I"d heard too many variations of that story over the years-young black boy killed for his race-but this one was the worst. The cruelest. The most heinous. The most s.a.d.i.s.tic. The least understandable.
Like Cece Turnbull, I would never get over Rashawn"s death.
Caine had lawyered up and wasn"t talking. Marvin Bell was talking to prosecutors who were going after Caine for murder, kidnapping, and depraved indifference within the course of a race-based incident. I hoped that whatever the jury decided about Caine, they"d make him suffer.
I spotted a middle-aged woman wearing a Domino"s hat coming around the corner carrying two pizzas. Wolfe, Bree, and I immediately went on alert. Varney, Bell, and Sherman had continued to turn over evidence against Caine, and they"d all stated that he had hired a female a.s.sa.s.sin known as the lace maker to kill members of my family and make it look like accidents.
She"d missed getting Bree and me with the broken brake line. Now that Caine was behind bars, there was no reason to think the lace maker was still around. But you never knew.
"Can I take those off your hands?" I asked the woman.
"Please," she said as she smiled and handed them to me. "I"m a little late, so it"ll be five dollars off."
"Who ordered them?" Bree asked.
"Connie Lou."
"Oh, Edith, there you are," my aunt said, hustling over with the cash.
They hugged, and Bree and I relaxed.
Then I saw something that warmed my heart. Cece Turnbull came into the backyard with a beautiful little girl who was the spitting image of her mother, and Cece looked clean and sober and thrilled to be with her daughter.
Bree went into the house for something to drink. I got in line for food. With my plate loaded with fried rabbit, coleslaw, broccoli salad, and little roasted red potatoes, I spotted Pinkie talking to Bree and started over.
"You didn"t eat all the rabbit, did you, Dad?" Jannie asked from a lawn chair between Damon and Ali.
"G.o.d, it"s really good," Damon said. "There better be seconds."
"I want some more too," Ali said. "But Pinkie said he"d cook the ba.s.s I caught yesterday up at the lake."
"I"m sure he hasn"t forgotten," I said. "But I"ll remind him."
Jannie said, "Coach Greene and Coach Fall said they were going to try to come by later."
"Looking forward to seeing them," I said. "But I want you to keep your options open, young lady. Okay?"
"Yeah, for real, Jannie," Damon said. "If you have Duke already at your door, you know there"s going to be a whole lot more."
Jannie nodded, and then sobered. "Sharon and her mom going to jail?"
"They"re turning evidence against Marvin Bell, but even if they convince a jury that he forced them into lying about the rape, planting Stefan"s DNA, and putting the drugs in your bag, I still think they"re both looking at convictions and sentences."
"I don"t want it to, like, completely ruin their lives," Jannie said.
"Neither do I," I said. "Have fun."
"Always," Ali said.
I grinned. "You do, don"t you?"
"Like Jim Shockey. Life"s an adventure."
Feeling like my youngest had an understanding of life far beyond his years, I walked over to Pinkie and Bree.
"Gimme some rabbit so I don"t have to stand in line," Bree said, looking hungrily at my plate.
"Not a chance," I said.
"What?" she said, miffed. "After how hard and ingeniously I worked on behalf of your cousin?"
"Okay," I said. "Take the thigh there."
Bree s.n.a.t.c.hed it off the plate.
"What about me?" Pinkie said.
"You"re able-bodied enough to work on oil rigs," I said. "Get in line."
My cousin laughed and went off toward the food.
Bree took two bites of the rabbit and looked like she was in heaven. "I had it figured out, you know. About Caine. Well, everything except Rashawn."
"I believe you."
I did. That satellite photo she"d shown me in court was of Caine Industries, which sat by the tracks between the Starksville Road and the crossing three miles to the south. Bree had figured out from the trail-cam photographs that the riders were boarding between those two crossings.
She"d called up Google Earth, saw the rail-line spur that ran out of Caine"s business, and thought, What a great cover for a meth-manufacturing op.
Bree said, "If your dad hadn"t gone Rambo, I would have pinned Caine to the wall."
"Yes, you would have," I said. "And for that, I think you"ve earned some downtime in Jamaica."
Bree perked up. "Really?"
"Why not?"
"Just us?"
"Why not?"
"When?"
"Soon as you want."
"G.o.d, I love the way you think sometimes," she said, and she kissed me.
"Get a room, you two," Nana Mama cracked as she eased into a lawn chair near us.
"We were talking about doing just that," I said.
"TMI, as Jannie says," my grandmother said, and she waved us off.
"You happy you came back to Starksville, Nana?" Bree asked.
"I"d be some kind of ungrateful wretch if I wasn"t," Nana Mama said. "This is like the story of the prodigal son, only I"m living it. Honestly, Bree, I could die right now and it would be perfectly fine by me."
"Not by me," I said.
"And not by me either," my father said, coming up behind her, bending down, and kissing her on the cheek.
Nana Mama usually made a fuss over public displays of affection, but she put her hand on her son"s cheek and closed her eyes, and I had a flash of her when she must have been very young and holding her newborn child in her arms.
My dad"s cell phone buzzed. He stood up, dug it out, and read a text. He looked at me, and then at my grandmother.
"I"m afraid I haven"t told you all of it," he said. "How I came to be Peter Drummond and all."
That was true. He"d been very evasive about that part of his life.
"You going to tell us?" Nana Mama said.
"In a minute," he said. "First, there"s someone I want you all to meet."
CHAPTER 102.
MY FATHER CAME back holding hands with Reverend Alicia Maya, who looked absolutely radiant in the last full rays of sunshine.
"Alex," my dad said, "Mom. I"d like to introduce you to my best friend, the woman whose love saved me. My wife, Alicia."
For the umpteenth time in the last two weeks I got tears in my eyes.
"I"m so sorry I had to lie to you that day in the cemetery," Reverend Maya said, coming to me and holding my hands. "But your dad thought that things would be better for you if you just went on believing he was dead. He considered his chance to see you a gift from G.o.d, and he said that was enough for him. But after you"d left Florida, he realized it wasn"t enough. He wanted to know you, to be a part of your life. To do that, he had to come back and face Bell and destroy the life he"d made for himself."
The story came out from the two of them as the day ebbed toward twilight, and everybody at the party stopped to listen.
Reverend Maya found my father just the way she"d told me, weak, homeless, and limping into her church one day. She"d allowed him to sleep there. She"d provided him with counseling and helped him battle his addictions.
"Through Alicia, I found G.o.d and have been sober for thirty-four years," my father said. "I was guilty of abandoning you boys, and you, Mom, but I was terrified of what might happen to me and to all of you if I ever returned to Starksville."
Reverend Maya said, "He confessed it all to me one night about a year after he started living in the church. He told me about seeing Marvin Bell kill your mom, about being arrested and shot, surviving the gorge, recovering with the help of his beloved Clifford. I told him I believed that G.o.d would forgive him."
"Is that when you fell in love with him?" Nana Mama asked.
"No, love came later, after the war, when I realized how close I"d come to losing him."
The night my father met Alicia Maya, he had fake papers that identified him as Paul Brown. But shortly after he confessed to the reverend his true ident.i.ty, a tragic miracle occurred.
A nineteen-year-old named Peter Drummond came into the Reverend Maya"s church seeking counsel, just as my father had a year before. Drummond told her that he was an orphan and had been out of foster care in Kansas City for less than a year. He"d been homeless, and so, on a whim, he"d enlisted in the Marine Corps.
"He said he"d made a mistake," Reverend Maya said. "That he never should have enlisted and that he knew he was incapable of handling the pressures of war, especially of killing other men."
She paused, and my father put his hand on his second wife"s shoulder, said, "You couldn"t have known."
"I know." She sighed. "Turns out he was in far deeper psychological and spiritual pain than I"d sensed. I told him to pray about it and trust that G.o.d would show him the right ..." She choked up.
My father said, "Drummond went out in back of the church and shot himself in the face with a shotgun."
"Jesus," Pinkie said.
"We were the only ones who heard the shot," Reverend Maya said. "I was hysterical when your father and I found him."
"She told me to call the police, and I didn"t dare because I was scared," my father said. "Then I started going through his pockets. And there was his ID and his enlistment papers that said he had to be at Camp Lejeune in two days."
"You switched papers," Ali said.
"Very good, young man," my father said. "Alicia wanted no part of it at first, but I showed her that, for me, it could be a total rebirth and a chance to do something hard and good for the first time in my life."
"No one questioned the papers?" Bree asked.
"Both ID photographs weren"t the best, and he"d shot himself in the face," Reverend Maya said. "The police in Pahokee never questioned that the dead man was Paul Brown."
"And the Marines were glad to have me," my father said. "I made corporal and went to Kuwait during the Gulf War. I was part of a crew that was supposed to seize and protect the oil wells that the Iraqis set on fire as they retreated. One blew, and I was too close."
Reverend Maya said she and my father had kept in contact, writing letters back and forth before the explosion.
She said, "When I saw him lying there at the VA hospital, I don"t know, I just knew that I loved him and couldn"t live without him ever again."
"I felt the same way," my dad said. "You don"t know what it did to my heart when she came in to see me."
"And then you became a cop," I said.
"I"d been a criminal," he replied. "I figured I"d be good at catching them."
"He"s good at it," Reverend Maya said. "But when he found out that you"d gone into the same field, Alex, he was beside himself with pride. He"s followed your career every step of the way."
"And you b.u.mp into each other in Belle Glade, Florida," Nana Mama said.
"What are the odds of that happening?" Jannie asked.
"Astronomical," Reverend Maya said. "That"s why I believe we were guided by a divine hand."