Aftermath Read online

  I sighed as the heat of the hallway enveloped me. “Long story. What are you doing in the office before eight on Christmas Eve? Is your boss practicing to be Scrooge for the town play?”

  “We’re closed next week, so I’m helping him finish some end-of-the-year stuff. He had to pick me up in his truck, since my car couldn’t hack the ice.” Tim led me to a break room where a full pot of coffee sat on its hot plate. “A mug, or something taller?” He opened a cabinet.

  “I could drink right from the carafe, but I guess I’ll take the biggest thing you’ve got.”

  As he poured, I thought again about how to discuss the reason for his pariah status and the way it fit into the terrible secret. When he handed me the insulated tankard, I thanked him and took a long pull of scalding bliss. A flush spread over my skin and started me shivering all over again. “Look,” I said, “you know I’ve long-since lost my Southern manners. Would you mind if I come right out with some Yankee bluntness?”

  “No problem.” He grinned and leaned against the counter. “Hit me with your best shot.”

  “I just walked over from Cindy Dwyer’s B&B, where she evicted me for verbally beating a confession out of her. I know about the Stapleton Scholarships, what my dad put everyone through for so long.”

  “Okay, yeah. What he did, that was messed up.” He turned, took down a mug, and busied himself with pouring again.

  “The people in your neighborhood had little to lose—why didn’t you or someone else on your street go public with it?”

  “When you only have a little to start with, you can’t afford to lose one bit of it, and you don’t want anybody you know to catch the blowback either.” He shrugged. “Besides, what do those scholarships have to do with me?”

  “Your sister—LaDonna—she was his pick for this year, wasn’t she? Your grandma said what happened to your family was hardest on her.”

  His face remained inscrutable while he sipped his coffee. “That your best shot?”

  “And you stopped him. I can’t prove how, but a bunch of people are still holding something against you. Because you were behind it.”

  Before he could react, Mr. Pearson said, “That is a powerful accusation, Ms. Wright.” I whirled to find him standing in the doorway, decked out as usual in a three-piece suit and silk tie. Contrary to our previous meetings, his expression showed no trace of amusement. “We must talk.”

  Dammit, if one more person snuck up on me.... Ready to do battle, I took my coffee and strode behind the lawyer into the conference room, while Tim brought up the rear. Mr. Pearson slid aside stacks of files to make room at the table. He sat opposite me, and Tim joined him, making his loyalty clear.

  Despite the hurt and disappointment in their eyes, I persevered. “The timeline works. The Scholar was picked in March or April, and I’m betting it was LaDonna. In June and early July, my father’s largest business had no revenues—Conway and his boys forgot to conceal that in the presentation materials they gave me. After sixty days’ warning, all nice and legal, my dad had made good on his threat to lay off everyone, because the Scholar’s family refused to give in. That’s how the Bladensburgs were made into the bad guys.”

  I pointed at Tim. “Your whole family are pariahs, not just you. Someone even tried to burn down your house. Your mom and dad left with LaDonna, but Abby wouldn’t abandon the old home place, so you stayed with her and continued to stand tall. Then, you came to work here in July, and uh—” I came up with the rest on the fly, combining my two lines of thought as I shifted my focus to Mr. Pearson. “Somehow, Tim makes a deal with Wallace Landry to murder my father, and brings you into the plan. You get my dad drunk and set the alarm after putting him to bed. This double-crosses Landry because Cade shows up and silences him.”

  “I see.” The lawyer steepled his fingers. Gold and diamond cufflinks glinted below soft, manicured hands. “So we have a conspiracy, in fact, where I work with Timothy to perpetrate the contract killing of my most lucrative client.” He shook his head. “Though you have described an interesting theory, there is a discrepancy in your timeline. I did hire Tim in July, but after Brady Stapleton’s murder, not before. The purpose was two-fold: first, I needed a talented paralegal—” he gave Tim’s arm a gentle pat “—but I also wanted to derail a second killing brought on by the turmoil that preceded and followed your father’s death. By vouching for Timothy, I think I succeeded.”

  “You should’ve hired him in June or even sooner, before my father shut down the town, and spared his family the death threats.”

  “Back then, my most lucrative client was still very much alive and feisty, Ms. Wright. ‘Enlightened self-interest’ often contains at least as large a portion of the latter as the former.”

  It was an admission of sorts, so I trotted out another theory kicking around in my mind. “My dad made you draw up the scholarship contracts for the families to sign, didn’t he?”

  “There you have it wrong again. I refused to play a role in that, claiming a conflict of interest, as I handle many other clients in town. Brady had the contracts done in Atlanta.”

  “But…but….” I slapped the table. “You did clear out the Scholar photos from the basement so I wouldn’t get suspicious.”

  “Yes, I am indeed guilty as charged on that count,” he said. “I wanted to spare you the pain of learning what your father was like. An impossible task, as it turns out, because you refuse to leave the past alone.”

  “That’s because there are so many details that don’t fit. I’ve learned too much to still believe Landry simply shot my father so he could rob him.”

  Tim glowered at me and said even more softly than usual, “I didn’t kill anybody. Or set anybody up to be killed.”

  “You both know who did, though. I can see it in your faces. You know who’s guilty.”

  “We are all guilty,” Mr. Pearson said. “If you know about the scholarships, you know the whole town is culpable, from the mayor down to the lowliest citizen. We all went along because—” he adjusted one of his cufflinks and then tapped it with his finger “—well, because of this, symbolically speaking. And if there is more to the deaths of your father and Mr. Landry than meets the eye, then we are all guilty of conspiracy, because everybody believes as you do: it was not simply a crime of opportunity.” He spread his hands. “Yet we continue to do nothing, because now we live without the annual guilt and anguish of ‘scholarship season,’ and business is even better than before.”

  I stammered, “But two men died.”

  “Tragically, yes.” Mr. Pearson rose. “The accusations you leveled are understandable, given the shock of learning what Graylee has endured, and kept secret, for more than three decades. We certainly do not hold them against you.” He walked to the door. “Clearly, your discoveries have left you overwrought. Please rest in my office while Timothy and I finish our work here.”

  Once again I followed him as we went deeper into the building, but now I barely managed to shuffle behind, feeling wrung out after my epic failure. I even forgot to bring my coffee.

  He gestured toward a lovely office of mahogany furniture, leather chairs, and glass-fronted bookshelves. “Make yourself at home. We will not be long.”

  I plopped into his swivel chair and spun one way and then the other, trying to gather my thoughts. While acknowledging so much and correcting my facts, the lawyer still hadn’t cleared up any of the deeper mysteries. Instead, he’d basically advised me to stop obsessing about the truth and be happy with my blood money, as he and everyone else in Graylee were happy with theirs. His frankness and lack of remorse were jarring—the man would’ve put Machiavelli to shame.

  What to do? I distracted myself by glancing at a wall of framed photographs, a combination of family mementoes and souvenirs with glad-handing celebrities, a little of Abby’s decorating style and a little of David’s. Some black and white shots showed boys at play
from probably as far back as the 1950s, while many others were in color and more recent, with the Pearson family growing older and prosperous.

  The American Dream. I think most of us assumed we could live that dream without others getting hurt. But maybe for one person to get ahead, someone else had to suffer. Perhaps a rising tide swamped some ships instead of lifting them all. At least in Graylee, Georgia.

  If I blew the whistle on what had gone on here, despite my desire not to shine a spotlight on the victims, would the Feds or some state law enforcement find enough cause to charge anyone? Would they target only Graylee’s leaders? Cade and his deputies? Nearly the whole damn town? And the people who were left—how would they behave toward me? Even if I fled back to New York or headed somewhere else, I’d always be looking over my shoulder.

  Losing myself in the photos again, I examined the oldest one more closely. Mr. Pearson was in the center of the shot, a bare-chested boy of maybe ten years old, his arms around the shoulders of two other boys who also were shirtless: a scrawny kid in thick glasses who looked a little like David and a taller, athletic boy who must’ve been my father. They stood in the glade of a forest, the three musketeers posing in a beam of sunshine, ready to take on the world.

  David had told me he knew everything about my father. Now that I knew what questions to ask, he could put an end to this crazy quest for the truth. Hopefully he also would have some ideas about how I should bring about the healing and reconciliation everyone needed.

  As I perused the other pictures, a horn honked twice on Main Street. I peered between two slats in the drawn blinds and saw a black truck even bigger than Mr. Pearson’s idling on the road. My ride had tracked me down. What a relief—I wouldn’t have to face Tim and Mr. Pearson anymore that day, or see the pain in their faces because of more wild accusations. I was so relieved to escape that I jogged down the corridor.

  Tim stepped out and intercepted me. He said, “Hey, I really don’t blame you for thinking what you did. I should’ve been more upfront. I just didn’t want to overwhelm you with our drama. You know: welcome to Graylee, here’s our big, bad scandal all thanks to your daddy.”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to talk it through,” I told him as the truck horn blared twice more, “but right now I’ve got to collect my luggage and settle in someplace where I might sleep for more than a night.”

  He grasped my arm with surprising intensity. “You’re going to stay—”

  I broke free and backpedaled toward the door. “Yeah, with David Stark.” Grinning at his expression of disbelief, I called back, “Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

  Before he could reply, I turned and exited. Only the icy street kept me from sprinting to the freedom David’s ride represented.

  Huge wheels elevated the truck cab so much that I needed to use the built-in steps and handholds to climb up. Cade would’ve stood there and helped me; David merely raced the engine, but I appreciated his confidence in me as I managed to climb into his testament to torque and testosterone.

  I closed the door and said hello. Despite the heat blasting from the vents, he’d outfitted himself in black leather: jacket, cap, and gloves, as well as the ear stems of his sunglasses. The ensemble looked good on him. He dropped the transmission into drive and started chewing up ice and snow with each revolution of his tires.

  “Making friends all over the place, I hear,” he rumbled, his voice pitched even deeper than the truck engine.

  “No point in being rich unless you’re also willing to be a troublemaker,” I said.

  He laughed. “Now you’re getting it. Actually, you don’t get points for pissing off Cindy. Even as a kid she had a stick up her ass.”

  I described where I’d stowed my bags. “Think she’ll pull out that stick and chase us with it?”

  “Naw, she was never the energetic sort. Be more likely to spin Blue Willow plates at us like Frisbees from her porch.”

  “Or launch Chanel grenades.”

  In short order, David parked in front of her house and actually helped me, hauling one of my suitcases across the snowy yard and setting it in the spacious passenger compartment behind his seat. On the other hand, he did let me retrieve two myself, including the useless gun vault, which seemed to grow heavier each time I lifted it. He was right—Cindy didn’t even make an appearance, much less give chase.

  Warm and dry again in the cab, I entertained him by telling about my encounter with Tara. The highway was as iced over as the streets of Graylee. Dozens of cars had spun out and were abandoned off the shoulders and big rigs had jackknifed across the road. Despite going extra slow, it took most of the trip to tell because he kept asking for more details. Writers!

  I concluded with, “And so that’s how Wallace Landry’s fiancée got her revenge. Unfortunately for me, I was the stand-in for my father and everyone responsible for Landry’s death.”

  “You mean Cade?”

  “I mean the whole town. You and Bebe, too—you said you knew everything about Dad. You could’ve told me about the scholarships and the pressure he put on those poor families, whose only crime was to raise the most beautiful girl in her graduating class.”

  “No, they had to be whip-smart, too. The girls he picked weren’t always the prettiest—he wanted the complete package.” He glanced over at me. “I think he was constantly trying to replace your mom. Looking back on my marriages, I wonder if I was doing the same thing.”

  “You and my mother were an item?” Subconsciously, I knew it must’ve been possible, but the fact of it took him off the dating board for sure.

  “It was the late 1960s—free love had made it all the way to South Georgia. Mary Grace didn’t like to be tied down to just one man.”

  “Then how’d my father get her to commit to him?”

  “You’ll love this: Brady appealed to her altruistic side, pointed out how much good they could do together.” He touched my arm in what I chose to interpret as a fatherly way. “Your looks aren’t the only thing you got from her. Maybe I reacted so strongly to your philanthropy pitch because it was like being with her all over again, and I couldn’t face that.”

  David turned off the highway. His road showed only a single set of monster-truck tracks across the otherwise undisturbed strip of white that led to his home. Demonstrating a bit of OCD, he tried to stay in the same ruts as he guided us toward his amalgamation of architectural styles.

  “See?” I said. “You could’ve helped me understand it all. I probably would’ve handled myself differently with Tara and not lost so much to her.” He only tapped out a rhythm on the steering wheel in response, so I thought some more about the case file and started in a new direction. “Here’s another thing I can’t figure out: why did Landry shoot my dad seventeen times?”

  “From what I heard, the guy had an angry streak.” He made a sweeping left around the corner of the stone manor wing and rolled up to a garage modeled after a Victorian carriage house. With the tap of a button on the visor, he raised the solid white door, and then we coasted inside. He’d needed a wide, high-clearance building to accommodate the height of his truck and leave room for his Hyundai sedan on one side and, on the other, a white Mini Cooper with thick green and orange racing stripes, suggestive of the Irish flag, which surely belonged to Bebe.

  I shook my head. “No, seventeen times is sending a message or acting out some kind of hatred. If he’d gone to the house to steal, he knew he would have to deal with my dad, but surely only one or two shots would’ve been enough.”

  “Could be the first few bullets were meant to loosen his tongue, but then Landry went nuts when it didn’t work, and he emptied his gun into Brady out of frustration. Lord knows I wanted to do that to your daddy about a hundred times over the years.” He replaced his sunglasses with his narrow, iconic specs and climbed down.

  I dropped to the ground and pulled out the gun vault and a rolling suit
case from behind my seat. “Did my father do his drinking at home, or did he have a favorite bar?”

  David yanked the remaining bag from behind his seat. “What are you getting at?”

  “He had a blood alcohol level of point-eight-four percent. Where’d he get so drunk and, if he did it anywhere but home, how could he manage to drive or fiddle with the alarm before dragging himself to bed?”

  “Hmm, you’ve got a good head for details. If you ever start writing, think about doing mysteries.”

  “Afraid of some competition in the horror market?”

  “No, it’s just that mysteries sell well. I’m offering helpful advice—why do you always turn everything into a goddamned argument or some kind of challenge?” He didn’t wait for my response, which was a good thing because I was speechless. Once again, he’d nailed my personality squarely.

  Instead of guiding us out and across the icy patio, he motioned me toward a dark, open passage built into the side of the garage. He touched a button there, lowering the garage door. I propped the gun vault on top of my suitcase, turning it into a makeshift dolly. Before we started to walk, David tilted his head, as if listening for something. I didn’t hear any sounds but the tick of the engine as it cooled and the drip of melted snow from the truck undercarriage to the garage floor.

  He shrugged and turned toward the opening. “Here’s another spooky effect,” he said with a boyish grin. As we crossed the threshold, a series of gaslight carriage lamps flickered to life on both stone walls, continuing the Victorian motif and illuminating a short tunnel that evoked secret hallways and haunted sewers. In the barrel ceiling, heaters with glowing orange coils began to blow warmth on us, drowning out conversation and the clatter of rolling luggage wheels. It ruined the Phantom of the Opera effect, but balmy spookiness was fine with me.

  The opposite end of the tunnel brought us to French doors and the tiled kitchen at the rear of the house. As we wiped our boots on a thick coconut-fiber mat, the heaters and gaslights cut off behind us. David indicated a hall to the right, leading to the Cape Cod wing. “Your suite is down yonder. I assume Cindy didn’t offer a meal before kicking you out?”