Two weeks and two days after we’d arrived in Starksville, on a warm, clear Saturday afternoon, we had ourselves a proper reunion in Aunt Hattie’s backyard. Everybody who mattered to me in life was there.
Damon had flown into Winston-Salem the day before to meet his grandfather, which had been as emotional and satisfying as every other moment of my dad’s return to my life. Naomi’s mother, Cilla, and my brother Charlie had come in the day before that.
At first, Charlie had not believed Nana Mama and me when we’d called him with the news. Then he’d gotten angry and said he wasn’t interested in meeting someone who’d cut out on us thirty-five years before. But Cilla and Naomi had insisted, and when Charlie laid eyes on our dad, all had been forgiven. The only thing that would have made it better was having my late brothers Blake and Aaron there too, and we all shed tears over those tragedies.
My best friend, John Sampson, and his wife, Billie, had come in that morning. Sampson and my dad had hit it off immediately, and when Drummond wasn’t sitting by my uncle Cliff, he and John were trading cop stories and laughing.
Stefan Tate was there with his fiancée, Patty Converse, the two of them looking as in love as any couple I’d ever seen. Special Agent Wolfe was there as well.
Evidently, the FBI had been looking at Starksville with suspicions of judicial and police misconduct long before my father called Wolfe and told her to come listen to the shocking testimony about to come out in the courtroom of Erasmus P. Varney.
I went over to Agent Wolfe, said, “What do you think my dad’s chances are?”
Wolfe said, “Well, he’s not going back to his job with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. They’ve been pretty clear on that, but I don’t think he’ll end up being prosecuted for taking Bell hostage and marching him into court.”
“You don’t think?” I asked. “Pretty extreme move.”
“It was,” she said. “But we arrested the police chief and the presiding judge in Stark County, and the sheriff’s been murdered. And Guy Pedelini regained consciousness and spilled everything on all of them. The DA’s office is even under investigation. Basically, there’s no one left in Starksville to go after your dad, and I don’t know what federal statute would apply.”
“So he walks free into a new life,” I said.
“He walks free into an old life,” Bree said, coming up beside me.
“And Marvin Bell and Harold Caine go down for so many things,” Wolfe said. “If they’re not given the death penalty, which I think is the appropriate punishment, they’ll at least never see the outside of a prison.”
I thought about Harold Caine, his callous, cruel indifference. We’d gotten more of the story from Cece.
After Rashawn’s birth, her parents had all but disowned her. Then Cece got pregnant by a white boyfriend she picked up while Rashawn’s father was doing time. Her parents found out, and they also found out that Cece was on drugs while she was with child.
The Caines used the rigged courts of Starksville against Cece and had the baby girl, Lizzie, taken from her mother’s arms within minutes of birth. The courts awarded Lizzie’s grandparents full custody, and they had greatly limited Cece’s involvement in her daughter’s life.
Harold Caine had evidently spent years bitter and humiliated about his mixed-race grandson while at the same time doting on his lily-white granddaughter and running a meth business from secret underground labs beneath his fertilizer factory.
The most terrible thing about it all was that the frenzied nature of the wounds Rashawn had suffered before death clearly indicated that Caine had enjoyed killing his grandson. He’d enjoyed murdering his own flesh and blood. When it came right down to it, that poor, innocent boy had been tortured and slain for the color of his skin.
I’d heard too many variations of that story over the years—young black boy killed for his race—but this one was the worst. The cruelest. The most heinous. The most sadistic. The least understandable.
Like Cece Turnbull, I would never get over Rashawn’s death.
Caine had lawyered up and wasn’t talking. Marvin Bell was talking to prosecutors who were going after Caine for murder, kidnapping, and depraved indifference within the course of a race-based incident. I hoped that whatever the jury decided about Caine, they’d make him suffer.
I spotted a middle-aged woman wearing a Domino’s hat coming around the corner carrying two pizzas. Wolfe, Bree, and I immediately went on alert. Varney, Bell, and Sherman had continued to turn over evidence against Caine, and they’d all stated that he had hired a female assassin known as the lace maker to kill members of my family and make it look like accidents.
She’d missed getting Bree and me with the broken brake line. Now that Caine was behind bars, there was no reason to think the lace maker was still around. But you never knew.
“Can I take those off your hands?” I asked the woman.
“Please,” she said as she smiled and handed them to me. “I’m a little late, so it’ll be five dollars off.”
“Who ordered them?” Bree asked.
“Connie Lou.”
“Oh, Edith, there you are,” my aunt said, hustling over with the cash.
They hugged, and Bree and I relaxed.
Then I saw something that warmed my heart. Cece Turnbull came into the backyard with a beautiful little girl who was the spitting image of her mother, and Cece looked clean and sober and thrilled to be with her daughter.
Bree went into the house for something to drink. I got in line for food. With my plate loaded with fried rabbit, coleslaw, broccoli salad, and little roasted red potatoes, I spotted Pinkie talking to Bree and started over.
“You didn’t eat all the rabbit, did you, Dad?” Jannie asked from a lawn chair between Damon and Ali.
“God, it’s really good,” Damon said. “There better be seconds.”
“I want some more too,” Ali said. “But Pinkie said he’d cook the bass I caught yesterday up at the lake.”
“I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten,” I said. “But I’ll remind him.”
Jannie said, “Coach Greene and Coach Fall said they were going to try to come by later.”
“Looking forward to seeing them,” I said. “But I want you to keep your options open, young lady. Okay?”
“Yeah, for real, Jannie,” Damon said. “If you have Duke already at your door, you know there’s going to be a whole lot more.”
Jannie nodded, and then sobered. “Sharon and her mom going to jail?”
“They’re turning evidence against Marvin Bell, but even if they convince a jury that he forced them into lying about the rape, planting Stefan’s DNA, and putting the drugs in your bag, I still think they’re both looking at convictions and sentences.”
“I don’t want it to, like, completely ruin their lives,” Jannie said.
“Neither do I,” I said. “Have fun.”
“Always,” Ali said.
I grinned. “You do, don’t you?”
“Like Jim Shockey. Life’s an adventure.”
Feeling like my youngest had an understanding of life far beyond his years, I walked over to Pinkie and Bree.
“Gimme some rabbit so I don’t have to stand in line,” Bree said, looking hungrily at my plate.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“What?” she said, miffed. “After how hard and ingeniously I worked on behalf of your cousin?”
“Okay,” I said. “Take the thigh there.”
Bree snatched it off the plate.
“What about me?” Pinkie said.
“You’re able-bodied enough to work on oil rigs,” I said. “Get in line.”
My cousin laughed and went off toward the food.
Bree took two bites of the rabbit and looked like she was in heaven. “I had it figured out, you know. About Caine. Well, everything except Rashawn.”
“I believe you.”
I did. That satellite photo she’d shown me in court was of Caine Industries, which sat by the tracks between the Starksville Road and the crossing three miles to the south. Bree had figured out from the trail-cam photographs that the riders were boarding between those two crossings.
She’d called up Google Earth, saw the rail-line spur that ran out of Caine’s business, and thought, What a great cover for a meth-manufacturing op.
Bree said, “If your dad hadn’t gone Rambo, I would have pinned Caine to the wall.”
“Yes, you would have,” I said. “And for that, I think you’ve earned some downtime in Jamaica.”
Bree perked up. “Really?”
“Why not?”
“Just us?”
“Why not?”
“When?”
“Soon as you want.”
“God, I love the way you think sometimes,” she said, and she kissed me.
“Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama cracked as she eased into a lawn chair near us.
“We were talking about doing just that,” I said.
“TMI, as Jannie says,” my grandmother said, and she waved us off.
“You happy you came back to Starksville, Nana?” Bree asked.
“I’d be some kind of ungrateful wretch if I wasn’t,” Nana Mama said. “This is like the story of the prodigal son, only I’m living it. Honestly, Bree, I could die right now and it would be perfectly fine by me.”
“Not by me,” I said.
“And not by me either,” my father said, coming up behind her, bending down, and kissing her on the cheek.
Nana Mama usually made a fuss over public displays of affection, but she put her hand on her son’s cheek and closed her eyes, and I had a flash of her when she must have been very young and holding her newborn child in her arms.
My dad’s cell phone buzzed. He stood up, dug it out, and read a text. He looked at me, and then at my grandmother.
“I’m afraid I haven’t told you all of it,” he said. “How I came to be Peter Drummond and all.”
That was true. He’d been very evasive about that part of his life.
“You going to tell us?” Nana Mama said.
“In a minute,” he said. “First, there’s someone I want you all to meet.”