The Truth About Love

by Sheila Athens

  “Where is Miss Ella?” Gina asked, looking over the woman’s head for Buford’s mother.

  “Honey, she in the house checking on those pies o’ hers,” one of the older women chuckled. “Miss Ella’s pies are world famous.”

  A burly man the size of Buford wrapped an arm around the former prisoner’s shoulder. “Buford thinks this party is for him, but it’s really about Miss Ella’s pies.”

  Buford chortled. “Just ignore them, Miss Gina. They forgot their manners, anyway. You want a glass o’ sweet tea?”

  “I’d love some unsweet, if you’ve got it.”

  “Let me go find out.” The big man turned to go into the house. Gina followed. She had been inspired by Miss Ella’s quiet strength and wanted to greet the woman with the level of respect she deserved.

  “Mama.” Buford lowered his head as he crossed into the house through the back door. “I got someone here to see you.”

  Two other women and a man turned in the crowded kitchen as Miss Ella set a ladle in the spoon rest near the stove and turned. Her eyes lit up as a smile slid across her weather-beaten face. “Gina.” She held her arms wide. “Now the party is ready to start.”

  Gina laughed. “What about Suzanne? She’s the one who did all the work.”

  Miss Ella patted her on the arm. “Now you know I’m gonna say the same thing when she gets here, too.”

  Buford chuckled. “She the boss. You gotta make her think she’s the most important one.”

  Miss Ella motioned toward the others who stood in the kitchen, smiling at them. “Let me introduce you to some of our church family. We been going to church together since before Buford was born.”

  Gina smiled and greeted each person one by one, shaking their hand as Miss Ella introduced them. She wondered how the older woman—and the rest of them, for that matter—had kept their faith while Buford spent time in prison. Had they trusted that he was innocent? Had Miss Ella known her child would come back to her one day? Had their faith ever wavered during this whole ordeal? Gina had so many reasons to admire this woman. Her hardships and character were as much a part of her as the wrinkles that dug deep lines into the beautiful caramel-colored skin of her face.

  One of the uncles Gina had met in the yard stuck his head in the kitchen door. “Come on out, y’all. The band’s about to start.”

  Buford offered his arm to escort Gina. She looped her arm through his and let him lead her outside, where Suzanne had arrived and was engulfed by the same sea of appreciative faces Gina had met when she’d first arrived.

  A trombone player led a makeshift band of four musicians in a John Philip Sousa march around the yard. The crowd cheered. Someone blew a loud noisemaker. A couple of preteen boys exploded party poppers full of confetti.

  The revelry and camaraderie continued through the afternoon. Besides a couple of old men toweling their foreheads with handkerchiefs, no one seemed to notice the heat. They ate and reminisced and hugged until the sun was setting in the western sky.

  Gina had escaped to the front steps of the house, where she sat scrolling through the pictures of the party she’d taken on her smartphone, deciding which ones to text to her law school friends who’d been asking about her work this summer.

  She smiled to herself. Just a few weeks ago, she’d slouched, half-asleep, listening to Dr. Ramesh drone on about torts. Today, she’d celebrated getting a wrongly convicted man out of prison. It felt good. Purposeful. She wanted to share that joy with the world.

  Buford rounded the corner. “Miss Ella’s gonna be mad if you don’t try a piece of her famous pecan pie.” He offered a plate with a slice of pie the size of Rhode Island.

  “I don’t know how a woman her age has made it through the day,” Gina said as she accepted the plate from him. Suzanne had left a long time ago. “I need about a two-day nap.”

  “It was a long time coming for her.” He settled on the step next to Gina. “I guess she been saving up all her energy for this.”

  “I thought I’d stick around and help her clean up.” She took her first bite of pie and immediately understood why Miss Ella was famous for it. She crunched through the crisp outer shell of pecans and was rewarded by the sweet, gooey mixture inside. She wasn’t sure what all it was made of, but she was fairly certain it was a mixture of sugar and heaven. “Oh, my God. This is delicious.”

  Buford laughed at her surprise. “You didn’t believe me? And her peach cobbler’s even better.”

  “You must have missed it a lot.” Something about the quiet of the evening magnified the importance of the event. “The cooking. The laughter. The hugs.”

  “The pie.”

  She put a hand on his thick, meaty shoulder. “You’re a good man, Buford Monroe.”

  He smiled and rested his hand on top of hers. “A good man with a couple of angels watching over him.”

  They sat in silence as the night air filled with the sound of croaking frogs. Gina hadn’t even seen a pond, but the noise seemed like it was within yards of her.

  A whirring sound joined the chorus of frogs, like a motor coming to life. A few seconds later, a high-pitched buzz cut through the air. The frogs fell silent as quickly as their chorus had come to life.

  “What’s that noise?” Gina asked.

  Buford motioned with his head toward the property to the north of them. “Old Man Summers don’t like to cut his wood in the heat of the day. He fires that thing up when it starts to cool off at night. Mama can’t sleep for the noise and all the lights he has shining over there.”

  “A sawmill?” Gina was surprised at how quickly the word popped into her mind. The man who lived next to the country store where Barbara Landon was murdered had operated a sawmill. She read that fact each time she studied the file. But he’d been out of town at the time of the murder.

  Buford nodded.

  “Are there a lot of them in Florida?” The place Landon had lived was three counties—more than a hundred miles—from where they sat now.

  “I ain’t been many places, but there’s a lot of them in this part of Florida, anyway. Cypress has natural oils that keeps the bugs away. Ain’t nothin’ like it for buildin’ log cabins and decks and such.”

  “Aren’t those the trees that grow in the swamps?” She’d seen pictures of them plenty of times. “The ones with those big”—she arched the back of one hand and pointed to her protruding knuckles—“those big things growing up out of the water?”

  Buford laughed. “They’re called knees.”

  “They look more like knuckles.” She stuck another piece of the delicious pie into her mouth.

  Buford once again nodded toward the property to the north. “Mama gonna get her shotgun after him if he keeps that thing running all summer long.”

  Gina grinned. She was glad Buford could joke about Miss Ella getting a shotgun after someone. Seemed like a healthy state of mind for someone who’d spent twenty-one years in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. “He runs the place all by himself?”

  Buford scoffed. “Won’t even let his own sons run the mill. Does it all himself, like he’s afraid one of them is gonna cut their arm off or something. They’re forty-five or fifty years old now. When he gonna let ’em do it?”

  Gina stopped chewing. The bite of pie in her mouth suddenly had no flavor. Martin Vista’s alibi had been that he and Grady Buchanan, the mill owner next door, were delivering a load of wood to North Carolina at the time of Barbara Landon’s murder. Only Maggie Buchanan, Grady’s college-age daughter, had been home, napping at the time of the murder. Yet Landon’s testimony a few days ago had been that he’d heard a buzzing noise a little while before he’d seen Cyrus Alexander run from the back of the store.

  She shot up from the porch steps. Her fork clattered down the stairs. “I’ve got to go see if Miss Ella needs help cleaning up.”

  Buford looked up a
t her, startled. “You okay?” he asked as he unfolded his big body to a stance.

  “I’m fine.” She bent to pick up the fork. “I just . . . I just realized I need to go back to the office tonight.”

  Landon stood at the point, dribbling the basketball just outside Calvin’s reach. The big, sweaty coach stood vigil, ready to pounce the second Landon made a move toward the net.

  “I hate to see you lose this game, too,” Landon taunted.

  Calvin swatted at the ball. “I’m six inches shorter and about a decade older than you are.”

  “Do you even remember the last time you beat me?”

  “Last time we played.”

  “I don’t think so.” Landon dropped back and launched the ball in a perfect arc toward the basket. It swooshed through. “And you’re not going to win this time, either.”

  Calvin walked to the back of his car and picked up the towel he’d left there. He wiped off his bald head and took a swig from a bottle of water. “When I’m old and crippled, are you still going to challenge me to a game of one-on-one every time you want to talk about something?”

  Landon tugged at the lid of his water bottle. “Who says I have something to talk to you about?”

  Calvin chuckled. “That’s the only time you ever ask me to play basketball.”

  Landon thought a minute, looking out onto Calvin’s street. There didn’t seem to be any way to get out of this one. Calvin had nailed him.

  “So, ’fess up,” Calvin said. “It’s the redhead, isn’t it?” He pointed his finger at Landon as he remembered her name. “Gina.”

  Calvin had always known him well. “I’ve seen her a lot because of the case.” Okay—not completely true, but he was just introducing the topic at this point.

  “And?”

  “I keep learning new things about it.” He wasn’t ready to talk about his latest discovery at Gina’s a few nights ago, but that was just the latest example of what he was talking about. “It drives me crazy.”

  “Because it’s your mom’s case?” Calvin took a swig from his water bottle. “Or because it’s Gina?”

  Landon grunted. “Both.”

  “What would you and Gina be doing if this case hadn’t been between you?”

  Landon slid his mentor a sideways glance. “The same thing we did already.”

  Calvin’s mouth fell open. “You slept with her?”

  He didn’t answer. There was too much emotion swirling in his mind about her for him to treat it like a conquest to brag about.

  Calvin’s face softened into a look of understanding. “So what’s the problem?”

  Landon was still too hurt about Morgan’s Ladder dropping the case to talk about it, but Calvin had been around long enough to know his relationship with his father. “She thinks I stay in Tallahassee because my dad is here.”

  “And this comes as a surprise to you?”

  “This is where I live. This is where my job is.”

  The coach took the ball from underneath Landon’s arm and dribbled it. “This is where your father is.”

  He grabbed the ball back. “She just doesn’t need to be in my business.”

  “Then stop seeing her. Is that what you want?”

  Landon hurled the ball toward the basket. It bounced off the backboard, way too forceful to have made it in. “I’m not sure what I want.” He’d wanted to go to her in the last couple of days, but couldn’t forgive her for withholding such an important bit of news.

  Calvin chased after the ball and returned it to Landon. “Then this doesn’t seem like her problem. It seems like yours.”

  Landon glared at him. The son of a bitch was right. Until Landon figured out what he wanted from Gina, he’d continue to be frustrated and confused. “She’s going away at the end of the summer.”

  “So is that what pisses you off about her?”

  “Who said I’m pissed off?”

  The coach pointed to the basketball goal. “You almost knocked my backboard right off the pole.”

  “Never mind. I don’t even know why I brought it up.” He took his keys off the back of Calvin’s car. He hadn’t planned to talk about Gina’s leaving in days, but there it was, slipping off the tip of his tongue like it had been lurking there all along. Was he really worried about her leaving? Or would he be happy to see her gone? Could he go back to the life he’d had before she came to Tallahassee and stirred up all this trouble?

  Or was it even possible for him to go back to being the guy he’d been before she came along?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Landon thought it was pretty damn ballsy of Gina to show up at his condo, but here she was, parked right out front when he got home from playing hoops with Calvin.

  Of course, she’d been ballsy since the first night they’d met. She’d been ballsy when he’d stormed into her office at Morgan’s Ladder and accused her of knowing that Barbara Landon was his mom.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to see her in the week since they’d slept together. But he didn’t know what he’d say to her. How he felt about her not telling him that Morgan’s Ladder was dropping the case. Why she made him feel like he had a big ball of spaghetti stuck in his sternum.

  She got out of her SUV when he pulled in beside her. “I know you don’t want to see me, but I’ve learned something you need to know.”

  “Yeah?’ He grabbed the gym bag out of the bed of the truck. He tried to ignore the way his body hummed every time she was near. “What’s that?” Some other bit of news that would make his life even worse? That had been her M.O. all summer.

  “First, I know what you saw on the table at my house the other night.”

  He held her gaze. Granted, he’d been pissed as hell the night he’d seen it, but this was Gina. The girl who’d made him think that maybe—just maybe—he was as good as people like her. But he still didn’t understand why she hadn’t told him. “Seems like that might have been a bit of information you would have shared with me before . . .”

  She crossed her arms and waited, as if wanting to see how he characterized their night together.

  He finally gave up. “You want to come in?”

  She nodded and followed him up the sidewalk.

  “I didn’t know. I found out about it by accident,” she said behind him as he unlocked the front door. “I planned to talk Suzanne out of dropping the case. There wasn’t going to be any reason for you to know.”

  “You’ve had a week to come up with that story.” He wasn’t going to let her off that easy. He stood aside and let her enter the condo first. God, she smelled good.

  “It’s not a story.” She turned in the foyer to face him. “It’s the truth.”

  He kicked the door shut behind him. “Your boss made that decision and told you nothing about it?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice.

  “She said she planned to tell me Monday. She didn’t think I’d see the notes over the weekend.” Gina seemed flustered. “Look, I don’t care if you believe me or not.” She paused. “Well, I do care, but—”

  “Is Morgan’s Ladder on the case or not?”

  Her shoulders fell. “I don’t know.”

  Damn it. He would never know the answers to all the questions that had haunted him this summer. All the questions that her arrival in Tallahassee had forced to the forefront. Maybe he could hire a private investigator or . . .

  “I’m still trying to talk her out of it, but if the DNA isn’t going to help us prove it, she thinks there are others she could help more.”

  Landon’s jaw tightened. He wished he’d met her at a different time, in a different context. Not one that was laced with so much pain and confusion.

  She held her hands in the air—a victory stance. Her eyes lit up. “But I have bigger news.”

  He doubted that, but he liked her being here, so he’d l
isten. Despite his anger the other night, he’d caught himself every day wishing she was nearby. He had things to tell her, experiences to share with her, moments when he wished she was near for no reason in particular.

  “I was in Macclenny today,” she continued. “West of Jacksonville. There was a party to celebrate the guy who got out on the day that Donna Crocker . . . well, you know.” She clearly didn’t want to relive the mistake she’d made in the media. “I heard a whirring sound. A buzzing like you said you heard the day of your mom’s murder.”

  Landon held his breath. He braced himself for this new bit of information to have the same disastrous consequences as the others.

  “Your dad’s alibi was that he’d been out of town for a couple of days.” She hesitated. He purposefully kept his face blank, not offering any kind of reaction. “Delivering a load of wood with Grady Buchanan, the guy next door.”

  “And?”

  “Grady Buchanan had a one-man shop. If you heard a sawmill that morning”—she looked him straight in the eye—“then who was running it?”

  Gina followed Suzanne over the threshold of the ramshackle cottage and immediately felt like something was out of place. The forty-ish woman before them seemed too polished, too sophisticated, for the worn furnishings that surrounded her. She smoothed the crease of her tailored tweed pants as Gina and Suzanne stepped into an L-shaped room that was a living room in one portion and a dining room in the other.

  This was Gina’s last hope. She’d convinced Suzanne to come talk to Grady Buchanan’s daughter before notifying the prison system and Cyrus Alexander that Morgan’s Ladder would no longer be representing him.

  “Please. Have a seat.” The woman motioned with a manicured hand toward a sagging couch. A burgundy-colored afghan with several big snags in it covered the sofa.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see us, Mrs. Rowling,” Suzanne said as she sat.

  “Ms. Buchanan,” the woman said.

  Suzanne’s eyebrows rose.