Burden of Proof Read online

  “What an engaging story. Bunn continues both to elevate the quality of his writing and to astonish with his vision. In Burden of Proof, he explores fundamental issues of human relationships, regret, and the need we all share to gain wisdom. I was profoundly moved.”

  Joseph Raia, chairman, American Bar Association International Division

  “Burden of Proof hit me with the emotional equivalent of a Mack truck. Beautiful and complex characters and plot. The prodigal’s dilemma brought me right inside the mystery, all the way to the surprising one-two punch on the final page. I loved this story and its profoundly personal message. Wonderful!”

  Sarah Gunning Moser, president, Lighthouse for Literacy

  “This is the first Davis Bunn book I have read, but it will not be the last. Burden of Proof beautifully demonstrates that a life spent in pursuit of selfish ends holds the makings of profound emptiness. Bunn’s rich characters and compelling plot beautifully reveal how hope is still possible, even here.”

  Dr. Brian J. Grim, president, Religious Freedom & Business Foundation

  “Bunn has outdone himself this time. Burden of Proof kept me hooked from the very first page. This legal thriller invites us to consider the nature of the world itself. It challenges our worldview of the human experience and is both a powerful legal drama and a heartfelt love story. Bunn has opened my mind to a new vision of the human spirit.”

  Jeffrey Arresty, president, Internet Bar Association

  “Novels with otherworldly themes normally are not my cup of tea, but Bunn’s latest work is an amazing exception. In fact, the final line in its utter simplicity moved me to tears! The way he brings together all the story’s various components is truly memorable.”

  Carol Johnson, founder, The Christy Awards

  Books by Davis Bunn

  Lion of Babylon

  The Domino Effect

  Unscripted

  Burden of Proof

  © 2020 by T. Davis Bunn

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-2659-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  For Joseph and Carmen Raia

  With deepest affection

  Contents

  Cover

  Endorsements

  Half Title Page

  Books by Davis Bunn

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

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  An Excerpt of Another Thrilling Story

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  C

  HAPTER

  ONE

  Ethan paddled his kayak slowly across the inland waterway, heading into the dawn. The sun was a glorious red-rimmed blister rising straight ahead of him. The strengthening light made it impossible to actually see where he was headed. Not that it was a problem. Ethan had been coming and going from this particular dock since the ripe old age of nine and a half months.

  The pain in his chest was worsened by the paddling motion. He needed to take his morning meds. But the pain medication left him somewhat removed from the world. That was not altogether a bad thing, since it was precisely what would be happening soon enough. Permanently. Even so, Ethan wanted to make his last journey out here with as clear a head as possible.

  Skin cancer was a risk for every aging waterman. Over recent years Ethan had lost far too many friends to the aftermath, when the skin disease invaded the body. The week after he turned fifty-five, Ethan learned the melanoma had landed in the lining around his heart and lungs, what the doctors called thoracic sarcoma. Because he had waited so long to be checked out, treatment was simply not an option.

  He minded, but not as much as he might have suspected. This dawn paddle was the first time in quite a while that he allowed his regrets to almost overwhelm him. Ethan did what he had been doing since the diagnosis. He pushed the bitter taste aside as best he could. By this point, the mental action was almost second nature.

  His brother, Adrian, used to love telling and retelling the story of Ethan’s first trip out here. How their father had basically ruined the best-ever father-and-son outing by insisting they bring the worm. That was what ten-year-old Adrian had named the family’s unexpected newcomer. The human worm.

  Needless to say, there had not been much love lost between the two brothers early on.

  Their father and Adrian had been passionate about kayak fishing, which perfectly suited the marshes and shallow waters of Florida’s inland waterway. As he grew into adulthood, Ethan had kept it up mostly because of his brother’s love for the sport. He personally found it a little ridiculous, maintaining an impossible sense of balance while casting. Not to mention the nightmare of catching and landing a large fish. But Adrian treated it like his drug of choice. And because of how close the two brothers had become, especially after their parents were taken from them, Ethan continued to paddle out and fish and paddle home. Even now. Thirty-five years after Adrian was murdered on the Jacksonville courthouse steps.

  In the past, Ethan had also made an annual trek up to the Saint Augustine cemetery where his brother and parents were buried, marking the trio of losses. Customarily this paddle-out took place the day he returned home to Cocoa Beach. But the graves were too far away now. And Ethan wouldn’t be asking anyone to cart his remains up to the family plot. He’d already arranged for buddies to cast his ashes over his beloved Atlantic surf.

  Ethan could make out the silhouettes of homes and carefully planted tropical gardens that now rimmed the Cocoa Beach waterfront. None of this had existed when he and his brother used to come out here, of course. The world had moved on. Soon it would continue without him.

  The pier was pretty much derelict now, used mostly by locals who remembered how things once had been. Back in the eighties, when the Holiday Marina was the center of their young lives, Cocoa Beach had positively hummed with energy and people and new money. The space race had ended, and I Dream of Jeannie had shifted from the nation’s number-one show to late-night reruns. But NASA was still going strong, and Cocoa Beach had become a choice winter destination for the nation�
��s college students.

  The Holiday Marina’s owners had retired twenty-three years ago. Because they loved their hometown and the folks who had been their regular clients for decades, they willed the place and the land to the city. The marina had been razed, and the pier was badly maintained by volunteers. But the boat ramp and parking lot were still jammed almost every weekend.

  As Ethan made the final approach, two silver-grey dolphins swam up alongside his kayak. They were the smaller brackish-water breed, and so tame that one let him reach down and scratch the slick pelt beside its dorsal fin. The other peeped a soft welcome, or perhaps a farewell.

  Then Ethan saw who was waiting for him, and he wished the dolphins had managed a clearer warning.

  There on the end of the pier stood Professor Sonya Barrett, widow of Ethan’s late brother. The reason Ethan had not been with Adrian on the day he was murdered. The point of the worst—and the last—argument the two brothers ever had.

  Sonya had not aged well. Ethan had not seen her since the day after the funeral, but he remembered her as a lithe figure with a ballerina’s grace. Now her hair looked chopped off with garden shears, blown by the dawn breeze into a bird’s nest of grey and silver. Her face was heavily lined. But at least the eyes were the same. Angry and tight. Ethan remembered that gaze.

  Sonya started in on him even before Ethan docked. “I’ve been waiting here over an hour.”

  If he’d had any doubt about who the woman was, her attitude confirmed it. He’d had no reason to think she’d be showing up today. Even so, she treated Ethan like he had been born permanently in the wrong.

  He swung the kayak around as though readying for a quick getaway. “Did I miss a message you were coming?” Ethan left unspoken the fact that if he’d known, he’d still be paddling in the opposite direction.

  She gestured impatiently. “We don’t have time for that. Get on up here before it’s too late for everything.”

  It had always been this way between them. Ten seconds together and they were circling each other like curs, hair bristling, looking for the chance to draw first blood.

  Only not today.

  The weight of knowing this would be his final paddle-out, and all the wrong moves that had brought him to this point, left Ethan immune to Sonya’s ire for the first time ever. On any other day, he might have found a bit of humor in the thought that struck as he gripped the lower railing. How being close to death proved to be the only way to put up with his brother’s widow.

  He reached out, offering her the line. “Want to make me fast?”

  Sonya hesitated, as if needing a moment to search out the hidden barb. She took the rope. “I positively loathe to be kept waiting.”

  Sonya had always been impatient with a world that refused to spin at her frenetic pace. He remained silent as he clambered onto the dock. But he pushed himself erect too fast, and the pain in his chest went from bad to unbearable. He clamped his arm to his chest and managed, “Give me a minute.”

  “I don’t have another minute.” She lashed the kayak to a rusting stanchion. “And by the looks of things, neither do you.”

  He breathed around the pain, waiting. Gradually the discomfort fit itself back inside a manageable space. When he could breathe easy once more, he asked, “You heard?”

  “Of course I heard. Why else do you think I’d be out here?”

  A younger voice called from the shore, “Okay, Mom. That’s enough.”

  “Well, really. Timing is everything.” Sonya waved an irritated hand in Ethan’s general direction. “And this man is making us late.”

  “Mom. You told me to say when you were being a pain. This is me doing my job.” The woman walked closer. She was tall and willowy and good-natured, the exact opposite of her mother. “Go start setting up, why don’t you.”

  She so resembled Ethan’s late brother that it took his breath away to look at her. “You’re . . .”

  “Delia. Nice to meet you, Uncle Ethan. Finally.”

  A blade of rage sliced through him. But he could no longer indulge in fury, even when it was justified. Anger magnified what he lived with constantly and turned his pain into a branding iron. Ethan tilted slightly to his left and breathed in and out, waiting for the world to resume its rightful course.

  Even so, the look he gave Sonya was enough to send her scurrying down the pier as she said, “Tell him to hurry.”

  Ethan said to Delia, “I can’t believe I’m just meeting you.”

  “It’s not what you think. Well, okay, maybe it is. At least partly.” Delia had her father’s hair, dark and long. She wore it woven into a rope as thick as her arm. And those eyes. Crystal grey and incredibly intense and constantly looking for a reason to smile. “See, a couple of weeks after I was born, Mom was taken to court by her Washington investors.”

  “Thieves and brigands, the lot of them,” Sonya called back.

  “Fighting them cost Mom everything,” Delia went on. “Her job, her research, her reputation, the works.”

  Ethan allowed himself to be gently ushered back toward the shore. The pier was missing a number of planks, which meant he had to take his gaze off his niece.

  His niece.

  He said, “That was thirty-four years ago.”

  “Right. Thirty-five next week. After that, life just kept getting harder. Her investors claimed the right to buy her company. Mom being Mom, when they pressured her, she somehow misplaced crucial elements of her research.”

  “Correction. I destroyed anything they could possibly use and handed over a smoldering wreck.”

  “See?” Delia smiled. “What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?”

  “They gave me no choice at all,” Sonya huffed from up ahead. “And if you insist on telling our entire past history to this man, you really should try to get it right.”

  Sonya’s ire left her daughter untouched. “Okay, then the investors charged her with theft, larceny, breach of contract, the works. So Mom up and vanished and officially became a fugitive from justice.”

  Sonya reached the end of the pier and stomped across the parking lot. “Give my work to those idiots? I’d rather die.”

  Ethan asked, “Why didn’t you contact me?”

  Delia gave him the sort of patented look that had been Adrian’s trademark in front of juries. A sideways glance that invited everyone to peer beneath the surface and see the truth. “Okay, point of order. You were nine thousand miles away at the time, am I right?”

  “I came home. Occasionally.”

  “So my mother, who did not consider you her closest pal, should have tried to track you down whenever your global surf trek brought you back to this part of the world? Please.”

  “You sound so much like your father it hurts.” And it did. Terribly.

  Delia reached out and took a companionable hold on his arm, like she had been doing it for years. “The short version of what happened next is, I changed my name. Legally became a Smith. Cut all ties to Mom’s past. It was the only way to keep working with her.” She flashed her father’s smile. “Plus, the way Mom described you, I had no reason to contact the ogre from the east.”

  Sonya called back, “How long do we have?”

  Delia checked the timer on her phone. “Fourteen and a half minutes.”

  Sonya paused long enough to glare at Ethan. “Could you possibly walk any slower?”

  When Sonya resumed stomping across the lot, Ethan asked softly, “Why did you bother staying with that woman? I mean, why not just cut and run?” He had to know.

  Delia even had her father’s shrug. A good-natured lifting of chin and shoulders both, a smile that never went further than those incredible eyes. “Mom’s a genius. You need to accept that and move on. Because she’s right. We don’t have much time.”

  Four trucks with empty trailers were parked alongside the boat ramp. The only other two vehicles were Ethan’s ride and a vintage refrigerated truck.

  Ethan watched as Sonya headed for the tr
uck and asked, “Time for what?”

  “We’re here to offer you a chance to save my father’s life.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Delia’s casual comment stopped him entirely. “Is this a joke?”

  “Does Mom look like somebody who has ever, in her entire life, told a joke?” Delia took a firmer grip on his arm and urged him forward. “We know the process works. At least, it does on mice, hamsters, an egret, and three young pigs. You’re our test goat. That’s what Mom calls you.”

  Sonya’s hearing was as sharp as her mind. She yelled back, “You’re not helping!”

  “Actually, I am.” To Ethan, “We know you’re dying. Mom’s been checking. You’ve got, what, three months?”

  “Maybe more.”

  “We understand your pain is getting worse. That much is true, yes?”

  “By the hour.”

  “We’re hoping you would be willing to try and do the impossible.” She offered the day’s best smile. “With a little help from your friends.”

  Ethan only half pretended that his discomfort forced him to walk even slower. She certainly had a point. What was more, despite all the impossibilities he felt a faint spark of hope. It was ridiculous, of course. But there was something to these two women and their intelligence and urgency. Something that defied the fact that Ethan was just weeks from checking out.

  How many nights had he awoken and lain there wishing for a chance to do that day over? Be there by his brother’s side? Save Adrian’s life, even if it meant giving up his own?

  Ethan realized she was watching him. “Can I ask a question?”

  “Manners. Nice. Go for it.”

  “Did Adrian know? About you, I mean. Because he never mentioned that little tidbit to me. I would have remembered.”

  “Mom didn’t know until a couple of weeks after Dad’s funeral.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Drinks all around, right?”

  “Your father used to say that.”

  “I know. I used to beg Mom for stories about Dad. I guess some of them just slipped into my psyche.”

  Sonya reached the truck’s rear doors and paused long enough to glare at her daughter before wrenching open the long metal handles. The doors groaned loudly as they opened.