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His grip is firm, his hand warm and smooth in mine. “Nice to meet you, too.”
“Fire up your fry-daddy,” Lexi tells Jake. “We’ve got to get some meat on my sister’s bones, pronto.” She winks at me. “There’s not a soul within fifty miles who’s not put on at least ten pounds since Jake opened this place five years ago. Wait’ll you taste his food. You’ll know why he’s got girls all over town flinging their panties at his front door.”
Jake gives her an appreciative grin and pours two generous glasses of wine. When he tells us about the special—seared duck breast and oven-roasted kale and sweet potato hash smothered in jus—my mouth waters and I smack my lips. Jake notices, and he gives me a cocky grin.
“Don’t laugh,” I say. “My last real meal was a watery stew with questionable chunks of what the cook swore was goat. The stray dog population took a hit that day, though, so I don’t think he was being entirely honest.”
“I don’t know whether to be offended or relieved,” Jake says.
Lexi snorts. “Try disgusted.”
He throws back his head and laughs, a deep rumble that vibrates through my bones, and then disappears into the kitchen with a twirl of his towel and our orders.
As soon as he’s gone, I whirl on my stool to face Lexi, and the words tumble out of my mouth like stock cars at the Bristol Motor Speedway, racing to the finish line. “Did you know that vice principal Sullivan still lives next door—his house is a dump by the way—and is a raging alcoholic?”
“That’s not exactly a 411, you know. By now that man’s liver is so pickled, you could batter it, fry it and serve it on a platter.”
“And his family? What happened to them?”
Lexi sips her wine. “Gone. Hightailed it out of here after what must have been his fourth or fifth DUI.”
The professor’s words—What do you think he’s hiding from?—skitter through my mind, but I switch gears. Dean Sullivan’s fall from grace, though intriguing, is the least of my worries.
I move on. “This law professor from Atlanta came by the house earlier, and you wouldn’t believe what he said about Dad.”
Lexi scowls and plunks down her wineglass, her gaze fishing over my right shoulder. “Why is it that every time somebody gets saved at Light of Deliverance church, they turn into a dowdy old frump? Surely that outfit can’t be what Jesus intended for his fans.”
I don’t bother checking. My sister is the Carrie Bradshaw of Appalachia, and not many people can live up to her fashion standards. And besides, I know this tactic. By interrupting me with some ridiculous nonsense, Lexi is hoping to distract me from a subject she hasn’t spoken more than a few words about in almost sixteen years: our father.
“I think they’re called followers,” I say, not backing down, “and we were talking about Dad’s case.”
“Whatever. That woman is a What Not to Wear episode waiting to happen. Oh, Lord. Now she’s passing out flyers.” She snorts and rolls her eyes. “Probably for their next snake handling.”
“Could you focus, please? This professor is writing a book about wrongful convictions. He thinks Dad’s is one of them.”
And now, I think, I’ve got my sister’s attention. Her gaze whips to mine, her good-humored expression fades and her brows slide into the ghost of a medically frozen V. She reaches for the wineglass and drains it, knuckles tightening ever so slightly around the stem. And then she dabs her glossy lips with a napkin and the storm on her face vanishes as quickly as it came, like a twister sucked up into a dissolving cloud.
“You’d think people would’ve heard by now that snake bites everybody.” Her voice is a little too loud, and a lot too vehement. “Even holier-than-thou Bobby Humphrey. By the time they got him the antivenom, he was foaming at the mouth. Besides, I thought the whole point was prayer, not antivenom. Isn’t that kind of cheating?”
“Lexi! We have to talk about Dad.”
She leans across the bar, snatches the bottle of wine and fills her glass to within an inch of the rim. “The hell we do.”
A familiar frustration ties a string of knots across my shoulders. My sister has always been a great believer in the power of denial. How else can I explain her staying in the one place where she will always be the murderer’s daughter?
But what if what Jeffrey Levine said is true? What if all this time, I’ve been running from something my father didn’t do?
“Did you hear me? This professor thinks Dad might be innocent. What if he’s right?”
She shakes her head definitively, almost violently. “He’s not.”
“But what if he is?”
“He’s not!” she shrieks, shrill enough that I jump. Everyone jumps, in fact. A young couple at a table to our left, three friends sharing a plate of fried calamari at our backs, two pot-bellied men in trucker hats three stools down. Even Jake looks up from the beer he’s pulling at the opposite end of the bar, and hell’s bells, I catch pity in his expression.
But Lexi has always preferred the part of sexy bombshell over damsel in distress, and really, who can blame her? Our life has been distressing enough. She tosses him a beauty-queen smile and reaches for her wineglass with a shaking hand, and all around us, conversations pick back up one by one.
I lean close, lower my voice. “Why do you refuse to discuss the possibility he may not be guilty?”
She glances over, and I see a flash of my sister. The real Lexi. The unguarded and devastated Lexi. “Because it’s a whole hell of a lot easier than praying he’s innocent.”
And then she flicks her perfect hair over a perfect shoulder and real Lexi’s gone.
5 (#ulink_d06f924b-ccb9-597b-842a-59d60d9b4204)
WHEN THE KITCHEN door swings wide a few minutes later revealing Jake coming at us with two plates piled high with tonight’s special, I realize I’m ravenous. Outta-my-way-and-let-me-at-it ravenous. He slides our dinners onto the bar, and I scoop up a bite and shove it in my mouth before he’s pulled back his hand.
“Omigod,” I mumble around the food, slicing off an even bigger bite of duck, stuffing it in with the half-chewed hash. I say more, but judging by the confused look on Jake’s face, none of it very intelligibly.
He blinks at Lexi. “What did your sister just say?”
She watches me take another monster bite, and her pretty nose wrinkles. “I don’t know, but you better back up.”
When you live in an area mired in chronic famine, it’s easy to forget how food is supposed to taste. Meals are freeze-dried and carried down dusty roads to distribution sites where nobody cares if they please the palate, as long as they nourish the body. After a while, you stop missing the tangy sweetness of a juicy plum, the prick of sea salt just before it explodes on your tongue, the way one bite of something delicious can be as satisfying as a sweaty romp between the sheets. Jake’s food makes me remember all those things now.
I swallow, swipe a napkin across my lips. “I said, this is an orgasm on a plate.”
A smile slides up Jake’s face and settles in. It’s a magnetic, no-holds-barred smile, a smile that’s fierce and undeniably sexy, a smile that tugs and tingles somewhere deep and low in my belly.
Jake Foster would make a mighty fine distraction.
He refills our glasses and points to the far end of the bar. “I’ll be down there if you need me.”
After he leaves, Lexi and I don’t return to our discussion of Dad. Not of the Emory professor, either. Skirting around the reason for our reunion is only a temporary respite, I know, but neither of us seems willing to risk another outburst. We scarf down our Thursday-night specials and tiptoe around each other, chatting and catching up on jobs and boys and Bo, who is about to put his name on yet another patent for Eastman Chemical Company, this time for a new and revolutionary mascara.
It takes a couple beats for her message to muddle through my jet-lagged brain. “Hold up. Bo hasn’t called me back because he’s working on a stupid mascara?”
“Excuse me, but just because you got all the dark lashes in the family—” she leans in, giving me a pointed look “—mascara is not stupid. Especially Bo’s. His is about to change the way women put on makeup in the mornings.”
“Again, we’re talking about a cosmetic.” My level tone abandons me now, as does my inside voice. “Not a cure for cancer. Not the key to world peace. A freaking cosmetic.”
Lexi sniffs. “One that women all over the world are going to pay a lot of money for. Good thing Bo promised me a lifetime supply.”
I resist rolling my eyes, but just barely. “But not one that’s more important than calling back his sister, who he hasn’t talked to in forever. And I know I don’t have to remind you what’s happening tomorrow. I swear to God, if he ditches Dad’s homecoming for a tube of face paint—”
She stops me with a manicured hand in the air. “Calm down. He’s going to call you back.”
“How do you know? When did you last talk to him?”
A frown tries to push up her forehead—a frown aimed at me, and not our errant brother. “Not for a few days, but Cal has. He told me Bo knows about tomorrow.”
“Good.” Though I may have been willing to back off—temporarily, at least—on the subject of Jeffrey Levine and his allegations, I bite down now. Dad’s homecoming is a party I don’t plan to host all by myself. “Because Dad’s supposed to arrive at noon.”
Her next words come at the tail end of a sigh. “So I hear.”
“Lexi.” My tone is weighed down with enough warning to sink a ship. “Don’t even think about bailing.”
She shoves away her empty plate with an elbow, opening her mouth for a response when she’s distracted by Jake charging by, a sheet of paper half crumpled in a fist. Something about the way he comes around the bar, mouth set, shoulders determined, eyes not so much as glancing our way, silences her before the first syllable. She clamps her mouth shut and follows him across the room with her gaze.
I, however, have had enough of my sister’s distraction maneuvers. “Just so we’re clear, Lex, tomorrow is nonnegotiable.”
But I’m talking to her back. Lexi is twisted around on her stool, watching Jake approach a woman with a droopy stack of flyers fanning over her arm like an accordion. The Light of Deliverance frump, judging from her outfit: a turtleneck sweater and pleated skirt that would give even Heidi Klum a fat ass.
The woman doesn’t resist when he clamps a palm around her biceps and pulls her aside, parking her next to the cigarette machine by the bathroom hallway. She doesn’t speak, either, mostly because Jake doesn’t give her a chance. Not with his expression, which practically dares her to try. Not with his body language, which puffs his chest and makes him stand a few inches taller in his boots. And not with his scolding—for Jake is surely giving her a scolding—which continues unbroken for a good sixty seconds.
“Who’s he talking to?” I say. “I feel like I should know her.”
“You should. That’s Tanya Crawford, formerly McNeal.”
It takes me a minute to connect the long-forgotten dots. “The same Tanya McNeal who got suspended for selling hand jobs in the school parking lot?”
“That’s her. Married one of those loony Pentecostals a few years ago, so I suppose it was inevitable she’d follow him over the hot coals.”
Whatever Jake’s message, Tanya doesn’t like it. She scrunches her mouth and pushes past him without a word, barely pausing to snatch her coat from a hook on her way out the door.
Lexi returns to her wine, draining her glass and then reaching for mine.
“What do you think that was all about?” I say.
“Not about snake handling, that’s for damn sure.”
The back of my neck tingles at her ominous words, at whatever’s written on Tanya’s paper, now stuffed into the back pocket of Jake’s jeans. And the undeniable hunch the episode has something to do with our father.
I steal another glance at Jake, but now he’s swapping greetings with a man in head-to-toe Harley-Davidson gear, and I’d be hard-pressed to find any indication of his former aggravation without a blood pressure cuff. He slaps the biker on the back, sweeps up two empty plates from the table to his right and heads back to the bar as if nothing happened, as if he didn’t just tell Tanya McNeal she was no longer welcome.
“Jakey.” Lexi’s voice is high and honey sweet, stopping him before he can slip into the kitchen. “Did you or did you not just toss that woman out of your restaurant?”
“Absolutely not.” He shifts the plates onto a forearm, not quite meeting Lexi’s eyes. Mine, either. “The choice to leave was hers entirely.”
Lexi and I share a look, and then she reaches a hand, palm to the sky, across the bar. “All right. Hand it over.”
He pauses a beat too long. “Hand what over?”
“Jake Foster, don’t you play coy with me. Either give me that paper in your back pocket or I’ll go over there and get a copy from Andy Jamison. Your call.”
A faint furrow dips between his brows, but Jake slides the paper from his pocket with his free hand. He goes to pass it to her, then reconsiders. He pulls back his hand, and the wadded-up paper, just out of her reach. “Maybe you should wait till you get home to read it.”
Lexi molds her lips into one of her beauty-pageant smiles. “Sweetheart, I wasn’t born yesterday. By the way your eyes get all pointy just looking at me, I already have a good idea what this is about. But don’t you worry. If that paper has something to do with that man, then it has nothing to do with me.” She holds up her palm. “Now give it.”
“What man?” I ask Lexi. “You have nothing to do with what man?”
Lexi doesn’t answer, doesn’t take her eyes off Jake, and he drops the wad into her hand. She uncrumples the paper, flattening it onto the bar with both palms. Her red-dipped fingertips swipe along the first three words: Guilty as Sin.
She thrusts the paper away like it’s garbage.
“That hardly seems very Christian,” I say.
“That’s exactly what I told Tanya.” Jake slides the dishes with a loud clatter onto the bar, his gaze hardwired to my sister.
Lexi ignores both of us. She reaches into her purse for a tube and a silver compact and sets about applying a fresh coat of pink gloss.
I slide the page closer with the tip of a finger and read further. My stomach twists at the image of my father, looking almost dashing in his trial suit, like he’s on his way to the Barter Theatre rather than playing center stage in his own nightmare. But I can see why Tanya chose to feature this shot of him. His mouth is set in a crooked grin, his expression confident and cocky, as if daring the jury to find him guilty, which of course they did.
And now, according to the flyer, Tanya McNeal and her Pentecostal cronies plan to gather tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp on the street in front of the house. They will be armed with posters and banners and righteous indignation. And I predict they will be louder than a monster truck jam.
“Awesome.” I throw up my hands. “Just awesome.”
Jake tucks the flyer out of sight under a stack of menus, picks up the dirty plates and disappears into the kitchen. Later, I will thank him for not tolerating Tanya’s propaganda in his restaurant, but for now, I’m too busy making plans. My training has kicked in, and I’m making plans.
Because if ever there was a disaster, then surely this is it.
I twist on my bar stool to face Lexi. “Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll call Cal. I don’t think we can stop them from protesting, but maybe we can come up with a technicality. A noise ordinance or loitering violation or something like that. And as soon as I get home, I’ll look up the name for our contact at the police department. Maybe you can work some of your magic on him, get him to help us out somehow.”
Lexi snaps the compact shut and glances over at me. “Why me?”
“Because he’s a man, and you’re Sexy Lexi.”
“So?”
“So this is crisis mode. We are in crisis mode. A bunch of angry Bible beaters are about to take up residence on our driveway.”
Her gaze fishes over my shoulder to the dining room behind me, and I know what she’s doing: damage control. Mentally counting the number of tables Tanya managed to reach with her call to arms, checking expressions for pity or displeasure or hostility, taking a moral temperature of the room. And I can tell by the way she’s folding her napkin, smoothing it over and over until it’s a fat but small square, that the damage has already been done.
“That Cal has somehow guilted you into helping is your business,” she says, her gaze returning to mine, her eyes narrower, sharper, “but I don’t want any part of it. I never gave either of you any indication I’d help. In fact, I think I’ve made it pretty clear to everyone involved I washed my hands of that man long ago. I don’t plan on getting them dirty again.”
“Our father is coming home to die. To die, Lexi, and from what I understand, a pretty painful death.”
“Oh, stop acting like such a goddamn martyr. Because I can assure you nobody in this town is going to feel a lick of sympathy for the murderer’s daughter.”
“Which is exactly what you are.”
Lexi bristles like a cornered porcupine. “Not anymore, I’m not. The very second that man wrapped saran wrap around Ella Mae’s mouth and nose until she suffocated, I stopped being his daughter, and he gave up any rights to call himself my father. And if there’s any justice in the world, they’ll call me when it comes time to pull the plug.”
Her words zap me like a Taser, temporarily paralyzing my heart, my lungs, my conviction Lexi would do the right thing. No matter what Ray Andrews did or didn’t do, he’ll always be her father.
“You can’t possibly mean that,” I say.
Lexi holds my gaze with unperturbed eyes.
