Behind her massive desk hung a portrait of Rory, smiling like he owned the Gulf Coast—which he did. Under the portrait was a silver tray with bottles of Jack Daniels and Cutty Sark and a set of crystal glasses. Next to the tray was Rory’s most prized possession, the football from Ole Miss’s 1969 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas, autographed by Coach Johnny Vaught and Archie Manning.
The three of us had met for the first time at the University of Mississippi. Rory had been a first-year law student. Dare and I were freshmen.
I was the first in my family to attended college, hailing from the Mississippi Delta town of Belzoni, the “Catfish Capital of the World.” I would have gone to Mississippi Delta Junior College in nearby Moorhead or Delta State University like my classmates who didn’t immediately enlist in the military or work on their parents’ farm out of high school, but Ole Miss had offered me an academic scholarship. My parents drove me to Oxford in the family station wagon and told me they would return to pick me up at Thanksgiving break.
Dare had graduated from St. Agnes Academy, a private Roman Catholic, all-girls high school in Memphis, the same school that Priscilla Presley attended while Elvis Presley courted her. Dare’s father was a corporate attorney for Holiday Inn and a running back on Johnny Vaught’s undefeated 1962 football team, and her mother was a former Ole Miss homecoming queen.
We met at a Pi Kappa Alpha pledge swap. Somehow I had ended up the pledge class president of the fraternity. Dare held the same position with the Chi Omegas. We launched the pledge toga party and ducked out to drink beer at the Gin, one of the few bars in Oxford that kept its kitchen open past nine o’clock on Monday nights. Over burgers and fried mushrooms, we talked for hours about William Faulkner, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and how we were going to change the South.
We stayed until closing time, and Dare drove me back to the dorm in her convertible Spyder. We didn’t kiss. No, we hugged, knowing that we would always have each other’s backs.
Rory came on the scene later. For some odd reason, he was jealous of me, but Dare refused to end our friendship. I served as an usher in their wedding in Pensacola in 1991. I found that I liked the town and made a pledge to myself that I would find a way to relocate to a coastal town.
The opportunity came three years after I had written an exposé for the Commercial Appeal on how Ole Miss boosters were taking football recruits to strip clubs in Memphis. Head football coach Billy Brewer lost his job and athletic director Warner Alford resigned. The football program was put on probation for four years and lost twenty-five scholarships. Ole Miss fans called me a “traitor.” Advertisers pressured the paper’s publisher and editor to terminate my employment. I was reassigned to cover the court beat and promptly turned in my resignation.
I moved to Pensacola, rented a cinderblock house on Pensacola Beach, and wrote for several local papers along the Gulf Coast for the next seven years until I got fed up with the revolving door of editors, layoffs, and unpaid leaves. I cashed in my 401(k), convinced a couple of investors to take the chance on a 33-year-old, and started the Pensacola Insider in 2002.
Dare was the only one in Pensacola who had known Mari, my fiancée. She had helped me deal with Mari’s death and got me through graduation. These days, I didn’t mention Rory, and she never brought up Mari.
As I walked into her office, Dare looked up from her desk as if she had been waiting for me to appear. I leaned over to place a kiss on her cheek, but she pulled away. She wasn’t ready to completely forgive me for setting the Hines trial in motion. We had barely spoken since Bo’s arrest. I sat in a leather chair by the bookcase, thinking that maybe a swallow of the Cutty Sark would relieve my headache.
Dressed in a black Armani suit with a white blouse and pearls, Dare’s blonde hair, flawless, luminous skin, and brilliant blue eyes captivated me as they did everyone who met her. Her speech had only a hint of a Southern accent, which became more pronounced when she was tired. I had missed hearing that accent.
She sat quietly as I relayed what Harden had told me. When I finished, Dare turned her chair away from me and stared out the window at sailboats in the bay. I sat and waited.
When she turned back to face me, Dare wiped her cheeks with the back of her right hand, held back her head, and shook off the remaining tears. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, didn’t need it.
“Do you think it was an accidental overdose?” she asked, twisting her strand of pearls.
I shrugged. “It’s possible, and maybe the medical examiner will even say that happened. I don’t know.”
“She was the old Sue when we were at Jackson’s on Monday. We didn’t talk about you, but she believed Bo would be acquitted.”
The girls frequently met at Jackson’s, the town’s only five-star restaurant that had long windows opening out onto Ferdinand Plaza. Jackson’s was where you went if you could afford it and didn’t mind being seen.
“So do you and much of this town,” I said.
“No, no, no, that’s not my point,” said Dare. “I’m talking about someone who was like a big sister to me. Sue had no
