The Price He Paid

by Jean Brashear

  The sheriff, he reminded himself, had been a deputy when Ned Compton died and had made no bones about his glee when David went to jail.

  All David had on his side was Callie, stubborn, loyal Callie. He appreciated her defense of him more than he could afford to let her know, but how long would her faith in him hold with her job in jeopardy, with no more chances for them to be together outside an interview room? He didn’t kid himself that he would ever get out of jail again.

  Not unless he were willing to tell the truth, which he could never do.

  “Well? You gonna read it or not?”

  He eyed the envelope again. “Since you’ve obviously done so, why don’t you just tell me what it says?”

  “Read it yourself. Don’t make sense anyway.”

  Why hadn’t David’s callous words sent Callie running? Why wouldn’t she give up on him?

  Because she’s got the heart of a lion, that’s why.

  David sighed and reached for the paper on the floor, holding it in his hand for a moment before reluctantly sliding it from the envelope. Slowly he unfolded the single sheet.

  You have to see me. For the sake of one lost angel, if nothing else.

  He bowed his head. Not fair, Callie. Not even a little fair.

  Damn it. What could she have to say but what he’d already heard? If she understood the true situation…

  But she didn’t. Couldn’t, as long as he continued to lie to her.

  There’s no hope, can’t you see that? You’re wasting your time. Go back to Philadelphia and get on with your life.

  His own was over. Any hope for them had fled.

  But one stubborn little seed pushed its fragile stem up from the depths of darkness. Up through a tiny crack in the grimy asphalt that was his life. Maybe she knew something…this was her arena after all. Maybe…

  “Damn you, Callie,” he muttered, but there was little heat in it.

  “All right,” he said to the deputy. “I’ll see her.” He refused to dwell on whether the appeal was simply having one last chance to be near her.

  Callie paced the interview room at the county jail after having made record time on a return trip through the mountains. At the last minute, she’d veered from her intended path of interrogating David’s mother because doing so felt like a form of torture when the woman was obviously fragile and lost.

  Callie would use the note first in an attempt to shake David out of his intransigence. She might have to resort to using his mother as a threat, but she hoped not. To that end, she’d decided an emotional appeal would have to work, and their only connection—besides one night that he had already destroyed—was their shared past.

  She didn’t have a lot of optimism that the sketchy note would sway him, but she also knew better than to put any concrete information in writing. Prisoners had rights, yes, but that didn’t extend to blind acceptance of sealed envelopes or containers by the authorities. She’d thought about various codes she might use, but she and David had been apart too long for that to work.

  Please, David. She paced again to the far corner of the concrete block room. Please talk to me.

  When she heard the door opening, she was almost afraid to turn.

  But then she heard the sound of heavy, shortened steps, like those of a prisoner whose ankles were bound. She bit her lower lip and revolved to face him.

  The man who had thrilled her, had sent her to stunning heights…that man was nowhere in evidence. Neither was the one who had given himself up to her embrace.

  Before her stood a stranger, not the one who’d raged at her, not the one who’d smoldered with anger. This man was solid stone, refusing to so much as meet her eyes.

  “Please remove his cuffs,” she requested of the deputy.

  A quick, impatient shake of David’s head. “No. This won’t take long.”

  The deputy looked between them as if trying to figure out whom to obey.

  David’s eyes remained locked on the wall above her head, but she could see his jaw flexing.

  To avoid causing him further grief, she merely nodded at the deputy, who shook his head and left the room.

  David said nothing, did nothing.

  For one of the few times in her life, Callie didn’t know what to say. At last she ventured a question. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if they uncuffed you?”

  “This is reality. It’s who I am.”

  But it’s not, she wanted to protest. A night without sleep, a day of upheaval…suddenly, Callie was exhausted, sick of everything. “What are you trying to accomplish by acting like this?”

  At last his gaze flicked to hers. “Just go away, Callie.”

  If his voice hadn’t been surprisingly gentle, perhaps she would have thrown up her hands. “I can’t.”

  His jaw clenched. “Why the hell not?”

  “What do you want from me, David? Your attorney’s out of town, and I’m trying to help you. You don’t have to be alone in this, but you slap away every attempt—” Seeing his hardened features, frustration rose.

  “All right!” she exploded. “No more kid gloves.” She slapped her palms on the table. “Tell me about Ned Compton.”

  At last she’d succeeded in shaking him. “What?”

  “I want to know about your life with your stepfather.”

  His whole face tightened. “Don’t call him that.”

  An inkling grew into a much stronger instinct. Ned Compton. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Callie had had to learn to trust her intuition; sometimes it made all the difference in a case. She’d been sleepwalking since she’d lost her confidence in her skills. Now the driven prosecutor was back and on the hunt. “What did he do to you, David? Did he hit you? What was he like when nobody was looking?”

  She saw the reaction, so faint she would have missed it if she hadn’t been staring straight at him.

  “He was fine.” Back to not meeting her gaze.

  “You don’t kill someone who’s…’fine.’” She punctuated the word with fingers clenched in quotation marks. “What are you hiding?”

  He ignored the question. “You have no idea what I was like back then.”

  “Only months after you played Sir Galahad with me? I don’t buy that, David. You reached out to a messed-up girl who was a total stranger, and you stuck with me even when it cost you dearly.” She started around the table. “How you treated me was no different than you treated everyone else. Everybody loved you. You changed that much after I left? Uh-uh.” She folded her arms in front of her chest. “I think I might need to have a chat with your mother.”

  His eyes flew wide, then narrowed to pure fury. Rage pumped off him in rolling waves.

  Abruptly, he simply shrugged. Turned off his feelings like a spigot. “She wasn’t there that night. She can’t tell you anything.”

  “She just walked in on you after you’d killed him, is that right?” That’s what his testimony had been.

  “Yeah.” His gaze locked on hers as if daring her to argue. “My fingerprints were on the murder weapon. Do your homework.”

  She let the insult pass. “So the person who sent me an anonymous note that Ned Compton is the key was…?” She left the question hanging, alert for the slightest reaction.

  The smallest things could betray a person—the faint widening of the eye, the tiniest hitch of breath, the quick flinch of a muscle.

  She spotted all three. David was not the accomplished liar she’d learned to be.

  “Someone’s just messing with your head,” he said. “You don’t have time to hang around anyway. Your job is on the line, you told me so.”

  It was her turn to react as he stated what she’d been trying to ignore. She did not have the luxury of lingering here, had indeed planned to leave today and return to fight for her career, her life, the only one she knew.

  She could relinquish Miss Margaret’s legacy and figure out some way not to harm the people involved. She had two weeks left on her thirty days, but that wasn’t an insurm
ountable issue, she had to believe.

  But if she went back now, David would stay in jail until his trial, then he would go back to Jackson, to a cell that would cage his spirit, that would harden him beyond redemption, the traces that were left of that beautiful boy. This time prison might even break him.

  “You’re absolutely right. It makes no sense for me to remain here,” she said, testing him.

  “Good.” Relief warred with the faintest spark of grief, then both settled into resignation bordering on despair.

  So what did she say to him when she knew she had no intention of leaving? When she planned to drive straight to his mother’s house and force the truth she was beginning to suspect? Did she walk away and let desolation settle deep into his bones for however long was required for her to dig out what had really happened that night?

  But what if she were wrong? Did she dare raise his hopes?

  Someone knew the truth of Ned Compton’s death. She’d hoped to shake it from David, but he hadn’t blinked. Locked up, he couldn’t interfere with her, and maybe that was what she needed, even though seeing him chained grieved her.

  She felt him staring at her and looked up, realizing she’d been silent too long. “So…can I bring you anything?” she said with careful politeness.

  “No.” His brow beetled. “Thanks,” he added as an afterthought, his gaze piercing. What are you up to? she could almost hear him asking.

  She watched his fingers—those long, powerful fingers that had caressed her body, had drawn her soul from her—clench, and she had a moment’s temptation to yell at him, to shout What are you doing to yourself? To us? To what we could be together?

  But even if she succeeded in getting to the bottom of this tangle and freeing him, she didn’t know what his dreams were, what he’d wish to salvage from the bright future that had been torn from him…and she had her own goals, her own game plan.

  One thing at a time, she lectured herself.

  “Okay, then. I’ll see you later.” She eased toward the door.

  “Callie.” His voice was ominous. “Where are you going?”

  She skirted around him.

  “Don’t involve my mother in this, you hear me?”

  The urgency in his tone was wrenching. She was on the right track, had to be. She slipped through the cell opening, biting her lip as she heard the jerky half steps caused by his ankle bindings.

  “Callie!” His tormented roar echoed in her head.

  I’m doing this for you, David. She was practically running as she left.

  “Mrs. Langley? It’s Callie Hunter,” she called as she knocked for the second time. “I need to speak with you about David.”

  The drapes were closed, the door was locked. Callie decided, after a third round of knocking, to circle the house and see if she could see anyone inside.

  Once more, the woman’s sad plight touched her. The small home that had always been neat and well-tended had fallen into decay. David’s efforts were slowly reversing the trend, but the sense of hopelessness was inescapable. For a second, Callie contemplated simply retracing her steps and letting the woman be.

  But that would not save David.

  When Callie had first learned of his criminal record, she had assumed that everything bad that had happened had begun with her, that his fall from favor was solely her fault.

  Only today had she stopped to consider that Ned Compton had entered David’s life at that same juncture. She’d never met the man, though she had heard his name mentioned when she lived here. He’d been new in town then, she thought, and wealthy compared to the rest of Oak Hollow.

  Not that she expected to escape blame herself. She had surely initiated David’s precipitous decline, and she bore plenty of responsibility for taking a decent boy and so ruthlessly pursuing him that the normal drives of a teenage male had led him straight into her very willing arms.

  He would never have touched her if he’d known she was only fourteen. She’d understood that then and even more so now.

  Still, Delia Langley had never given any indication of wanting a husband. She’d been an exceedingly beautiful woman, but her life had been centered around David, and even a dumb teenage girl could see all that she’d sacrificed to raise a very fine boy.

  So how had Ned Compton come into the picture? And what kind of man had he been really?

  A tiny stir in the curtains of the back bedroom caught Callie’s eye.

  Gotcha.

  She strode up the back steps and tried the screen door. Finding it locked, she rapped sharply on its frame. “Mrs. Langley, when I left David at the jail, he was chained hand and foot. He’ll go back to prison for a long time if something doesn’t change.”

  Was that faint sound footsteps? Just in case, she continued. “I think there’s more to the story than anyone knows. I also think you’re the one who sent me that note—”

  The back door opened. “Chained?” His mother’s hand went to her throat.

  “Yes. Did you send me that note?”

  Unpainted lips pressed together. She nodded.

  “He doesn’t want me talking to you,” Callie said. “But if I don’t, there’s no help for him.”

  “Please.” The screen door opened. “Come inside.”

  Callie followed her.

  “Would you like some tea?” His mother’s hands fluttered like wounded birds.

  Callie trod carefully, though she wanted to scream Talk to me now! Witnesses could be spooked so easily, and this woman was teetering on the sharp edge of falling apart. “Yes, thank you.”

  With jerky steps, Mrs. Langley moved to the cabinet and drew out a glass, then opened the freezer compartment of the ancient refrigerator and took out ice cubes. She dipped into the refrigerator section and withdrew a plastic pitcher.

  The pitcher suddenly tumbled to the floor, splattering tea everywhere.

  With the hoarse cry of someone stretched beyond her limits, Delia Langley fell to her knees, oblivious to the pool of brown liquid around her.

  “It was me,” she choked out. “He was trying to protect me, and I was—I couldn’t—” She extended her arms, beseeching Callie, for what she couldn’t say. Mercy? Forgiveness?

  What exactly had David done? Nauseated by what she was beginning to suspect, Callie went to the woman ineffectively attempting to mop up the liquid with a dish towel and pulled her to her feet.

  “I—I need to—” Mrs. Langley gestured to the floor. “I have to—” Normally a graceful, contained woman, she was shaking and spreading the mess to her clothing.

  “Come here.” Callie used the most soothing tone she could manage, given her own agitation. “I’ll take care of it.”

  But Delia continued to mop and was only making things worse. Callie cast around until she found a drawer with more towels and went to work on the mess, hoping David’s mother would calm down as the puddle receded.

  At last they were done. Callie deposited the stained towels in the washing machine and turned to the woman standing in the middle of the kitchen as if in a trance.

  Pity swamped Callie. Whatever exactly David had done, she thought she understood why. The woman before her was a frail wisp. She’d had the strength to raise David, to care for him alone and struggle every day to feed him and put a roof over his head until he was big enough to help.

  The price of that, though, had to be steep. Had the incessant battle to keep them afloat stolen all her strength?

  Or had the events of that tragic night finally broken her? Callie wasn’t sure, but it was time to find out.

  “Let’s sit.” She led Delia to the table and seated her in a chair, then pulled another one near. “I need you to tell me exactly what happened, for David’s sake.”

  The vacant stare turned to her. A tiny flicker told Callie she was still in there, the woman who had raised him, had loved him. “He made me promise. After. I didn’t—I couldn’t—By the time I recovered myself, began to understand what he’d done, it was too late. He’d alre
ady…” Her shoulders rounded, her voice became a whisper. “Still, I should have done something….” Her entire body began to quake. “I will never forgive myself. I’m his mother. I should have…”

  Callie had to get the story from her before she fell apart completely. She clasped Delia’s hands and squeezed. “You know David loves you,” she began.

  If anything, Delia curled in on herself even more.

  “Mrs. Langley, if you care about your son, you have to get a grip on yourself and talk to me. We’re running out of time. He’s in a dangerous situation. He could be sent back to prison very soon.”

  “No—” she cried, her head lifting, her eyes sparking. “He can’t! He did nothing. It was me, I told you!”

  And then Callie began to truly understand.

  She’d had it all wrong. “David didn’t kill Ned Compton, not even in defense of you, did he? It was you, and David took the fall.”

  “Yes!” His mother covered her face with her hands and broke into racking sobs.

  Fifteen years. Of pure hell. Of endless hate aimed in his direction.

  A life fractured. Dreams ground to dust.

  And none of it his fault. The David she’d loved—still loved, she might as well accept—had, in one selfless act, sacrificed everything he’d ever hoped for to protect the woman who’d given him life, who’d sacrificed so much for him. He would have seen it as proper and just, that noble boy upon whose shoulders so much had been heaped.

  Where is the justice? Callie wanted to cry.

  She believed in the system—she had to to survive every day in the grim world that she inhabited. But sometimes there were cases that literally made you sick, that robbed you of even the slimmest threads of faith in a just world. Of the conviction that good could triumph.

  Oh, David. She wanted to weep for him, but that would do no good. It was time to fight for him.

  With every weapon in her armory.