by Jill Orr
Before I had a chance to say anything, she reached across the table and clasped my wrist. “Does that bother you?”
It was the first time she’d ever asked me point-blank what I thought of her relationship with Ryan. We’d talked around the subject of my being in Ryan’s past and of course about them raising Lizzie together, but Ridley had never asked how I felt about it. It was sweet of her to care, even though we both knew my feelings on the subject were (and should be) irrelevant.
“Not one bit,” I said.
At that, her face broke into the kind of smile that countries went to war over. She’d been looking for my approval, and although she didn’t need it, I was glad to give it to her.
“I want you both—you all,” I corrected myself, “to be happy. You deserve it.”
She gave my arm an extra squeeze before letting go. “You deserve it too. Be careful not to talk yourself out of it.”
CHAPTER 12
I hadn’t gotten three steps into the newsroom before Kay leaned her head out of her office. “Ellison, can you come in here a sec?” She’d obviously been waiting for me.
I walked in and saw Holman sitting in one of the two chairs opposite Kay’s desk. I caught his eye. He gave a slight shrug.
“What’s up?”
“Close the door.”
I did and then sat down next to Holman, my heartbeat ticking up a few notches. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Joe Tackett.” Kay said.
“What about him?”
“He sent a letter addressed to Riley Ellison and Will Holman, care of the paper.”
Holman’s face betrayed nothing. I tried to follow suit. Lindsey Davis had told us about Tackett with the understanding we would not report it. I didn’t want to do or say anything that would betray that agreement. I’d given her my word. Plus, getting crosswise with the county prosecutor was never a good idea.
“Neither of you look surprised.” Kay looked from Will to me.
“Did you open it?” Holman asked.
“Of course I didn’t open it,” Kay snapped.
“Can I see it?” I held out my hand, seized by a strong and sudden impatience to see what that sonofabitch wanted from me.
Kay gave me a long look, then took an envelope out of her top drawer and handed it to me. “If I didn’t know he was in prison, I would have had that checked for ricin.”
I slid my finger under the seal and worked it across the top of the envelope. Inside, there was a single piece of unlined paper. I unfolded it. There was no greeting, no pleasantries, just three handwritten sentences followed by his signature: “I know what really happened to your grandfather. It was not suicide. I am ready to talk if my conditions can be met. Joe Tackett.”
A fuzzy sort of numbness started to crawl up my neck toward my face. I passed the letter to Holman. He read it, then handed it back across the desk to Kay. The three of us sat in silence for at least ten seconds until Holman finally said, “Do you think he’s talking about your grandfather, Riley?”
I shot him a look that could have cut glass.
“What?” he asked.
“Of course he’s talking about my granddad, Holman.”
“Well, technically the letter was addressed to us both, so an argument could be made that he might have been talking about my grandfather.”
Both Kay and I stared at him, our mouths hung open in twin expressions of bewilderment.
“I have two grandfathers, actually,” he continued, undeterred by our reaction. “Both are still living, though, so the part about suicide wouldn’t fit. Then again—”
Kay cut him off. “I think we can safely assume Tackett is referring to Riley’s grandfather, Will.”
Holman opened his mouth to say something, but thankfully his good sense prevailed, and he closed it.
“I want to go see him,” I said to Kay. “There’s a story here.” This is what I’d wanted to do since the moment I heard about Tackett’s sudden desire to talk—and now was my chance to do it legitimately for the paper.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” Kay pursed her lips.
“Holman will come with me, right?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Kay, this is newsworthy. Albert Ellison wasn’t just my granddad. He was a part of our community. If his death wasn’t a suicide, then it was murder. That is a story we need to tell.”
Kay had to know I was right, but she was probably worried about sending Holman and me to face Joe Tackett, the man who in the not-so-distant past had ordered both of our deaths. She tapped her pencil rapidly against the desk. “Fine.” The word shot out like a dart. “But you know he’s going to push you to help him trade his information for something he wants, right?”
“I know.”
“And you know that the odds are overwhelmingly against Tackett ever actually telling you what he knows—now or at any point in the future?”
“I know.”
“And you realize that reporting on this story is going to open up a lot of old wounds for you personally?”
“I know.”
Kay held my gaze for a few seconds and then said quietly, “You can’t trust him. He’s a bad guy, Riley.”
“Believe me, I know.”
Kay sighed. “Call Greensville. If you’re lucky, they’ll get you in before the end of the year.”
“I’ve interviewed the director before,” Holman said, standing up. “I did a piece a couple of years back on the lower recidivism rates coming out of Greensville. It was favorable. Maybe he’ll remember me and get us in sooner?”
“Oh, he’ll remember you,” Kay said, but it was impossible to tell from her tone whether or not she was happy about that.
CHAPTER 13
I don’t understand,” my mother said to me later that evening. “Why do you have to go talk to him again?”
“I told you,” I said, trying (and failing) to keep the frustration from my voice. “We’re trying to see if the information he supposedly has about Granddad can be connected to Flick’s death. If it can, there’s a chance the judge will grant him a reduced sentence or a prison transfer or whatever.”
“Yes, but why you?” She pulled the car over and looked into the backseat. “Here you are, Mrs. Foley. Bingo should be just about ready to start!”
Old Mrs. Foley nodded, clutching her brown cracked-leather purse handles with two hands. “And you’re sure I don’t pay you in cash?”
“All the payments are done right through your phone, remember?” my mom prodded, pointing to the phone in her hand.
Mrs. Foley’s daughter, Susie Ryerson, was one of my mother’s oldest friends. She worked odd hours at the hospital and wasn’t always available to drive her mother places, so when she heard Tuttle Corner got its very first Uber driver in the form of Jeannie Ellison, she was all over it. My mom had driven Mrs. Foley a few times a week over the past month, but she still seemed to distrust the process.
“I’ll never understand how tapping on this thing translates to money, but I suppose it’s a new world.” She sighed. “And Riley honey?”
“Yes, ma’am?” I turned around.
“You be careful going to see that horrible old sheriff, okay?”
“I will, Mrs. Foley.”
“I sure hope you find out what happened to Albert.” She shook her head sadly. “He was such a dear, dear man. Did I ever tell you he took my little sister out for ice cream one time when they were seniors in high school?”
She had, many times, but I knew the memory made her happy, so I let her tell me again. He’d picked her up in his powder-blue Mercury and taken her out for mint-chip cones at Landry’s General Store. “There wasn’t a spark between them, but it was just as well. He wanted to travel the world and Janie wanted a more traditional life. He was so handsome, though, just like your daddy.” She smiled at my mother.
“You’d better get in there before all the best cards are gone,” Mom said.
Mrs. Foley got out of the ca
r, and my mom pulled out her phone, clicked a few things, and said, “All right. I’m officially off the clock. Dinner?”
“Dinner.” I nodded.
My father had an Elk’s Club meeting, so it was just the two of us. We decided to pick up salads from Landry’s and eat back at their place. She said she had a dress that would be perfect for me to wear to the New Year’s party, an old beaded number she’d picked up at an estate sale years ago. “I always knew if I hung onto it, eventually I’d find a use for it!”
We settled into our familiar places around the kitchen table and I explained more about the situation with Tackett as we ate.
“And tell me again why it has to be you?”
“My guess is he thinks I’ll push the hardest to bring this story to light. If there’s public interest, it could help sway the lawyers in the case to consider making him a deal.” I speared an apple chunk out of my salad. “It’s smart, actually. It wouldn’t be the first time journalists were used to bring attention to a cold case.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth? What if he’s just making something up in order to reduce his sentence?”
“I’ve always believed Joe Tackett knows more than he’s said.” That was putting it as diplomatically as I could manage.
While I’d been unwilling to believe that Granddad committed suicide from the start, my parents had accepted that explanation, despite the complete absence of warning signs. Granddad wasn’t depressed, he had no history of mental illness, and he didn’t even own a gun. When you threw in the fact that Tackett closed out the case with only the most cursory of investigations, the whole thing felt wrong to me. But my parents hadn’t seen it that way. They’d met Granddad’s suicide with deep grief and then quick acceptance, which was the easiest path forward for them. I tried not to resent them for their attitude. It was consistent with who they were, who they’d always been. And it was probably a form of self-preservation, particularly for my dad. The agony of losing a parent to suicide could easily swallow a person whole.
My mother looked down at her plate, pushing the same four farro grains around and around. I could tell she was working up the courage to tell me something. “The day after Granddad was found, Dad went over to his house—your house now,” she looked up and gave me a sad smile. “I offered to go with him, but he said he wanted to do it alone.”
I set my fork down. I had not heard this story before.
“He was still in shock about the whole thing, of course, but the anger was starting to set in. He kept repeating, ‘I can’t believe he’d do this to us. I can’t believe he’d do this to Riley.’”
A lump started to build in my throat.
“That night he went over there, he was particularly angry, which as you know, is not an emotion Skip is used to. It was understandable given the situation…but anyway he went over there on a mission.” She paused. “He told me later he went over there and tore through Albert’s house looking for some clue as to what would have caused him to take his own life. He looked through his bank statements, files, combed through his desk drawers looking for anything that might help explain. Was he sick? Was he in trouble somehow?”
A picture of my dad, wild with grief and anger, tearing through Granddad’s things appeared in my mind. It nearly knocked the wind out of me.
“He looked under the mattresses, behind the bookshelves, even took Albert’s desk apart, piece by piece,” she said. “He didn’t find anything that explained what happened, but he did come across something kind of odd that night.”
I looked at her, moisture rimming the edges of my eyes, the question evident on my face.
“It was a small scrap of paper that had been taped flush to the underside of his desk drawer. It was only visible if you pulled the drawer all the way out and turned it over. He’d clearly hidden it for some reason.”
I swallowed audibly. “What’d it say?”
My mom got up, walked into the study, and came back a few seconds later. She handed me a plastic zip bag containing the piece of notebook paper. In my grandfather’s thin, slanted handwriting it read: “You shall chase your enemies and they will fall by the sword before you. Leviticus 26:7.”
I stared at the note, trying to bypass my emotional reaction to seeing his handwriting after all these years. I’d never seen this particular verse before, and while my grandfather was technically a Christian man, quoting scripture was definitely out of character. He was your typical twice-a-year churchgoer, Christmas and Easter. As far as I knew, he had no real feeling about religion at all. “What does it mean?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “But in light of everything that’s happened with Flick and the file and…well, we think it must have had something to do with something he was working on. We thought maybe you should have it. Maybe it could be helpful to you as you look into what really happened.”
After Flick died, I had told my parents all about his investigation into why Granddad was killed. I’d also told them I was going to pick it up where he left off, to the extent that I could. Though they never explicitly said it, they seemed more open than ever before to the idea that Albert might not have committed suicide. And this here tonight—my mom giving me what she hoped might be a piece of evidence and hearing her admit we still don’t know what “really happened”—was her way of saying they believed me. I felt a surge of love and gratitude wash over me. “Thank you, Mom.”
She sniffed her emotion away—Jeannie didn’t do weepy—and after a deep breath in, she said, “Now let’s go see about that dress!”
Daily Astrological Forecast
Scorpio
Teamwork is the name of the game today, as a spontaneous Uranus trine inspires you to form a surprising alliance. Conversation, connection, and your keen powers of observation will unearth a treasure trove of much-needed intelligence. However, the effects of the recent double eclipse are still reverberating throughout the universe. This cosmic concealment has a habit of flipping up with down, front with back, and good with bad. You’d be wise to focus a questioning eye on all information gathered today. Remember that while problems can masquerade as solutions—the opposite can also be true. Watch your back today, Scorpio.
Tonight: Light some incense and indulge in a manipedi of the DIY variety!
CHAPTER 14
We were issued an approval for a sixty-minute interview with Joe Tackett and were on the road by eight the next morning. Just as Kay suspected, the director of Greensville did remember Holman, and when he reached out to ask if our application to visit Tackett could be fast-tracked, the director agreed by saying, “Anything for a friend of the facility.” It took me fifteen minutes to talk Holman out of sending the email he’d written in response denying that he was a friend of any of his story subjects, accompanied by a three-paragraph written lecture on how one of the most important tenets of good journalism was impartiality. In the end, I think it was my promising to buy bear claws for the drive that convinced him.
It wasn’t a super long drive, but so far most of it had been spent in relative quiet. I was nervous about seeing Tackett again, about what he might or might not tell us, so I guess I’d been less talkative than usual. Holman must have picked up on my apprehension because he kept asking me if I was okay.
“I’m fine,” I said. I looked out the window at the bean fields stretched out wide on either side of the highway. The crops were dormant now, and dried-out husks, cracked mud, and brittle sticks lay where lush green abundance had been just a few months ago—and would be again come spring. This decay was a necessary part of the life cycle, but it was ugly and bleak all the same.
I could feel Holman looking at me. “Coffee is a diuretic, you know.”
“What?”
“Your travel mug looks like it holds about sixteen ounces. That’s nearing the upper limit of what the average female bladder can comfortably hold. Studies have shown that while the bladder is elastic like a balloon, it will eventually reach capacity when your body produces
enough ur—”
“Holman!”
“What?”
“I’m fine,” I repeated, then shifted in my seat, suddenly feeling sewn in by the safety belt.
He dropped the topic and was quiet again. For about ten seconds. “All I’m saying is that we’ve been in the car for a while now and you’ve consumed several fluid ounces of a diuretic. It stands to reason that your bladder is nearing its limit. Holding it for too long can lead to an overgrowth of bacteria and increased frequency of bladder infections.”
“Ohmygod, fine,” I sighed. “I’ll go if you’ll stop saying the word bladder.”
Holman took the next exit and pulled into a Sunoco station. He switched off the engine but made no move to get out of the car.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“No.”
“But you’ve been drinking coffee too! Didn’t you just lecture me on the importance of not stressing the limits of the human bladder?”
“No, I said the female bladder. While there is little functional difference in bladder size between males and females, female anatomy is such that the nerve receptors leading to the exit tube, or the ureth—”
“Seriously, please just stop. I’m begging you.”
He looked up at me and blinked. “What?”
I opened the door and put one foot out. “I’m going inside now. When I come back, can we please talk about something else?”
“If you tell me a subject you’re interested in, I can think about it while you’re—”
I shut the door on the rest of that sentence. Sometimes you just had to do that with Will Holman, bless his literal heart.
I walked inside the small convenience store, and the woman behind the counter barely looked up at me. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a low ponytail, and she wore oversized glasses and a T-shirt with a picture of a fox on the front. She was reading what looked like a tabloid magazine and was listening to a fire-and-brimstone-type sermon on the radio. Evocations of devils among us and the unquenchable thirst of Satan curled out into the quiet of the store. When she looked up and saw me, she turned down the radio and muttered a tepid greeting.