Lance glanced at his daughter. She’d been spoilt all her life. The older she got, the more expensive things got. Not just on the things she demanded, but also getting her out of whatever trouble her temper got her into. This time, he was thankful she’d not killed anyone, but it was no less expensive. The restaurant being closed down was costing him more than he would have had to pay the family of Lach had Allie’s aim been a little more on target. Maybe, like him, they would have been just thrilled to have her out of their lives.
“Daddy, when do you think we’ll be able to go home?” He told her he didn’t have any idea right now. “That stupid fat cow. Just look at her up there, reading off every little thing. You’d think she was a spy or something.”
“I don’t think she’s fat, Allie, but going to have a baby.” She rolled her eyes at him. “Well, I didn’t want you to say something like that to her, and it come back on you. You know how people are when there is a pregnant person hurt.”
He hadn’t had his time to talk to Lach yet. She was still going over her notes with Mr. West. She must have spent a great deal of time, his time, writing all this shit down. Lance might bring that up if it got to the point where that was all he had left to throw at her. Time would tell, he supposed.
He wished he’d been able to afford someone like Ricky West. He seemed to be sharp and on top of shit. The only attorney he could find that would take him and his daughter on was some fuck that wanted a retainer upfront, as well as four-hundred dollars an hour. That would have included him having to drive out to the jail where they were. Then she mentioned tossing out food that hadn’t been used.
“What gave you the authority to toss out perfectly good food? I surely didn’t.” Lach said he never gave her permission to run the restaurant either, but someone had to do it. “And you figured you were the best choice? I don’t think you were running anything but into the ground.”
Lance thought that was a good thing to say, but no one laughed. He thought about what she’d said about him not calling her back, and couldn’t remember if he’d objected to that yet. Worth a try. He said he’d had more and better things to do with his time than to spend it all day talking to her. Lance knew he’d fucked up again when the judge banged on his desk. He wondered what it would look like if he took the gavel and beat every one of the people here in the head with it.
“While I was working two or more jobs for you, Mr. Gray, the inventory was well maintained, the staff was getting better tips, and fewer things were coming back to the kitchen that were either the wrong meal or cooked wrong. Me and the staff working there before your daughter came to work for you had your rating with the health department go from a ‘C’ rating to a ‘B’ in three weeks.”
“Are you saying my daughter was dirtying things up when she worked there?” She said she was saying that. “Oh yeah? How the hell do you figure that? She was only working there for three weeks.”
“In those three weeks, she only showed up for work nine days. While there, she dropped four trays of meals. Would dump her plates into the planters around the room instead of into the can in the back room, where it was sold for compost.” She pulled out her fucking notebook and started reading from it. “Eighteen times—Eighteen times. I want to make sure you’re hearing me correctly—she took so long to take the food out to the tables that it had to be sent back and redone. Those meals, instead of, again, taking them back to the kitchen, she must have thought that dumping them on the floor in the dishwashing area was so much better. I might add that was while the inspector was there following up on one thing we’d missed having to do with expired meat in the cooler.”
“You’re just trying to make my daughter look bad.” No one in the room seemed to be breathing. The silence was so profound he made himself exhale loudly so he could assure himself he was still alive. “What? You think any of this is true? Everywhere my daughter went to work was the same thing. You’d think the entire world was out to get her or something.”
“Your Honor, I’d like to give my witness here a little break if you’d not mind, and let me call Lance Gray to the stand. If that’s all right with you.”
Henry looked at him, and Lance nodded. Anything to get that fucking notebook reading stopped. Lach had been making them both look like saps. After being sworn in, he took a seat.
“I’d like to talk to you about your daughter’s past jobs.”
“Why?” Mr. West told him he’d opened the door to that sort of questioning when he mentioned it. “No, I didn’t. I was only saying that everyone treated Allie like shit and that the Lance Gray was no different.”
“That means I can question you on it. Now, where was the last place your daughter worked where she was treated so badly?” Lance didn’t want to go down this road. Things might come out that he didn’t want to have to deal with here. Ricky didn’t smile at him now but looked at him hard. Like he was a criminal. “Answer the question, Mr. Gray. Where did your daughter work before, and what happened that you believe she was treated badly?”
“I had another business where she worked. Girls like to have spending money, and I was getting sick of just handing her my credit card each day without any kind of repayment. I love Allie. She’s my only child. But she can be expensive when she wants a new outfit. I set it up so she could work in the hanger place I owned.” Mr. West asked him why he’d said he had owned it. “Well, there was a spot of trouble there. Allie was doing a good job of making sure the bundles of hangers that came off the line were correct when the boss told her she wasn’t even fit for counting hangers. Let me ask you, Mr. West, when someone says your child isn’t fit to count to ten, wouldn’t that upset you?”
“But he didn’t say that to you, did he, Mr. Gray? He said it to your daughter, Allison Gray. What happened the day she was fired? I’m sure there was something, aren’t you?” Lance nodded. Boy, had there been something. “Tell us about it, in your own words, please.”
“Allie came home every night with some kind of complaint about the job. The lines were running super-fast, she told me, so she’d not be able to keep up. They timed her, only her, for her lunch hour and not anyone else. She told me how Noel, the plant manager, would have a stopwatch on him when he saw her clocking out for her meal. No one else was singled out that way. So I went to the place to see what I could find out.” Mr. West told him to continue. “Noel was ragging on Allie about how she was dropping a lot of the hangers on the floor and that it was dangerous for people to get around. Also, he told her that she was too slow, and she needed to keep up. While I didn’t see that her line was any faster than the others, she did seem to be struggling to keep up.”
“She’d been working there for six days by then. I was told that most everyone else had picked up what they were doing in the first few hours. Miss Gray wasn’t able to keep the bundles together, nor was there a good counting on them. A lot of them were short. Some were so over that it wasn’t difficult to see why the manager was upset. Don’t you agree?” Lance said they were picking on her from the first day. “I didn’t ask you that, sir. I asked you about how upset the manager was about the shortages and overages of her bundles. Wouldn’t that be cause enough to fire her? I also want to point out that you told Noel Smithson that he was to treat her like any other employee on the line. Didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want her to be singled out. They still did it, and that would upset her. Me too, but Allie has a temper when she’s feeling like she was that day.” Mr. West asked him what had happened. “Nothing that I wasn’t able to fix.”
“Again, I didn’t ask you that, sir. I asked you what happened. In your own words, what transpired between Mr. Smithson and your daughter?” Lance didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened. He sometimes didn’t believe his daughter was capable of the violence that occurred in those short few minutes. “Tell the jury what happened, sir.”
“She killed him. Took a hanger off the line an
d beat him to death with it. Once Noel was dead, she stomped on his head until there was nothing left but a mashed mess on the floor.” He looked at Ricky. “You’re not human, are you?”
“I am not.” Lance asked him if he’d made him answer the question. “No, I did not. You told me that all on your own. I’m sure there are other things you have on your chest. Do you want to tell us about them?”
Did he? Yes, he realized he did want to unburden himself. He figured when they got out of jail, Allie would be pissed at him. But he really needed to tell someone of the struggles he was enduring while being a good parent to his daughter.
Allie was a great girl—a great woman, he amended in his thoughts. She was just misunderstood by others. Even when he suggested they treat her like everyone else, he really didn’t want them to do that. She was special to him, and he wanted everyone else to see what he saw. A strong willed, highly intelligent woman that just needed someone to treat her like he did. A goddess. Which he supposed most didn’t understand either.
“Mr. Gray?” He nodded at the man and said he did. Since he was just volunteering the information, he thought, they’d not be able to use any of it against them. This was like a sideline, he told himself. No one was going to get hurt by him telling them his deepest and darkest secrets about Allie. “Go ahead then. Tell us what you know.”
Lance started out by finishing up the story about Noel. How he’d lost his business when Noel’s family had demanded more than he had in cash. From there, he started at the beginning. The first time he’d had to step in and pay someone off for the way one of her classmates had tried to take back the toy in preschool that was his. Allie had beaten the little boy with a block to the point where he’d not only lost one of his eyes, but he’d also had some broken bones. Just a misunderstanding between children, he told Mr. West.
After starting at that start, he jumped around in the timeline of her life telling of this or that that he’d had to pay out for. He made sure with each story, it was understood it was the other person’s fault and not that of his highly emotional daughter.
At five-thirty, Lance was emotionally drained. Who would have thought just talking about something could make him feel like he’d not had a good night’s sleep in forever, and a headache? Getting down from the seat he’d been in, his legs were a little wobbly. Grabbing the table he’d been sitting at with his daughter, his legs went out from under him.
Lance laid there for several seconds. He wasn’t hearing anything right then. The people in the room, all of them, seemed to have left the courtroom, and it was only him there. It was almost as if he was having an out of body experience. Or something like that. All his past deeds seemed to rush through his mind like a terrible horror movie. When he heard the screaming—his daughter’s, he thought—Lance looked around to see what had disturbed her. Whatever it was, Lance didn’t think he was in the position of seeing to her needs, as he was feeling sort of off for some reason. Whatever was going on, Allie was not happy about it.
Chapter 8
Since she’d been cooped up in a room all day, Lach asked Oakley if they could just walk around for a bit. He must have thought the same about being cooped up because he agreed so readily. As they walked, hand in hand, she was surprised to realize just how many people knew she was having twins, and that she and Oakley were living in one of the nicest houses on the street. Mrs. Murphy stopped them as they made their way past her shop.
“I have something I want to show the two of you. Mind, you don’t have to like it, but I think you will.” Oakley held the door open for her as she and Margaret, what she insisted they call her, went into the shop. “I’ve been working on some things here while waiting on customers. Having some new businesses around is certainly making a difference in the people that come here now. They love everything about our little town, it seems.”
“I agree with you. Just yesterday, I saw Mr. Owens trimming his trees and bushes back from the sidewalk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him doing that himself. Usually, he hires one of his kids to do it, and they butcher them.” Margaret told Oakley she’d thought the same thing. “I think I’ve seen a bit more late flowers being planted as well. It certainly does make it nice when you see all the fall colors.”
“You bet it does.” Margaret pulled out this large book. Lach had seen the kind that it was before. It was used for newspaper clippings and such. “I’ve been tracking our heritage, I guess you could call it. For the town, not for me. I’ve found some things I think might be of interest to that granddaddy of yours. Alma was in a lot of the little clubs that were the rage in the thirties and forties.”
As she looked at the pictures, she saw that Margaret was right; Alma was in a lot of clubs. Her face showed up in about ninety percent of the ones that had been pasted in the book. Some of them even had Sheppard in them, along with his son, and things that he and his family had been working on.
“What’s this?” Margaret turned the book toward her to look at the shot Lach was talking about. “I’ve never seen this place before, have I? I mean, I would think something this grand would have been kept up over the years.”
The building was round and open, with a pergola on top of it. The flowers, Lach thought, were either wisteria or morning glories. It was difficult to tell with the black and white that was there. It looked like it might have been on the square somewhere.
“Oh, it’s still here. I don’t think it was torn down when they were making way for the new high school. Let me see what I can find out.” She went to the back room, then came back a few seconds later with the oldest woman Lach had ever seen. “This is my grandma. You’d never know she was in her late nineties. She’s pretty sharp on things. You ask her what you’re talking about. She’ll know more than anyone else.”
“I was just wondering about this place. Whether or not it was still around.” Grandma, how she was introduced to her, said she was just poking around there last week. “Is it still in good shape?”
Mrs. Anderson suggested they go in the back room so that Grandma could rest while they spoke. Sitting in a well-worn chair covered in a beautiful blanket, Lach turned down a cup of tea while she unloaded the other chair and sat down as well.
“No. Not so much anymore. I think the kids around here have been putting their names all over it for so long that it’s done wore down the wood.” Grandma was still telling her about her poking adventure when a ghost made herself present behind her. “There was a murder done there too. Let me think on it a moment.”
“It was me. I was killed there after a football game so long ago that I’m not sure of the year anymore.” Grandma provided that information unknowingly to both her and the ghost. “They never found who murdered me, but then I was considered nothing more than a girl born on the wrong side of the tracks back then.”
“Lily Lynne Anderson was her name.” The ghost nodded and smiled at her. Grandma continued talking about the young woman. “She was a pretty little thing. Didn’t hurt anyone around here. Babysat for nearly all the folks around back then. She’d not do anything with the money on her own but turned it over to her momma when she made any. It wasn’t much, but her momma could make money stretch until it screamed for mercy.”
They both laughed, and Lily looked at Grandma with sadness in her eyes. Lach was more than glad to ask of Grandma what Lily didn’t know, or had not been privy to about her mother and her sister.
“She had herself a little sister. No one would believe it was her momma’s baby, but said it was Lily’s. It wasn’t. I was there when Ms. Anderson birthed both those girls. But nobody would believe me on account ‘a me being so young myself. But someone, they killed her, that’s for sure.” Lach asked what had happened to the little sister and their mother. “Let me see. I don’t want to put them out of order. The sister, her name was Rosa, died one night during the worst kind of storm. The doc back then, he’d make house calls if he had to, but he
’d not make much of an effort for the poorer people around here. Rosa got herself a cold and never got better from it. She died a little bit after her sister did, if I’m right.”
“Rosa was alive when I was killed. She did have a cold. I remember that now.” Lily moved around the room and stopped by the front door. “This used to be our house. I remember that too now that I’ve been told a little. There was a coal burner there that Momma would cook on in the winter months. Mostly she’d do her cooking outside when the weather was warmer. I remember a great many meals eaten out back on a turned over tub and rags on the ground to sit on. Momma made the worst lemonade in the world. I was glad we only had it for special occasions.”
Lach looked at Grandma and then back at Lily. She didn’t want to say anything for fear that it would get around that she was insane, but Lach thought of all the people she knew, Grandma would believe what she was going to tell her.
“She’s here with us, Grandma. Right beside you, as a matter of fact. Lily is dressed in a green long sleeved dress that fits her nicely. Her hair is pulled back in a little ponytail with a green ribbon.” Grandma asked, very quietly, if she had on her pendant from high school. “No, she doesn’t. She just told me the person that killed her has it. That when he raped her, he took it before he killed her with one of the large stones around the gazebo.”
Grandma just stared at the picture she’d pointed out. Not saying anything, Lach told her what her interest in the gazebo was about. She thought it would make a great place to have holiday pictures taken. As well as wedding photos, if it were in better shape.
“I took some photography classes when I was in college. I enjoyed them very much. I was thinking about going out there when the twins are born and taking their pictures around this little bit of history. I love this little town.” Grandma still looked lost, or perhaps like she was trying to remember something. “Oakley and I are going to name our daughter after Alma, Grandda’s wife.”
Oakley: Marshall’s Shadow – Jaguar Shapeshifter Romance (Marshall's Shadow Book 3) Page 10