“Oh my God.” My aunt Hattie gasped.
“It’s a miracle,” my aunt Connie cried.
I looked down at Nana Mama, saw my grandmother dissolving through sheets of tears.
“It’s him,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but it’s him.”
When I looked up, Drummond had left Bell in the witness stand, handed the shotgun to Detective Frost, and was coming toward us with tears streaming down his blank face and his arms cast open.
“You don’t know how much I missed the both of you,” he said. “You have no idea of the loneliness without you.”
I slid into my father’s arms and he slid into his mother’s as if they were the most natural and familiar acts possible.
We bowed our heads into one another, suddenly apart from everyone else in that courtroom, like a miniature universe unto ourselves. I don’t think any of us managed to utter an intelligible word in those first few moments of reunion. But I know we were communicating deeply in a whole other language, like people embraced by holy spirits and speaking in tongues of fire.
Chapter
101
Two weeks and two days after we’d arrived in Starksville, on a warm, clear Saturday afternoon, we had ourselves a proper reunion in Aunt Hattie’s backyard. Everybody who mattered to me in life was there.
Damon had flown into Winston-Salem the day before to meet his grandfather, which had been as emotional and satisfying as every other moment of my dad’s return to my life. Naomi’s mother, Cilla, and my brother Charlie had come in the day before that.
At first, Charlie had not believed Nana Mama and me when we’d called him with the news. Then he’d gotten angry and said he wasn’t interested in meeting someone who’d cut out on us thirty-five years before. But Cilla and Naomi had insisted, and when Charlie laid eyes on our dad, all had been forgiven. The only thing that would have made it better was having my late brothers Blake and Aaron there too, and we all shed tears over those tragedies.
My best friend, John Sampson, and his wife, Billie, had come in that morning. Sampson and my dad had hit it off immediately, and when Drummond wasn’t sitting by my uncle Cliff, he and John were trading cop stories and laughing.
Stefan Tate was there with his fiancée, Patty Converse, the two of them looking as in love as any couple I’d ever seen. Special Agent Wolfe was there as well.
Evidently, the FBI had been looking at Starksville with suspicions of judicial and police misconduct long before my father called Wolfe and told her to come listen to the shocking testimony about to come out in the courtroom of Erasmus P. Varney.
I went over to Agent Wolfe, said, “What do you think my dad’s chances are?”
Wolfe said, “Well, he’s not going back to his job with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. They’ve been pretty clear on that, but I don’t think he’ll end up being prosecuted for taking Bell hostage and marching him into court.”
“You don’t think?” I asked. “Pretty extreme move.”
“It was,” she said. “But we arrested the police chief and the presiding judge in Stark County, and the sheriff’s been murdered. And Guy Pedelini regained consciousness and spilled everything on all of them. The DA’s office is even under investigation. Basically, there’s no one left in Starksville to go after your dad, and I don’t know what federal statute would apply.”
“So he walks free into a new life,” I said.
“He walks free into an old life,” Bree said, coming up beside me.
“And Marvin Bell and Harold Caine go down for so many things,” Wolfe said. “If they’re not given the death penalty, which I think is the appropriate punishment, they’ll at least never see the outside of a prison.”
I thought about Harold Caine, his callous, cruel indifference. We’d gotten more of the story from Cece.
After Rashawn’s birth, her parents had all but disowned her. Then Cece got pregnant by a white boyfriend she picked up while Rashawn’s father was doing time. Her parents found out, and they also found out that Cece was on drugs while she was with child.
The Caines used the rigged courts of Starksville against Cece and had the baby girl, Lizzie, taken from her mother’s arms within minutes of birth. The courts awarded Lizzie’s grandparents full custody, and they had greatly limited Cece’s involvement in her daughter’s life.
Harold Caine had evidently spent years bitter and humiliated about his mixed-race grandson while at the same time doting on his lily-white granddaughter and running a meth business from secret underground labs beneath his fertilizer factory.
The most terrible thing about it all was that the frenzied nature of the wounds Rashawn had suffered before death clearly indicated that Caine had enjoyed killing his grandson. He’d enjoyed murdering his own flesh and blood. When it came right down to it, that poor, innocent boy had been tortured and slain for the color of his skin.
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 sadistic. 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 assassin 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.
“God, it’s really good,” Damon said. “There better be seconds.”
“I want some more too,” Ali said. “But Pinkie said he’d cook the bass 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 f
un.”
“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 snatched 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.”
“God, 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 God, 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 God 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 God 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 identity, 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 God 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 bump 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.”
“You believe that?” Nana Mama asked.
“I do,” she said.
“I do,” my father said.
“I do too,” I said.
“How else do you explain it?” Nana Mama said, and she smiled.
We all fell into a reflective quiet that had me wondering about the mystery that had been my life and how perfectly complete I felt at that moment.
“I’d like to make a toast,” my dad said. “So everyone get a glass.”
By the time we’d all gotten glasses and gathered together again, fireflies were flashing in the pines.
My dad raised his ginger ale and said, “To our extended family and all our friends, living, dead, and now living again: May God bless the Crosses.”
“Amen,” Nana Mama said, and we all echoed her. “Amen.”
Paris is burning—and only Private’s Jack Morgan can put out the fire.
For an excerpt, turn the page.
1st Arrondissement
April 6, 3:30 p.m.
“The secret to understanding Parisians, Jack, is to see that they are almost the exact opposite of people in Los Angeles,” said the big bear of a man sitting across from me. “In L.A., children are raised to be optimistic, full of life, friendly. People who grow up in Paris, however, are taught the value of melancholy and an unwavering belief in the superiority of suffering. It’s why they have a reputation for being rude. It’s to make you as uncomfortable as they are, and they honestly believe they are doing you a favor.”
It was late afternoon, a warm, gorgeous spring day in the French capital, and Louis Langlois and I were sitting outside Taverne Henri IV in the Place Dauphine, well into our second glasses of excellent Bordeaux.