Love Remains by Kaye Dacus

doesn’t contain much information. There are two people we are especially interested in investigating. The first is the agency’s director, Dennis Forrester. Undergraduate degree in civil engineering from the University of North Carolina. Worked as a city planner and zoning official in several places for the first twenty years of his career, then must have gone through a midlife crisis because he moved to Nashville and went back to school to pursue his graduate degree in historic preservation at James Robertson University. He’s been the director of the commission for going on ten years now. We will need to look into his financials, because he seems pretty well-to-do for someone who’s been the head of a government-funded nonprofit agency for that long.”
    Bobby started a list of actionable items under Forrester’s name down the left side of the page. He drew a line down the middle. “And the other person of interest?”
    Carroll looked down at the file and frowned, thumbed through a couple of pages, then flipped back to the beginning of the file. He turned to call for his secretary over his shoulder. “I seem to be missing a page from my notes, but I have some of the pertinent information here. If I recall, the person’s title was assistant director and seniorpreservationist. Um…let’s see…oh, here we go. Bachelor’s in history from Vanderbilt; master’s and PhD from Robertson, and all in six years.” Carroll’s secretary stepped into the room. “Julie, I’m missing the page on—”
    The middle-aged woman handed him a sheet of paper. “I saw it sitting on my desk just as you called for me. Sorry about that.”
    “Not a problem. Thank you.” The secretary left, and Carroll looked down at the page. He frowned. “Looks like there’s a typo on this. I’ll get her to fix it before she makes you a copy of the file. Okay. Says here the assistant director and senior preservationist is named Dr. Sarah Mitchell.”
    Bobby’s heart dropped into his stomach. That was why the name of the agency seemed familiar. “Sir, is the first name spelled with a Z?”
    Carroll looked down at the page then up that Bobby in astonishment. “How did you know?”
    Bobby thought he might be sick. “It’s not a typo, sir. Her name is Zarah.”
    Carroll rocked back in his chair. “Do you know her? Should I assign this case to someone else?”
    With every fiber of his being, Bobby believed in Zarah’s innocence. But he had seen far too many assistant directors and vice presidents thrown under the bus and convicted of crimes perpetrated by their superiors to let someone else handle this case. “No, sir. I want this case.”

Chapter 7

    A nd that’s why we live in Nash ville and not Nash borough . Because during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, we didn’t like the British, but we did like the French. So they changed the settlement’s name to the French ville rather than the British borough.”
    Zarah looked over the group of homeschooled children. Ranging in age from four to late teens, it was hard to gear her regular talk on Nashville’s history toward one end of the spectrum without either totally confusing or totally boring the other. However, she was starting to lose all of them.
    “Who here has ever heard of David Crockett?”
    Eyes lit up, hands flew into the air. She could always reel them back in with Davy Crockett—though they weren’t necessarily always thrilled to learn that the “King of the Wild Frontier” wasn’t nearly as glamorous as the TV shows and movies made him out to be.
    Zarah continued the educational tour of the small museum that took up the entire first floor of the Middle Tennessee Historic Preservation Commission’s building. Now that everybody was back in school, she would have one of these field-trip groups to entertain and try to teach something at least once a week until Thanksgiving. She had learned over the years to structure these types of instructional lessons