Sara Linton no longer thought of Grant County as her home. It was of another place, another time, as tangible to her as Rebecca’s Manderley or Heathcliff’s moors. As she drove through the outskirts of town, she couldn’t help but notice that everything looked the same, yet nothing was quite real. The closed military base that was slowly reverting to nature. The trailer parks on the bad side of the railroad tracks. The abandoned box store that had been converted into a storage center.
Three and a half years had passed since Sara had been home, and she wanted to think that her life was okay now, getting closer to a new normal. Actually, her current life in Atlanta looked a lot like it would have if she had stayed there after medical school instead of moving back to Grant County. She was the chief pediatric attending in Grady Hospital’s emergency room, where students followed her around like puppy dogs and the security guards carried multiple clips on their belts in case the gangbangers tried to finish the job they started on the streets. An epidemiologist who worked for the Centers for Disease Control on Emory’s campus had started asking her out. She went to dinner parties and grabbed coffee with friends. Occasionally, on the weekends, she would take the dogs to Stone Mountain Park to give the greyhounds space to run. She read a lot. She watched more television than she should. She was living a perfectly normal, perfectly boring life.
And yet, the minute she saw the sign announcing that she had officially entered Grant County, her carefully constructed façade started to crack. She pulled over to the side of the road, feeling a constriction in her chest. The dogs stirred in the back seat. Sara forced herself not to give in. She was stronger than this. She had fought tooth and nail to climb out of the depression she’d spiraled into after her husband’s death, and she was not going to allow herself to fall back in just because of a stupid road sign.
“Hydrogen,” she said. “Helium, lithium, beryllium.” It was an old trick from her childhood, listing out the elements from the periodic table to take her mind off the monsters that might be lurking under her bed. “Neon, sodium, magnesium …” She recited from memory until her heart stopped racing and her breathing returned to normal.
Finally, the moment passed, and she found herself laughing at the thought of Jeffrey finding out she was chanting the periodic table on the side of the road. He’d been a jock in high school—handsome, charming, and effortlessly cool. It had tickled him no end to see Sara’s geeky side.
She reached around and gave the dogs some attention so they would settle back down. Instead of starting the car again, she sat for a while, staring out the window at the empty road leading into town. Her fingers went to the collar of her shirt, then lower to the ring she wore on a necklace. Jeffrey’s Auburn class ring. He’d been on the football team until he got tired of warming the bench. The ring was bulky, too big for her finger, but touching it was the closest she could come to touching him. It was a talisman. Sometimes, she found herself touching it without remembering putting her hand there.
Her only consolation was that there was nothing left unsaid between them. Jeffrey knew that Sara loved him. He knew there was no part of her that did not belong wholly and completely to him, just as she knew that he felt the same. When he died, his last words were to her. His last thoughts, his last memories, all were of Sara. Just as she knew that her last thoughts would always be of him.
She kissed the ring before tucking it back into her shirt. Carefully, Sara pulled the car off the shoulder and back onto the road. The overwhelming feeling threatened to come back as she drove farther into town. It was so much easier to push away the things that she had lost when they weren’t staring her right in the face. The high school football stadium where she had first met Jeffrey. The park where they had walked the dogs together. The restaurants where they ate. The church that Sara’s mother had occasionally guilted them into attending.
There had to be one place, one memory, that was untouched by this man. Long before Jeffrey Tolliver even knew there was such a thing as Grant County, she’d had a life here. Sara had grown up in Heartsdale, gone to the high school, joined the science club, helped out at the women’s shelter where her mother volunteered, done the occasional odd job with her father. Sara had lived in a house Jeffrey had never stepped foot in. She’d driven a car he’d never seen. She had shared her first kiss with a local boy whose father owned the hardware store. She had gone to dances at the church and attended potlucks and football games.
All without Jeffrey.
Three years before he entered her life, Sara had taken the part-time job of county medical examiner in order to buy out her partner at the children’s clinic. She had kept the job long after her loan had been paid off. She was surprised to find out that helping the dead was sometimes more rewarding than saving the living. Every case was a puzzle, every body riddled with clues to a mystery that only Sara could solve. A different part of her brain that she hadn’t even known existed was engaged by the coroner’s job. She had loved both her jobs with equal passion. She had worked countless cases, given testimony in court on countless suspects and circumstances.
Now, Sara could not remember one detail from any of them.
What she could vividly recall was the day that Jeffrey Tolliver had strolled into town. The mayor had wooed him away from the Birmingham police force to take over for the retiring chief of police. Every woman Sara knew practically tittered with joy whenever Jeffrey’s name was mentioned. He was witty and charming. He was tall, dark, and handsome. He’d played college football. He drove a cherry red Mustang, and when he walked, he had the athletic grace of a panther.
That Jeffrey set his sights on Sara had shocked the entire town, Sara included. She wasn’t the type of girl who got the good-looking guy. She was the type of girl who watched her sister or her best friend get the good-looking guy. And yet, their casual dates turned into something deeper, so that a few years later, no one was surprised when Jeffrey asked her to marry him. Their relationship had been hard work, and God knew there had been ups and downs, but in the end, she had known with every fiber of her being that she belonged to Jeffrey and, more important, that he belonged completely to her.
Sara wiped her tears with the back of her hand as she drove. The longing was the hardest part, the physical ache her body felt at the memory of him. There was no part of town that didn’t slap her in the face with what she had lost. These roads had been kept safe by him. These people had called him friend. And Jeffrey had died here. The town he’d loved so much had become his crime scene. There was the church where they mourned his death. There was the street where a long line of cars had pulled over as his casket was driven out of town.
She would only be here for four days. She could do anything for four days.
Almost anything.
Sara took the long way to her parents’ house, bypassing Main Street and the children’s clinic. The bad storms that had followed her all the way from Atlanta had finally subsided, but she could tell from the dark clouds in the sky that this was only a temporary reprieve. The weather seemed to fit her mood lately—sudden, violent storms with fleeting rays of sunshine.
Because of the coming Thanksgiving holiday, lunchtime traffic was nonexistent. No cars were snaking a long line toward the college. No noontime shoppers were heading into downtown. Still, she took a left instead of a right at Lakeshore Drive, going two miles out of her way around Lake Grant so that she would not drive past her old house. Her old life.
The Linton family home, at least, was welcoming in its familiarity. The house had been tinkered with over the years—additions tacked on, bathrooms added and updated. Sara’s father had built out the apartment space over the garage when she went away to college so that she would have a place to stay during summer break. Tessa, Sara’s younger sister, had lived there for almost ten years while she waited for her life to start. Eddie Linton was a plumber by trade. He had taught both his girls the business, but only Tessa had stuck around long enough to do anything with it. That Sara had chosen medical school instead of a life navigating dank crawl spaces with her sister and father was a disappointment Eddie still tried his best to cover. He was the kind of father who was most happy when his daughters were close by.
Sara didn’t know how Eddie felt about Tessa leaving the family business. Around the time Sara had lost Jeffrey, Tessa had gotten married and moved her life eight thousand miles away to work with children in South Africa. She was as impulsive as Sara was steady, though no one would have guessed when the girls were teenagers that either of them would be where they were today. The idea of Tessa as a missionary was still hard for Sara to believe.
“Sissy!” Tessa bounded out of the house, her pregnant belly swaying as she angled herself down the front stairs. “What took you so long? I’m starving!”
Sara was barely out of the car when her sister threw her arms around her. The hug turned from a greeting into something deeper, and Sara felt the darkness coming back. She was no longer certain that she could do this for four minutes, let alone four days.
Tessa mumbled, “Oh, Sissy, everything’s changed.”
Sara blinked back tears. “I know.”
Tessa pulled away. “They got a pool.”
Sara laughed in surprise. “A what?”
“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’ house, 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 someone 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.
Tessa struggled to kneel down and help her mother clean up the broken dish. Sara stayed where she was, frozen in place.
The darkness was back, a suffocating cloud of misery that made her want to curl into a ball. This kitchen had been filled with laughter all of Sara’s life—the good-natured bickering between her mother and sister, the bad puns and practical jokes from her father. Sara did not belong here anymore. She should find an excuse to leave. She should go back to Atlanta and let her family enjoy their holiday in peace rather than dredging up the collective sorrow of the last four years.
No one spoke until the phone rang again. Tessa was closest. She picked up the receiver. “Linton residence.” She didn’t make small talk. She handed the phone to Sara.
“Hello?”
“I’m sorry to be bothering you, Sara.”
Frank Wallace always seemed to be making an effort when he said Sara’s name. He had played poker with Eddie Linton since Sara was in diapers, and had called her “Sweetpea” until he realized that it was inappropriate to address his boss’s wife with such familiarity.
Sara managed a “Hi” as she opened the French door leading onto the back deck. She hadn’t realized how hot her face was until the cold hit her. “Is Brad all right?”
“You heard about that?”
“Of course I heard.” Half the town probably knew about Brad before the ambulance had arrived on the scene. “Is he still in surgery?”
“Got out an hour ago. Surgeons say he’s got a shot if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours.” Frank said more, but Sara couldn’t concentrate on his words, which were meaningless anyway. The twenty-four-hour mark was the gold standard for surgeons, the difference between explaining a death at the weekly morbidity and mortality meeting or passing off an iffy patient to another doctor to manage their care.
She leaned against the house, cold brick pressing into her back, as she waited for Frank to get to the point. “Do you remember a patient named Tommy Braham?”
“Vaguely.”
“I hate to pull you into this, but he’s been asking for you.”
Sara listened with half an ear, her mind whirring with possible excuses to answer the question she knew that he was going to ask. She was so caught up in the task that she hadn’t realized Frank had stopped talking until he said her name. “Sara? You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“It’s just that he won’t stop crying.”
“Crying?” Again, she had the sensation of missing an important part of the conversation.
“Yeah, crying,” Frank confirmed. “I mean, a lot of them cry. Hell, it’s jail. But he’s seriously not right. I think he needs a sedative or something to calm him down. We got three drunks and a wife beater in here gonna break through the walls and strangle him if he don’t shut up.”
She repeated his words in her head, still not sure she’d heard right. Sara had been married to a cop for many years, and she could count on one hand the number of times Jeffrey had worried about a criminal in his cells—and never a murderer, especially a murderer who had harmed a fellow officer. “Isn’t there a doctor on call?”
“Honey, there’s barely a cop on call. The mayor’s cut half our budget. I’m surprised every time I flip a switch that the lights still come on.”
She asked, “What about Elliot Felteau?” Elliot had bought Sara’s practice when she left town. The children’s clinic was right across the street from the station.
“He’s on vacation. The nearest doc is sixty miles away.”
She gave a heavy sigh, annoyed with Elliot for taking a week off, as if children would wait until after the holiday to get sick. She was also annoyed with Frank for trying to drag her into this mess. But mostly, she was annoyed with herself that she had even taken the call. “Can’t you just tell him that Brad’s going to be okay?”
“It’s not that. There was this girl we pulled out of the lake this morning.”
“I heard.”
“Tommy confessed to killing her. Took him a while, but we broke him. He was in love with the girl. She didn’t want to give him the time of day. You know the kind of thing.”
“Then it’s just remorse,” she said, though she found the behavior strange. In Sara’s experience, the first thing most criminals did after they confessed was fall into a deep sleep. Their bodies had been so shot through with adrenaline for so long that they collapsed in exhaustion when they finally got the weight off their chests. “Give him some time.”
“It’s more than that,” Frank insisted. He sounded exasperated and slightly desperate. “I swear to God, Sara, I really hate asking you this, but something’s gotta help him get through. It’s like his heart’s gonna break if he doesn’t see you.”
“I barely remember him.”
Sara chewed her lip. “Where’s his daddy?”
“In Florida. We can’t get hold of him. Tommy’s all alone, and he knows it.”
“Why is he asking for me?” There were certainly patients she had bonded with over the years, but, to her recollection, Tommy Braham had not been one of them. Why couldn’t she remember his face?
Frank said, “He says you’ll listen to him.”
“You didn’t tell him I’d come, did you?”
“Course not. I didn’t even want to ask, but he’s just bad off, Sara. I think he needs to see a doctor. Not just you, but a doctor.”
“It’s not because—” She stopped, not knowing how to finish the question. She decided to be blunt. “I heard you took him down hard.”
Frank couched his language. “He fell down a lot while I was trying to arrest him.”
Sara was familiar with the euphemism, code for the nastier side of law enforcement. Abuse of prisoners in custody was a subject she never broached with Jeffrey, mostly because she did not want to know the answer. “Is anything broken?”
“A couple of teeth. Nothing bad.” Frank sounded exasperated. “He’s not crying over a split lip, Sara. He needs a doctor.”
Sara looked through the window into the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table beside Tessa. Both of them stared back at her. One of the reasons Sara had moved back to Grant County after medical school was because of the paucity of doctors serving rural areas. With the hospital downtown closed, the sick were forced to travel almost an hour away to get help. The children’s clinic was a blessing for the local kids, but, apparently, not during holidays.
“Sara?”
She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “Is she there?”
He hesitated a moment. “No. She’s at the hospital with Brad.”
Probably concocting a story in her head where she was the hero and Brad was just a careless victim. Sara’s voice shook. “I can’t see her, Frank.”
“You won’t have to.”
She felt grief tighten her throat. To be at the station house, to be where Jeffrey was most at home.
Lightning crackled high up in the clouds. She could hear rain, but not see it yet. Out on the lake, waves crashed and churned. The sky was dark and ominous with the promise of another storm. She wanted to take it as a sign, but Sara was a scientist at heart. She had never been good at relying on faith.
“All right,” she relented. “I think I have some diazepam in my kit. I’ll come through the back.” She paused. “Frank—”
“You have my word, Sara. She won’t be here.”
Sara did not want to admit to herself that she was glad to leave her family, even if it meant going to the station house. She felt awkward around them, a piece of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit. Everything was the same, yet everything was different.
She took the back way around the lake again, avoiding her old house that she had shared with Jeffrey. There was no way to get to the station without driving down Main Street. Thankfully, the weather had turned, rain dripping down in a thick, hazy curtain. This made it impossible for people to sit on the benches that lined the road or stroll up the cobblestone sidewalks. All the shop doors were tightly closed against the cold. Even Mann’s Hardware had taken down their porch swing display.
She turned down a back alley that ran behind the old pharmacy. The paved road gave way to gravel, and Sara was glad that she was in an SUV. She had always driven sedans while she lived in Heartsdale, but Atlanta’s streets were far more treacherous than any country road. The potholes were deep enough to get lost in and the constant flooding during the rainy season made the BMW a necessity. Or at least that’s what she told herself every time she paid sixty dollars to fill up her gas tank.
Frank must have been waiting for her, because the back door to the station opened before Sara put the car in park. He unfolded a large black umbrella and came out to the car to walk her back to the station. The rain was so loud that Sara did not speak until they were inside.
She asked, “Is he still upset?”
Frank nodded, fiddling with the umbrella, trying to get it closed. Sutures crisscrossed the knuckles of his right hand. There were three deep scratches on the back of his wrist. Defensive wounds.
“Christ.” Frank winced from pain as he tried to get his stiff fingers to move.
Sara took the umbrella from him and closed it. “Do they have you on antibiotics?”
“Got a prescription for something. Not sure what it is.” He took the umbrella from her and tossed it into the broom closet. “Tell your mama I’m sorry for taking you away your first day back.”
Frank had always seemed old to Sara, mostly because he was a contemporary of her father’s. Looking at him now, she thought Frank Wallace had aged a hundred years since the last time she had seen him. His skin was sallow, his face etched with deep lines. She looked at his eyes, noticing the yellow. Obviously, he was not well.
“Frank?”
He forced a smile. “Good to see you, Sweetpea.”
The name was meant to put up a barrier, and it worked. She let him kiss her cheek. His dominant odor had always been cigarette smoke, but today she smelled whisky and chewing gum on his breath. Instinctively, she looked at her watch. Eleven-thirty in the morning, the time of day when a drink meant that you were biding time until your shift ended. On the other hand, this wasn’t like a usual day for Frank. One of his men had been stabbed. Sara probably would have had her share of alcohol in the same situation.
He asked, “How you been holding up?”
She tried to look past the pity in his eyes. “I’m doing great, Frank. Tell me what’s going on.”
He quickly shifted gears. “Kid thought the girl was into him. He finds out she’s not and sticks her with a knife.” He shrugged. “Did a real bad job covering it up. Led us right to his doorstep.”
Sara was even more confused. She must be mixing up Tommy with one of her other kids.
Frank picked up on this. “You really don’t remember him?”
“I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure.”
“He seems to think y’all have some kind of bond.” He saw Sara’s expression and amended, “Not in a weird way or anything. He’s kind of young.” Frank touched the side of his head. “Not a lot going on up there.”
Sara felt a flash of guilt that this boy she barely remembered had felt such a connection to her. She had seen thousands of patients over the years. There were certainly names that stuck out, kids whose graduations and wedding days she had witnessed, a couple whose funerals she had attended. Other than a few stray details, Tommy Braham was a blank.
“It’s this way,” Frank said, as if she had not been in the station a thousand times. He used his plastic badge to open the large steel door that led to the cells. A blast of hot air met them.
Frank noticed her discomfort. “Furnace is acting up.”
Sara took off her jacket as she followed him through the door. When she was a child, the local school had sent kids on field trips to the jail as a way of scaring them away from a life of crime. The Mayberry motif of open cells with steel bars had changed over long ago. There were six steel doors on either side of a long hallway. Each had a wire-mesh glass window and a slot at the bottom through which food trays could be passed. Sara kept her focus straight ahead as she followed Frank, though out of the corner of her eye, she could see men standing at their cell doors, watching her progress.
Frank took out his keys. “I guess he stopped crying.”
She wiped away a bead of sweat that had rolled down her temple. “Did you tell him I was coming?”
He shook his head, not stating the obvious: he hadn’t been sure that Sara would show up.
He found the right key and glanced through the window to make sure Tommy wasn’t going to be any trouble. “Oh, shit,” he muttered, dropping the keys. “Oh, Christ.”
“Frank?”
He snatched up the keys off the floor, uttering more curses. “Christ,” he murmured, sliding the key into the lock, turning back the bolt. He opened the door and Sara saw the reason for his panic. She dropped her coat, the bottle of pills she’d shoved in the pocket before she left the house making a rattling sound as they hit the concrete.
Tommy Braham lay on the floor of his cell. He was on his side, both arms reaching out to the bed in front of him. His head was turned at an awkward angle as he stared blankly up at the ceiling. His lips were parted. Sara recognized him now, the man he had become not much different from the little boy he’d once been. He’d brought her a dandelion once, and turned the color of a turnip when she’d kissed his forehead.
She went to him, pressing her fingers to his neck, doing a cursory check for a pulse. He had obviously been beaten—his nose broken, his eye blackened—but that was not the reason for his death. Both his wrists were cut open, the wounds gaping, flesh and sinew exposed to the stale air. There seemed to be more blood on the floor than there was inside of his body. The smell was sickly sweet, like a butcher’s shop.
“Tommy,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “I remember you.”
Sara closed his eyelids with her fingers. His skin was still warm, almost hot. She had driven too slowly getting here. She shouldn’t have used the restroom before leaving the house. She should have listened to Julie Smith. She should have agreed to come without a fight. She should have remembered this sweet little boy who’d brought her a weed he’d picked from the tall grass growing outside the clinic.
Frank bent down and used a pencil to drag a thin, cylindrical object out of the blood.
Sara said, “It’s an ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen.”
“He must have used it to …”
Sara looked at Tommy’s wrists again. Blue lines of ink crossed the pale skin. She had been the coroner for Grant County before she’d left for Atlanta, and she knew what a repetitive injury looked like. Tommy had scraped and scraped with the metal ink cartridge, digging into his flesh until he found a way to open a vein. And then he had done the same thing to his other wrist.
“Shit.” Frank was staring over her shoulder.
She turned around. On the wall, written in his own blood, Tommy had scrawled the words Not me.
Sara closed her eyes, not wanting to see any of this, not wanting to be here. “Did he try to recant?”
Frank said, “They all do.” He hesitated, then added, “He wrote out a confession. He had guilty knowledge of the crime.”
Sara recognized the term “guilty knowledge.” It was used to describe details that only the police and the criminal knew. She opened her eyes. “Is that why he was crying? He wanted to take back his confession?”
Frank gave a tight nod. “Yeah, he wanted to take it back. But they all—”
“Did he ask for a lawyer?”
“No.”
“How did he get the pen?”
Frank shrugged, but he wasn’t stupid. He could guess what had happened.
“He was Lena’s prisoner. Did she give him the pen?”
“Of course not.” Frank stood up, walked to the cell door. “Not on purpose.”
Sara touched Tommy’s shoulder before standing. “Lena was supposed to frisk him before she put him in the cell.”
“He could’ve hidden it in—”
“I’m assuming she gave him the pen to write his confession.” Sara felt a deep, dark hate burning in the pit of her stomach. She had been back in town for less than an hour and already she was in the middle of yet another one of Lena’s epic screwups. “How long did she interrogate him?”
Frank shook his head again, like she had it all wrong. “Couple’a three hours. Not that long.”
Sara pointed to the words Tommy had written in his own blood. “ ‘Not me,’ ” she read. “He says he didn’t do it.”
“They all say they didn’t do it.” Frank’s tone told her his patience was running thin. “Look, honey, just go home. I’m sorry about all this, but …” He paused, his mind working. “I gotta call the state, start the paperwork, get Lena back in …” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Christ, what a nightmare.”
Sara picked her coat up off the floor. “Where is his confession? I want to see it.”
Frank dropped his hands. He seemed stuck in place. Finally, he relented, leading her toward the door at the opposite end of the hall. The fluorescent lights of the squad room were harsh, almost blinding, compared to the dark cells. Sara blinked to help her eyes adjust. There was a group of uniformed patrolmen standing by the coffeemaker. Marla was at her desk. They all stared at her with the same macabre curiosity they had shown four years ago: How awful, how tragic, how long before I can get on the phone and tell somebody I saw her?
Sara ignored them because she did not know what else to do. Her skin felt hot, and she found herself looking down at her hands so that she would not see Jeffrey’s office. She wondered if they had left everything as it was: his Auburn memorabilia, his shooting trophies and family photographs. Sweat rolled down her back. The room was so stifling that she thought she might be sick.
Frank stopped at his desk. “Allison Spooner is the girl he killed. Tommy tried to make it look like a suicide—wrote a note, stuck Spooner’s watch and ring in her shoes. He would’ve gotten away with it but Le—” He stopped. “Allison was stabbed in the neck.”
“Has an autopsy been performed?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you know the stab wasn’t self-inflicted?”
“It looked—”
“How deep did it penetrate? What was the trajectory of the blade? Was there water in her lungs?”
Frank talked over her, an air of desperation to his voice. “She had ligature marks around her wrists.”
Sara stared at him. She had always known Frank to be an honorable man, yet she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that he was lying through his teeth. “Brock confirmed this?”
He hesitated before shaking his head and shrugging at the same time.
Sara could feel herself getting angrier. She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that her anger was unreasonable, that it was coming from that dark place she had ignored for so many years, but there was no stopping it now—even if she wanted to. “Was the body weighted down in the water?”
“She had two cinder blocks chained to her waist.”
“If she floated with both hands hanging down, livor mortis could have settled into her wrists, or her hands could have rested at an angle on the bottom of the lake, making it look to the untrained eye as if she’d been tied up.”
Frank looked away. “I saw them, Sara. She was tied up.” He opened a file on his desk and handed her a piece of yellow legal paper. The top was torn where it had been ripped away from the pad. Both sides were filled. “He copped to everything.”
Sara’s hands shook as she read Tommy Braham’s confession. He wrote in the exaggerated cursive of an elementary school student. His sentence construction was just as immature: Pippy is my dog. She was sick. She ate a sock. She needed a picture took of her insides. I called my dad. He is in Florida. Sara turned the page over and found the meat of the narrative. Allison had spurned a sexual advance. Tommy had snapped. He’d stabbed her and taken her to the lake to help cover his crime.
She looked at both sides of the paper. Two pages. Tommy had ended his life in less than two pages. Sara doubted he’d understood half of it. The only time he’d used a comma was right before a big word. These, he printed in block letters, and she could see small dots where he had pressed the pen under each letter to make sure he’d spelled it correctly.
Sara could barely speak. “She coached him.”
“It’s a confession, Sara. Most cons have to be told what to write.”
“He doesn’t even understand what he’s saying.” She skimmed the letter, reading, “ ‘I punched Allison to subdude.’ ” She stared at Frank, disbelieving. “Tommy’s IQ is barely above eighty. You think he masterminded this fake suicide? He’s less than one standard deviation from being classified as mentally disabled.”
“You got that from reading two paragraphs?”
“I got that from treating him,” Sara snapped. It had all come flooding back to her as she read the confession: Gordon Braham’s face when Sara suggested his son might be developing too slowly for his age, the tests Tommy had endured, Gordon’s devastation when Sara told him his son would never mature past a certain level. “Tommy was slow, Frank. He didn’t know how to count change. It took him two months to learn how to tie his shoes.”
Frank stared back at her, exhaustion seeping from every pore. “He stabbed Brad, Sara. He cut me in the arm. He ran from the scene.”
Her hands started shaking. Her body surged with anger. “Did you think to ask Tommy why?” she demanded. “Or were you too busy beating his face to a pulp?”
Frank glanced back at the officers by the coffee machine. “Keep your voice down.”
Sara was not going to be silenced. “Where was Lena when all this happened?”
“She was there.”
“I bet she was. I bet she was right there pulling everybody’s strings. ‘The victim was tied up. She must have been murdered. Let’s go to her apartment. Let’s get everybody around me hurt while I walk away without so much as a scratch.’ ” Sara could feel her heart shaking in her chest. “How many people does Lena have to get injured—killed—before somebody stops her?”
“Sara—” Frank rubbed his hands over his face. “We found Tommy in the garage with—”
“His father owns the property. He had every right to be in that garage. Did you? Did you have a warrant?”
“We didn’t need a warrant.”
“Have the laws changed since Jeffrey was alive?” Frank winced at the name. “Did Lena identify herself as a cop or just start waving her gun around?”
Frank didn’t answer her question, which was answer enough. “It was a tense situation. We did everything by the book.”
“Does Tommy’s handwriting match the suicide note?”
Frank blanched, and she realized he hadn’t asked the question himself. “He probably forged it, made it look like the girl’s.”
“He didn’t have the intelligence to forge anything. He was slow. Is that not getting through to you? There’s no way in hell Tommy could’ve done any of this. He wasn’t mentally capable of plotting out a trip to the store, let alone a fake suicide. Are you being willfully blind? Or just covering for Lena like you always do?”
“Mind your tone,” Frank warned.
“This is going to catch her.” Sara held up the confession like a trophy. The shaking in her hands had gotten worse. She felt hot and cold at the same time. “Lena tricked him into writing this. All Tommy wanted to do was please people. She pushed him into a confession and then she pushed him into taking his own life.”
“Now, hold on—”
“She’s going to lose her badge for this. She should go to prison.”
“Sounds to me like you care a hell of a lot more about some punk kid than a cop who’s fighting for his life.”
He could have slapped her face and the shock would have been less. “You think I don’t care about a cop?”
Frank sighed heavily. “Listen, Sweetpea. Just calm down, okay?”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. I’ve been calm for the last four years.” She took her cell phone out of her back pocket and scrolled through the contacts, looking for the right number.
Frank sounded scared. “What are you going to do?”
Sara listened to the phone ring at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters in Atlanta. A secretary answered. She told the woman, “This is Sara Linton calling for Amanda Wagner.”