Count on Me (Petal, Georgia) (41 page)

She didn’t have as much time to work before she had to stop and get ready for Shane to come over, but it was worth it. She’d missed her uncle more than she’d thought she did. Hearing his voice made her smile, and after she’d briefed him about the situation with Hicks, she ended up spending far more time telling him about Royal and her growing feelings for him.

It had kept her busy, and prevented her from thinking too deeply on anything but putting one foot in front of the other.

Royal came looking handsome and all cleaned up while she’d been making a fresh pot of coffee, and they’d just poured two cups when there was the sound of a car approaching the house.

Royal stilled. “We’ll both go to the door.”

Nodding, she took his hand, and they walked to the front and peeked out before opening up and stepping onto the porch.

It wasn’t Shane, but Shep who’d approached and parked. The words sending him back to school were on her tongue until her grandfather got out as well.

Fuck. She didn’t have the reserves to deal with another fight with her grandparents.

James raised a hand in a wave as they came up the steps to the doorway where Caroline and Royal stood. “I let Shep leave school for this meeting on the promise that I’d get to come along.”

“Why is that?”

“You and I have some things to work though. I’m sorry, Caroline. I failed you in a lot of ways, and I don’t know if you can get past it. But I hope so. I’d like you to give me a chance, and I’d also like to come in and hear what Shane Chase has to say.”

Caroline took a deep breath and stepped from the way, motioning them into the house. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Shep, show him where it’s at. Shane’s pulling up to the house now.” She waved his way and they all went inside.

Royal watched her. His usually confident Caroline was nervous. There were chinks in her normally self-assured armor of confidence. He wanted to comfort her, but it was clear she was holding on by her fingernails.

They all settled around the kitchen table.

“We served the warrant, like I said.” Shane sipped his coffee. “And he freaking ran. We chased him and brought his butt back to his apartment where they were doing the search. Hicks didn’t want to go back inside, and when we got into the living room, I knew why.”

“Why do I want to cringe before I even know?”

“The whole room was papered with pictures of you, Caroline. Newspaper articles you wrote going back as far as your first year in college. And the pictures he took from your apartment were up on the wall too.”

“There’s your link.”

Royal’s stomach bottomed out. He leaned a little closer, bumping his thigh to hers.

“Yes, there’s our link on the stalking, and as we’re all standing there in his living room, he knows it. So we take him back to the station in Porter and, I shit you not, I turn on the recorder, introduce myself and the other officer in the room and he just starts talking. He starts
confessing
. He’d been obsessed with your mother. In the search they found some of what we think is the hair taken from her at the scene. He had pictures of her too. Polaroids usually shot from what looks like a dumpster at the back of the diner. Stacks of them he had in a box with a locket necklace that had pictures of Enrique and you guys in it.”

“My mother had a locket. It had their wedding picture and then a tiny department-store picture of me and Mindy holding baby Shep. It was white gold with rose-gold accents. I think it had little diamond chips in it. Nothing flashy.”

“That’s what we found. Anyway she was nice to him, he said, but she always turned him down. So he waited for your father to make a run to the bank as the diner cleaned up and readied for the next day. Hicks came in when your mother was alone and he killed her. He described the kind of knife. It’s what killed her. He never knew Joyce Marie saw him. But he heard you on the radio, and then he saw you on television because he keeps up on you, what you’re doing, where you’re going. So he listened to that radio show, and it enraged him. And then the television. He knew you had to go and he had plans to kill you. He wrote them down in a notebook and he also told them to us.”

“Why? Why would he tell you all this? This guy should be savvy. He’s done some time. He should know the drill.”

“Right? So there I am, I can’t figure that out. I’m poking around, asking him questions trying to figure it out when he tries to make a deal to keep us from putting him back inside. Turns out he’s ripped off a local drug dealer who has a lot of
associates
doing time. Hicks panicked, and then he lost his control and confessed to try to save himself. He’s seriously scared of this dealer he screwed over. So much he didn’t even make a fuss about moving to Petal. Figured his attorney would fight it just to slow things down. Guess Petal’s lack of drug lords in the cells was a better option than fighting because once he got himself a lawyer, no one said a thing about it.”

“Pity.”

Shane sighed. “So there you go. He confessed. On tape. There’s so much evidence in his apartment I had nightmares. He definitely needs to be off the streets. We have his journals, which he stashed in a friend’s garage with all his boxes of trophies, while he did time. There are other victims. I’m sure of it. The state folks are already looking at it, and since he’s moved around across several states, the federal people are too. Your father, Enrique Mendoza, did not kill your mother, Bianca Mendoza. Please count on my help when you go through the process to clear him posthumously. I’m deeply sorry that shoddy investigation by a racist incompetent let the man who killed walk free, and an innocent man spent thirteen years in prison on death row. I’m sorry Petal PD had any part of it.”

“You helped solve it. You can’t own what the other guy did, as people tell me so often. You made it right because your department has the integrity his lacked. Thank you.”

“The prosecutor will call you about interviewing you and getting evidence from you. He’s interested in seeing your files that you put together.”

She got up and brought him out a huge three-ring binder and then a smaller one. “I have them copied in bulk.”

They walked Shane to the door and he drove away.

Shep sat at the table, his hands clasped tightly. “You did it.”

“I’m not even sure how to put it all into words.” She smiled at Shep and he got up to hug her. “But I’m glad you were here to hear it with me.”

Shep sat again as uncertainty rose from where her grandfather sat.

“I had a lot of help. So much help. There’s still a ways to go though, so it’s best to brace yourself for a long process. But I’m hopeful and I’m going to allow myself that hope. And now people can see Dad didn’t do it.”

She turned to her grandfather. Royal stood close enough that the heat of him blanketed her back as she faced one of her demons. “He’s innocent.”

James cocked his head. “It appears that way.”

“He’s innocent,” she repeated. Because it was important. If they ever were to get to a place where she could work things out with her grandparents, they needed to admit it.

Her grandfather understood and took a deep breath. “Yes. He’s innocent. I misjudged you and your father. Now that we’ve got all this proof, your grandmother will come around. Mindy too. We really had no idea you’d been threatened and harmed to that degree. If we’d have known…”

“You
did
know. You
knew
someone shot at me and you never called to check on me. Not once. You
knew
my apartment had been broken into. You
knew
my car had been vandalized. And you never called. Now that you know the truth and it’s been proven by another person, you want to just what? Pretend none of that happened? She slapped me. And she threatened me to never see my brother and sister again. It was bad enough you threw me out, thank goodness for the Mendozas. Because
they
finished raising me. They dealt with my grief and pain, and they sent me off to college and law school. They came to my graduations too. For a long time I pretended it didn’t matter. I pretended that I could make this better if I was just more of this or less of that. But it never worked, and it won’t because I can’t be anything but what I am. And I don’t even want to. So I accept your apology from earlier. But I don’t know how I’m going to be taking any new steps back toward you all.”

“That’s fair. She was wrong to have hurt you. Wrong to have threatened you. She and I had a very bitter disagreement once I found out. We love you. All three of you. We did what we thought was best but we messed up. People make mistakes.”

“I love you too. But I need some time and some space away from you and Abigail. I’m sorry your daughter died. You didn’t deserve that.” Caroline hugged him.

“Thank you for finding her killer,” he whispered before kissing her cheek and leaving with Shep.

Shep came back inside. He hugged Caroline tight. He was so lost, her baby brother.

She hugged him back. “It’s okay. He’s behind bars. At last. He’ll pay, Shep. He’ll pay for what he’s done to our family.”

“I can’t quite believe it. I want us all to meet. You, me and Mindy. She needs to think this through. Especially now. We need to stick together. All three of us for Mom and Dad. She needs her letters.”

“What if we misjudge, and she destroys them or tells Grandma about them? My heart breaks to imagine how she’ll feel later when she realizes she was wrong.”

“Don’t baby her. Everyone babies her. She needs to accept what is true. She’s a grown woman, and she has to choose her freaking future. Garrett, whose anger will turn on her some day? Or us? The truth? And we need to be a united front to make sure everything happens the way it should and Vernon Hicks is the one behind bars. This is a big job and you’ve done it alone long enough. The three of us can do the job together.”

“You’re an admirable young man, Quique.”

“Did he really call me that?”

“Everyone called you that. Mom did, Mindy and I did.”

“Where did Shep come from? That’s all I ever remember.”

“Grandma used to call you that. She felt Quique and Enrique were too hard to pronounce. She said she liked it because Shepard was her paternal grandmother’s name.”

“I’m going back to Mendoza. I’ve thought about it for a while.”

She looked at her brother. “You don’t need to decide right now. Baby steps and we’ll get through this just fine. It’s your name if you want it. If you don’t, that’s not a thing either. Understand?”

He hugged Caroline again. “I do. I love you. I have a final in my last period so I gotta get back to school. I’ll call you.”

She watched them drive away as she leaned in to Royal.

“I can’t quite believe it.”

Royal brought her back inside, closing the door and locking it.

“You’re afraid to believe it.”

“Yeah, that too.”

He turned off lights and the coffeemaker and drew her back to the bedroom. “No way, buster. I have to go to work. I can’t be taking fuck breaks.”

He laughed but after he stole a kiss, he sobered. “You’re not going in.”

“Am so.”

“Oooh, will you say that and stomp so your boobs jiggle? It’d be even better if you pouted a little.”

Her brows flew up, and Royal knew he was on the right track. Ever since he’d met her, she’d kept a tight rein on her feelings about the whole mess she’d pretty much dragged single-handedly over the finish line. In the end people helped her, yes, but it was her dogged perseverance that won out.

But he knew she pushed her emotions—vulnerability, doubts and fears, her survivor’s guilt, her grief and her anger—out of her mind. To examine them would have been to pull her foundations down when she needed to keep strong.

But she paid a price for it. A big one and he was over watching her bear everyone else’s weight and never thinking about dropping her burdens every once in a while.

And you needed to. It was a safety valve that prevented you from exploding.

“So here’s a thing, the police just arrested the man responsible for killing your mother when you were just fifteen years old. The same guy who let your dad go to prison. The one who tore your family apart. He’s why Quique is Shep now and why Mindy is with a dingus like Garret. And then he stalked you and hurt you and made you scared all the time. The man who did all that damage to you is finally known and in jail.”

“Yes.” She was aiming at bland, he could tell, but she missed that by a mile. “But I still have to go to work.”

“There’ll be work tomorrow and Sunday and Monday and beyond, now that the piece of human garbage who has terrorized you for sixteen years is finally fucking dealt with.”

“I can’t do this right now.”

“Just another week. Or another month. Just until we figure out who the guy is. Just until he’s arrested. Now it’s what? Just until trial? Just until he’s sentenced? Goes to prison? How long, Caroline, are you going to push fifty percent of what you should feel away, and when is it going to break through? Vernon Hicks killed your mother. She would have been scared and in pain. And alone on that floor as Hicks walked away like she was nothing. Your poor father. Walking in on that? Of course he was incoherent for a while. And then he got railroaded and sent off to death row. And your entire life continued to just plummet as you refused to believe your father was guilty, and your grandparents, grief laden and selfish, pushed you away for it instead of trying to deal with it head-on. And then, you had to leave here. Leave everything you ever knew, and while the Mendozas love you, you had this whole side of your life you needed so badly and it just wasn’t there.” He pushed her to the mattress where she watched him through exhausted, wary eyes.