“Mama and Daddy put in a pool. With a hot tub.”
Sara wiped her eyes, still laughing, loving her sister more than words could ever convey. “You’re kidding me?” Sara and Tessa had spent most of their childhood begging their parents to put in a pool.
“And Mama took the plastic off the couch.”
Sara gave her sister a stern look, as if to ask when the punch line was coming.
“They redecorated the den, changed all the light fixtures, redid the kitchen, painted over the pencil marks Daddy made on the door … It’s like we never even lived there.”
Sara couldn’t say she mourned the loss of the pencil marks, which had recorded their height until the eighth grade, when she had officially become the tallest person in her family. She grabbed the dog leashes from the passenger seat. “What about the den?”
“All the paneling’s down. They even put up crown molding.” Tessa tucked her hands into her expansive hips. “They got new lawn furniture. The nice wicker—not the kind that pinches your ass every time you sit down.” Thunder made a distant clapping sound. Tessa waited for it to pass. “It looks like something out of Southern Living.”
Sara blocked the back door of the SUV as she wrangled with her two greyhounds, trying to snap on their leashes before they bolted off into the street. “Did you ask Mama what made her change everything?”
Tessa clicked her tongue as she took the leashes from Sara. Billy and Bob jumped down, heeling beside her. “She said that she could finally have nice things now that we were gone.”
Sara pursed her lips. “I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t sting.” She walked around the car and opened the trunk. “When’s Lemuel coming?”
“He’s trying to get a flight out, but those bush pilots won’t take off unless every chicken and goat in the village buys a ticket.” Tessa had come home a few weeks ago to have the baby in the States. Her last pregnancy had ended badly, the child lost. Understandably, Lemuel didn’t want Tessa to take any chances, but Sara found it odd that he hadn’t yet joined his wife. Her due date was less than a month away.
Sara said, “I hope I get to see him before I leave.”
“Oh, Sissy, that’s so sweet. Thank you for lying.”
Sara was about to respond with what she hoped was a more artful lie when she noticed a patrol car driving down the street at a slow crawl. The man behind the wheel tipped his hat at Sara. Their eyes met, and she felt herself tearing up again.
Tessa stroked the dogs. “They’ve been driving by like that all morning.”
“How did they know I was coming?”
“I might’ve let it slip at the Shop ’n Save the other day.”
“Tess,” Sara groaned. “You know Jill June got on the phone as soon as you left. I wanted to keep this quiet. Now everybody and their dog’ll be dropping by.”
Tessa kissed Bob with a loud smack. “Then you’ll get to see your friends, too, won’t you, boy?” She gave Bill a kiss to even things out. “You’ve gotten two calls already.”
Sara pulled out her suitcase and closed the lift gate. “Let me guess. Marla at the station and Myrna from down the street, both trying to milk every ounce of gossip.”
“No, actually.” Tessa walked alongside Sara back to the house. “A girl named Julie something. She sounded young.”
Sara’s patients had often called her at home, but she didn’t remember anyone named Julie. “Did she leave a number?”
“Mama took it down.”
Sara lugged her suitcase up the porch stairs, wondering where her father was. Probably rolling around on the plastic-free couch. “Who else called?”
“It was the same girl both times. She said she needed your help.”
“Julie,” Sara repeated, the name still not ringing any bells.
Tessa stopped her on the porch. “I need to tell you something.”
Sara felt a creeping dread, instinctively knowing bad news was coming. Tessa was about to speak when the front door opened.
“You’re nothing but skin and bones,” Cathy chided. “I knew you weren’t eating enough up there.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Mother.” Sara kissed her cheek. Eddie came up behind her, and she kissed his cheek, too. Her parents petted the dogs, cooing at them, and Sara tried not to notice that the greyhounds were getting a warmer welcome.
Eddie grabbed Sara’s suitcase. “I got this.” Before she could say anything else, he headed up the stairs.
Sara took off her sneakers as she watched her father leave. “Is something—”
Cathy shook her head in lieu of an explanation.
Tessa kicked off her sandals. The freshly painted wall was scuffed where she had obviously done this many times before. She said, “Mama, you need to tell her.”
Cathy exchanged a look with Tessa that raised the hair on the back of Sara’s neck.
“Tell me what?”
Her mother started off with an assurance. “Everybody’s fine.”
“Except?”
“Brad Stephens got hurt this morning.”
Brad had been one of her patients, then one of Jeffrey’s cops. “What happened?”
“He got stabbed trying to arrest somebody. He’s at Macon General.”
Sara leaned against the wall. “Stabbed where? Is he all right?”
“I don’t know the details. His mama’s at the hospital with him now. I guess we’ll get a phone call one way or another tonight.” She rubbed Sara’s arm. “Now, let’s not worry until it’s time to worry. It’s in the Lord’s hands now.”
Sara felt blindsided. “Why would anyone hurt Brad?”
Tessa supplied, “They think it had something to do with the girl they pulled out of the lake this morning.”
“What girl?”
Cathy cut off any further conversation on the matter. “They don’t know anything, and we are not going to add to these rampant rumors.”
Sara pressed, “Mama—”
“No more.” Cathy squeezed her arm before letting go. “Let’s remember the things we have to be thankful for, like both of my girls being home at the same time.”
Cathy and Tessa walked down the hall toward the kitchen, the dogs following them. Sara stayed in the foyer. The news about Brad had been brushed over so quickly that she hadn’t had time to process it. Brad Stephens had been one of Sara’s first patients at the children’s clinic. She had watched him grow from a gawky teenager into a clean-cut young man. Jeffrey had kept him on a tight leash. He was more like a puppy than a cop—a sort of mascot at the station. Of course, Sara knew better than anyone else that being a cop, even in a small town, was a dangerous job.
She fought the urge to call the hospital in Macon and find out about Brad. An injured cop always brought a crowd. Blood was donated. Vigils were started. At least two fellow police officers stayed with the family at all times.
But Sara wasn’t part of that community anymore. She wasn’t the police chief’s wife. She had resigned as the town’s medical examiner four years ago. Brad’s condition was none of her business. Besides, she was supposed to be on vacation right now. She had worked back-to-back shifts in order to get the time off, trading weekends and full moons in exchange for the Thanksgiving holiday. This week was going to be hard enough without Sara sticking her nose into other people’s problems. She had enough problems of her own.
Sara looked at the framed photographs that lined the hallway, familiar scenes from her childhood. Cathy had put a fresh coat of paint on everything, but if the paint had not been recent, there would have been a large rectangle near the door that was lighter in color than the rest of the wall: Jeffrey and Sara’s wedding picture. Sara could still see it in her head—not the picture, but the actual day. The way the breeze stirred her hair, which miraculously had not frizzed in the humidity. Her pale blue dress and matching sandals. Jeffrey in dark pants and a white dress shirt, ironed so crisp that he hadn’t bothered to button the cuffs. They had been in the backyard of her parents’ h
ouse, the lake offering a spectacular sunset. Jeffrey’s hair was still damp from the shower, and when she put her head on his shoulder, she could smell the familiar scent of his skin.
“Hey, baby.” Eddie was standing on the bottom stair behind her. Sara turned around. She smiled, because she wasn’t used to having to look up to see her father.
He asked, “You get bad weather coming down?”
“Not too bad.”
“I guess you took the bypass?”
“Yep.”
He stared at her, a sad smile on his face. Eddie had loved Jeffrey like a son. Every time he spoke to Sara, she felt his loss in double measure.
“You know,” he began, “you’re getting to be just as beautiful as your mother.”
She could feel her cheeks redden from the compliment. “I’ve missed you, Daddy.”
He took her hand in his, kissed her palm, then pressed it over his heart. “You hear about the two hats hanging on a peg by the door?”
She laughed. “No. What about them?”
“One says to the other, ‘You stay here. I’ll go on a head.’”
Sara shook her head at the bad pun. “Daddy, that’s awful.”
The phone rang, the old-fashioned sound of an actual ringing bell filling the house. There were two telephones in the Linton home: one in the kitchen and one upstairs in the master bedroom. The girls were only allowed to use the one in the kitchen, and the cord was so long from being stretched into the pantry or outside, or anywhere else there might be an infinitesimal bit of privacy, that it had lost all of its curl.
“Sara!” Cathy called. “Julie is on the phone for you.”
Eddie patted her arm. “Go.”
She walked down the hall and into the kitchen, which was so beautiful that she froze mid-stride. “Holy crap.”
Tessa said, “Wait till you see the pool.”
Sara ran her hand along the new center island. “This is marble.” Previously, the Linton décor had favored Brady Bunch orange tiles and knotty pine cabinetry. She turned around and saw the new refrigerator. “Is that Sub-Zero?”
“Sara.” Cathy held out the phone, the only thing in the kitchen that had not been updated.
She exchanged an outraged look with Tessa as she put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“Dr. Linton?”
“Speaking.” She opened the door on the cherry wall cabinet, marveling at the antique glass panels. There was no answer on the phone. She said, “Hello? This is Dr. Linton.”
“Ma’am? I’m sorry. This is Julie Smith. Can you hear me okay?”
The connection was bad, obviously a cell phone. It didn’t help matters that the girl was speaking barely above a whisper. Sara didn’t recognize the name, though she guessed from the twangy accent that Julie had grown up in one of the poorer areas of town. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry. I’m calling from work and I gotta be quiet.”
Sara felt her brow furrow. “I can hear you fine. What do you need?”
“I know you don’t know me, and I’m sorry to be calling you like this, but you have a patient named Tommy Braham. You know Tommy, don’t you?”
Sara ran through all the Tommys she could think of, then came up not with a face, but with a disposition. He was just another young boy who’d had myriad office visits for the sorts of things you would expect: a bead shoved up his nose. A watermelon seed in his ear. Unspecified belly aches on important school days. He stuck out mostly because his father, not his mother, had always brought him to the clinic, an unusual occurrence in Sara’s experience.
Sara told the girl, “I remember Tommy. How’s he doing?”
“That’s the thing.” She went quiet, and Sara could hear water running in the background. She waited it out until the girl continued, “Sorry. Like I was saying, he’s in trouble. I wouldn’t have called, but he told me to. He texted me from prison.”
“Prison?” Sara felt her heart sink. She hated to hear when one of her kids turned out bad, even if she couldn’t quite recall what he looked like. “What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything, ma’am. That’s the point.”
“Okay.” Sara rephrased the question. “What was he convicted of?”
“Nothing as far as I know. He doesn’t even know if he’s arrested or what.”
Sara assumed the girl had confused prison with jail. “He’s at the police station on Main Street?” Tessa shot her a look and Sara shrugged, helpless to explain.
Julie told her, “Yes, ma’am. They got him downtown.”
“Okay, what do they think he did?”
“I guess they think he killed Allison, but there ain’t no way he—”
“Murder.” Sara did not let her finish the sentence. “I’m not sure what he wants me to do.” She felt compelled to add, “For this sort of situation, he needs a lawyer, not a doctor.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know the difference between a doctor and a lawyer.” Julie didn’t sound insulted by Sara’s clarification. “It’s just that he said he really needed someone who would listen to him, because they don’t believe that he was with Pippy all night, and he said that you were the only one who ever listened to him, and that one cop, she’s been really hard on him. She keeps staring at him like—”
Sara put her hand to her throat. “What cop?”
“I’m not sure. Some lady.”
That narrowed things down enough. Sara tried not to sound cold. “I really can’t get involved in this, Julie. If Tommy has been arrested, then by law, they have to provide him with a lawyer. Tell him to ask for Buddy Conford. He’s very good at helping people in these sorts of situations. All right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She sounded disappointed, but not surprised. “Okay, then. I told him I’d try.”
“Well …” Sara did not know what else to say. “Good luck. To both of you.”
“Thank you, ma’am, and like I said, I’m sorry to bother you’uns over the holiday.”
“It’s all right.” Sara waited for the girl to respond, but there was only the sound of a flushing toilet, then a dead line.
Tessa asked, “What was that about?”
Sara hung up the phone and sat down at the table. “One of my old patients is in jail. They think he killed somebody. Not Brad—someone named Allison.”
Tessa asked, “Which patient was she calling about? I bet it’s the boy who stabbed Brad.”
Cathy slammed the refrigerator door to express her disapproval.
Still, Tessa pressed, “What’s his name?”
Sara studiously avoided her mother’s disapproving gaze. “Tommy Braham.”
“That’s the one. Mama, didn’t he used to cut our grass?”
Cathy gave a clipped “Yes,” not adding anything else to the conversation.
Sara said, “For the life of me, I can’t remember what he looks like. Not too bright. I think his father is an electrician. Why can’t I remember his face?”
Cathy tsked her tongue as she spread Duke’s mayonnaise onto slices of white bread. “Age will do that to you.”
Tessa smiled smugly. “You should know.”
Cathy made a biting retort, but Sara tuned out the exchange. She strained to remember more details about Tommy Braham, trying to place him. His father stuck out more than the son; a gruff, muscled man who was uncomfortable being at the clinic, as if he found the public act of caring for his son to be emasculating. The wife had run off—Sara remembered that at least. There had been quite a scandal around her departure, mostly because she had left in the middle of the night with the youth minister of the Primitive Baptist church.
Tommy must have been around eight or nine when Sara first saw him as a patient. All boys looked the same at that age: bowl hair cuts, T-shirts, blue jeans that looked impossibly small and bunched up over bright white tennis shoes. Had he had a crush on her? She couldn’t remember. What stuck out the most was that he had been silly and a bit slow. She imagined if he’d committed murder, it was because so
meone else had put him up to it.
She asked, “Who is Tommy supposed to have killed?”
Tessa answered, “A student from the college. They pulled her out of the lake at the crack of dawn. At first they thought it was a suicide, then they didn’t, so they went to her house, which happens to be that crappy garage Gordon Braham rents out to students. You know the one?”
Sara nodded. She had once helped her father pump the septic tank outside the Braham house while she was on a holiday break from college, an event that had spurred her to work doubly hard to get into medical school.
Tessa supplied, “So, Tommy was there in the garage with a knife. He attacked Frank and ran out into the street. Brad chased after him and he stabbed Brad, too.”
Sara shook her head. She had been thinking something small—a convenience store holdup, an accidental discharge of a gun. “That doesn’t sound like Tommy.”
“Half the neighborhood saw it,” Tessa told her. “Brad was chasing him down the street and Tommy turned around and stabbed him in the gut.”
Sara thought it through to the next step. Tommy hadn’t stabbed a civilian. He had stabbed a cop. There were different rules when a police officer was involved. Assault turned into attempted murder. Manslaughter turned into murder in the first.
Tessa mumbled, “I hear Frank got a little rough with him.”
Cathy voiced her disapproval as she took plates down from the cabinets. “It’s very disappointing when people you respect behave badly.”
Sara tried to imagine the scene: Brad running after Tommy, Frank bringing up the rear. But it wouldn’t have just been Frank. He wouldn’t waste his time pounding on a suspect while Brad was bleeding out. Someone else would have been there. Someone who had probably caused the whole takedown to go bad in the first place.
Sara felt anger spread like fire inside her chest. “Where was Lena during all of this?”
Cathy dropped a plate on the floor. It shattered at her feet, but she did not bend to pick up the pieces. Her lips went into a thin line and her nostrils flared. Sara could tell she was struggling to speak. “Don’t you dare say that hateful woman’s name in my house ever again. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sara looked down at her hands. Lena Adams. Jeffrey’s star detective. The woman who was supposed to have Jeffrey’s back at all times. The woman whose cowardice and fear had gotten Jeffrey murdered.
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