On June 15, continued the reports, Tabitha answered a knock at the front door of the main house. There stood Billy. He told Tabitha he wanted to get a T-shirt he’d left in the pool house.
Tabitha hurried upstairs to get Mrs Resnick. When the women came down, Billy was seated on the piano bench in the formal living room. Mrs Resnick, all 115 pounds of her, faced the burly six-foot-two man.
“She asked him what in the world he was doing in her house,” the report quoted Tabitha. “I don’t know what he told her, but I slipped to the phone and called Mr Ramsey.”
Tabitha heard Mrs Resnick’s raised voice speak sharply to Billy. Mrs Resnick then hustled him outside to wait for Ramsey and the police, who arrested him for trespassing. Ramsey wasn’t surprised at his mother’s cool. “Mother wasn’t scared of the devil,” he told officers.
But when his mother was murdered just twenty days later, he feared her sharp tongue had triggered a disturbed man’s anger.
Branigan paused from reading the incident reports on Billy that Grambling police had dutifully attached to the voluminous interviews from that first day. It hadn’t taken long for the news to spread among downtown neighbors about the man living on Mrs Resnick’s property. Branigan remembered her mom and dad shaking their heads at the thought of Billy living in the pool house that was a three-minute walk from their house; her dad had quietly installed bolt locks on their exterior doors.
On the day of the murder, police officers made the connection almost immediately.
By 5:23 p.m. — just forty-four minutes after the neighbor’s first call to the police — a patrol car with two uniformed officers was sitting outside Billy’s grandmother’s house in the crumbling mill village of Forest Lawn. Billy was there.
The officers escorted him to the Grambling Law Enforcement Center, a squat building behind the more gracious courthouse, and handed him over to detectives. Throughout the evening, detectives called and asked the officers to pick up friends whom Billy named as companions during the afternoon.
Branigan shuffled through other incident reports that were clipped to the investigative time line. Nine months before the murder, Billy had spent time in the Gainesville jail, forty-five minutes from Grambling. The charge was domestic violence for attacking a girlfriend, plus simple assault on the first officer who tried to subdue him. It took five officers and a stun gun to wrestle him into a cell.
Since returning home from Gainesville, Billy had been haunted by hallucinations, said family members. He saw black flies swarming from his belly button and planes zooming over his house. The grandmother blamed his condition on the stun gun, but it sounded more like full-blown schizophrenia to Branigan — and to the psychiatrist whose report was attached to the file.
Flipping forward to the July 5 incident report, she read the police department’s conclusion. Because Mrs Resnick had last been seen alive at 12:40 p.m., because police had Billy in custody by 5:23 p.m., and because he’d been in the continuous company of Forest Lawn neighbors in between, it was apparent he did not commit the murder. Detectives would question Billy further in ensuing days, but their obvious suspect — the stranger who had moved into Mrs Resnick’s pool house, the man she had angrily removed from her piano bench — was not her killer.
The problem was that Billy had looked so promising that clues leading to someone else might have been overlooked. This tidbit didn’t come from the police file, but from a later interview conducted by Jody. Branigan reached for the notebook he’d given her when she took the assignment. It took only a moment to find the quote he’d transcribed from a homicide detective who was one of the first responders.
“My thinking was clouded by it,” the detective admitted. “I was completely focused on this guy Billy at the time.”
Branigan remembered those first few days after the murder. Billy made such a logical suspect. Who wouldn’t focus on him? She idly wondered if Billy still lived with his grandmother, if she was even alive. Or did he hang out now at Jericho Road, with so many of those who faced similar demons?
The phone rang as she put down the last report on Billy. Its words were blurring, and she knew her focus was waning. She rolled her neck while reaching for the receiver.
“Brani G, I’ve found him,” came Liam’s voice.
She was momentarily confused, thinking of Billy, then of Vesuvius’s hit-and-run driver. His next words yanked her to lucidity.
“I’ve found Davison.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Branigan quickly changed from pajama pants into jeans, leaving on her sleeveless T-shirt, and grabbing her keys and purse. Cleo skidded to the door, and looked up hopefully.
“Yeah,” she told the dog. “I might need you.”
Cleo barked and followed Branigan to the car, hopping into the passenger seat. Branigan didn’t bother with the sheet she usually placed beneath the dog.
Driving fast, she soon pulled into the convenience store parking lot Liam had named. It was in a shabby former mill village less than a mile from Jericho Road. Grambling was dotted with these mill villages, remnants of vibrant communities in the early twentieth century that were now collapsed and drug-infested. A few unbroken streetlights made a half-hearted effort, but the area beyond the lot was in deepest shadow. This parking lot was the city’s single most active spot for prostitution and drugs, Jody had once told her. For rapes and murders, too, when things went wrong.
She nervously pulled alongside Liam’s SUV, her stomach in a knot. Liam emerged as soon as he saw her Honda.
“He’s under the bridge,” he said.
“Is he strung out?”
“No. I smelled alcohol, but he’s coherent.”
She smiled tightly. “Did you tell him you were calling me?”
“Yeah. He knows. Get in the back, Miss Cleo,” Liam commanded. “I’ll ride with you.”
Cleo obediently leaped over the seat back as Liam climbed in. Branigan knew where they were headed — the Michael Garner Memorial Bridge, named for a police officer gunned down in this neighborhood fifteen years before. When the bridge was built some years later, Grambling’s police chief lobbied for naming rights. Had she been part of Michael Garner’s family, she wasn’t sure she’d want his name connected to a site so close to his murder. But they considered it an honor, and the bridge now bore his name. It also sheltered dozens of the city’s homeless.
Liam knew the bridge community. He and his staff frequently visited, inviting residents to Jericho Road for drug rehab, mental health counseling and worship. But even he never came here after dark. With the blackness impenetrable, suffocating, Branigan felt her heart thumping. She was about to face the man she loved above all others.
Her twin brother, Davison.
They parked in the pitted lot of a storage facility 200 feet from the bridge. It was as close as they could get in a car. Liam had wisely brought a flashlight that helped illumine a path through the weeds. Cleo ran ahead, and Branigan heard her excited bark before they reached the bridge.
Then she heard the voice so like her dad’s, so like Chan’s.
“Well, what a pretty girl! You must be one of Gran’s.”
Branigan stumbled forward. There, sitting on a cement block, was her brother. Even with Liam’s dim light, she could see that his blond hair was shoulder-length and matted. A week’s stubble grew along his jaw line. His jeans looked too large. But she could see the glitter of his familiar emerald eyes, identical to hers and shining like a cat’s in the dark. The slow smile that emerged when he saw her was one she remembered well.
“Brani G,” he said through cracked lips, using the childhood nickname Liam had adopted. “Hey, Sis.”
The bridge soared at least fifty feet above them, devoid of traffic at this hour, and invisible. Branigan peered into the darkness, but could see nothing past Davison in Liam’s little circle of light. Still, she’d never known this site to be vacant and sensed people listening from nearby tents staked into the hard red mud, and from the girders forty-five
feet up an incline.
Davison stood to hug her, and she walked into his arms silently, awkwardly. She steeled herself against the smell of dried sweat, dirt and grime, and he sensed it.
“Sorry. I haven’t bathed in awhile,” he apologized, pulling away. “Liam says I can shower tomorrow at the shelter.”
Branigan nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Then clearing her throat, she fought the urge to scream a hundred questions and instead said quietly, “Tell me how you’ve been.”
He shrugged. “Not much to tell.”
The siblings had never been ones for chitchat. So she asked what was foremost in her mind: “Are you clean?”
He hesitated, knowing how badly she wanted him to say yes, and she presumed, wanting pretty badly for it to be true.
“No,” he said.
She exhaled and slumped, not realizing how tightly she’d been holding on to this hope until it was whisked away.
“Crack?” she asked.
He nodded. “And beer. Some meth.”
She glanced at Liam. It didn’t get much worse than crystal methamphetamine, he’d once told her. The rotting teeth, the skeletal face, the aging skin. Five years and Davison would be unrecognizable.
Branigan took a shuddering breath, stopped the cries of Why? before they flew from her mouth. But it was as if he heard them anyway. He shrugged again, turning inward.
“I’m glad to see you,” she managed. “So glad to know you’re okay.”
He gave her a sad smile.
“Are you okay?”
He gave a sideways wag of his head, meaning yes and no.
“I thought it was time to come and see Chan, now that he’s heading to college.” She heard Liam draw a sharp breath. “But I’m having second thoughts,” he said to Liam. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”
“I agree,” Liam said. “Telling him is one thing. Having him see you strung out is another.”
Branigan cringed. Liam didn’t mince words. Chan knew he was adopted, had known since he was old enough to know the word. But Liam and Liz had never shared the part about his biological parents being drug addicts.
Davison hung his head. “So here’s what I’m thinking. I’d like to go to rehab, then tell Chan before he leaves for Furman.”
Liam and Branigan looked at each other. She didn’t know what surprised her more — rehab or that he knew where Chan was going to college.
“I need to tell him he has a royal screw-up for a father. So he can do everything in his power to be different.”
“All right,” she whispered, gripping her twin’s shoulder. “Sounds like a plan.”
In the glow of the flashlight, Liam’s face was expressionless. Branigan knew him well enough to know he wasn’t happy.
Davison had been younger than Chan was now, sixteen and a junior at Grambling East, when he had his first drink. Branigan saw it happen, saw the light dawn in his eyes. She just didn’t know what she was looking at.
Gran and Pa had taken their RV to visit Gran’s sister in Texas. They were going to be gone for two weeks, maybe more. Pa had timed the visit to coincide with the selling of chickens, so the chicken houses were empty. Uncle Bobby would take the cattle into his adjoining pastures. That left only the dogs — Cleo’s grandmother and great-uncle, to be precise.
After driving out to the farm every afternoon after school to feed and play with the German shepherds, Davison and Branigan casually told their parents it would be easier to spend the weekend there. Mrs Powers, who ran an accounting business from their house, was in the middle of tax season. She welcomed the break in cooking. “As long as you call us every morning and every night,” she said.
The twins didn’t go wild, but they did invite their best friends to the farm on Friday night. Davison’s swim team buddies, Brandon and Liam, brought beer, and Branigan’s softball cohorts, Sandy and Alissa, sweet white Zinfandel. After sunset, they plugged in a CD player on the back porch and let their friends introduce them to alcohol.
Branigan quickly got giddy, then silly, then sick on the candy-colored wine. She was asleep by eleven, leaving the party in full swing. When their friends left around noon on Saturday, they couldn’t take the alcohol back to their houses, so they left it. Branigan could no more have touched another glass of wine than she could have eaten the dead mouse Gran’s shepherd proudly dumped on the porch. But Davison could hardly wait to get back to the beer.
In mid-afternoon, he pulled one from the refrigerator, popped it with a satisfying spurt and licked the foam from the can. He then settled onto the porch and began talking excitedly about his plans for senior year, then college, then law school. Her normally reticent brother talked excitedly, non-stop. In fact, he pretty near babbled.
She watched, puzzled, as he drank four beers in a row, then stretched out on Gran’s couch and fell asleep.
Five years later, he mentioned that afternoon once. Just once.
It was the night he came to her dorm room to tell her he was dropping out of college. Certainly she’d heard the rumors; heard about Davison’s reputation for being the hardest drinking frat man at the University of Georgia — which was saying something.
She had watched him uneasily the preceding summer, when he stayed overnight at friends’ houses more often than he came home. She had heard whispered conversations between her parents, and much louder confrontations between them and Davison. She had walked into his bedroom and been stunned by the boozy smell.
But she wasn’t prepared for what he was saying that fall evening in her dorm. He wasn’t fully sober, though it was just past dusk. He had failed every mid-term, he said. He was giving up.
“But what about law school?” she cried, honestly bewildered.
He laughed bitterly. “No law school’s going to take me.”
“But Davison, why? You’re throwing away three years of school.”
He waved her words aside as if they were mosquitoes. “Do you remember the weekend we spent at Gran and Pa’s that spring they went to Texas?”
She nodded.
“And you remember that was the first time I tasted a beer?”
She nodded again.
“Well, something happened that night. It was the first time I felt normal. It was the first time I felt what other people feel like all the time.”
“What are you talking about? You’re not making sense.”
He sighed. “Anyway, Brani, I just wanted you to know. Mom and Dad don’t get it and never will. But I’m not like you. I’m not like other people.”
He got up to leave then, even as she was attempting to argue him out of this rash plan. He quietly closed the door while she was in the middle of a sentence.
It would be two years before she saw her brother again.
CHAPTER NINE
Branigan’s first stop the next morning was the house she had grown up in, two blocks from the stately Resnick home. She wanted to catch her folks before her dad left for work.
Her father was eating cereal, and her mother was drinking a glass of cranberry juice when she arrived. Her mother hugged her, and poured coffee into a mug without asking. Her dad remained seated at the breakfast table, but pulled her in for a quick hug.
“What brings you out so early?” he asked.
“I need to tell you both something.”
They glanced at each other.
“It’s good. It’s Davison.”
Her mom’s eyes widened, and her dad’s jaw tightened. Davison had caused them so much pain.
“He’s back?” breathed her mom. “Davison’s back?”
She nodded. “Apparently he wants to go to rehab. He got in touch with the treatment counselor at Jericho Road. Liam called me.”
“Well, I guess that is good,” said Mrs Powers. She’d been down this road before, knew not to get too excited. Branigan’s dad only cleared his throat.
“There’s one more thing,” Branigan said. “He wants to tell Chan.”
“Why?” asked her da
d.
“Something about Chan going off to college. So he’ll know his gene pool regarding addiction.”
“That may not be a bad thing.”
“It’ll be good for you guys too,” she said. “To finally let Chan know you’re his grandparents.”
As friends of the Delaneys, they knew Chan — knew him well. But with Liam and Liz’s decision to keep Chan’s junkie parents a secret, they hadn’t known his parentage until Chan grew into his tall and loose-limbed physique. Branigan had come to them with her suspicions and they realized instantly that she must be right. But they respected the Delaneys’ decision and said nothing to anyone outside the family.
Now her mom nodded, sitting down to take in this new development. She blew out a slow breath. “Tell Liz and Liam to call us when they’re ready.”
Branigan’s second stop was Jericho Road. She wanted to see if Malachi, the homeless man Dontegan had recommended she speak to, was there for breakfast.
Three of the shelter residents were cooking grits, bacon and eggs as she walked in. Two of them ducked their heads, but Dontegan waved a greeting.
“You have a plate, woncha?” he called.
“Sure, if you have enough.” She helped herself to a cup of steaming coffee from a battered urn, ignoring the packages of artificial sweetener. Liam once told her it was impossible to keep real sugar, because alcoholics poured entire bowls into their coffee, trying to get a mini-high.
Dontegan passed her a generously filled plate through the cafeteria window. She asked him if Malachi was around, and he pointed to a man of medium build sitting alone at the farthest table. Malachi’s skin was dark black, possibly the darkest Branigan had ever seen in Georgia, a shade she associated with beleaguered Nigerians or Sudanese in the news. His cornrow braids dangled a few inches below his camouflage baseball cap. His clothes were so worn as to be colorless — threadbare shades of khaki and green.
She set her plate on his table, leaving an empty space between them.
“I’m Branigan Powers,” she said. “Is it okay if I sit here?”
The Cantaloupe Thief Page 5