The Last Breath (2 page)

1

FOR AID WORKERS,
home can mean a lot of things. A two-bedroom ranch with a picket fence. A fourth-story walk-up in the city. A mud hut under a banana tree. A country listed on a passport. It can be big or small or anything in between.

One thing all these homes share, though, is that aid workers miss them. They long to go there. They are homesick.

Not me. I’ve spent the past sixteen years running from my home, and what happened there. Could have lived the rest of my life never returning to the place where I will always be known as the murderer’s daughter.

And yet here I sit in my old driveway, in a rental parked behind a shiny new Buick. More than thirty-six hours into this new disaster—my disaster—and I’ve accomplished exactly nothing more than a crusty coffee stain down the front of my jeans and a mean case of jet lag.

Embrace the chaos, Gia.
Over the course of the past seven thousand miles, it has become my mantra.

Uncle Cal climbs out of his car, and he’s wearing his usual outfit: gleaming reptile skin stretched across pointy cowboy boots, Brooks Brothers suit of smoky pin-striped wool, black leather jacket worn soft and supple. Here in the hills of Appalachia, it’s a look perfectly suitable for church, a fancy restaurant or a courtroom. As one of the highest paid criminal lawyers in Tennessee, Cal’s worn it in all three.

I follow his lead and step out of the rental. It’s mid-February and Rogersville—a tiny blip on the Eastern Tennessee map—is in the death throes of winter. My ancient fleece is not equipped to handle the Appalachian Mountain cold, and I long for my winter coat, still in mothballs in a London suburb. Cal opens his arms and I step into their warmth, inhaling his familiar scent, a combination of leather, designer aftershave and Juicy Fruit gum.

“Welcome home, baby girl,” he says into my hair.

Home.

I twist my neck to face the house I’ve not seen for sixteen years, and a shudder of something unpleasant hits me between the shoulder blades. Once a place that instilled in me a sense of refuge and comfort, this house now provokes the exact opposite. Grief. Fear. Dread. This house isn’t home. Home shouldn’t give you the creeps.

Cal’s hands freeze on my protruding scapula and he steps back, his gaze traveling down my frame. Thanks to a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning last month, it’s a good ten pounds lighter than the last time he hugged me, back when I was already high-school skinny. “I thought you were putting an end to the famine, not succumbing to it.”

“If you’re ever on the Horn of Africa, you should probably stay away from the street stalls in Dadaab. Just because they claim their meat is fresh doesn’t mean it’s true. Or for that matter, that it’s even meat.”

“Good tip.” He pulls the toothpick from his molars and gives me his trademark squint, but there’s a smile in his tone. “I’ll try to remember that.”

A lucky break Cal had called it when he finally tracked me down in Kenya. There was more, something about a perjury scandal and a diagnosis that required full-time, in-home hospice care, but by then I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy wondering on what planet capping off sixteen years of high-security confinement by coming home to die would be considered lucky.

I swallow a sudden lump. “Is he in a lot of pain?”

Cal doesn’t have to ask who I mean, and at the reminder of the cancer squeezing his only brother’s pancreas, grief muddies his brow. “Not yet. But he will be very soon.”

The lump returns and puts down roots.

“For an innocent man to end his prison term like this...” He sighs, and his breath makes puffy wisps in the February air. “I’ve got lots of choice words to say about it, none of them fit for your ears.”

From the moment Cal arrived on the scene—before my father was a suspect, before he signed on as my father’s attorney, even before Ella Mae’s body had been photographed and bagged and carried away—his belief in my father’s innocence has been unwavering.

For me, the situation was never that clear. If I thought my father was capable of murder, that he premeditated and carried out a plan to suffocate Ella Mae Andrews, his wife and my stepmother, I’m not certain I could forgive either him or his behavior. In fact, I’m not certain I would even be here, that I would have traveled all this way for a last goodbye.

But I came all this way because I’m not certain. In my father’s case, the evidence is unclear, the testimony conflicted. The shadows of my doubt run in both directions.

I stuff my icy hands into my front jeans pockets and shiver, not merely from the cold.

Cal takes the gesture as his cue and reaches into his pocket, where a set of keys jingles. “Ready to get inside before you freeze to death?”

No. My heart races, and every tiny hair soldiers to attention on the back of my neck, commanding me to run. Never again. No.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

I follow Cal up the five steps to the wraparound porch, summoning the detached efficiency that’s made me one of Earth Aid International’s top disaster relief experts. I can’t manage even an ounce of objectivity. This disaster is too close, its aftermath still too painful. I can’t detach from its reality.

A reality that, according to the doctors, could last anywhere from three weeks to three months.

“The renters moved out about six months ago,” Cal says without turning his head, searching through his key ring for the right one. The sisal mat under his feet mocks me with its cheery message: Welcome, Guests. As if anyone but me and Cal will be stepping on it, waiting to be invited in to pay their last respects. Not in a Million Years would be more like it.

“Good timing, I suppose.”

“I’ve had the house painted. And all the furniture is new. Appliances, too.”

“What happened to Dad’s old stuff?”

“I donated most of the furniture and clothes to Goodwill after the trial. The rest is in a storage facility in Morristown. I’ll get you the address and the access combination if you want to head over there.”

“I doubt I’ll have the time.” Or the inclination. Digging through old memories sounds like torture to me.

Uncle Cal twists the key in the handle and the door swings open with a groan, a sound I find eerily appropriate. He steps inside like he owns the place, which I suppose by now he probably does, but I don’t follow. I can’t. Somebody switched out my sneakers for boots of lead. My knees wobble, and I grip the doorjamb to keep from falling down.

A strange thing happens when a home turns into a crime scene. Its contents are labeled, cataloged and photographed. Walls become scene boundaries, doors and windows, the perpetrator’s entry and exit. Seemingly ordinary objects—dust bunnies behind the couch, scuff marks on the stairs, a tarnished nickel under the carpet—take on all sorts of new significance. And the people living there, in a place now roiling with bad memories and even worse juju, no longer think of it as home.

But what about that one spot where the victim took her last breath, where her heart gave its final, frantic beat? What do you do with that place? Build a shrine on top of it, wave a bouquet of smoking sage around it or pretend it’s not there?

At the foot of the stairs, Cal stops and turns, studiously ignoring my distress. My gaze plummets to the fake Persian under his feet, and a wave of sick rises from the pit of my belly. Just because I can’t see the spot doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened there.

Or for that matter, that I’m ever stepping on it.

“Shut the door, please, Gia.”

I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and follow him into the house.

“My assistant Jennie did all the shopping,” he says, gesturing with his keys toward the living room. Except for the unmade hospital bed in the corner, the decor—oversize furniture, silk ferns in dark pots, framed paintings of exotic landscapes on the walls—looks plucked from the pages of a Rooms To Go catalog. “I hope it’ll do.”

I finger a plastic pinecone in a wooden bowl on the dresser and peer down the hallway toward the kitchen. There’s literally nothing here that I recognize. Probably better that way. “She did a great job.”

“The bedrooms are ready upstairs. Thought we’d let the nurse take the master. You don’t mind sharing the hall bath with me on the weekends, do you?”

I smile, hoping it doesn’t come across as forced as it feels. “I’ve gone months with nothing but a bucket, a bar of soap and a muddy stream. I think I can handle sharing a bathroom.”

One corner of Cal’s mouth rises in what looks almost like pride. “You’d make someone a fine huntin’ partner.”

He motions for me to follow him into the kitchen at the back of the house, where he points to a credit card and iPhone on the Formica counter. “Jennie stocked the kitchen with the basics, but there’s enough money on that account to buy anything else you need. You probably won’t need it for a couple of days, though.”

I peek into the refrigerator, check the cabinets above the coffee machine, peer around the corner into the open pantry. “There’s enough food here to feed half of Hawkins County for weeks.”

Cal smiles. “That’s the great thing about Jennie. She always goes above and beyond.” He plucks the iPhone from the counter and passes it to me. “She also programmed all the numbers you’ll need into the phone. The lead officer assigned to the case will be calling to set up a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. The hospice nurse arrives tomorrow morning at eight, and the motorcade and ambulance with your father, sometime before noon. And the local doctors, hospitals and the funeral home have been notified.”

“Sounds like everything’s been taken care of.”

He smiles, and his voice softens. “Just trying to make things as easy as possible for you, darlin’. I know you’d rather be anywhere but here.”

I think of some of the worst places I’ve been sent. Overpopulated Dhaka, where if the water doesn’t kill you, the air will. The slums of Abidjan after floods and mudslides have swept away too many of its children. The dusty streets of Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, where malnutrition and cholera compete for leading cause of death.

Uncle Cal has a point.

“And don’t think you’re completely out here on your own,” he says after a long stretch of silence. “I’m less than an hour down the road, and so are your brother and sister. Do me a favor and don’t let either of them off the hook, okay? This concerns their father, too.”

I half nod, half shrug. When it comes to our father, Bo would rather bury himself in his work than admit the situation affects him, while Lexi prefers to pretend he’s already dead. How can I let my siblings off the hook when neither of them are willing to acknowledge there is one? It seems as if the only person not getting off the hook around here is me.

Cal pulls me in for a hug, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “Call me anytime, okay? Day or night. I’ll pick up, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” His tone is reassuring, but he’s already backing away, already moving toward the door. “I’ll see you Saturday morning.”

He gives my shoulder one last squeeze and disappears into the hallway, and I’m slammed with a wave of panic. Disasters and destruction of global magnitude I can handle. Facing my father alone, not so much.

I rush down the hall in his wake. “Uncle Cal?”

The desperate note in my voice stops him at the door, and he turns to face me.

“Explain to me again why you can’t stay. Why you won’t be here tomorrow when Dad gets here.”

He scrubs a hand through his hair, now salt-and-pepper but still thick and shiny as ever. “Because I’m busy stalling the retrial. God willing and the creek don’t rise, your father won’t spend another second of his life in either a courtroom or a prison cell.”

A casket sure seems like the ultimate prison to me.

A few seconds later he’s gone, leaving me to wonder how I ended up here. In a town I vowed never to return to. In a house filled with ghosts and memories I’ll never outrun. In a life I have spent the past sixteen years trying to escape.

But most of all, I wonder how I ended up here alone.

2

BACK IN THE
house, I put on a kettle and rummage through the cabinets for tea. Cal’s assistant must be either misinformed or seriously delusional about the number of mourners we will be expecting because she bought us a 312-count, industrial-sized box of Lipton tea bags. If we get through even one row of them, it will be a miracle. I rip open the cellophane wrapping with my teeth, pull out a bag and drop it into a yellow ceramic mug.

The sharp, bitter scent reminds me of some of my British colleagues, who are convinced a spot of tea is the cure to all emotional ails. My boss, Elsie, a hard-nosed type, drinks enough of the stuff to poison her liver...thanks to the generous splash of bourbon she adds when things in the field get really hairy. If only life were that easy.

Unlike the satellite phone I carry in the field, Cal’s iPhone has only a handful of contacts, most of them people I’ve never met and, after burying my father, will probably never think of again. It doesn’t take me long to find Bo.

His cell goes straight to voice mail, so I leave what must be my fifth message in as many days, careful to keep my voice level. Five years older and light years more serious, my brother has always preferred that people reserve their zeal for backyard fireworks and the Nature Channel, and he doesn’t respond well to gushing.

I have better success with Lexi, who picks up on the second ring. I abandon my tea and squeal, “Lexi!”

Unlike Bo, my sister welcomes enthusiasm. Demands it, even.

“Is it true? Is it really true?” Lexi’s familiar voice, the same gravelly one that used to give boys all over Hawkins County wet dreams. “Did my do-gooder little sister finally come home from Lord knows where?”

“It’s true that I’m here, yes. But nowadays, home is in Kenya.”

“Well, laa-tee-daa.” She stretches out her words, loads them up with an extra serving of Tennessee twang. “Don’t that sound fancy.”

I snort at what I know to be a joke. Lexi is no dummy. She has a master’s in finance from Stanford, runs a local chain of banks and could kick even Alex Trebek’s ass at
Jeopardy.
Not only is she aware of my latest whereabouts, she knows Dadaab is pretty much the polar opposite of fancy. My chest seizes with a wave of sudden affection for my sister, who I haven’t hugged in...six years? Has it really been that long?

“Where are you?” I say, switching gears. “Because I’m coming there right after I lock up the house.”

“I’m going to need a little more time than that.” Her tone takes a serious turn, matching mine, and her voice and vowels soften into the more generic timbre she perfected in college. Less country hick, more Southern belle. Unlike me, Lexi can turn her accent on and off like a faucet. “I’m about to head into a staff meeting, but I could meet you after for a late dinner. Say, seven-thirty?”

I check my watch. Three and a half hours I can fill with a nap and a shower, in that order. “Perfect. So where’s the place to be on a Wednesday night these days?”

“It’s Thursday, actually, not that it matters. And there’s only one place to be every night, and that’s the Roadkill Bar and Grill in town.”

Roadkill? I make a face. “Do I have to bring my own rodent, or do they run it down for me?”

She laughs, a throaty, musical sound that makes me wish I’d called more often. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your roots, young lady.”

“I haven’t forgotten. My palate has just evolved to more refined creatures, like stray animals. And last month in the Philippines I tried this thing called balut, a fertilized duck embryo that’s boiled alive and eaten shell and all.”

Lexi makes a retching sound. “I think I’d rather starve to death.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh. Though I’ve always been adventurous with food and my sister the pickiest eater in Appalachia, Lexi does have a point. Balut tastes just as bad the first time as it does the second, on its way back up.

“A girl’s got to eat. And besides, my rule wherever I travel is to eat or drink whatever is offered to me, even if it does end up turning my insides to gurgling water. Sharing a meal, no matter how vile, fosters trust between my team and the people we’re there to help.”

“Good Lord. Your job sucks worse than mine.”

“Mostly, my job is pretty awesome, especially for a wanderer like me. I’ve flown around the globe more times than anybody on my team, and been to more than a hundred and twenty-five countries. The consulate has had to add pages to my passport now, twice.”

“I thought your job was to make the world a better place.”

“Well, duh. That goes without saying.”

Lexi covers the receiver with a hand, muffling her voice when she tells a colleague she’s on the phone, but will be right there.

“You’ve got to go?” I ask.

“Sorry. We’ll catch up on all the rest tonight, okay?”

“Okay. And, Lex?” She pauses, but I hear papers shuffling around her desk, and even though I know I’ve probably already lost her, I say it anyway: “I’ve missed you.”

“Same here. See you at seven-thirty.” And then she’s gone.

I plunk the phone on the counter by my mug and head outside to retrieve my suitcase, still in the trunk of my rental. In the past hour, the temperature plummeted and the air turned metallic, thick with invisible frost and crystals. I cast a glance at the darkening sky. No clouds yet, but I know what that scent means. I inhale enough of it to give my lungs freezer burn. God, how I’ve missed the smell of promised snow.

Up at the street, a silver Escort slows, tires crunching in the dirt and gravel on the side of the road. Any other day, any other place, and I probably wouldn’t have paid the car a bit of attention. But I lived on Maple Street long enough to know strangers don’t typically happen down this way by accident. I keep it in my periphery as I make my way up the concrete drive.

The car pulls to a sudden stop with a piercing squeal of brakes, and I freeze, gaze glued to the passenger side window. It whirrs and lowers to reveal a dark-haired man about my age. He leans across the seat, ducking his head to get a clear view through the window.

And though he may be wearing a friendly smile, I’m not.

“Sorry to bother you.” His bangs flop over an eye, and he pushes them back with a palm. “But can you tell me where the closest gas station is?”

The breath I’d been holding makes a thick cloud before it dissipates into the air. I take two steps across the frozen grass to his car, keeping a careful distance, pointing him in the opposite direction. “You’ve got to go back toward town, but it’s not far. Only two miles or so.”

“Two miles?” He draws out the last word, stretching his mouth wide to fit the vowels. I get this a lot in the field, people trying to imitate my Tennessee drawl as if there’s something funny or quaint about an accent. But their teasing only comes across as condescension, or at the very best, surprise that I’m not as dumb as I sound.

Which is why I lay it on thick now. “Two miles, yeah. Take a left at the four-way stop, and then it’ll be on your right. You can’t miss it.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be a decent hotel near there, too, would there?”

I take in his longish hair and battered leather jacket. Scruffy chic or penny-pincher? I can’t tell. “There’s the Hale Springs Inn in town, but it’s pretty swanky. Take the highway either way, though, and you’ll find some more affordable places a little farther out.”

He gives me a smile of thanks, but I detect something more to it—there’s something more than just fuel and shelter he’s looking for. A chill that has nothing to do with the February air brushes my shoulders, and I think of my cell, lying useless inside on the kitchen counter. I glance behind me, eyeing the distance to the front door, my senses on high alert.

He points over my shoulder. “Nice place. You live here?”

“Only temporari—” I swallow the last syllable, realizing a second too late I shouldn’t have admitted to living in a semi-deserted house at the end of a semi-deserted street.

He stretches his neck to get a better look, and then his gaze returns to mine. He smiles again, and I back up a step. “You’re Gia Andrews, right?”

Something like relief that he’s not a rapist or armed robber washes over me, quickly replaced by fury. A journalist. A goddamn journalist. You’d think after all my interactions with them in the field, I would have recognized him as one immediately.

I turn and stalk to my car. “I don’t talk to journalists.”

“Fine by me, because I’m not a journalist.” I don’t slow, and he bolts out of the Escort, his voice booming over its hood. “I’m a writer. I’m writing a book about America’s most shocking wrongful convictions.”

His words are electric, shooting a paralyzing current from my crown to the tips of my toes and melding my sneakers to the icy pavement. Wrongful conviction? I pivot my head to meet his gaze. “Excuse me?”

He bites off a mitten and digs around in a coat pocket, then crosses the driveway and hands me a card. “I’m Jeffrey Levine, by the way.”

I blink at the paper between my fingers, thick white linen with raised letters and a crest embossed in blue. “It says here you’re a professor of law.”

He slides his bare hand back into his mitten and nods. “For Emory. I’m taking a semester sabbatical to work on my book. It’s called
True Crimes, False Convictions: Criminal Injustice in America.
” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Yeah, it’s a working title.”

“And you think my father’s case is one of them?”

His head bobs in a decisive nod, and those ridiculous bangs flop over one eye. “Let me put it this way—your father’s case is a textbook on what not to do. How to ignore leads. How to sweep conflict of interest under the rug. How to miscarry justice and send an innocent man to prison.”

“But there was a witness.” I pivot now to face him, purposefully playing devil’s advocate. It’s one thing to say my father’s conviction was wrongful, another thing entirely to believe it. There was too much evidence to the contrary.

“One who thought he saw him breaking and entering his own house two hours after the time of death, not standing over the body with a smoking gun.”

“Ella Mae was suffocated.”

He gives me a look. “It was a figure of speech. And between you and me and everybody else who’s going to read my book, I think Dean Sullivan’s testimony was coerced. Did you know the police held him for six and a half hours? That screams gross misconduct to me.”

Six and a half hours? Is that even allowed? But still. “The judge and jury believed him.”

“Of course they did. Mr. Sullivan was an upstanding, God-fearing citizen.” He points past me to the ramshackle ranch where the Sullivans once lived. “Just look at him now.”

I gape at the neighboring property, so neglected I’d assumed it was abandoned. Front steps, rickety and rotting, lead to a front porch littered with trash and a ripped brown leather sofa. The yard, a foul-looking patch of dirt and rock, has seen neither fertilizer nor lawn mower since sometime last century. Even Dean’s prized rosebushes have hardened into brown and scraggly branches jutting up from the frozen earth, a tangle of sticks and thorns.

“People actually still live there?” I say.

“Dean Sullivan lives there. Alone. His family won’t have anything to do with him. His only friend is Jack Daniel’s. His house, his yard, his entire life is a mess.”

A mess might just be the biggest understatement on the planet. Dean’s house makes some of the shanties in Dadaab look like palaces.

“What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jeffrey asks.

I don’t know what to say to that. I’d never considered the possibility Dean was still living there, much less hiding from something.

I think for a moment. If everything Jeffrey said is true, then why not tell me this right away, when he stopped to ask for directions? Or better yet, why not tell Uncle Cal? I was barely eighteen when Ella Mae was murdered, and I’ve had practically nothing to do with the case since.

“What do you want from me? You should be talking to my uncle Cal. He’s the one who handled everything.”

“I’d love to talk to him, but unfortunately, he wants nothing to do with me.” He gives me a wry smile. “It might have something to do with me telling him I’m devoting an entire chapter to his shoddy defense of your father.”

His words echo in my ears, bounce around my brain, feel foreign on my tongue. I don’t get it. Uncle Cal is known as the Tennessee Tiger, as tenacious and tireless in the courtroom as he is with his girlfriends, an endless string of gold diggers and social climbers. There’s no way his defense of my father—his own brother, for Christ’s sake—was shoddy. What is this guy talking about?

Jeffrey arches a brow, seeming almost amused at my reaction. “This surprises you?”

“Yes, this surprises me, and it also infuriates me. Cal is a brilliant lawyer, and he worked his ass off to put together Dad’s defense. He barely ate, he didn’t sleep and nobody—nobody—was more upset than Cal when his brother, the one he defended, went to prison.”

He lifts his shoulders in a don’t-blame-the-messenger gesture. “Then why didn’t he try to appeal?”

And here, I think, I have him. Lawyer, my ass. He doesn’t even have all the information. “You should check your sources, because I know for sure he did appeal.”

“Once.” Jeffrey points a mitten to the sky. “Just one time, to the Court of Appeals.”

“And it was declined.”

“Denied.”

“Same thing.”

“But why did he stop there? Why didn’t he keep going?”

“I don’t...” I take two steps to my trunk, pause and turn back. “He could have done that?”

“Of course he could have. He definitely should have, but he didn’t.”

My heart misses about five beats. Cal slacked on my father’s case? I still don’t believe it. Dad is his only brother. There’s no way.

Jeffrey points to his card, still clutched between my fingers, and turns to go. “Think about it, and give me a call when you’re ready to hear more. And I hope you’ll be ready sometime soon, because in the spirit of full disclosure, you should know I’m writing this book with or without your family’s input. You can help me write it, or you can sit back and wait for your copy.”