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.”
“He remembers you.”
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.”