by Debra Webb
He barreled out of her driveway and onto the road. Anger blasted through him. He had to find a way to get back on track.
He owed Jack better than this.
He didn’t owe Cece Winters one damned thing.
Chapter Six
By the time Deacon returned, Cece had pulled herself together. Her eyes weren’t red anymore and she didn’t feel like such a complete idiot. What she felt was mad as hell. The things her sister and her older brother had said about her in those damned statements were lies—most of them, anyway—just like their answers in that courtroom.
She paced back and forth, the crumpled statements in her hand. Deacon’s knock on the door reminded her that she needed to calm down. Sure she had the tears under control, but the anger was a whole new level of emotion. Her entire life she could not remember ever being this outraged. Not even when the jury found her guilty of murder. Those people had not known her. They had based their judgment on the evidence, which was completely against her, and an endless string of witnesses who had either embellished some semblance of the truth or flat-out lied.
Not even, she told herself, when the two deputies and the sheriff had treated her like a murderer. She’d had her father’s blood all over her. The knife had been lying on the floor at her feet and though her prints weren’t found on it, the district attorney suggested she had wiped away the prints.
This, she tightened her fingers on the wad of papers, was her kin. They knew her. Grew up in the same house with her. And they had lied.
Another knock echoed and she stopped pacing, drew in a big breath, let it out and strode to the door. Her fingers on the knob, she hesitated, reminded herself to make sure who was on the other side before she opened it. Just because she was expecting Deacon didn’t mean it was him.
The man on the other side gave her a little wave and she told herself to relax. That did not happen. Her heart fluttered and she lost her breath all over again. She really, really was an idiot. This man was only being nice. The last time she had been touched by the opposite sex, the guy had been a boy—not a man—and that had been a very long time ago. And he was a jerk. She had been way too naive.
She forced her gaze down to the bucket in his hand. “Thanks.”
“Looks like you’ve been working.”
She followed his gaze to the coffee table and couch. Documents were spread all over the place. “Yeah. I’ve been...working.”
“Why don’t you get back to it and I’ll take care of the door. This paint has a built-in stain blocker. A couple of coats should do it. When you’re ready, you can walk me through what you have.”
He smiled that smile that did not mean anything, yet her pulse still reacted.
She nodded. “Sure. That would be great.”
Taking another deep breath, she returned to her piles. She knelt between the coffee table and couch, settled the wadded statements there and attempted to smooth them out. She shouldn’t have reacted so angrily. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She needed to handle all these emotions like an adult.
On some level she still felt like that nineteen-year-old who hadn’t experienced the world. She had lived in Winchester her entire life. Never been farther than Nashville to the north or Birmingham to the south. She had never even seen the ocean. Navigating all this—she stared at the mass of papers—was difficult. She smoothed at the pages some more. Didn’t help.
“As long as you can still read them, that’s all that matters.”
Her attention shifted to the man who’d propped open her front door and placed a drop cloth on the floor beneath it. His hand wrapped around the handle of the brush and her gaze followed the long brush strokes. His method for applying the paint was not at all like the smear process she had used.
“I guess I didn’t like what I read,” she confessed.
“You want to start with that?”
He was a stranger. He didn’t know her family beyond their fanatical religious affiliations. She supposed he could be a good sounding board. Objective. She could definitely use an objective opinion. And he was a private investigator. He was an experienced investigator. Frasier had trusted him. She should, as well.
“When I was arrested, the police interviewed a lot of people who knew me and my father.” She sat back on her heels and let her mind drift back to that dark time. “The reviews were mixed. Most folks lumped the whole Winters clan into the same category of fanatical misfits.”
“Human nature.” He glanced at her. “People see what they expect to see. What they want to see.”
She bit back the question on the tip of her tongue. She wanted to know what he saw. “I didn’t hold it against them. Still don’t. Like you said, they see what they expect to see. I guess I hadn’t given anyone a reason to see anything different.”
“You were a kid.”
She nodded. “True.”
Cece wondered how old he was. Maybe thirty-two or thirty-three. Smart. Probably went to college. Most likely had a nice family.
She did not have a nice family. Since they had all turned their backs on her, she didn’t really have a family at all.
“My older brother...” Saying his name was like a knife to her chest. She wondered if any amount of time would make that hurt go away. “Marcus, he stated that I was unbalanced and angry. That I’d said I hated our father on numerous occasions.”
“He lied.”
Was that doubt she saw in his eyes. After all, surely one’s own brother wouldn’t say such things. “About most of it, yes,” she clarified.
“Which parts did he lie about?”
He did not look at her this time, just kept painting. She expected any moment that he would start looking at her the way everyone else in town did. It was highly likely that she wouldn’t be seeing as much of this new neighbor after today. But then he’d been over the case file with Frasier. She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.
“I’ve never been unbalanced in my life.”
When he looked at her with surprise she had to laugh. “Like you said, I was a kid. I probably told the bastard that I hated him a hundred times. I did hate him. And I was angry, very angry. I hated what he had done to our family, particularly our mother. I hated everything about him.” She sighed and then said the rest. “I had probably wished him dead a thousand times, maybe more.”
“But your brother didn’t know that part?”
Cece shook her head. “I’m sure he knew but he chose to use that information in a way that suited him. What Marcus said didn’t surprise me. He and I weren’t that close. It was Sierra who threw me under the bus. We were really close growing up. I told her how I felt. Usually when I was so angry I couldn’t stop myself. She gushed the mean things I had said to the jury so tearfully, they were certain the words were tearing her apart. But that wasn’t the case at all. I could see it in her eyes. She was enjoying the attention and she loved making me look bad. Even though I was the one who had helped her out too many times to count.”
“You think someone was directing her? Maybe your older brother?”
“Possibly.” Marcus had wanted Cece out of the picture permanently. “He knew there were people in the church who would listen to me if I decided to speak out against him.”
“You never spoke out against your father?”
She shook her head. “My grandmother was afraid if I did that something bad would happen to me. The way it did to my mother.”
Cece stared at the crime scene photos of her father lying in all that blood. Her shoe prints in the mess. Blood all over her hands, her clothes. No matter that she had hated him—despised him for all those years—as he lay dying and unable to be cruel or hurtful, she’d felt pain. The little girl in her who had loved the man who was her father had felt fear, anguish, shock at seeing him in that condition. Her most basic instinct had been to help him. To cry out for assistance.
“What happened to your mother?”
Cece’s attention snapped back to the present. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You said your grandmother mentioned something bad happened to your mother.”
She frowned. Why in the world would she tell this stranger all these terrible things about her past? If Frasier hadn’t told him that part, maybe she shouldn’t. Even as the thought entered her mind, memories from more than two decades ago rushed into her head. Voices and sounds from that night. She had only been six. Her sister had just turned two; Levi was four. Marcus had been twelve. The screaming woke her. Cece remembered getting up but Marcus was there, in the darkness. He had ushered her back to bed. Sierra clung to her, crying. Levi was hiding in the closet. It wasn’t until the abrupt silence that Cece realized the screaming had been coming from her grandmother.
The sun came up on the next day before she understood what had happened. Her mother had fallen down the stairs. Her father had tried to help her but could not. Her grandmother had arrived in the middle of it all. Cece did not really understand that part but her grandmother would never talk about it. She just said something terrible had happened and she did not want anything like that to happen to Cece.
“My grandmother believed my father killed my mother. I’m certain of it.” Cece had never said those words to anyone else. Not even Levi.
Deacon asked her to start at the beginning, the morning before that night. It took a while for her to pull all the memories from the place to which she had banished them. Slowly, she pieced all the parts together. By the time she finished he had put his paintbrush down and joined her on the floor between the couch and coffee table.
“Did you ever confront your father about your memories of that night?”
How could he seem to care so much? Had she been locked away for so long she couldn’t tell the difference between basic human kindness and whatever else it was she believed she saw in his eyes?
What she wanted to see in his eyes?
“I did. One morning when I was sixteen and it was just the two of us, I blurted out that I thought he killed her. That’s when he kicked me out. He said if my grandmother was going to fill my head with lies, I could just go live with her.”
“But she never confirmed your belief?”
She shook her head. “No. But I saw the truth on her face. She was afraid of him. I’m sure he threatened her that night.”
“What about your grandfather? Was he still alive then?”
“He was, but he was blind and confined to a wheelchair.” She closed her eyes against the memory of her grandfather sobbing at her mother’s funeral.
“You’ve been through a lot.”
His words drew her back to the present. “Mine was not a pretty childhood.”
“What about Levi? You didn’t mention his statement to the police.”
With him sitting so close she saw the lines at the corners of his eyes. He looked genuinely interested in knowing what happened. Was she so desperate for an ounce of human kindness that she would imagine his concern?
“Levi insisted I wasn’t capable of murder. He believed it was Sierra. She was acting all weird about our father. Possessive and at the same time rebellious against his rules. He told the police as much in his statement. But it didn’t change anything. Sierra had an alibi.”
“Don’t tell me,” Deacon said. “Her alibi somehow involved Marcus.”
“Her car had broken down and he went to her rescue. Sierra’s boyfriend, who was a mechanic and a member of the church, helped, too.”
“Convenient.”
“Very.”
They sat in silence for a long moment until he finally asked, “So, what’s the plan?”
She laughed. “Who says I have a plan?”
“You were in prison for eight years. You had a lot of time to plan what comes next.”
Relaxing against the couch, she decided maybe he did care. Not everyone in the world had a hidden agenda. Some people were genuinely good. “At first I mostly just concentrated on surviving. Eventually—when I was more confident that I might live through being there—I started to think about when I got out.”
“And here you are.” He smiled, glanced around the room. “Ready to find some answers.”
“I thought about not coming back.”
She had made up her mind to come back and stay with her grandmother until she passed away and then move on. But her grandmother had died before Cece was released so she didn’t get the chance. Why bother coming back with her grandmother gone? It would have been so easy to just never return. To forget this place. It should be even easier to leave now that Levi had abandoned her, too.
But life had never been easy for Cece and the trouble in the walking-away scenario was the idea that her grandmother had still been trying to prove Cece was innocent when she died. That reality changed something deep inside her. Cece needed to finish what her grandmother had started.
When she had finished relaying all this to her neighbor, he said, “Revenge is a very strong motivator.”
If he only knew. “I guess so.”
More of that silence settled between them.
She should probably say something but the quiet felt too comfortable to interrupt. Not at all like the noisy environment at the prison. So noisy and yet she had felt utterly isolated. Alone. There had always been the fear that the other shoe was about to drop...that something bad would happen at any second. Most of the time it did.
“I’ll clean up that brush and have a look at the roof before I go. If you need anything, I can pick it up next time I’m in town.”
“Sounds great. If you’re sure you want to be that neighborly.”
He got to his feet. “I’m sure.”
Cece scrambled up and followed him to the door. “I have money. I can pay you.”
He stared at her for a long moment. She couldn’t quite label what she saw in his eyes, but it made her wish she had not said anything.
“I don’t want your money.” He reached for the brush and the bucket of paint.
She really was out of practice with how to read and to communicate with everyday people. “Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
When he met her gaze again, the strange look was gone. “It’s all right, really.”
But the tension she sensed in him told her it wasn’t all right. That moment was the first time she had felt uncomfortable in his presence. It was as if the neighborly stranger had suddenly disappeared.
Had she made another mistake trusting this man?
* * *
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT one of the many alarms he’d put in place went off. Deacon straightened away from the files he had been reviewing. Checked the monitor and didn’t see anyone outside the house. Cece had gone to bed. He grabbed his handgun, tucked it into his waistband and headed out. Could be an animal, but he preferred not to take the chance, particularly after last night.
He knew the path between their properties so well he didn’t need a flashlight. A thin sliver of moonlight managed to cut between the trees every few yards, enough to ensure he didn’t veer from the path. By the time he reached the tree line the sound of engines was loud in the air.
One was a four-wheel-drive truck, the sort with lifts that caused it to sit chest-high off the ground. The other was an SUV. Both dark green or black. Both blasting music and filled with drunk or just plain rowdy scumbags.
His cell vibrated in his pocket. It was her. He answered with, “I’m here. Call 911.”
This wasn’t going to be like the jerks last night. Those two had been sober and fully capable of being scared.
The ruckus these guys were causing just climbing out of their vehicles warned that the bastards wouldn’t be scared of much. Not in their condition.
Never a good thing.
If Deacon co
uld get the drop on one, he would gain the upper hand. He moved through the shadowed tree line. Counted heads as he went. Four. All sounded drunk or high and ready to cause trouble.
“Come on out here, Cece Winters!” The one who appeared to be the leader shouted.
He stood at the bottom of the porch steps.
The porch light flared to life and the front door swung open.
“Oh, hell,” Deacon muttered.
She stepped out onto the porch, the shotgun in her hand aimed at the SOB at the bottom of the steps.
The commotion that followed sent Deacon’s tension skyrocketing. Three weapons—looked like hunting rifles—suddenly appeared in the hands of the man’s buddies, all aimed at Cece. Deacon palmed his gun.
Anything he did at this point could cause one of these drunken fools to pull the trigger.
“I called Sheriff Tanner,” Cece warned. “He and his deputies are on the way right now.”
“Good,” one of the idiots said. “They’ll get here just in time to pick up the pieces of your skinny ass from all over that porch.”
The man at the bottom of the steps twisted around to face his friends. “Show some respect. Put those damned guns away. Right now, damn it!”
“She’s got a shotgun aimed at you!” one of the three said. “Hell, man, she killed her crazy daddy. What’s to keep her from killing you?”
“Hell, I ain’t afraid of Cece. We used to be sweethearts. Now put your guns down and get back in your damned vehicles while I talk to the lady.”
So this was the one boyfriend she’d had before going up the river. Evidently he wasn’t any smarter than he’d been all those years ago.
The three weren’t too happy, and they let it be known, but they did as their leader instructed. All three climbed into their vehicles and turned the music even louder. If Deacon was lucky the sheriff would get here before things got too interesting.
Deacon moved back through the tree line until he was parallel with the porch. The best he could tell, the man wasn’t armed, but he could be carrying a piece in his boot. No way to make a firm determination.