Jane was different. She wasn’t abducted. Her murder was spur-of-the-moment. She was strangled, then thrown from the roof so that her death would look like a suicide.”
“Henry?”
“I wasn’t sure until I saw that check. What I said was the absolute truth. It bothered Evelyn that Ulster had a high-priced lawyer. Frankly, it bothered me. Ulster was never interested in material things. He wanted control, and I guess making Hank mail him that check at the jail exerted some control.”
“Henry’s going to skate on the envelope. You know the check isn’t enough.”
“Henry’s DNA is going to match evidence from Jane Delray’s case. I called the gal who’s in charge of archival evidence the minute I heard your father was out. It’s a miracle the chain of custody was still intact, or we’d never be able to use it.”
“What’s the evidence?”
“It’s what I said in there. Jane scratched her attacker. It’s going to match Henry’s DNA from the envelope.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Aren’t you?”
Will had seen his uncle’s face. He was sure.
“What about Kitty?”
“I can only give an educated guess. Ulster got her off heroin. Hank kept her to leverage money out of Treadwell.” She nodded back toward the house. “Not a bad plan, as you can see.”
Will looked at the house.
Amanda asked, “Is there anything else you want to know?”
There was a lifetime of questions. “Why are you making me pull teeth?”
“Because this is difficult for me, too, Will.”
He hadn’t considered that. For all her bluster, Will knew that Amanda was close to this. Her first case. Her first homicide. She tried to act like it was nothing, but the fact that they were both sitting here right now belied that assertion.
Eventually, she said, “Hank always hated women. I imagine he hated Lucy for her independence. Her free spirit. That she made choices for herself. She was going to school. Living in Atlanta. Hank thought women should stay in their place. Most men did back then. Not all of them, but—” She shrugged her shoulder again. “All you need to know is that your mother was a good person. She was smart and independent, and she loved you.”
A cable truck drove down the street. Will could hear the hum of the wheels on the road. He wondered what it felt like to live in a mansion, to watch the rest of the world pass you by.
Amanda said, “Everyone I interviewed at the school loved her.”
Will shook his head. He’d heard enough.
“She was funny and kind. She was very popular. All of her professors were devastated when they heard what happened. She had great promise.”
He tried to swallow the glass in his throat.
“I was there when she died.” Amanda paused again. “Her last words were for you, Will. She said that she loved you. She wouldn’t let go until she was certain we heard her, until she knew that we understood that with every breath in her body, she loved you.”
Will pressed his fingers into his eyes. He wasn’t going to cry in front of her. There would be no going back from that.
“She hid you in the trashcan to save you from your father.” Amanda paused. “Evelyn was there. We found you together. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life. Not before or since.”
Will swallowed again. He had to clear his throat to speak. “Edna Flannigan. You knew her.”
“A lot of my cases took me to the children’s home.” Amanda adjusted the strap on her sling. “No one told me she’d passed away. When I found out—” She looked Will straight in the eye. “Trust me, her replacement was duly punished for his actions.”
Will couldn’t help but take some pleasure in the thought of Amanda annihilating the man who’d kicked him out into the street. “What was in the basement? What were you looking for?”
She stared back at the lawn, letting out a long sigh. “I wonder if we’ll ever know.”
Will remembered the scratches in the coal chute. He’d assumed they had been made by an animal, but now he knew it was probably one of Amanda’s old broads. “Someone went back there while we were at the hospital.”
“Really?” Amanda pretended to be surprised.
Will tried to let her know he wasn’t a complete idiot. There was no way a slide had been in police custody for thirty-seven years. “Archival evidence.”
“Archival evidence?” She had an infuriating smile on her lips, and he knew she was back in full dissembling mode before she even opened her mouth. “Never heard of it.”
“Cindy Murray,” he continued. Will’s caseworker, the woman who’d helped him get off the streets and into college.
“Murray?” Amanda drew out the name, finally shaking her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Captain Scott at the jail—”
She chuckled. “Remind me to tell you stories about the old jail sometime. It was awful before Holly cleaned it up.”
“Rachel Foster.” Amanda still called on the federal judge to sign off on her warrants. “I know you’re friends with her.”
“Rachel and I came up together. She worked dispatch, the night shift, so she could go to law school during the day.”
“She expunged my record when I graduated from college.”
Amanda would only say, “Rachel’s a good gal.”
Will couldn’t help himself. He had to find at least one crack. “I’ve never known you to go on another GBI recruiting trip. Not once in fifteen years. Just the one where you got me to sign up.”
“Well.” She adjusted the sling again. “No one really enjoys those trips. You talk to fifty people and half of them are illiterate.” She smiled at him. “Not that that’s a bad thing.”
“Did I get it from him?” He couldn’t look at her. Amanda knew about his dyslexia. “My problem?”
“No.” She spoke with certainty. “You saw his Bible. He was constantly reading.”
“That girl—Suzanna Ford. She saw—”
“She saw a tall man. That’s all. You’re nothing like him, Will. I knew James Ulster. I talked to him. I looked him in the eye. There’s not a drop of your father inside of you. It’s all Lucy. Everything about you comes straight from your mother. You have to believe me on that, at least. I wouldn’t waste my time on you otherwise.”
Will clasped his hands in front of him. The grass was lush beneath his feet. His mother would be fifty-six years old now. Maybe she would’ve been an academic. Her textbooks were well read. Words were underlined. Asterisks were scribbled in the margins. She might have been an engineer or mathematician or a feminist scholar.
He had spent so many hours with Angie talking about the what-ifs. What if Lucy had lived? What if Angie’s mom hadn’t taken that overdose? What if they hadn’t grown up in the home? What if they’d never met each other?
But his mother had died. So had Angie’s, though it’d taken longer. They’d both grown up in the home. They’d been connected to each other for nearly three decades. Their anger was like a magnet between them. Sometimes it pulled them together. Most times it pushed them apart.
Will had seen what it took to hold on to resentment that long. He read it in Kitty Treadwell’s emaciated body. He saw it in the arrogant tilt of his uncle Henry’s chin. And sometimes, when she didn’t think anyone was looking, he saw it flash in Amanda’s eyes.
Will couldn’t live like that. He couldn’t let the first eighteen years of his life ruin the next sixty.
He reached into his pocket. The metal of the wedding ring was cold against his fingers. He held it out to Amanda. “I want you to take this.”
“Well.” She pretended to be embarrassed as she took the ring. “This is rather sudden. Our age difference is
