Landon and Calvin waited in silence as the officer walked toward his car.
“You know, I don’t need you to protect me anymore,” Landon said, though he appreciated his friend looking out for him.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t need you sticking up for me every time someone brings up my mom’s murder.”
“I’m just trying to help you out. I know it must suck.”
Landon nodded as he fiddled with the tangled bumper, trying to see if it might fall off as he drove down the road. He took a deep breath. Normally he didn’t talk about these things, but Calvin was his friend and mentor. “They’re taking my testimony tomorrow.” He messed with the bumper some more, not wanting to look at Calvin.
“The girl you told me about?”
Landon straightened and took his keys from his pocket. “Her boss.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if Gina will be there or not.”
“Did you talk to the police the day it happened? Or were you too young then?”
Landon nodded. Surely Calvin knew Landon had been the one to find his mother’s body, but he wasn’t sure. He tried to swallow the lump in his throat. “I testified at the trial.”
Calvin stayed silent.
Landon looked at the ground. “What if I helped put an innocent man in prison?”
“You think there’s a chance of that?”
After what he’d learned from Gina and Dr. Stanton, he was beginning to wonder. He kicked a piece of gravel on the road. “I never thought it before.”
“And now?”
“I just want to be certain.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be one of those witnesses who put the wrong guy behind bars.”
“You want me to be there with you tomorrow? A little moral support?”
“Thanks.” Landon had appreciated Calvin’s being there for him when he’d gotten into trouble in the past, but he was a college kid then, busted for underage drinking, and once for shoving a reporter who’d gotten too aggressive with his questions about Mama’s murder. But Landon was twenty-four years old now. Old enough to handle things on his own. He gave his friend a good-natured look. “But I’m a big boy now.”
Calvin nodded. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
Landon held out his hand. They shook hands. Did the shoulder bump.
“Good luck tomorrow,” Calvin said. “Call me if you want to go out for a steak and a beer afterwards.”
“I will.” Landon walked toward his truck, then turned to make sure Calvin heard him. “Thanks again for the offer.”
Calvin held up a fist of solidarity. “You’re the man.”
Landon chuckled and opened the truck door.
“Hey, big boy,” Calvin called across the yard.
Landon paused to look at his coach before he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.
Calvin grabbed something off the chair on his front porch and started to walk toward him. “Don’t forget your girly pants.”
CHAPTER NINE
Landon sat in the main office area of Morgan’s Ladder, scared as hell about revisiting the testimony he’d given fifteen years ago.
Gina’s boss opened the door to the office near the back of the room. “Mr. Vista,” she said. “We’re ready for you now.”
Behind Suzanne, Gina stood with her hands clasped in front of her.
How the hell was he supposed to act around her? Yesterday, he’d had his hands on her hips, inches from a bedroom where he’d like to lie with her. To smell that sexy curve at the base of her neck. To hear her soft moans as they pressed their bodies together. To do things that would make them both forget everything else in the world.
And today he’d be reciting the details of his worst nightmare in front of her. He had no idea if he’d even be able to talk about what he’d seen that day. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about what he’d witnessed since the trial. Not his aunt and uncle. Not Boomer or Ricardo. Not even Calvin.
But he was also scared as hell that he was wrong. For a decade and a half, he’d been certain about what he’d seen. Absolutely sure the right man was in prison. But then Gina had come along and made him wonder. Made him ask his dad questions that were still unanswered. Made him wonder if he’d ruined an innocent man’s life.
He stood mechanically and walked toward them. The older woman offered her hand as he entered the tiny room.
“Call me Landon,” he said as he shook her hand.
“And you can call me Suzanne.” She motioned for him to sit in a chair around a small round table. “I believe you know Gina?”
His gaze met Gina’s for the first time since he’d entered the room. Her eyes narrowed slightly. What did she think he was going to do? Tattle on her for inviting him to breakfast? He was a better man than that, and he hoped Gina understood that. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “We’ve met.”
“Have a seat, then,” Suzanne said.
The three of them sat and Suzanne rested a leather portfolio on the edge of the table at an angle so that Landon couldn’t see its contents.
“I’m sorry to have to put you through this,” Suzanne said.
She paused as if for a response, but he’d be damned if he was going to make this easy on her. He clasped his hands on the top of the table, waiting for her to fill the awkward silence. Gina fidgeted in her chair.
“We know this will be difficult.” Suzanne’s voice was calm and quiet. Tinged with sympathy.
Landon’s gaze shot to Gina before he realized what he was doing. He’d known in advance that she might be a part of this, but somehow her presence unnerved him.
Suzanne laid her pen on the table. “Does Gina’s being here make you uncomfortable?”
He held his hands in the air. “No. No. I’m fine.” The only thing that mattered here was finding the truth. If there was any chance at all that he’d helped put an innocent man in prison, then he wanted to help get the guy out, too.
“Do you need a bottle of water?” Suzanne asked. “A bit of fresh air before we get started?”
He blew out a long breath and rubbed his hands down his thighs. “I’d rather just get it over with.”
Suzanne picked up her pen again. “Okay, then. Tell us what you were doing that morning. Before you found your mother had been murdered.”
He closed his eyes briefly and was immediately whisked back to the little grove of trees near the river. “There was this stand of trees. Back behind the store.” He opened his eyes. “It got really boring hanging around the store, so I’d fish there a lot.”
“You and your mother lived in the back of the store?”
Landon realized how pathetic he must look in front of Gina. She had her family ski trips to Breckenridge and he had—what?—a cot in the back of his mom’s place of employment. “Not at first. We’d had a duplex. In town. This old lady owned it and lived in the other side. My mom helped take care of her.”
“Did you both live with your father then?” Suzanne asked.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gina’s gaze fall to her lap. She’d met the guy. She had an idea of what Landon’s childhood had been like. Embarrassment welled inside him, like it had in elementary school when the other kids had asked what he planned to do with the Father’s Day card each of them had made during art. “I’m not sure we ever lived with him.”
“Why did you move out of the duplex?” Suzanne’s tone was patient and kind.
“I remember that the old lady’s relatives came and moved her out. I think they put the duplex up for sale or something.” Anger roiled inside him. Entire swaths of his childhood were missing from his memory because he hadn’t grown up with adults who could reminisce and fill in the missing pieces. “Why does this matter?” He wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.
“I’m just trying to set the stage.” S
uzanne’s calm voice told him she’d done this many times before. “Trying to find out anything I can about that day.”
“We lived in a room in the back of the store. We had two cots, a sink, and a hot plate.”
The old man who owned the store had let them eat bananas once they got brown and lettuce once it wilted, but Suzanne and Gina didn’t need to know that.
“Is that what you need to know?” he asked.
Suzanne glanced at Gina. “So the day your mother was killed?” the older woman continued. “Let’s go back to that day.”
Landon closed his eyes. He could almost feel the unbearable heat of the South in the summertime. “I had to get out of the store. It was hot and sticky and . . .” God, he’d hated the hours he’d spent cooped up there that summer. “My mom and I had played about fifty games of Crazy Eights.” He could still see the wrinkled playing cards with the Piggly Wiggly logo on the back. “I went to the creek to go fishing.”
“By yourself?” Suzanne asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me about your fishing that day.”
He gave her an impatient look. “I didn’t usually catch anything.”
The older woman shook her head. “I’m not talking about what you caught. I’m talking about what you saw. What you heard.” She reached out and touched his hand where it rested on the table. “Close your eyes and try to remember that day. The sights. The sounds. The smells.”
He did as he was told—half afraid of what he’d remember and half afraid of what he might forget. “Doc Barker’s car pulled up. He stopped by every Sunday for a newspaper. He used a walker, so Mama would take his paper out to him. She waved to me as he was pulling away.” Landon felt his fingers raise off the table as if he waved back.
“Go on.”
“There was that smell you get at low tide. Kind of muddy and”—his nose curled up; anyone who’d been around a marsh at low tide would know the smell—“like dead fish.”
“What sounds do you hear?” Suzanne’s voice got more distant the more he let himself sink into his memory.
“Quiet, mainly.” He sat for several seconds. “Mosquitoes buzzing. A boat going by way off in the distance. And this . . .” He paused. A fact he’d forgotten before leapt to the forefront of his mind. His heart beat faster. “This high-pitched whir.”
“Any idea what the whirring was?”
He waited a moment, listening for anything his memory might serve up. “I don’t know. A boat motor, maybe. The marsh led out to the intracoastal. A lot of boats went by in the distance.” He frowned. “But it was more high-pitched.” He opened his eyes.
“So you were fishing. What happened next?”
He sat back in his chair and rolled his head around to loosen up his neck. He needed to at least tell his body to relax, even if he knew it wouldn’t. “I packed up my stuff to go inside.” He’d used an old shoe box for a tackle box, even though he had only three lures that he’d found in the marsh grasses, left by fishermen who didn’t have the patience to untangle them. “I hadn’t caught anything and had been out there for a while.” He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I heard the back door slap closed.” He banged his hand on the table, replicating the noise. “And saw Cyrus Alexander running out of the back of the store.”
“You mean a man you thought looked like Cyrus Alexander?”
Landon turned toward Suzanne. His body quivered. Felt like it might cave in on itself. This was the part that put the right man in prison.
Or not.
“No. He came into the store sometimes.” Landon’s voice shook. “I knew who he was.”
Suzanne shifted in her seat. “When he ran out of the store, where did he go?”
“He ran through this field—there was this dock down there where guys used to fish and drink beer and stuff. He ran in that direction.”
“How soon after he ran that you arrived in the store?” Suzanne asked.
Landon looked down at his lap. Beside him, Gina sat forward. Yes, now they were getting to the part they all knew would be most difficult.
“I walked right there.” His voice was barely a whisper. “I mean, I didn’t think Cyrus had done anything. I didn’t know . . . anything was wrong. I’d seen her walk out to Doc Barker’s car a little while earlier.” He hesitated. Thought he might throw up. It was the last time he’d seen his mother alive. He’d replayed this scene over and over in his mind through the years, but he’d only spoken about it two other times—once for the police on the day she’d died and once in court. “That’s why it was such a surprise . . . to . . . find her.”
He heard the blood sloshing around in his head. Heard Gina’s quick breathing beside him. He continued to look down at his lap. He didn’t want to see the look on either of their faces.
“I know this is hard.” Suzanne’s voice was as soft as his. “But can you tell me what you saw?”
He swallowed. If he hurried through this, it would be over more quickly. God, he hated this. “She was there. Draped over the counter. There was a puddle of blood on the floor.”
“Was she alive?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. Those eyes. Her eyes. Staring blankly at him. Lifeless. Like Cyrus Alexander had stolen her breath and taken it with him as he dashed out the back door. “No.”
“What did you do next?”
He didn’t want to think about Gina sitting over there, staring at him, so he kept his eyes on her boss. “I shook her and cried and shook her some more. Finally, I ran down the street to the neighbors’ house and got them to call 9-1-1.”
“You didn’t have a phone at the store?”
They took sponge baths in the sink and cooked cans of soup on a hot plate, but he didn’t want to share those details. “We barely had running water.” It hadn’t dawned on him back then that it was odd, even for a backwoods business, to not have a phone.
Suzanne gave a single nod. “How far away was the neighbors’ house?”
He remembered panting by the time he got there—hotter, sweatier than he’d been before. Tears and snot mixed into a salt-flavored sap that covered his upper lip as he’d tried to tell the neighbors what had happened. “You couldn’t see it from the store.” Jesus, he’d been nine years old and his mom had just been killed. Did she want to know the precise number of meters he’d run?
“So the store was empty for a while?” This was the first time Gina had spoken since he’d been here. His head whipped around to look at her. She startled at his quick motion. Her eyes widened. What was she getting at?
“The neighbors put me in their car right away and we got back down there before the police arrived.”
“They questioned you about what you’d seen?” Again, the older lady was talking.
He turned to her and nodded.
“Did you identify Cyrus Alexander to them by name?”
He hesitated, wondering what Suzanne was up to. Surely she’d read the file. Surely she knew he hadn’t known Cyrus Alexander’s name. Not then. Not before that day. Anger roiled inside him. These women were grilling him and they knew more than he did.
“Maybe you should tell me.” He placed a hand on the folder that sat on the table between him and Gina. He slid it toward him. “Or maybe we should see what it says in your file.”
Gina slapped her hand on the file folder as soon as Landon started sliding it toward himself. She’d seen the pictures in there. Crime scene photos she hoped Landon would never see—or had never seen—because they showed such vivid pictures of that horrible day.
A nine-year-old boy should never see his mother stabbed to death. And he shouldn’t see them now.
He stared her down like a gunman from the Wild West, daring her to make the next move. She gripped the side of the folder and dragged it toward her. The tips of his fingers turned white as he pressed hard to keep her fro
m pulling it away from her. Finally, she wrestled it from underneath his hand and tucked it into the leather portfolio on her lap.
“We’d appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Vista.” Suzanne’s voice was stern. Gina had never heard her talk like that.
Landon set his elbows on the table and steepled his hands in front of his face. “I didn’t know Cyrus Alexander’s name, but I described him to the police. Later that day, at the station, they did a lineup. I picked him out—no problem.”
“What made you think it was him?”
“Because he’d been the guy I saw running from the store.” Now it was Landon’s turn to grind out his words.
“Your selection had nothing to do with the injury on his arm?” Cyrus’s wrist had been wrapped in a blood-tinged bandage at the time of his arrest.
“I only saw the picture of his wound later. At the trial. I don’t even remember seeing it in the lineup.”
Gina made a mental note to look again at the photos taken at the police station.
“You’re sure about that?” Suzanne asked.
Landon slapped his hands on the table and leaned toward Suzanne. “Look. I was nine years old. My mother had just been murdered. I did the best I could.”
Gina’s gaze shot to Landon’s. He’d done the best he could? For the first time since she’d known Landon, he hadn’t stated his testimony as a certainty. He’d left open some room for doubt.
She pulled the photograph out of her portfolio. The photograph she and Suzanne had agreed to show him. “Do you see Cyrus Alexander in this picture?”
The photo showed two rows of young men in basketball uniforms. The fronts of their jerseys each said Wildcats. The length of the shorts and the hairstyles indicated the picture was from a couple of decades ago.
Landon slid the picture from Gina’s hand and studied it.
“That one,” he said after several seconds. He pointed to one of the men in the photograph. “The tallest one in the back row.”
Gina glanced at Suzanne. They’d proven their point. She pulled a printout of a screenshot from her portfolio. “His name is Caleb Bass. I saw his picture when my uncle David posted it to his Facebook page.”
The Truth About Love Page 10