Page 8 of Justice Denied

Jetta punched the body pillow in the hopes she could get it into a shape suitable for sleeping. Seth’s assertion he would find evidence someone deliberately tried to harm her dog had her insides tied up with more knots than ropes on a ship. To focus her thoughts on something else, she’d read everything she could find online about her father and the embezzlement charges. Learning the sordid details of the crime had merely revved up the baby, who had somersaulted for hours, keeping her awake.

She tried to pray but couldn’t form the words with her thoughts all jumbled. While raised in church, her mother hadn’t attended much after her father’s sudden death. Now that Jetta knew a bit more about the circumstances surrounding his fatal heart attack, she wondered if church members had snubbed them because of the embezzlement accusations. In her teens and college years, Jetta had allowed herself to drift away from the things of God, but her current situation had driven her back into the arms of her loving Savior. Jetta had begun to memorize Scripture to bolster her fledging faith, and now a recent verse from the Psalms flitted through her mind. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

Jetta repeated Psalm 27:1 over and over, whispering the words until her eyelids dragged downward and her heart rate slowed. Her phone buzzed on the nightstand, jolting her back from the edge of sleep. One a.m. She pushed up onto her elbows and checked the incoming call. Jade, the last sibling who hadn’t called after she’d texted their group chat about Bingley’s trip to the vet, keeping the reason vague.

“Hey, sis.” Jetta flopped onto her back. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Girl, why didn’t you call me? I had to find out by text?”

Jade’s manufactured outrage made Jetta grin. She did enjoy riling her older sisters, Jade in particular, who hated being the last to know any family news, but living in California with the rest of her siblings on the East Coast meant Jade missed some things. But her smile fell away at the serious nature of the incident. “Sorry, wasn’t feeling up to talking.”

“Yeah, it must have been rough.” Her sister’s voice softened. “But I’m glad Bingley will be okay. You haven’t told Mom, have you?”

“I’m planning to when I see her first thing in the morning.”

“What did the vet say was wrong with him anyway?”

Jetta contemplated the ceiling, trying to figure out how to tell the truth without alarming her sister with all the details. “He must have eaten something that disagreed with him.”

“You’ll need to keep a close eye on him, since you now know he’s apt to get into things he shouldn’t.”

“I most certainly will.” Jade’s assumption Bingley had been the culprit instead of someone who wanted to harm him eased some of the stress building inside Jetta. She wouldn’t have to share her suspicions that someone had deliberately poisoned her dog. If her siblings found out, one of them would be on their way to Falls Church on the next available flight—and would find out about her delicate condition. She most certainly did not want them butting into her life. Hiding her pregnancy felt like lying to her brothers and sisters—okay, itwaslying by omission—but she couldn’t handle their questions and well-meaning directives, not when she was still sorting through her options.

Before Jade could launch into another topic, Jetta asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about Dad?”

“What about Dad?”

Jetta rolled her eyes at Jade’s obvious attempt at dissimulation. “You know very well what I’m talking about—the embezzlement charges.”

“We—”

“And don’t tell me I was too young. I haven’t been too young for years now.”

“You’re right.” Jade’s voice softened. “We should have told you. But honestly, we didn’t want to ruin your memories of him like ours were ruined.”

“Wait, you think he was guilty?” Jetta couldn’t believe what she was hearing. While she knew only what she’d read online, she didn’t for a minute believe the man who had tried to find the owner of a dollar bill he’d found on the sidewalk outside a store could have embezzled millions.

Jade’s breath sounded suspiciously like a huff, something her sister did whenever she thought the other person was having a “duh” moment. “It didn’t impact you as much as it did us. We had to deal with the fallout of having a father accused of embezzling millions from a cutting-edge company working on developing robotic prosthetics, among other things.”

Jetta hated to push, but she needed to know where Jade stood. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes and no.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Usually Jade wasn’t one to mince words, so her reluctance to say what she thought of their father made Jetta wonder how the accusations might have hurt her sister, who’d been at Boston College at the time of the arrest.

“As chief financial officer, he had to know about the missing money. He was very good at his job.” Jade paused, then continued, her voice soft yet firm. “So either he didn’t know and therefore wasn’t paying close attention to the books like he should have been or he turned a blind eye to whoever was taking the money.”

Jetta mulled that over before positing her thoughts. “Mom always said Dad was a straight arrow.”

“Until this happened, I would have agreed.”

“Then there must be a third option.”

“What’s that?”

“What if he knew someone was taking the money but was trying to find the evidence to prove it?”

Jade stayed silent for so long, Jetta checked to make sure her sister hadn’t hung up. “Jade?”

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