Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (36 page)

“I have one question,” Kade said.

Flannery, of course, brightened.

“The day Allison and I tried to take you home, Elgin said we’d better be off his property before he got back. But that house doesn’t belong to him, right?”

“No. It actually belongs to my great-uncle. He lives in Fort Myers and when he dies, it’s in his will that my mom gets the house. All the stuff like the electric bill and all that are in his name because my mom had a lot of credit issues when she was married to my bio-dad.” The chin tilted. “But she’s working really hard on all that. Which is why I just want to make sure she doesn’t get blamed for any of this.”

“Were you headed for your uncle when you tried to run away?” I said. “Before Elgin found you in Palatka?”

“Yeah. That’s where I wanted to go when Tango and I … well, you know that part.”

Now that the story was out, she wasn’t interested in repeating any of it. I didn’t blame her.

“We through?” Flannery said.

“Are you tired?” Liz said.

“No, I’m starving. Can we go get pizza or something?”

It was my turn to hold back tears. I was saved by a tap on the mirror-window.

“I’ll stay with Flannery,” Liz said. “We haven’t had a chance to get to know each other.”

Kade touched my elbow, and he and Nick and I met the woman from the DA’s office in the hall. She was slim and black-suited and professional, but she didn’t hide the hunger in her voice. She had
let’s get this miserable excuse for a human being
written all over her face. I liked her.

“What do you think, Tara?” Kade said to her.

Tara. Well then.

“She’s amazing. I’d put her on the stand in a heartbeat. But here’s the thing.”

“What thing?” I said.

“We’re going to have to turn the charges of solicitation of minors over to Duval County since his business was run out of Jacksonville. But we can indict him on sex with a minor, all of that, here in St. Johns. You heard her: he was having sex with her for months before he started renting her out.” She looked at me. “I don’t know how you deal with this all the time. I want to throw up.”

“I do that a lot,” I said. Yeah, I was going to make a lunch date with this woman.

“It can be really hard to make sexual abuse charges stick,” she went on, “so we’re going to need the mother’s testimony as well. We’ll send somebody down to Hastings to take her statement.”

“I guarantee you Brenda Donohue is going to freak out,” I said. “She’s not like Flannery.”

“Then how about if I go personally?”

Forget the lunch date. I was having her over for dinner.

We all agreed that would work, and Tara said she’d head straight to Hastings. The storm wasn’t hitting that far inland as hard as it was hitting there in St. Augustine. I could see the rain slashing into the window at the end of the hall.

“I’m glad we rode with you, Kade,” I said. “Can we stop and get Desmond at school?”

“Yeah,” he said, and then he grinned at me. “And I think we’d better get some pizza.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Flannery had to settle for one of Hank’s pizzas from my freezer because by the time we picked Desmond up the streets were flowing like small versions of the St. John’s River. Kade consulted the weather app on his phone while we savored Hank’s inimitable crust and sauce around the trunk in my living room.

“They’ve downgraded it to a tropical storm,” he said. “And we’re just looking at the front side of it right now.”

“Them kindergartners gonna drown if they don’t close school this time,” Desmond said.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, genius,” Flannery said.

She reached across the trunk and wiped a straggling piece of cheese from his chin. Desmond took a swat at her hand. Yeah, they were in brother-sister mode. At least that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. My main concern at the moment was whether Tara was going to get Flannery’s mother to talk to her. Maybe I should give Brenda a call and assure her that I wasn’t siccing the law on her.

“I could sure use another Coke, Des,” Kade said.

Desmond inspected Kade’s glass. “You ain’t finished the one you got, Cappuccino.”

“They want us to leave the room,” Flannery said. “Like I said, you’re a genius.”

When Desmond had chased her into the kitchen, Kade turned to me. “That attorney from CE called me this morning. I’m having a hard time putting her off.”

“Pix? She called me and left a voice message.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t listen to it.”

“You’re not even a little bit curious? I am.”

“Why?”

Kade shrugged. “Maybe they want you to testify against Troy. Impeach his character.”

“I am not—”

“I know,” Kade said, hand up. “I just like to see you get all feisty.”

“Like you don’t have plenty of opportunities to witness that. If you want to find out what they want, I’m okay with that, but I don’t want to do lunch.” I selected another piece of pizza. “Now your friend Tara is a different story. I’d really like to get to know her.”

“Big Al! Look who’s here.”

The unbridled excitement in Desmond’s voice could only mean one thing. Chief came through the kitchen door, covered head to toe in Gore-tex.

“Kade,” he said. “Classic.”

“Hey, boss,” Kade said. “Glad you could …” He pressed his lips together and pushed himself out of the green chair. “Let me take that gear and hang it up in the laundry room before Allison gets on your butt for dripping on the hardwood.”

Chief backed into the kitchen and Kade disappeared with him. I let the pizza slice drop back to the tray and tried not to let in every
one
of the scenarios that crowded for admittance to my mind. He was here. Yes. But there could be several reasons why, and I only liked one of them.

“I hear it went well today.”

Chief passed through the dining room and sat on the edge of the chair Kade had just left. I could smell the rain on him. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell anything.

“It did. They’re going to get that piece of slime. Actually, he’s not just a piece, he’s the entire bottom of the septic tank. We’re waiting for the DA’s office to … well, you know all that, I guess.”

“Yeah, but go on. Your rendition of anything is always more vivid than anyone else’s.”

I didn’t look to see if his eyes were crinkling. I was afraid of what else I might see.

“Have some?” I said, pushing the tray his way.

“I’m good.”

“Well, yes.” I did look at him then. “You’re good at a lot of things. But letting people know where the heck you are when you disappear for days isn’t one of them.” I put up both hands. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

“You done?”

“Yes. No. I do want to say one more thing.”

“I don’t think there’s any stopping you.”

The only thing that
could
stop me was the clog in my throat. I swallowed it down. “I’m going to worry about you no matter what. But I just need to know if I have the right to ask where you are when you take off without telling anybody.”

“I want you to know. That’s why I came over here.”

I sank into the red chair. “Now I’m not sure I want to know. You’re scaring me.”

“Classic—”

My phone rang. I ignored it, but Chief picked it up and looked at the screen.

“Tara McClanahan,” he said.

“I have to take this.” I pointed at him as I took the cell from him. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Staying.”

“Tara,” I said into the phone, my eyes still on Chief. “Did she talk to you?”

“No, she didn’t.”

The hunger was gone from her voice, replaced by something I didn’t know her well enough to name. It sounded like sympathy to me.

I pressed a hand to my temple and focused on the wall across from me. “What happened?”

“Allison, Brenda Donohue is dead.”

The air left the room. Chief took the phone from me and put it on speaker.

“Her car was in the carport,” Tara said, “but she didn’t answer when we knocked. I had a sheriff’s deputy meet me there, and he looked in the front window. She was lying on the floor.” Her voice softened. “The paramedics didn’t even try CPR. She’d obviously been gone for hours.”

“Was she … do they know what caused it?”

“The deputy told me it looked like an overdose, but there’s no way to know for sure until they perform an autopsy.”

“I don’t think she did drugs.”

“There were two empty prescription bottles on the coffee table. Both narcotic pain meds. Both with someone else’s name on them.” I heard her sigh. “I know you don’t want to get into this now, but she did work in a nursing home.”

“Yeah. She did.”

Tara let a small silence fall.

“I’ll call Liz Doyle,” she said. “I just thought you’d want to know right away so you can tell Flannery. I don’t envy you that. She suffered a lot to protect her mother.”

“Just get that monster, Tara,” I said.

“Oh, don’t you worry. I am on it.”

Chief ended the call and moved to the arm of my chair. I sank my face in my hands.

“When does it end, Chief?” I said. “It’s like the evil just goes on and on and on and we can’t get away from it.”

“We do stay right in the middle of it, don’t we?”

“Do we have a choice? I don’t think
I
do.”

I felt his arm go around me and I let him pull my face into his chest. The misery pulsed through me.

“I will say this, Classic. It sounds like that poor woman’s life was a walking death. When you get to that place, the step into literal death doesn’t seem that hard to take.”

I sat up to look at him. “I don’t think she took that step. I think she was pushed. In fact I know she was. Even if he didn’t shove those pills down her throat, he started pushing her there the minute he walked into her life.”

“What’s going on?”

It was Flannery, with Desmond.

Chief got up and met Desmond in the middle of the dining room. “In the kitchen, buddy,” he said. He took the glasses Flannery was carrying and pushed open the swinging door. As Desmond moved past him Chief looked over his head at me.

Nobody can do this like you can, Classic,
he said with his eyes.

PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod let him be right.

Flannery took the news as if she had been expecting it for a long time. Tears slid soundlessly down her face as she tucked herself into the corner of the chair-and-a-half and stared, unfocused, at her knees. But she didn’t sob or tremble. She didn’t even ask for details. It was as if I had told her the plot of a film she had already seen and it was only the memory of it that made her cry.

She didn’t say much of anything beyond “thank you” when Desmond promised that, as her brother, “Imma be here for you.” She simply stared as quiet activity went on around her. Kade left to meet Liz and find out what legalities we were now facing. Chief removed the pizza and Hank came with Gigi and Rochelle and a bag full of groceries I knew would be turned into comfort food. Only when Bonner showed up with Zelda, and India arrived with Jasmine, Ophelia, and Mercedes, only then did Flannery stir from her stoic staring.

I couldn’t see how she could do otherwise. All the Sisters but Sherry gathered around her in the Palm Row living room just as they always did at the Sacrament Houses when one of their own faced the dark tunnel of crisis. None of them tried to pull her out of it. They were simply there to see her through it.

“You want to talk, you can talk, baby girl,” Mercedes said. “Or we can just sit.”

“We been there,” Jasmine said. She was doing the crying Flannery had yet to do.

Flannery slid her gaze over all of them. “What happened to your mothers?”

Jasmine looked anxiously back at me, but I nodded.

“Mine died from AIDS,” she said. “Prob’ly got it from one of my pretend stepfathers.”

Ophelia, who sat on the arm of the chair, wiped a tear from Flannery’s cheek to make room for the others. “My mama left me with my aunt when she went back to Mexico.”

Zelda started to speak, but Mercedes shook her head at her and slid closer to Flannery from her place further down on the red chair.

“Why you wanna know all this?” she said.

“Because I was hoping it isn’t just automatic that the same thing happens to you that happens to your mother.”

I put both hands to my mouth. Flannery’s pain throbbed in my throat, but Mercedes seemed to have no such problem.

“I can’t believe I just heard that come out your mouth. My mama raised me on her own and she did it right, just like your mama raised you, and then I got in with the wrong things, just like you did—only I made bad choices. You didn’t have no choice, so you don’t got to dig your way through a whole lotta guilt like we havin’ to do.”

“That’s right,” Jasmine said.

Zelda added an amen. Rochelle’s grunt was kind. I let my hands fall to my sides. The rhythm was starting, the one that could sing Flannery right into God’s arms.

“But that isn’t even the point,” said Mercedes, who was by now no more than five inches from Flannery. “This thing we doin’ here, this isn’t about the past, about some legacy you got handed to you.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You listen now.”

“This about what
you
gon’ pass on,” Mercedes said. “That’s why we all gettin’ ourselves straight with God and tryin’ to give somethin’ good back to Sacrament House by workin’ in the bow-tique and the garden and the car place and the coffee place.” She pointed to each of the Sisters like a maestro conducting a symphony of croons and murmurs. “You way ahead of any of us, Miss Thing, and you got a responsibility to do somethin’ with your healin’ so other girls don’t have to stay in that trap you got out of.” Mercedes gave her a slow nod. “That’ll honor your mama. That’ll make her life worth somethin’.”

Flannery put her hands to Mercedes’s wrists and let her face give in to the true sobs she’d been holding back for hours. Maybe even since the first time Elgin Wedgewood touched her.

As I cried with her from my place near the stairway, I watched Mercedes cradle “that child” in her arms and rock her as she whispered into her hair. There was no need to look for someone to oversee the Sacrament Houses. We had just found her.

I was awakened from a restless sleep on the couch by my phone ringing in my hand. I checked the time before I answered. Nine a.m. The room was probably still dark because of the storm. Flannery was asleep in the chair, so I took the phone toward the kitchen as I answered Chief’s call.

“How you holding up, Classic?”

“I’m not sure yet. How’s it going out there?”

He and Kade had left before the Sisters to go out to Kade’s house at the beach to shore it up. I opened the curtain on the kitchen door and looked out at a murky mass of gray.

“We’ve got the house pretty well buttoned up, but he’s going to lose a lot of real estate if we don’t do some sandbagging. You think Desmond’ll want to help? Stan could pick him up on his way out. It would give Des something to do.”

“We all need something to do,” I said. “Besides, I don’t really want us to stay here with Elgin on the prowl and you that far away.”

I had already given that a lot of anxious thought and had come to the conclusion that we would all be safer in a storm with Chief than at my house with Elgin Wedgewood on the loose. If indeed he had killed Brenda, he wasn’t going to leave Flannery alone for long. Tara had assured me in her last call to me the night before that there was a BOLO alert out on him. I hadn’t asked her if Detective Kylie was in charge of that.