The news of Cole’s death vibrates through me like an electric shock. I’ve been frozen all afternoon, not sure what to do. Little Ava’s fear as she hunkered in the bathroom stall splits through my brain. Did he really go through with suicide? Ava’s fate seems sealed. There’s no one left to tell the truth about what’s happening to her.
I check out of the motel and drive back to Dallas, knowing it’s the last place I should be. But I can’t just forget about Ava’s problems, whatever mine might be. I drive from Cole’s house to the UpDown Seat Company, trying to find the embankment he went over. I don’t see anything like that.
I stop at a restaurant with Wi-Fi. On my laptop, I go to the news station’s website and watch the clip again that I saw this morning, and also the updates they’ve filed since. Police are ruling it a suicide based on it being a one-car accident, and on his state of mind over the last few weeks. Family members have told authorities that he had talked of suicide and that he’d been talked down from jumping off a bridge just days earlier. I’m surprised he told them about that.
I’m thankful no one mentions me to reporters.
I try to imagine what would make Cole do such a thing after his children were back with his wife and the media were exposing the Trendalls. Just when things were turning around, when there was a chance to right things, he drove off a cliff? No, I don’t believe it. The website identifies where his car went off the embankment, and I drive over there. There are flowers on the side of the road where it must have happened. They’ve been placed near a broken guardrail.
I walk up to the flowers and look down to the rocks below. There’s paint where the car hit, but the car itself is nowhere in sight. I sit on what’s left of the guardrail and look down the road. It’s not on a curve, so it’s not like he checked a text and forgot to turn. It’s a straight stretch.
I get back in my car and turn it around. I drive slowly up the road. I see two sets of black tire tracks about a half mile from where he went off. They zig toward the dirt, then back onto the road. I frown. Surely the police saw that. Those could be Cole’s tracks, and the other set indicates that someone might have run him off.
Suddenly I’m as sure as I was with my own father. Cole Whittington didn’t kill himself. He was run off the road.