The Buck Stops Here

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Fifteen

  “James was the result of a one-night stand,” Tilly said, “but it wasn’t like it sounds.”

  We were sitting at the picnic table, the river bubbling in front of us, our conversation going much better than I ever could have expected. My fervent prayers must have been answered, because Tilly had warmed up to me almost from the moment I shook her hand. I had a feeling she kept so much of her son’s story to herself that it was a relief to talk about it with someone, even if that someone was the wife of her son’s victim.

  “I had had a crush on Jimmy Shepherd for two years, ever since we were assigned as lab partners in the tenth grade,” she continued. “All my friends thought he was a nerd, but I knew how smart he was. None of my family ever went to college, you see, but Jimmy was gonna go to some Ivy League school and find a cure for cancer or something. I used to dream about being an Ivy League wife.”

  As I listened to her tale, I couldn’t help compare her present situation with how her life might have turned out had her wishes come true.

  “It’s an old story, but graduation night we ended up next to each other at the bonfire. Jimmy hadn’t ever been with a girl, see, and I thought maybe if I was his first, he would fall in love with me. We did it in his daddy’s car, parked not too far from here. Three months later, I realized I was pregnant and he was off to college without a word.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Jimmy wouldn’t return my calls, so I went to see his daddy. He gave me a check for five thousand dollars and told me never to contact his family again.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “Yeah, I did,” she said. “I figured it was the most I was gonna get. I think he expected me to use some of the money for an abortion or something, but I would never do that. I named the baby James, after his daddy. I’m sure that didn’t go over too well at the Shepherds’ house.”

  She rolled her eyes wryly, and I was struck with the sudden, surprising notion that I actually liked this woman.

  “You raised James yourself?”

  “I sure did,” she said proudly, “with a lot of help from my mama. I got a job nights tending bar so I could be home with James during the day. ’Course, that didn’t leave much time for sleep, but I was young, what did I know? When he started first grade, I switched to being a waitress at a coffeehouse. That way I could get up early and work all day and get home right when he got off the school bus. Nowadays, of course, I work over at the restaurant, doing all different shifts, whatever they need. Ain’t nobody home waitin’ for me anyway.”

  “It must be hard keeping the fact that James is in prison a secret.”

  Her face turned red.

  “It’s nobody’s business.”

  “I can see not wanting to tell your coworkers, but what about your closest friends?”

  She shook her head no.

  “How about your church, Tilly? Do you have a church?”

  “I go once in a while over to the Church of the Way. The pastor knows, but nobody else.”

  “You know, people might not be as shocked as you think. It’s the duty of the church body to love you through something like this. To step in and help you when you’re all alone.”

  “I’m pretty self-sufficient,” she said. “Always have been.”

  I nodded, knowing I could see a lot of me in her. I, too, struggled with the burden and blessing of being self-sufficient. For now, I needed to steer the conversation back to the past.

  “That must’ve been a hard life,” I said. “As a single mom.”

  “James was a good boy,” she replied, shrugging, “smart as a whip, just like his daddy. James taught himself to read when he was only three, so soon as I realized he had some brains, I planted some big seeds in his head. Told him he could use his mind to take him places I had only dreamed of going. Maybe I made him dream a little too much.”

  She looked out at the water, and I could see pain in the lines on her face.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, reaching for a leaf that had dropped from the overhanging limb onto the table.

  “I built him up, made him expect too much. Told him he was smart enough to become anything he wanted. That made him impatient. Nothing ever happened fast enough for James. He graduated high school two years early, got through college in just three—and that was with a double major.”

  I asked where he went to college, and she said MIT—not Georgia State, as he had lied about in his deposition.

  “There were some lean years in there, you know, and I think he was really just in a hurry to make some money. For a long time, he said, ‘Mama, I’m gonna be a millionaire by the time I’m twenty-five.’” She shook her head sadly. “I never knew how much he hated growing up so poor until the FBI arrested him the first time and what he done all came out.”

  I tried not to let a sudden burst of emotion show on my face.

  “Wait, back up,” I said, my voice calm, my fingers breaking the leaf into pieces and letting them fly away in the breeze. “When they arrested him the first time? What had he done, exactly?”

  She glanced at me sharply.

  “You don’t know ’bout all that?” she asked, and I had a feeling she was sorry she had brought it up.

  “I don’t know the details,” I hedged.

  “Well,” she said, exhaling slowly, “he was working down in New Orleans at a start-up company that had something to do with computers. He created a secret code or something; I never could quite understand it. But the folks he worked with were all supersmart, just like him. Together they made something really important—some kind of computer thing that was gonna change the world.”

  I swallowed hard, knowing that Tom must have been one of the “folks” he worked with.

  “Everything seemed to be going right for James. He got married, she got pregnant, they had twins.”

  At this she choked up, and I was glad for the distraction. My heart pounded. The twins she spoke of were Tom’s nieces, his sister’s children, the flesh and blood that connected him forever to the man who killed my husband. How could Tom have spoken to me so many times about the twins, all the while knowing they were the daughters of my husband’s killer?

  Tilly took a tissue from her pocket and tended to her tears.

  “Those kids were my heart,” she whispered. “I miss them so bad.”

  I looked at her.

  “Don’t you see them?”

  “No,” she said, folding the tissue in her hands. “Not since the divorce. When Beth broke things off with James, she broke off with me too.”

  “That’s not right,” I said.

  “That’s how it is, though,” she replied.

  “So James doesn’t have a relationship with his own children?”

  “Not hardly,” she laughed bitterly. “Pretty soon after the divorce was final, he got arrested by the FBI.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For ‘violating U.S. export restrictions,’ they said. The FBI accused James and his friends of selling their secret code to a restricted country—Iraq, Iran—one of them places. I didn’t believe it till he told me himself that it was true. He got convicted and sentenced to five years. A traitor to his country.”

  “What about his friends?” I asked. “His coworkers.”

  “Well, they was all investigated, of course, but James had done it by himself. Got paid five million dollars and had to give it all up. He says now that was one million for every year of his sentence.”

  I tried to comprehend all that she was telling me, each answer giving rise to new questions.

  “What happened then?” I asked. “Did he have to serve all five years?”

  She looked at me, her face growing suddenly hard.

  “You know what happened then,” she said.

  I shook my head, wishing I could take notes, wishing I could put a timeline down on paper to keep all of these facts straight. But I didn’t want to spook her, so I worked hard to keep it all straight in my m
ind.

  “He had the boating accident,” she said simply.

  “After he got out of prison?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He was in prison, supposedly, up at Keeplerville. I went to see him once a month for three years. Things were always the same. He was doing okay, he was hanging tough, he was counting the days till he would get out and he could start over again. He wanted a fresh chance.”

  “So where did the accident come in?” I asked. There were now three different prisons involved—Virginia State Penitentiary, where I thought he had been incarcerated following Bryan’s death; Berwick Federal Correctional Institution in Berwick, Georgia, where he actually had been incarcerated following Bryan’s death; and now Keeplerville Federal Prison, where he had been incarcerated before Bryan’s death! It made no sense.

  “Where did the accident come in? I don’t know!” she exclaimed, though her sudden anger wasn’t necessarily directed at me. “I haven’t understood a thing since, I’ll tell you that, and he won’t talk about any of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I don’t know what he was doin’ in Virginia, I don’t know why he was driving a big fancy boat, I don’t know how he ended up killing your husband. Here I thought he was locked up in prison, and the next thing I know I see his face on the news. They said he killed a man while drunk and driving a boat. I thought they made a mistake, put the wrong guy’s picture with another man’s story. Then I found out it was true. I ’bout had a heart attack.”

  I put my hands on my knees, my head spinning.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Try being me,” she said, making fists with her hands. “I think my boy’s in prison, and then I find out he’s been in a horrible accident and killed somebody. He won’t tell me what’s going on, and every single thing I read in the papers is a lie. They got his whole life wrong. Wrong college, wrong job, not a word about the FBI or the prison sentence.”

  “And the DUIs in his record?”

  “No such thing. James don’t even drink!”

  “Did he ever live or work in Atlanta?”

  “No way. It was all lies.”

  Something caught my attention, from the corner of my eye. I looked up to see a blue sedan driving slowly past. My hair stood up along the back of my neck.

  “What is it?” Tilly asked, turning to look.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just thought I recognized someone.”

  The car turned the corner and drove away. Before I could react further, she spoke again.

  “When I saw all these lies in the newspaper about my son, I wanted to clear them up. But then James said, ‘Quiet, Mama. If you love me, you’ll just let it be.’ I wasn’t gonna shut up, no how, but then they gave him sixteen more years—sixteen years!—and all I could think was, please God let him be close enough to me that I could go and see him once in a while. I think they put him in over at Berwick just to keep me quiet. Now I go once a week and try not to think about the fact that he might not be free for years.”

  Tilly’s tears were flowing freely at this point, and I couldn’t help but be moved. The woman and I were on opposite sides of the same tragic incident, one horrifying day that changed many lives—and ended one.

  We sat in silence for a while, the river’s gurgle unable to calm my raw nerves. Coming here had answered some questions, but it had created many more. I wondered if I would ever make it to the bottom of this confusing labyrinth of secrecy. More than that, I wondered if I would be the same person now that I had heard the other side of the story.

  “Why did you come here?” she asked finally, her words echoing those of her son earlier. I didn’t know what to tell her, didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t want to lie, but I also couldn’t speak the truth.

  “Like you,” I said, “I have questions about that time. I thought maybe you could help me get some answers.”

  She was about to reply when my cell phone rang. I saw that it was the prison, so I asked Tilly to excuse me as I answered.

  The call was collect from James Sparks, so I accepted the charges.

  “Yes?” I tried to keep my voice steady and my expression blank even as my heart was pounding wildly in my chest.

  “Can you come back and see me tomorrow?” he asked. “I’m ready to answer your questions.”

  Sixteen

  I didn’t tell Tilly it was her son on the phone. I simply agreed to come, set the time for noon, disconnected the call, and then wrapped up my conversation with her. Between seeing the blue sedan and hearing from James, I was feeling thoroughly rattled and eager to be on my way.

  In the end, my encounter with Tilly left me feeling sad, confused, and yet in some way a little bit healed. I think it was the same for her. As we said goodbye, for some reason we hugged, and the hug was spontaneous and genuine.

  After I left there, I stopped off at a home improvement store, bought a $1000 gift certificate, and delivered it to the pastor at the Church of the Way. I told him it was to be an anonymous gift to Tilly Sparks, and that my hope was that a group of parishioners might band together, use the money for supplies, and donate the labor to fix up Tilly’s house. The man seemed astounded and grateful. Apparently, Tilly’s situation weighed heavily on his heart, but until now he hadn’t really been able to think of a way to reach her.

  After that I drove across town and got a room at the same motel I had stopped in earlier. I brought in everything I might need for the night from my car, and then I double-locked the motel room door and slid the table up against it as an extra safety measure. As I did, I kept trying to figure out how the blue sedan could have possibly caught up with me here in Albany. Was it just a coincidence that the same color and model of car had driven slowly past us today? If not, then obviously whoever that driver was, he wasn’t working alone but as some sort of tag team. If so, though, who were the other members of that team? I had been on the lookout constantly, and I had never spotted any other vehicle doing anything even remotely suspicious.

  For now, I would have to table that question. It looked as though all that was left for me to do was to pass the time until noon tomorrow when I would get to see James Sparks again and learn the truths that had thus far been hidden from me.

  I watched television for a while, flipping channels with the remote, but I clicked it off when I couldn’t stand the noise anymore. I wondered absently how my dog was faring without me and how angry Harriet might be that I hadn’t yet checked in with her. It struck me that there wasn’t a soul on earth who knew where I was right now, with the possible exception of whoever was tailing me in the blue sedan. And though I kept going to the shaded window and peeking outside, I didn’t see any signs of anyone observing me.

  I sat back on the bed and stared at the phone, wanting to call Tom, thinking about calling my mom, knowing I ought to call Harriet. I did nothing but sit there and stare. Finally, a surge of pure loneliness pierced my heart, and before I knew it, I had doubled over from the pain.

  It hurt so bad! I clutched my pillow and closed my eyes, tears suddenly flowing down my cheeks. Up until today I had held out hope for my relationship with Tom—despite the fact that he had abandoned me in Florida, despite the fact that he had something to do with the death of my husband. At this point, none of that mattered. His sister had been James Sparks’ wife. His nieces were James Sparks’ children!

  I sobbed, rocking back and forth, deep, heaving sobs that left me breathless and gasping. I wasn’t crying for Bryan, really—that wound had been healing for a while. I was crying for Tom, for all the dreams I had allowed myself to have about our future. I was crying for myself, that I could have been so utterly and completely deceived.

  Bryan had been a good man, a good husband, but everything he was had died that day in that river. Truly, a big part of me had died as well. At that time, I knew one thing for certain; I would never love anyone that way again.

  But then, eventually
, there was Tom. Our relationship had grown slowly and steadily, for a long time in friendship and then, much later, in love. I thought it was love.

  I didn’t know it was a complete and utter lie.

  Still crying, I leaned over onto the bed and held my pillow tightly to my chest, curling into a fetal position. As I had cried over Bryan’s death so many times, I now cried over the death of my relationship with Tom. In my mind, the two men’s faces blurred together, two men, both gone from me in their own way. I fell asleep, finally, the bedside lamp still on, my eyes swollen shut from crying.

  I slept for nearly eight hours, waking a little before 4:00 A.M.

  I sat up in the bed, my head pounding, my nose completely stopped up. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, I climbed under the spray of a hot shower, the water soothing away the tension in my neck.

  I hadn’t cried like that since last fall, I realized. Surely, there would come a day when there were no more tears left, when my memories brought me only a dull sadness.

  Right now, the pain was as sharp as glass. Saddest of all was the realization that the entire focus of this investigation had now shifted—and something in my heart had frozen into solid ice. This was no longer about learning the truths so I could move forward in my relationship with Tom.

  Tom had betrayed me.

  No, now this investigation had one single purpose: to learn the truth about Bryan’s death, for Bryan’s sake. If I did one thing with what I was about to learn, I would make sure that every single person involved in the death of my husband received full justice for the life they had taken away.

  Seventeen

  Clipping the tags from the last of my new clothes, I got dressed and went out into the predawn darkness in search of breakfast. A new boldness had taken hold of me, and I almost welcomed an encounter with the blue sedan, but it was nowhere in sight.

  I found a nearby coffee shop that was open 24 hours, so I bought a newspaper and took a seat by the window and ordered my usual breakfast of poached eggs, whole wheat toast, and hot tea. On second thought, I had the waitress bring me a plate of blueberry waffles and coffee instead. Somehow, today I just couldn’t face the routine.