“What is the harm?” Gus asked. “We both be behind the bars.”
Jonathan realized that was true. “All right,” he said, “I’ll pray with you.”
Gus nodded and sat down on the one chair in his cell, folded his hands, and dropped his elbows onto his knees. Jonathan did the same, and they both bowed their heads and closed their eyes. After a few seconds of silence, Jonathan looked up.
“You go first,” he said. He wanted to hear Gus pray, wanted to hear if it sounded like Gus was used to talking to God, wanted to hear if his words sounded sincere.
Gus’s gruff voice grew soft, and he began to speak in a tone that was reverent and awestruck. “My gracious Father, the God of the universe,” he said, then paused for a moment as if catching his breath at the awe inspired by such a statement. “I be amazed at you,” he went on.
Jonathan opened his eyes, looked over at Gus, and saw the tears on his face and the struggle he was having to keep his voice steady. A sure knowledge came over him that this man in the cell next to him was no threat at all. His heart was sincere. He was, indeed, a brother.
Jonathan closed his eyes and bowed his head in earnest this time, joining his heart with Gus’s in prayer.
C H A P T E R
60
The standing-room-only crowd at City Hall that night made Blair feel like a movie star whom people had come to gawk at. It was a minidrama, she thought. The daughters of the murder victims having their property snatched out from under them. Adrenaline rushed through her as she prepared for the fight.
“I don’t care if we’re going to sell the place,” she whispered to Morgan. “I’m not going to honor them with that announcement tonight. It’s the principle of the thing. They have no right to do this.”
Morgan touched her hand. “I wish I knew what Mama and Pop knew that day. They were so confident that they were going to win. They had some information, they said. I wish they’d told me what it was.”
“Well, if it was important, we’d have found it by now.”
Morgan looked around uncomfortably. “Blair, why don’t you let me do the talking?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s me they’re going to contend with. They’re counting on our not having the strength to fight. I resent their tactics, and I won’t let them get away with it.”
The mayor hammered his gavel and drew the microphone too close to his mouth. It produced instant feedback, and people moaned and yelled for someone to fix it. It was like the opening bell in a boxing match, only she didn’t intend to shake hands.
“This meeting will come to order,” the mayor said. He had dressed up for the occasion in a Hawaiian tourist shirt and a pair of khakis with sandals on his feet. At least Sarah Williford hadn’t worn her bathing suit to the meeting, Blair thought.
“As everyone knows,” the mayor began, “we’re here to discuss Hanover House and the fact that polls show that seventy percent of the citizens on Cape Refuge want to see it closed down.”
“Give me a break!” Blair sprang up and pushed through the crowd to the microphone. “Don’t give us that stuff about polls,” she said. “You know good and well this island doesn’t have a pollster. What did you do, go out on the beach and ask random people? Did any of them happen to live here?”
She didn’t get the cheers that she got the last time she had done this, the night her parents were murdered. The townspeople were scared now and weren’t on her side anymore.
“Blair and Morgan, first of all, let me offer my greatest sympathies in the death of your parents,” Fred Hutchins said. “The whole island has felt the loss. It’s with great sorrow that we called this meeting tonight.”
She didn’t have the patience for condolences. “Yeah, I’m sure you cried your eyes out as you were putting on your Hawaiian shirt and rehearsing how you were going to twist the knife. Could we just get on with this?”
The council members looked at each other uncomfortably, then went on. “Very well,” Fred Hutchins said. “As you know, we’re a little upset about the article on the front page of the paper today. It’s about one of your tenants being a convicted killer and a fugitive from the law. Your family has been harboring him. He is a danger to the community.”
“Cade told me this afternoon that he can’t confirm that anything in that article was true.”
“I understand Rick Dugan has left town. Is that true?” the mayor asked.
“He left,” Blair told him. “But that certainly doesn’t implicate Hanover House in any way. It’s not a reason to close it down.”
“Blair, we all understand your pain,” Sarah said, her saccharine voice carrying without the mike. “We understand about the grief that you and your sister must be going through. Having Jonathan on his way to prison for murder, and then Gus and now Rick—”
“My husband is not going to prison,” Morgan said from her seat. “He is not guilty!” She stood up. “Do you hear yourselves? You just named three people you think committed these murders. What do you think it was, some kind of killing club?”
“Might have been,” the mayor said. “As a matter of fact, there’s been quite a bit of speculation that’s just what Hanover House is.”
“Why are you out to get us?” Morgan demanded. “What do you want?”
“I’m not out to get you,” he said. “We just want to make Cape Refuge a safe island for everybody.”
Blair wasn’t going to let that go. “Well, you don’t care about making it safe from tourists. You want more of them to come through, not fewer. And you don’t know anything about them. They could be from anywhere. It’s your plan to have strangers roaming this island. And you can thank the 20/20 piece on Hanover House for tourism picking up thirty percent already this summer. At least the tenants at Hanover House work in the community and contribute to it. People get to know them. They’re not just phantom convicts roaming around mysteriously.”
“They might as well be,” the mayor said. “Rumor has it that you’re now harboring a teenage runaway.”
“She’s not a runaway,” Morgan shouted. “She says she’s eighteen. She can live anywhere she wants to. She came here with a broken arm and a bashed face, and I wasn’t going to turn her away.”
“Maybe if you did start turning people away you wouldn’t be here before us tonight,” he said. “We wouldn’t have to close you down. But since you refuse to be discriminating about who you keep in that place—”
“That place is my home,” Morgan shouted as tears twisted her face. “It’s where I live. It’s where my parents lived. How dare all of you treat their memory like it was nothing?” She stumbled across the people in her way, and grabbed the microphone in front of her sister. “My parents did something for every one of you, and you know it. They took in people with problems, even some of you. You have no right to stomp dirt into their memory like this. They were coming here to fight for Hanover House the night of their deaths, but they never made it here. And if they had made it, you would have seen a fight like you’d never seen before. Hanover House was their dream and they loved it, and it was the best thing they’d ever done. We have the right to do whatever we want with our own property, and you don’t have the right to choose that for us.”
Silence fell over the room as Morgan’s impassioned speech hung in the air. Under her breath, Blair whispered, “Way to go, Sis.”
“Well, we appreciate your plea,” Fred said. “Now, we have a few residents who would like to speak.”
Blair shot a look around, daring anyone to get up and speak against them. No one did.
“I think you’re mistaken, Mayor,” she said. “Looks like these fine folks are here to support us.”
“I have something to say.” Sam Sullivan got up at the middle of the room, and slid his hands into his pockets. “Mayor, Council Members. . . .”
“Would you mind going to the microphone, please?” Fred asked.
Blair relinquished it to him but didn’t sit down. If he was going to trash Hanover Hou
se, then he was going to do it standing right beside her.
“Uh . . . Mayor, Council Members . . . I just want to say that ever since Wayne and Thelma’s death, I’ve been afraid to leave my family alone. I don’t want my children playing outside. I want to go back to the life we knew before this tragedy. And I think we can do that if Hanover House no longer harbors criminals.”
“Hanover House never harbored criminals,” Blair said. “And as for wanting to go back to the way things were before the tragedy, you don’t know the half of it, Sam. But the fact is that closing Hanover House won’t solve anything. We’re still going to need a police force because there are still going to be people who come and go with evil intentions. But Hanover House is one of the good things about this island.” It had gotten hard to talk around the lump in her throat, so she forced it down and forged on. “Most of you know I’m not a religious person. But I’ve got to tell you, I do believe in good and evil. Hanover House is a light in this town. It’s a beacon and a symbol of all that Cape Refuge should be. A symbol of all it can be. If you shut Hanover House down, then what hope do any of us have?”
She met Morgan’s eyes and saw the tears on her face. She fought valiantly to keep her own emotions at bay. “We’re a community of kind, warm, caring people. That’s what our name represents. Sadie, the teenager who is staying at Hanover House, told us she chose Cape Refuge because the name sounded inviting. It sounded like a pleasant, beautiful place. And she found that it was. Hanover House drew her here because some stranger in a café in Savannah told her that she wouldn’t be turned away. Don’t you want to live in a place that opens its arms to people like Sadie, instead of a place that shuts them out?”
Hattie Brumfield, who sat near her, got up and waddled to the microphone. “I just have to say that Blair makes a good point, but I feel that we can be a sweet, warm, inviting town without Hanover House. In fact, we might be more inviting if we didn’t have the reputation that Hanover House brings us.”
Blair rolled her eyes. “What reputation? You’ve never had a problem with Hanover House until the 20/20 special came out. It’s always been known as a good place, not a breeding ground for killers.”
“Then explain what’s happened with that Rick fellow,” Hattie said in her deep drawl. “There he is, a fugitive convict who’s already killed once, and now he’s disappeared. He could be anywhere, and all because your parents, rest their souls, invited him here.”
“I told you, the article is probably a lie. We haven’t been able to confirm it.”
“Well, Nancy couldn’t print it if it wasn’t true,” she said. “Could you, Nancy?”
Nancy, who sat taking notes on the front row of chairs, said, “We’re in the process of confirming the story, but I can tell you that I do trust my source.”
“Your imagination is your source, and you know it!” Blair bit out. “Since when has anyone put any stock into what she writes? She makes a hobby of misquoting everybody on this council, and you’re telling me that she prints truth? She’s the one who ought to be shut down!”
Fred banged his gavel. “That’s enough, Blair. I think we’ve heard enough. It’s time we took a vote.”
She didn’t sit down, just crossed her arms and watched as the council members settled in to cast their votes.
Fred got his pen and pad, as if he wouldn’t be able to add the five votes up in his head. “To give thirty days’ notice to close down Hanover House, vote yes. To keep it open, vote no. Sarah Williford, what is your vote?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
He made the notation. “George O’Neill?”
“Yes.”
“You’re kidding me!” Blair shouted. “George?”
George looked down at his hands.
“Harold Delaney?” the mayor said.
The man leaned forward to the microphone. “I have to vote yes.” He shrugged. “Sorry, Blair.”
“Cowards,” Blair said. “That’s what you all are.”
“Ron Helms?”
Helms raised his hand. “Count me as a yes.”
“And finally, Ken Adams?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“I can’t believe you people! You’re not worthy to serve this island! I’ll spend every cent I have campaigning against each one of you!”
“Please, Blair,” the mayor said. “Don’t make me call the police to escort you out.”
“Why don’t you do that?” Blair asked. “Call Cade to escort me out. He’ll probably love reliving the whole thing. I’ll just wait right here.”
She had called his bluff, and the mayor just sighed. “As you know,” he said, “I only vote in the event of a tie if one of the council members is absent—but since we have a unanimous vote to shut down Hanover House, my vote will not be needed.”
“We’ll get a lawyer,” Blair said in a flat voice. “We’ll get a team of lawyers. We’re going to fight this with every resource we have.”
“You’ll wind up paying more than Hanover House is even worth,” the mayor said.
“It would be worth every penny,” Blair told him and tore out of the room with Morgan behind her.
The wind was whipping hard from the east as she stepped outside, and she swung around to her sister. “We’ll sell that bed-and-breakfast over my dead body. Those people are not going to decide what we do with our own property. And they won’t tell us who we can have in our home.”
Morgan was silent as Blair got behind the wheel and drove them back to Hanover House.
C H A P T E R
61
Cade and McCormick spent half the night going over the evidence they had on both of their prisoners and trying to figure out where Rick fit in. They had located the nursing home where Rick’s mother lived and learned that she was indeed in the hospital with a case of pneumonia. They called the Sheriff’s Department in Atlanta and asked them to post a man near her room, to catch Rick if he happened to show up there.
It was too much of a coincidence that he had left town to visit her on the very day the article had come out. And why hadn’t he been found yet? Every police force in Georgia was looking for him.
Cade slept for three hours, then got up and showered. Feeling weary to the bone, he called the DA and went over the evidence with him.
“I’m holding them for two different crimes,” he said. “Gus for breaking and entering, and Jonathan for murder. But I haven’t been able to build a very strong case against either one of them. In fact, if you took what I’ve got to a jury, they’d both be acquitted.”
The DA agreed. “The speargun was big, but a good defense attorney could refute that with the evidence of the shed being broken into. And it looks like his alibi holds. What’s your gut feeling about Gus?”
“I don’t know,” Cade said. “I was absolutely sure that he was the one who’d broken into Blair’s. So far, the bandana is the only evidence we’ve got, but I’d like to keep him in custody. I don’t want to take any chances. But I feel sure that we’re barking up the wrong tree with Jonathan.”
The DA thought for a moment, then let out a heavy sigh. “The more I look into it, the less of a case I have. I’ll go along with Jonathan Cleary’s release.”
Cade headed to the judge’s office, a brand-new sprawling building overlooking the water on the north side of the island. The office buzzed with activity. Judge Randy Simmons had many enterprises other than law. Cade tried to catch the secretary’s attention as she flitted from room to room, delivering memos and picking up mail.
“Whatcha need, Cade?” she asked as she hurried past him.
“I need to see the judge.”
“I’ll tell him you’re here.” But she headed to the back of the offices, instead of to the judge’s office.
Irritated, Cade went to the judge’s door and knocked, then pushed it open. Randy had his feet propped up on his desk, holding the phone with his shoulder. He wore Reeboks, faded jeans, and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Randy gestured for him to sit.
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Cade remained standing.
After a moment, Randy got off the phone and dropped his feet to the floor. “It’s a madhouse around here today. Want a Coke or something?”
Cade shook his head. “Has the DA called you about Jonathan Cleary?”
“Yeah,” Randy said. “I can’t do much about it if he doesn’t want to press the issue, but I sure don’t want him leaving town.”
“I think we can trust him.”
“Right,” the judge said. “We can trust him—just like we could trust Rick Dugan, who I hear has fled and can’t be located.”
“You know, your wife’s article didn’t wash. I checked and Rick Dugan has no prison record. Where she got her information I have no idea, but it was slanderous and inflammatory.”
“You sound like a defense attorney now,” Randy said, propping his feet back up. “Whose side are you on?”
Cade didn’t honor that with an answer.
“If you’re wrong, and we let Jonathan out, he could kill again.”
“I wouldn’t recommend releasing him if I thought he did it. I’m convinced now that he didn’t. Enough’s been done to the Owens family. I’d like to undo some of it.”
“You’re telling me. That house must be cursed. Two of them murdered, and three of them suspects. It’s a good thing they’re closing the place down. Nothing good can come out of Hanover House.”
Cade didn’t want to get into an argument right now. “So do I let him out?”
Randy rubbed his jaw, as if giving it deep consideration. “So you have people out looking for Rick Morrison or Dugan or whatever his name is?”
“Yes,” Cade said. “We have some leads. I think we’ll have him by day’s end.”
The judge sighed heavily, then stretched and got up. “I’m not going to make a decision right now, Cade. I’ll get back to you.”
Cade had to be satisfied with that, but by the time he got back to the police station there was already a call for him from the judge. He picked up the phone and dialed the number, waited until the call was routed to the judge.