Threads of Suspicion(16)
She touched her water glass to his. “How much work did you bring along with you for later?”
“Enough to have me reading until well past midnight—I brought one of his laptops too. You?”
“I packed all Jenna’s journals.”
David laughed. “Yeah. The faster we know what’s there, the easier our lives become. So we’ll work twenty-four seven the first few days.”
“Not sure about your number, but ambition suits us both.”
“It’s the foundation of an interesting career,” David agreed. He closed the menu. “Lasagna and a house salad, to help me decide how I like their sauce and seasonings, along with the appetizer special and hot bread, because lunch was a long time ago and any leftovers suit the hours of work still ahead.”
She thought that sounded perfect. “A double on the lasagna and salad.”
The waiter returned with their soft drinks, took the order, and brought a shared salad bowl and hot-bread basket.
Evie let David serve the salads while she split the bread loaf. “So start somewhere, David, and tell me about Margaret May McDonald.”
He smiled at the way she said the full name.
Evie added, “I have to admit, you really threw me with Maggie’s photo—it kind of scrambled my brain. Jenna Greenhill needs my attention, and I found myself instead wondering about the two of you at odd points throughout this afternoon.”
David passed her salad over. “You’ll like Maggie. She’s got a thing about famous people too, sort of stammers when she meets other singers for the first time. It’s really rather cute. She’s still very much a fan despite the fact it’s also her profession.”
“She sells a lot of records.”
“Vinyl, CDs, streaming audio, radio time—her music is everywhere, which makes for a nice icebreaker when I’m looking to find common ground with someone twenty years younger than me.”
“How did you two meet?”
“We’ve known each other since high school.”
He paused as the waiter brought the appetizer platter of colorful grilled skewers stacked with mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, onions, and pineapple chunks. David nudged the ranch dressing and honey dipping sauce toward Evie, the marinara toward himself. “Are you a Christian, Evie?”
She deftly slid one skewer of vegetables off the stick and onto a shared plate. “Why do you ask?”
He sampled one of the mushrooms, nodded his approval. “There are two ways to tell this story, one of which is going to make less sense than the other depending on your answer.”
“I am.”
“A Christmas and Easter kind of Christian, or your Bible came packed in your luggage for this trip?”
She couldn’t help but chuckle at his description. “It’s currently sharing space on the bedside table with a J. D. Robb mystery and a Derek Prince book on biblical prophecy and the Middle East.”
“Then I’ll give you some of the nuances as I tell this.” David accepted one of the slices of hot bread. “I was twenty-six, had just made detective, was settling into my career, when Maggie and I got engaged.”
“Oh. Well, that’s . . . unexpected.” She found herself totally unsure of what to say.
He smiled. “I’ll get to that in a bit.” He buttered the bread and took a bite, settled into the narrative. “But first we’ll back up.
“I’m older than Maggie by a few years. We actually went to different high schools. Our parents are good friends. Maggie had a talent for singing, wanted to see where it would take her, and the kind of events and places a new singer gets invited to perform can make for late nights. The band hadn’t formed yet, she didn’t want to make it obvious her parents were keeping an eye on her from the crowd, so I made it a point to be her guy, keep the social headaches away from her, be a safe ride home. It began as a good friendship on both sides. But it’s hard not to love Maggie, and I fell for her hard. We were going steady by her senior year in high school.”
The relationship and romance began with the blessing of both families. Evie could see it. She ate some of the grilled peppers and pineapple as she listened, finding herself glad he was willing to talk about this. She would have been stumbling around otherwise, trying to figure out his history with Maggie and how it had developed.
“She has talent, wanted a band, and other performers met her and signed on, became her core group. Triple M officially formed after Maggie graduated from high school.”
David reached for his drink. “She didn’t hit it big right away. It was a steady climb through the ranks, playing everywhere they were invited, starting to travel as an opening band for others, then booking out weekends and beginning to get a following among the college crowd. They were working on their first songs for a recording when she turned twenty-three. That was the turning point. Her own music, some of them lyrics I’d heard her working on since high school—genuine emotion with a powerful voice. Triple M gradually became a featured band after that.”