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Authors: Carolyn McSparren

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David looked at Kate.
“Find the real killer,” she translated. “Give your D.A. another raccoon to tree or whatever they say down here.”
“How do we do that?”
“Investigate.” Arnold said. He sat down and began munching another roll.
“We have an investigator who works for the firm,” Kate said. “He’s not cheap, but he’s good. If Jason didn’t kill Waneath, then whoever picked her up on the road is the most likely suspect.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve already asked for a private autopsy on your behalf.”
“You what?” Jason said from the doorway.
Kate turned to him. “Good morning. Another autopsy from a top forensic pathologist in Memphis. Arnold started the paperwork yesterday afternoon. The body should be delivered to Memphis this morning.”
“You can’t do that!” Jason said. He wore ragged sweats and an Athena High Panthers sweatshirt that sagged at the neck.
“It’s the obvious next step. The coroner in Athena isn’t even an M.D., just a funeral director. He barely touched the body. We want to have accurate data on time of death, cause of death, whether or not she was raped...”
“She wasn’t raped. Dad, you’ve got to stop her.”
“She knows what she’s doing.”
“We’ve also asked for a full toxicology screening to see whether there were any drugs in her system.”
“We were drinking beer, okay? I told you that. Listen, you work for me. And I say no.”
“And I say yes,” Dub spoke from behind Jason’s shoulder. “She may work for you, young man, but I’m gonna help pay the bill on this.”
“But Granddaddy...”
“Don’t you granddaddy me. We’ve got to nip this foolishness in the bud. I won’t have you going to trial over something you didn’t do.”
“I won’t go to trial, and if I do I’ll be acquitted. I mean, this is America, right? I mean it’s
The Big Clock
. The good guy always gets off at the last minute.”
“This is real life, not a movie,” David said.
“What the hell do you know? You always get off,” Jason snarled. A moment later they heard his bare feet slap the marble stairs as he ran upstairs.
“Ooooo-kay, that’s it,” Kate said, putting down her napkin and pushing her chair back. “Dub, have some breakfast. I’ll be right back.”
She reached Jason’s bedroom door only seconds after he slammed it. She knocked and called out, “Jason, let me in.”
“Go away.”
“The heck I will.” She opened the door. The room was at least as big as the guest room in which she’d slept, and every wall was papered with movie posters. The horizontal surfaces were drowning in clothes, shoes, papers, books, pages of what appeared to be scripts in shiny black covers. There was a big computer with an oversize screen on the desk in the corner, a scanner, some other equipment Kate couldn’t identify and a big handheld video camera on a tripod in the corner. It was the room of a creative male slob with a great many interests, none of which included order. It was also the room of a male who was used to having someone else pick up after him.
“Good grief,” Kate said. “Is that an original
Revenge of the Jedi
poster over your bed?”
“Yeah. Cool, huh?”
“Expensive. They’re very rare.”
“My dad gave it to me for Christmas last year.” He turned away and Kate saw his fists clench at his sides.
“Enough small talk. Sit down.”
“I didn’t ask you up here.”
“Don’t be a jerk.” Kate pulled out the chair from behind his computer desk, stacked half a dozen scripts onto the floor on top of at least a dozen others and sat. After a moment in which she was afraid he’d simply walk out, Jason sat on the edge of the bed with his knees apart and his hands hanging between his knees. He refused to meet her eyes.
“You are obviously planning to use your twenty-five years in Parchman as the basis of a documentary,” Kate said.
“Hey!”
She opened her hands. “What else can I think? If you really believe that innocent people don’t go to jail in this country, you have been watching too damn many movies. I recommend you watch
The Shawshank Redemption
and
Cool Hand Luke
. Then tell me prison life is what you want.”
“Listen, you’re my lawyer, you’ve got to do what I tell you, right?”
“Within reason.”
“Then go down to that D.A. and see what kind of a deal you can make me.”
Kate’s heart fell. “So you did kill her.”
Jason swarmed off the bed and bolted toward the window. Kate came up out of her chair. For a moment she was afraid he planned to jump.
“I’m responsible for her death.”
“You hit her with your tire iron?” Kate tried to keep her voice level.
He turned to look at her. “What tire iron? No. Man, I’d never hit a woman, and I don’t even have a tire iron.” He seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Why not? They come with the car.”
“Yeah, well, last August I was trying to break my out-board-motor mounts loose on the ski boat and I kind of dropped the tire iron in the lake.” He shrugged. “I guess I forgot to get another one.”
Kate took a deep breath. “That’s one of the things the police have against you—your missing tire iron. If you didn’t hit her, then responsible or not, you are not
guilty
of her death.”
“But I left her on the road in the middle of the night. Man, it was real warm for Thanksgiving weekend, you know, but it was still cold. And I just drove off and left her.” His voice broke, and Kate suddenly saw not a truculent young man, but a very frightened nineteen-year-old boy, eaten up with guilt and pain.
“Tell me something, Jason. You’ve been at school for less than three months and California is a long way to fly for Thanksgiving. Why did you come home?”
He flushed. “It’s just the three of us, you know? I thought my granddaddy would be lonesome.”
Not his father, but his grandfather. Kate continued gently, “How about you?”
“Yeah, okay, I missed everybody, all right? It’s not like we can’t afford it or anything.” He turned back to the window. “Man, I wish now I’d gone to Carmel like they wanted me to.”
“Who wanted?”
“Some friends, that’s all.”
“So you came home when?”
“I told you this yesterday.”
“Tell me again.”
He heaved a cavernous sigh and sat on the bed. “My dad picked me up in Memphis about eight Wednesday night. Thursday we had Thanksgiving dinner around two, and then I lazed around here watching football for a while.”
“Who called who?”
“Waneath called me. Said some of the old crowd were getting together Saturday night and would I pick her up. I mean, she sounded like it was no big deal, you know?”
Kate nodded. “But it was.”
“The party was out at the Blue Jack. We had a couple of beers, and I was having a good time seeing everybody, but Waneath kept trying to drag me out. Finally we had a fight about it.”
“But still you went.”
“Yeah. I mean she was my date, right?”
“And you thought you’d have sex.”
“Okay, so I thought we’d have sex. What’s wrong with that? It’s not like it was the first time.”
“Can you show me where you were?”
For the first time Jason hesitated. “Why’d you want to go over there?”
“I want to see the place you say you left her.”
“I did leave her there. I mean, we had sex, and then she hit me with...” He took a deep breath. “Okay, this is the truth.”
It was Kate’s turn to heave a sigh. “Well, finally.”
“She wanted us to get married.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She told me we could get married at Christmas, and then she could go back to California with me.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “To do what? Go to school?”
He shrugged. “To be the next Pamela Lee to hear her tell it.”
“And you weren’t interested.”
“I’m a freshman in college, for God’s sake. I don’t want to get married!”
“Then she told you she was pregnant.”
“No! She never told me she was pregnant. I didn’t know she was pregnant until the sheriff told me.”
“It wasn’t yours?”
“No way.”
Kate leaned back in the desk chair and stared at him wordlessly. He squirmed. She was certain he was still holding something back, but she didn’t think that something was an attack with a tire iron. She could see him making Waneath get out of the car, but more likely she got out of her own free will, expecting him to sweet-talk her back in so that they could make up.
What she’d wanted meant responsibility and growing up and the end of his career and life plans. He wouldn’t have thought beyond putting the pedal to the metal. He was an irresponsible nineteen-year-old nitwit. But not a killer.
She said conversationally, “So you plan to expiate your guilt by going to jail for twenty-five years?”
“Yeah. No! I don’t know.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I knew I shouldn’t have left her there, but, man, she made me so mad.”
“You did go back,” Kate said gently.
“Oh, sure, I went back. But by then she was gone.” The face he turned toward Kate was tear-stained. “I tried to find her. I drove around and I yelled...”
“And then what?”
He shrugged. “I was pretty wasted. I mean, we’d been drinking beer and getting it on and fighting and stuff. I figured somebody’d picked her up. I came home and went to bed. I was still asleep when Sheriff Tait showed up around noon.”
“Okay. What are you leaving out?”
“Nothing!” It was a wail. “Look, I saw what Waneath’s mother did to you. I knew she’d be mad at me for leaving Waneath that way, but she really thinks I did it, you know? No matter what happens I can’t ever come back to Athena.” He fell back onto the bed. “Not that I want to.”
“What do you want to do?”
He sat up and waved a hand at the posters on the wall. “Make movies. I’m going to make it too.” He glanced at the door and curled his lip. “Not like my dad.”
Kate felt her heart leap in her chest. Was that it? Jason thought his dad was a quitter because he gave up an acting career to marry Melba and be a farmer. “Your dad did what he thought was right.”
“Sure. Like he ever gave a damn.”
“He gives a damn about you.”
“Right.”
Kate stood up. “Okay, here’s the deal. You’re going to have to work out your guilt over leaving Waneath on that road, and I have no idea how you’re going to do it. What you are
not
going to do, however, is plead guilty to salve your conscience. I guarantee you that two days after you got to Parchman you’d realize what a bad bargain you made. Maybe you can make documentaries that save humanity from famine or something. That’s up to you. But if you’re telling me the truth about not hitting Waneath, then you didn’t kill her. Now, come get some breakfast and act like a rational human being for a change.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Of course you are. You’re nineteen.” Kate stopped with her hand on the door. “Oh, and later on this morning you’re going to give me the name of every friend the two of you had in high school, everybody who was at that party, everything you can remember from the minute you got off that airplane in Memphis. You’re going to make a list of every old beau of Waneath’s and anyone and everyone else in this town that she might have run into on that road.”
“But...”
“And another thing. Whether it’s me or somebody else, your attorney has one job—to get you acquitted. If you get in the way, I’ll run over you.”
She left the room before he could say anything. At the head of the stairs she leaned on the balcony railing and looked down at the empty foyer, trying to catch her breath. Maybe she was being too trusting, but she believed he didn’t kill Waneath.
Was her sixth sense about Jason because he was David’s son? She sure didn’t owe David a damn thing. He’d tricked her into coming, he’d tricked her into spending the night thinking about him. Maybe Jason was tricking her as well, but she didn’t think so.
She felt the old swell of enthusiasm whenever she got her teeth into a case she believed in. She started down the stairs. By the time she reached the last step, she’d decided.
For better or worse, she was going to get Jason Canfield out of this mess.
CHAPTER FIVE
 
“W
HERE’S ARNOLD?” Kate asked when she walked back into the kitchen.
“He and Dub are in the library,” David answered. “He’s calling Atlanta to see when that investigator of yours can get here.”
“Oh.” She leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms across her chest. “Are you absolutely certain you want to go on with this? With me as defense counsel, that is.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Answer my question. This is Jason’s life we’re dealing with. You want the best, not someone who hasn’t had a criminal case in over six months.”
“Before I give you an answer, you give me one. Why did you stop practicing criminal law?”
She closed her eyes, and the familiar sensation of fear and loathing began to surface. “I owe you that.”
“And tell me what the differences are between the civil stuff you’re doing now and what you were doing before.”
“Sensible questions.” She smiled at him ruefully and walked around the table to sit opposite him. “Questions you probably should have asked before you brought me down here.”
He picked her cup and his off the table, and went to the half-full carafe of coffee on the counter. She could feel him behind her, hear the soft sound of his breathing. Why had she never been as physically aware of another human being? He laid his hand on her shoulder. His long fingers kneaded her muscles with a tenderness that she’d never known from anyone else.
“I needed you,” he said softly. He continued in a normal voice. “But I also knew you were a hell of a lawyer.”
She took a deep breath. “So sit down and let’s talk. Lawyer talk.” She took a hefty swig of her coffee that came close to burning the roof of her mouth. He sat opposite and watched her.
“You wanted to know the difference between civil and criminal law,” she said. “The rules of evidence are different, for one thing. Civil verdicts are based on preponderance of evidence; criminal cases are based on reasonable doubt. In civil cases the defendant usually testifies. More and more defendants are not testifying in criminal cases because it leaves them open to cross-examination.”
“Have the rules changed in the last year?”
“No.”
“Then you still know what you’re doing. Where’s the problem?”
She walked over to stare out the breakfast-room window at the November sun sparkling on the waters of the swimming pool. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
“And that means?”
“When Alec was alive I had a mentor and a colleague as well as a husband. Whenever I went off half-cocked on some crusade, he was there to haul me back. Just before he died I was in the middle of a big arson case. My client was a rent-a-cop in an apartment complex. He discovered a fire, turned in the alarm and got everybody out. He was a hero until they arrested him.”
“Sounds like an innocent man to me.”
“In arson cases the person who turns in the alarm, especially if it’s a guard who winds up being hailed as a hero, is invariably the prime suspect. Fits the profile. You know what happened in Atlanta during the Olympics. I was certain this was the same miscarriage of justice. So was the jury. He was acquitted.”
“You did your job.”
“And I was damn proud of it, until two months later when he was caught red-handed setting a fire in the basement of a nursing home.” She turned back to David. “Two people died before they could get them out. I as good as killed those people, because I believed in him, believed in my judgment.”
“That’s ridiculous.” He set his cup down and came to her. He put his hands on her arms and held her at arm’s length. “You didn’t know.”
“I should have known.”
Without warning he pulled her to him, wrapped his arms around her and whispered, “You keep forgetting you’re only human, Katie. You don’t know everything.”
He lifted her chin. She knew there were tears in her eyes. She also knew that standing like this against his body felt right, as if he was the shelter she’d sought for so long and had not found. But as he lowered his mouth toward hers, she pulled away and snapped, “Don’t.”
“It’s what we both want.”
“No, we don’t. Or if we do, we shouldn’t” She pushed past him. “The past is dead and buried. You are my client’s father, and that’s all you’ll be or I’ll walk away from this now.”
“Does that mean you’re staying?”
“In the Paradise Motel and only until we get the preliminaries over with. I intend to be in Atlanta for Christmas.”
“With whom?”
She flushed. There was nobody, not even Alec’s children, both of whom lived hundreds of miles away, or her mother, who had no intention of leaving her buddies in Florida. “That’s none of your business. And remember, that’s all that is between us. Business.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“Then I’ll make that pledge for both of us. I’m going to find Arnold.” With that, she left the breakfast room, and walked briskly down the hall in search of her partner. She found Arnold and Dub in the living room.
Dub sat in a big leather wing chair by the fireplace with his everyday boots on the heavy slab of marble that served as a coffee table. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be asleep.
Over the mantelpiece, carefully lit by special lights, was the misty portrait of a woman stretched languidly on a white wicker chaise longue in a flower garden. In the curve of her arm stood a girl of about four or five, barefoot and tousled. It was a beautiful picture, all soft pastels, with the rosy resonance of an early Renoir.
Kate nearly backed out of the room. She had seen pictures of Melba Mays with David, on stage and off, the year before she graduated, before Kate had arrived at school to take David away from her.
This woman looked very much like those pictures, but the clothes were more old-fashioned. And David and Melba didn’t have a daughter, did they? She realized he could have a dozen kids by Melba without her being any the wiser.
Behind her, David said quietly, “That’s Melba with her mother. Melba was about three at the time.”
On closer inspection, Kate felt a frisson of disquiet as she looked at the direct, intense gaze with which both subjects stared out at the world. Although the picture might be ethereal, the two subjects were anything but. Kate had an idea she’d discovered from which side of the family Melba got her unshakable determination to get what she wanted at any price.
Arnold sat on the edge of Dub’s broad partner’s desk with his back to the room, and the phone seemed to grow out of his left ear. “Well, find me somebody,” he said, and slammed the phone into its cradle. He noticed Kate in the doorway and gave her an exasperated shrug. “Mahoney broke an ankle jumping off some cheating husband’s second-floor fire escape,” he said.
“Drat,” Kate said. She said to David, “The firm’s P.I.” Then to Arnold, “Are they going to locate a substitute?”
“Not immediately. Are we turning this over to Haskind and Vortiger?” He glanced at David. “Remember Kate told you about the murder twins?”
“As of this moment,” Kate said, “you’re moving us to the Paradise Motel. We’re back in the criminal-defense business.”
“Yes!” Arnold said and pumped his arm straight up and down. “About time you stopped having the vapors.”
“Thank you very much.”
Dub stirred and opened one eye. “Shoot. More foolishness. Good money after bad.”
“What happens now?” David asked.
“We start interviewing the kids at that party after we get the list from Jason.”
“I know most of them,” David said.
She sighed. “Arnold can set us up at the motel, and baby-sit the paperwork with the sheriff and the D.A. All we need is a couple of other suspects. And somebody who knows Jason hasn’t owned a tire iron since summer.”
“I know that much,” Dub said.
“Great witness you’d make, old man,” David said affectionately.
“David’s right,” Kate added. “Let me go get my stuff ready, and we’ll head out.”
“See you sometime this evening at the motel,” Arnold said, turning back to the telephone. “Great to have you back, boss-lady.”
She made a face at him.
 
“I KNOW YOU’D RATHER do this without me,” David said as he turned his car in the direction of town. “But this is one time when you need me as your stalking-horse. I know the people on that list Jason gave you. I can at least introduce you—pave the way.” He glanced over at her. She stared out the window as though the endless acres of plowed fields were the finest scenery in the world.
“I wrote you a dozen letters when your husband died,” he said abruptly.
She turned to stare at him. “I never got them.”
He grinned ruefully. “That’s because I tore them all up. Save you the trouble, I guess.”
“What did they say?”
“That I was sorry for your loss.” They’d said a great deal more than that. The pile of letters he’d written to her over the years, far from being in bits and pieces, lay in the bottom drawer of his desk in his office under lock and key. He kept telling himself he ought to destroy them. Some of them, especially the early ones when he was very young and very horny, were pretty raw.
He’d started writing them first when she refused to see him, refused even to let him know where she was staying. He’d hoped to get friends to pass them along to her, but before he could, Melba had dropped her bombshell.
He supposed there’d been other alternatives to marrying Melba and moving to Mississippi. Live in New York, try to get Kate back, struggle after a second-rate career, or take up working as a full-time waiter. Let Melba have the baby alone. Send support checks when he could. Neither abortion nor adoption had ever been an option. Not for him.
If he’d been able to talk to Kate, maybe he would have explored those other options, but once the divorce was final, he felt he had only one responsibility—to be a decent husband and a good father. The prospect of his baby was the only thing that kept him sane. That, and Dub, who’d set about turning him into a farmer the first afternoon they’d met. David had always loved growing things, working beside his father among the roses. But that was entirely different from farming as a business. At least it had given him a way to submerge his misery.
What did it matter where he lived or with whom? It wasn’t as though Melba had not been a good friend in times past. Even a good lover, before he discovered real love with Kate.
Even after he realized Melba had set out to break up his marriage, he couldn’t hate her, because he understood her. She’d always had her own way. If he was the golden boy, she was definitely the golden girl. The only difference between them was that she was willing to do just about anything to make her desires come true. And nobody, least of all David’s wife, was going to stand in her way.
Give her credit. She’d settled down to try to make him happy once she got him.
That was the thing. They’d both tried too hard. Trying had probably killed her. They’d both spent their time compensating for wrongs they’d committed. She, because she’d destroyed his marriage, and he, because he could never truly love her.
He realized Kate was speaking to him and drew his attention back to her. “What did you say?”
“I asked where we’re headed first.”
“I’ve got to go by the gin to make sure the last of the cotton is baled and ready for shipment before we get started on Jason. You mind?”
“Not at all. I’ve never seen a cotton gin in action.”
“You probably won’t today either. Just a bunch of trucks being loaded. After that, our next stop is Jimmy Viccolla. He’s the best mechanic in these parts and Jason’s best friend.”
“You think he saw Jason drop his tire iron in the lake last summer?”
“Possibly. And he would know whether Jason replaced it.” David shook his head. “Kids. If he had managed to break that motor mount loose, he’d have dropped the motor into the lake as well.”
“He has his own ski boat?”
“Actually, it’s Dub’s big bass boat, but in the summertime Jason uses it most weekends, or did. He’s a safe driver. I never had to worry about him on the water.”
“How about on land?”
David nodded. “Here we are.” He turned into the gravel parking area in front of a high metal building with open sides. Several men were sitting around smoking, while a big truck with its tailgate wide open sat backed up to the loading dock. There were several enormous bales of hay on the truck, but room for plenty more.
“Hell,” David snapped. “Wait here.” He climbed out of the car and sauntered toward the men, not betraying his anger by so much as a clenched fist or tightened shoulder muscles.
The moment they saw him approach they dropped their cigarettes and ground them out underfoot They knew the restrictions against smoking around the cotton. He’d ream them out later. At the moment his primary concern was that cotton. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said casually. “Little early for a break, isn’t it?”
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