“Since when have you ever needed to be asked for your opinion?” she counters, and they both laugh.
They’re still standing in his entryway, so he gestures for them to have a seat on his couch. He thinks of what his girlfriend would say if she knew that another woman was here with him, alone. The truth is, his girlfriend doesn’t know anything about Annie. Annie had made him promise not to tell her about them. “It’s none of her business.” She’d pouted. He’d been delighted to hear the jealousy in her words, so he’d agreed. The fact that he has been able to keep this from his girlfriend still astounds him. But he’s learned something from it: the trick to keeping a secret is you just have to do it every day, day after day. It’s not as hard as people make it out to be. Sure, sometimes your conscience nags at you, but you just find something to distract you when it does.
“How do you feel about it, now that you’ve sent it?” he asks, though he’s not sure he wants to know. He has mixed feelings over what this lawyer is doing, pushing for the release of the man who went to prison for Annie’s mother’s murder. He thinks of the countless times he’s listened to Annie pour out her heart about this man, his conviction, and her role in it. “You were only three years old,” he’s said more times than he can count. “The adults in your life were the ones responsible for wrongfully convicting him. If he was even wrongfully convicted,” he always adds. Because he isn’t sure this man didn’t do it. There were no other likely suspects. But then again, the town wasted no time taking up their pitchforks and going after the person Annie had pointed at without considering other options. They hadn’t exactly looked for another suspect.
Annie thinks for a moment, then swallows before speaking. “There was other DNA in the tent. Male DNA. When Tyson started looking into the case, he dug around and found that the DNA was noted on one of the police forms, but it was never admitted into evidence and never turned over to Lewis’s attorney. He proved they intentionally left out that evidence, which is getting Lewis a new trial based on something called a Brady violation.” She looks at Kenny. “In other words, even without my support, Tyson says he’s going to get out.”
Kenny feels inexplicable jealousy at Annie’s use of the lawyer’s first name, as if they’re pals now. He pictures a guy who looks like a southern banker, dressed in a ridiculous seersucker suit that Annie probably finds charming, sees her sitting close to him as they go over some legal brief. Their hands touch by accident, then linger for a second too long. He sees this guy, this Tyson Barnes, who’s been all over the paper since he started this controversial crusade, being the one who stops Annie’s wedding when Kenny himself cannot.
“So.” He clears his throat and his mind at the same time. Focus, he has to focus. “That’s good. Right?”
“I just wanted my conscience to be clear,” she says. She tucks her legs underneath her as he watches, traces the curve of her calf muscle with his eyes, then forces himself to look back at her face. Friends. They are friends. Best friends, even. Secret best friends, as she always says. He has this part of her, this part no one else has, a secret side of herself that she gives only to him. In some ways, it’s more than her own husband will get. It is theirs alone. He must learn to be satisfied with that. And yet, as the wedding draws closer, she’s moving further away. And soon he will lose her altogether. He isn’t sure he can handle that.
He raises his eyebrows. “Well, if it did clear your conscience . . .” He lets the words hang in the air. Annie has struggled with this for as long as he’s known her. He wants her to be free of this. He wants her to be free of a lot of things. Scott and that ring, for starters.
She sighs and rests her head against the back of the couch, looking hard at him with those blue eyes of hers. “But what if I’m wrong? What if I’ve let time confuse me, and I was actually right when I was three? What if I’m helping free the man who murdered my mom?”
He looks down at his hands, resting on his knees. “Is that what you really think?” he asks.
“I don’t know what I think!” she hollers, startling him. He looks back at her just as she launches herself into him, knocking him into the couch’s armrest. With her face buried in his chest, she says, “And besides, I already did it. It’s out there now.”
He feels the nearness of her, feels her breathe in and out as she waits for his response. He knows she wants reassurance, but he is silent as he considers how to respond. He will not lecture her like Faye or tease her like Clary. He will not take charge like Scott. But what does that leave him with?
“Please tell me I did the right thing,” she says, her face still buried in his chest. He wishes they could stay that way forever.
He wraps his arms around her, kisses the top of her head as tears fill his eyes. He is glad she cannot see him right now. “I can’t do that,” he says sadly. “No one can.”
“I know,” she says, and her voice is very small. “But can I just stay here awhile, with you?”
And he says okay. Of course. She can stay as long as she wants.
MAY 28
FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE WEDDING
Laurel
She stands at the prison gate and waits for Cordell Lewis to walk through. There aren’t as many people here as she would expect, considering the way everyone’s been fussing about the news of his release. She would’ve expected a throng of reporters, a gathering of relatives and friends with signs that say WELCOME HOME, maybe even some protesters with signs of their own. She’d expected a scene but has happened upon a quiet affair.
A reporter from the Greenville paper is there, and one from the Spartanburg paper. They stand awkwardly together, pretending they wouldn’t step over the other to get at Cordell Lewis, given the chance. They make the smallest of small talk, keeping their words at one-syllable responses, passing the time and doing their best to ignore the heat. This is taking longer than it should, and Laurel is daydreaming about going to the pool after she writes up the story, maybe even ordering a Tom Collins or a margarita from the bar to sip. She’s spent most of her adult life pretending her family doesn’t have money, that she didn’t grow up with all the trappings of a privileged southern girl’s life. Today she intends to own it outright, if just for a few hours.
If they’d get this show on the road, she thinks, and as she does, she thinks of her grandmother, who used to say that all the time. “Let’s get this show on the road, Glynnis,” Minnie Porter, or Miss Minnie as everyone calls her, would pronounce, and that meant it was time to move. At the thought of her grandmother, a small wave of guilt washes over Laurel. She’s gone to see her only once since she’s been home. She keeps telling herself she’s too busy, but the truth is, she just doesn’t like seeing her grandmother as she is now. Once upon a time, Minnie Porter ruled this town, deciding people’s social standing with one word from her lips. Now she’s a sad, confused old woman who stares at the TV until she falls asleep sitting up every night, a line of spittle snaking its way out the corner of her wide-open mouth. Every afternoon, Clary Wilkins—the weirdo—drives her grandmother along the same route, then feeds her supper. Laurel supposes she should feel bad that Clary is being paid to do what probably should be done by her own family. But they’re all busy with their own lives. And she’s sure Clary needs the money.
It strikes her then—how odd it is that she’s standing here thinking about Clary as she’s waiting for the man who went to prison for her aunt’s murder to walk out the prison gates. She wonders briefly how Lydia Taft’s family feels about this. Of course, she’d have to get one of them to talk in order to find out. And Annie never has returned her calls since her no-show at the restaurant. But she keeps faithfully trying, enduring the brush-off.
She shakes her head, uses the toe of her shoe to kick at a loose piece of gravel in the asphalt, which is radiating heat in waves that undulate in the air. She’s definitely going to the pool as soon as she files this story for Damon. Ugh. Damon. There’s someone else she’s got to contend with now that she’s back. She
needs to write that book about Annie’s mom—and now about Cordell Lewis’s release—make her mark in the writing world somehow, and get out of here again. Preferably soon. Preferably for good this time.
A man begins to sidestep his way toward her. She recognizes him immediately and feels slightly nervous as he approaches. She has always respected and feared lawyers, as if they possess something she never could, some special insight into truth and justice, a gift bestowed on them at birth, like a pitching arm or a brilliant mind. Laurel likes the news, but she wouldn’t want to legislate it. The responsibility would scare her. Just look at the reason they’re here today. A man’s life is in this man’s hands. Whether she reports it correctly or not ultimately won’t matter. Whether Tyson Barnes does his job will.
Tyson Barnes, though, seems unfazed by the weight of what he is doing. He grins and points at her. “I know you,” he says, his voice affable. She can almost feel her mother’s hand on her back, pushing her toward him. He would be perfect, her mother’s voice inside her head says.
She silences her mother in her mind and finds it in herself to smile. “You do?” she asks. She can see that he is a man who will respond to flirting. She will do what it takes if it earns her a good quote for this story.
“You’re the new reporter for the Ledger,” he says. “I know your dad.”
She rolls her eyes. “Everyone knows my dad.”
He lifts his eyebrows and intones in mock seriousness, “You’re from a prominent local family.”
She laughs in spite of herself. “Well, that’s sort of a dubious honor.” She sniffs. “A prominent Ludlow family is sort of an oxymoron, isn’t it?”
His eyes stray toward the still-shut gates that presumably Cordell Lewis will stroll through momentarily. She watches Barnes’s face to determine if he’s worried. But he seems confident. Laurel wonders if Tyson Barnes is ever not confident. “I guess if you’re here, then I’m in the right place.”
He inhales deeply, and she sees it—the slightest flicker of doubt. It is gone nearly instantaneously. He turns toward her. “Yep. Big story, lots of time invested in this one.”
“And you really don’t think he did it?”
This time there is no flicker of doubt. “No. Not for a minute.”
“And you have no qualms about his being released today?”
Tyson gives her the side-eye. “Is this on the record, or are we just shooting the shit?”
Laurel, feeling brave, replies, “On the record.” She pretends to search for a pen as if she’s going to take notes, but it’s not necessary. She will remember this conversation.
He cocks his head, considering what to say if it’s going to be quoted in black and white. “No qualms whatsoever. This is justice you’re seeing here today. Delayed justice, to be sure. But justice all the same. It’s time he got some.” His eyes stray toward the gates again, as if willing Cordell Lewis to appear. “He’s a victim just as much as the victim herself.”
“A victim of what?” Laurel hears herself challenge.
“Small-town justice,” Tyson responds quickly. “An inept police force gunning for someone to pin a murder on, not taking the time to do their due diligence. He might’ve been the first suspect, but he shouldn’t have been the only suspect. They never looked any further, and they should’ve.”
She watches as color rises in his cheeks, sees that he is in this for far more than glory or notoriety. Tyson Barnes is a man who believes in his cause. “Well, you’re making it right today,” she says.
He nods, agreeing with her. She sees it again, though, that barest flicker of doubt. “I hope so,” he says.
“There he is,” she hears the reporter from Greenville say to his cameraman as they begin to move forward in one practiced, synchronized motion. The pronouncement spurs Tyson Barnes into action. He forgets that she exists as he pushes forward to intercept his client before the hordes get to him. Laurel watches the whole thing from a safe distance, almost forgetting to lift her camera and snap a photo of what is playing out in front of her.
Cordell Lewis, tall and bulky in the old photos Laurel has seen, seems to have shrunk in prison. He looks slight and shriveled as he blinks in the bright sunlight, scanning the few faces gathered there for familiar ones. His gaze flickers across her, and their eyes meet for a fraction of a second before he looks elsewhere, in the direction of someone calling his name. She feels a prickle along the back of her neck. Did she just look into the eyes of a murderer? Is she watching a killer walk out of jail, exonerated by an opportunistic attorney with a smart angle? Or did she just look into the beleaguered face of a broken man who took the fall for someone else’s crime?
Annie
She isn’t normally here at night. She usually comes only in the day. She hadn’t intended to end up here, but here she is, alone and afraid. Large, driving summer raindrops fall all around her, pelting her in the head and running into her eyes. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. The evening she’d planned has unraveled. One last time, she’d thought. One last, innocent moment together. Then new life ahead.
She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one is coming as she stands in the clearing, steps away from, based on what Hal York has always said, the spot where they found her mother twenty-three years ago, cold and still on a chilly morning in Eden Hill State Park.
“My mommy’s sleeping,” her three-year-old self had told Hal. “I’m hungry, but she won’t get me any breakfast.” Hal York said he’d found a Pop-Tart wrapper she’d tried unsuccessfully to tear into before she went off in search of help. Hal told her that was what got to him the most: that ravaged, but unopened, Pop-Tart wrapper, the Pop-Tart inside it smashed and crumbled by determined three-year-old hands. It had told Hal York all the story he needed to know. It had set him off in search of a monster who would kill a young single mom, then leave her little girl to fend for herself in the cold, dark woods.
“I think I’ve made a mistake, Mom,” Annie says now. “I think I’ve messed up for real this time. Cordell Lewis got out this morning, and I think I saw him this afternoon in town, watching me. So I went to talk to Kenny because he always makes me feel better, you know? Safer? And I can tell him anything without him trying to fix it or take control of it. He just, you know, listens.”
Her voice breaks, and she cannot tell if it’s because tonight Kenny didn’t listen like he usually does or because, as of tonight, she cannot go to Kenny anymore. She won’t have him around to talk to. It’s the deal they made. But the time has run out so much faster than she counted on. “It’s the end of an era,” Kenny had said tonight, trying to be funny. But it isn’t funny.
“But tonight he didn’t want to listen to me. He didn’t want to talk about Cordell Lewis or what he called ‘my unfounded delusions.’ He told me he wants . . . more.” Annie pauses, thinks about what Kenny brought up, about that one night all those years ago that they spent together. Did she think about it ever? Didn’t it change things for her? Because it did for him.
“Why do guys always want more?” she asks her mom. “This is why I need you to talk to—not Faye and not Clary and not Scott and not even Kenny. I need my mom! I need to ask you about relationships and who I should marry—the guy who knows I come here or the guy I would never tell about that?” She pauses, straining her ears to listen for approaching footsteps. She knows Kenny will eventually show up—he just doesn’t know the way as well as she does, especially in the darkness and rain.
What if, now that he’s out, Cordell Lewis decides to come back to the scene of the crime? What if he finds her there and gets angry? She tries not to give herself over to her unfounded delusions. She takes a few deep breaths.
“Kenny was supposed to be my friend—so why did he have to ruin things tonight? Why do they push like they do?” She stops talking as a realization dawns on her.
“Is that what happened to you, Mom? Did someone want more than you were willing to give? Did it set them off?” She drops her head as if she
is praying, but she’s only collecting herself, centering herself. She looks up again, at the empty spot where she imagines her mother is sitting, unseen but there.
“I think he’s really mad at me. So I ran off. I was hurt and angry but also a little scared. I’ve never seen him like that before.”
“ANNNNIIIEEEE!” She hears Kenny calling for her, his voice nearly drowned out by the pounding rain. The voice calls again. Then again, sounding closer. She thinks it’s Kenny, but the closer it gets, the less certain she becomes. What if it’s Cordell Lewis? Or Scott? Her heart is pounding so hard in her chest she’s not sure she can run, but she feels she must. She must find somewhere safe to hide until whoever it is gives up and goes home. She can’t talk to Kenny right now, not after what he said. She’s never seen him so angry. He frightened her. She’ll hide for a while, then go back home, invent something to tell Faye. Her lies are starting to pile up. She has lied to Tracy, lied to Scott, lied to Faye and Clary. She has lied to herself. One thing she knows about lies—once they start to stack up, they can topple over, crushing you under the weight of them.
“I’ve gotta go now, Mom. But I’ll come back.” She starts to run away but turns back. “Who knows, maybe the next time I come here, I’ll be an old married woman.” She smiles, turns, and runs.
MAY 29
ARRIVAL DAY
THREE DAYS UNTIL THE WEDDING
Faye
She’s finishing with a customer when she looks up to see Laurel Haines milling around in the waiting area. She averts her gaze before Laurel realizes she’s seen her, hoping in vain that Laurel is simply here to get her hair done. She is in no mood for an encounter with that girl right now, not when she can’t find Annie and doesn’t know what she’d say to Laurel if she asks. She glances back at Laurel. When she asks.
Sure enough, as soon as her customer is up front paying, Laurel appears at Faye’s side as she’s sweeping away the hair.
Only Ever Her Page 6