was with my dad when he met my mom at a restaurant. He knew all about their affair. The affair with my mother was a mistake. And he’d only been with her for a couple of nights when they were young, but they really didn’t get along. When my mom learned she was pregnant with me, Gerard did everything he could to make sure I had everything I needed, including sending me away to college when it came time for that. He was sure Betty would divorce him over it, but he never had the courage to tell her the truth.”
Sheri had a hard time believing Gerard hadn’t told Betty because he loved her. “Okay, so why did your dad ask you to fly the plane? He must have known Fitz was up to no good. Why put you in that predicament?”
“Me? I didn’t fly the plane.”
“Who did then?”
“My dad wouldn’t tell me.”
“Will Gerard meet with me?”
“He’s afraid to meet with anyone,” Jessica said.
“I have to talk with him, even if it’s just on the phone.”
Their food was delivered to the table then. Sheri was glad that Slade didn’t seem to mind that she was working on the case during their lunch date.
“All right. I’ll tell him. You really are going to help him and not tell Betty about me or my mom?”
“Yes, I’m here to help him, and I’m not going to tell anyone about you and your dad, though I wonder how many people already know the truth besides Fitz.”
“I–I don’t know. Okay, I’ll call him and get back to you one way or another.”
“Thanks, Jessica.” They ended the call and Sheri smiled at Slade. “Sorry about that.”
“No problem. I’m glad I get to hear a little bit of what’s going on.”
Then they began eating their delicious burgers.
“So what do you think? Will Betty divorce Gerard when she learns the truth about his daughter?” Slade asked.
“I really don’t know. The affair was long ago, so maybe not. When I was doing a search about Gerard and Betty, I learned they never had any kids. And Jessica can’t help that she was born in that situation.”
“Do you think he truly loves Betty and his not coming clean about his daughter doesn’t have anything to do with the prenuptial?” Slade asked, lifting his hamburger to take another bite.
“I suspect the money has something to do with it, but maybe not. When it comes to fickle human relationships, I don’t have a clue.” Sheri sipped some more of her drink. “Now this is good.”
“Mine is too.” He asked then, “Will Gerard talk to you?”
“I sure hope so. What do you have planned for this afternoon?”
“I have to be up for any calls that come in. Tomorrow’s my Santa gig. You’re flying with me, right? Unless you have something that comes up concerning Gerard’s case.”
“Oh, absolutely.” Sheri didn’t get a call while they were eating, so she figured Gerard still didn’t want to speak with her.
Slade paid for their meals and drove her back to the office. “I’ll make dinner for us if I get off early.”
“That sounds like a winner.” Sheri loved how things were working out between them and their jobs so far. In the summer when Slade was so busy, things would change, but she was looking forward to all of it. She would be the one to make fun meals if he had long days.
“Good luck on your case,” Slade said. “If Gerard wants to meet you and I don’t have a flying commitment, let me know and I’ll take you to meet him.”
“All right, that sounds good.”
Then they kissed and hugged. He left her at her office and drove off.
She filled Cameron and Owen in on the new developments in Gerard’s case and began looking more into Jessica’s background when she got a call from Betty. Ugh. Sheri wished Gerard would have just come clean with Betty and relieve her of having to keep the secrets.
“Hello, Betty.”
“Yes, I wanted to call you and tell you Gerard called me. He said he couldn’t talk, but he wanted me to know he loved me with all his heart. I’m so worried about him. Have you gotten any clues about where he is?”
This was the hard part. Not that Sheri knew where Gerard was. Still, she had a lot of new information about him that she couldn’t share, even though Betty was her client.
“You’re my only client and I’m working full time on this case. I’m sure I’ll know something before long. I’m waiting to hear back on a couple of calls and have several leads right now. I’ll let you know as soon as I have confirmed anything,” Sheri said.
“Okay, thanks. I’m sorry if I sound impatient, but I really want Gerard to be all right.”
“Yes, I totally understand. I would feel the same way as you, given the same circumstances.” Betty really sounded sincere. Would she still feel that way if she knew the truth about Gerard’s daughter? Then Sheri got another call on her cell phone and said to Betty, “I have an incoming call. It might be about Gerard. I need to go.”
“Thanks. Let me know if you learn anything.”
“I sure will.” Then Sheri picked up the other call. It was from Jessica again.
“Gerard told me to tell you to meet me at a location and then I’ll take you to where he is so you can talk to him.”
Then Jessica gave her directions on how to reach her.
Sheri called Slade after that, but he didn’t answer, so she called his mother, who scheduled all the plane trips.
“Hi, Sheri,” Lolita said. “If you’re trying to get ahold of Slade, he had a flight to take a pet to a new owner. He won’t be longer than about two hours.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll see him later then.” Sheri hoped he didn’t get upset with her for not waiting for him to go with her. Both Owen and Cameron were working on their own cases, but she let them know where she was going to and then headed out to the rendezvous site to meet up with Jessica. She called her just to let her know that she was coming alone.
When she finally reached the hotel where Jessica was waiting for her outside, Sheri recognized the pretty brunette right away from her Facebook photos. Sheri waved at her, and Jessica quickly joined her.
“Sheri Whitmore,” she said, offering her gloved hand to Jessica.
“Hi, and thanks for wanting to help us,” Jessica said. “After I spoke with you the first time, I checked the newspapers and read that you had done everything you had said—saving Mr. Lincoln, investigating Gerard’s plane crash, even saving some other people during that awful storm. You and Slade White. We’ll go in your car, all right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
They got into Sheri’s car and then Jessica made a call. “I’m with Sheri now. Her boyfriend couldn’t make it. All right. We’ll go there.” She ended the call and gave Sheri directions to a house.
“Who knows about this house?” Sheri asked, wanting to make sure Gerard would be safe there.
“No one. My grandparents on my mother’s side owned it and when my mother passed, I inherited it. Normally, I rent it out, but the last renters moved out a few weeks ago, so my dad has been staying there.”
“Fitz and his friends don’t know about it though?” Sheri asked. If they knew about Jessica and her mother and the affair, then they might have learned Jessica inherited her grandparents’ home.
“No one does,” Jessica said.
Sheri hoped she was right.
When they arrived at the house, they went to the door and Jessica unlocked it. They walked inside and Gerard greeted them from the kitchen. “You’re the PI my wife hired.”
“Yes, Sheri Whitmore. You have to tell Betty about your past and about Jessica. It’s the only way Fitz won’t have a hold over you. He can’t blackmail you if Betty knows about it, unless there’s something else your brother has on you.”
“No, nothing else. I just know Betty will want to divorce me over this, and I truly love her. I made that one mistake shortly after we were married, and I never wandered again.”
“But since I was the result of it, he always had to worry about Betty learning about me,” Jessica said.
“The thing of it is, Fitz is going to tell Betty or threaten you with it for the rest of your life. But I wonder why he didn’t do this beforehand,” Sheri said. “Why wait all these years until now?”
“He didn’t know that I’d had a child. And he wanted to do this heist. Though someone else might be in charge of it. I’m not sure.”
“Who did you hire to pilot the plane then?” Sheri asked.
“I didn’t. I told Fitz I was going to fly it, but then I took off so he couldn’t force me to pilot the plane. I really didn’t believe he would hire anyone else to fly my plane. When I didn’t show up for the appointed hour, Fitz must have gotten another pilot.”
“Who would he be able to hire who could fly the plane?”
“I don’t know. I mean, our cousin, Tex Lincoln, flies, but I know he wouldn’t have done it. I don’t know who else Fitz knows. Drug runners? But Fitz was mad enough to want to kill me because I didn’t go along with the plan, the plane crashed, and he lost the stolen merchandise.”
“But he didn’t tell Betty about what he knew,” Sheri said.
“True, he didn’t. I figure if he doesn’t kill me, he’ll want me to fly another mission. Except now I don’t have a plane.”
“And you’re unreliable.” Sheri couldn’t imagine Fitz trusting his brother to follow through on another case, if he tried to steal more merchandise and transport it the same way as before. “Has Fitz done any criminal activities before?”
“He was always stealing stuff when we were kids. Then he hooked up with Otis and Danbury and they decided on a bigger heist. But I don’t know if they had done other ones before they wanted me to ferry the merchandise to New Mexico.”
“Your brother didn’t seem to like your cousin, Lincoln, all that much.”
Gerard thought about that for a while. “Do you want a drink of something?”
“Water, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll get it,” Jessica said.
“So about your cousin—” Sheri began again. “Tell me more about why you might think he could have been involved in this.” Sheri always kept an open mind in the cases she worked because sometimes the most unlikely candidate could be the real culprit. Like Jessica even. She had a pilot’s license too.
“Lincoln has talked about the ultimate theft where no one would be the wiser. Though I hadn’t put two and two together before,” Gerard said. “He has a pilot’s license. It’s like I said, he could have been the one flying my plane. He doesn’t have his own plane any longer. I kind of dismissed the notion that he was a suspect when you found him in the BWCA having a heart attack a couple of weeks after the plane went down. If he’d been flying the plane and it had crashed, he most likely would have suffered a heart attack then and might not have survived.”
Sheri was thinking the same thing.
Jessica brought in glasses of ice water. “We have to stop the charade, Dad. Sheri’s right. You need to call Betty and tell her the truth. Maybe she’ll hate you for it and she’ll divorce you. Or maybe if Betty truly loves you like you love her, she’ll be reasonable about it because it has been so many years since you had seen my mom. You can work things out. The truth is going to come out and it would be better if you told her.”
They all sat down in the living room.
“All right, I’ll do it,” Gerard said, and got his phone out and made a call. “Hey, Betty. I need to tell you some things.” Then he proceeded to tell her about the mistake he’d made that had resulted in having a daughter named Jessica. He didn’t say anything for a while, then began to cry.
Sheri felt teary-eyed and saw that Jessica was too. What was Betty’s response? She hoped Gerard’s tears were of joy and not the sign of a breakup. But it had to be done.
“I’m so sorry. Yeah, okay. Uh—” Gerard looked at Sheri and smiled. “Yeah, Sheri is here, and she and Jessica convinced me to tell you. All right. Yeah. Okay. Sounds great.” He gave her the address. “See you soon. Love you.” He ended the call and as soon as he did, he looked like a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders.
“Well, Dad, don’t keep us in suspense,” Jessica said. “Spill.”
Gerard wiped away his tears with his hand. “Betty knew. All these years, she knew—about you, about your mother, all of it. She had hired a PI way back then and learned of it.”
“And she never said anything to you about it?” Jessica asked, wiping away tears.
“No, she didn’t. She was waiting for me to tell her. She didn’t know that was what Fitz was blackmailing me over. She thought it was something else or she would have told me she already knew about the big secret.”
“She’s not divorcing you?”
“No. She wants to meet you. She wants you to come have Christmas with us. Or we might have it here if Fitz is still looking for my blood. She’s coming here to see you right now. Well, the both of us.”
Sheri smiled, glad that this part of the story, at least, was going to have a happy ending. “Okay, so then I need to talk to your cousin, Tex Lincoln, to learn if he knows anything about all this. I will use the ruse of checking on him to see if he’s okay, after we found him having the heart attack in the BWCA.”
“To learn if he flew the plane?” Jessica asked.
“Yes. And to learn if he was involved in stealing the merchandise.”
“There’s no need to learn if Tex piloted the plane. I flew it,” Jessica said.
Shocked to hear the confession so freely given, Sheri didn’t speak for a moment.
“No,” her dad said, sounding just as astounded. Sheri was glad that her dad hadn’t asked her to fly the illegal mission.
“Yeah. When you didn’t fly, Fitz came to me and said he knew who I was, that I had access to the plane and a pilot’s license and I had to fly it, or he was going to go to Betty and tell her all about the affair and about me. I did it because I knew you loved Betty and you were afraid she would divorce you.” Jessica sniffled and wiped away tears.
Gerard gave her a hug. “I never wanted you involved in any of that.”
“I had to do it for you.”
“You crashed the plane. Thank God you weren’t injured or killed.”
“I had a dislocated shoulder, but I found a campsite about a mile away. The guys who were camping there drove me home and I went to the hospital to have my shoulder fixed. I didn’t tell the campers or you what had happened. I–I didn’t really think the plane would be found until the spring. I have to admit I crashed it on purpose. I found the best place to land, based on stories you had told me about survivors of crashed airplanes. It was storming out, so I assumed it would cover the sound of the crash. I also had only enough fuel to make it there. I’d tested it out before they loaded the merchandise.”
“What?” Gerard asked.
“I wanted to make sure they couldn’t force you to fly for them again.” Jessica wiped away more tears.
Sheri thought the world of Jessica for trying to save her father from his vengeful brother.
“Jessica.”
“I did it for you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell Betty a long time ago and got you mixed up in all this,” Gerard said.
“It’s going to work out,” Jessica said.
“I agree. You just need to tell Betty the whole story.” Sheri really thought it would work as long as Gerard was honest with her, and they talked things out. Not just now, but into the future. Fitz and the other men needed to be made to pay for their crimes though.
“I don’t want to tell the police you were flying the plane,” Gerard said to Jessica.
“They have to know, Dad. No more secrets. We need to tell the truth. I couldn’t tell what was in the boxes, but I assumed the merchandise had been stolen. That’s another reason I had to stop them. When I crashed the plane, I didn’t recognize where I’d gone down exactly so I couldn’t have given the police the coordinates.”
“All right. We’ll call them then.”
“Call Conway King or Tanner Papadopoulos since they’ve been working the case. Tell them I’m here with you since I’ve also dealt with them while trying to help them find the stolen merchandise.” Sheri didn’t mention Dulcie because she was so new to their office, while the two detectives had been working this case all along.
“Okay.” Gerard called Conway, and the officer said he and Tanner were on their way to their location, to stay put.