The next shot is a wedding picture. Joey and Caroline – young, happy, blissfully unaware. I have packed those pictures away, the portrait that hung in the upstairs hallway, the eight-by-ten that used to be displayed in the living room, the three-by-five on my desk. Whatever you say about my son, he is breathtakingly handsome in a tux.
I think how innocent they all look in their pictures. How anything could happen to them, and often does.
‘Why are you crying, Mrs Miller?’
I use a knuckle to wipe a tear from my cheek. When I go home today, I’m going to take those pictures out of the box in the attic and put them back up again.
Woods puts two more pictures on the table, snapping the edges and pushing them close. The first shows a man on his back and a dark stain that runs like syrup from beneath his body to the edge of a refrigerator. The toe of the man’s right foot points south, resting a few inches from a storm door. The bottom glass is fractured where the bullet went through.
The second picture is a close-up, skillful or lucky. You can see the destruction of the man’s left eye, now a dark, blood-crusted hole.
‘Do you recognize this man, Mrs Miller?’
‘No.’
‘This is Burton Stafford. Shot two times through the head. Once from a distance, once close range. He was in the kitchen, making a sandwich.’ Woods reminds me of Jimmy Mahan, snorting fire and brimstone from the pulpit. He stabs the close-up with his finger. ‘Mrs Stafford was in bed at the end of the hallway when this happened, Mrs Miller. Just a few feet away. She heard the shots. She heard her husband cry out. She heard him fall. She knew there was an intruder in Caroline’s house, because her husband told her about it while he called the police.
‘Think about that. Mary Stafford spends her days in a wheelchair. She can’t get out of bed by herself. So she has to lie there. Afraid. Not knowing if her husband is dead or alive. She can’t go to help him. She doesn’t know if the killer is in the house, if he’s coming for her too. And she can’t run away. All she can do is hide under the blankets, and wait.’
Woods is good. He looks at me with such intensity that I feel guilty, as if all of this is my fault. I want to be forgiven. I want to make it stop. If he offered me absolution and understanding I would say whatever he wanted to hear.
Woods leans across the table, maintaining eye contact. ‘Anything you know. You have to help us. This man is dangerous. The longer Caroline and Andee are gone, the less our chances are of finding them alive.’ He taps Andee’s picture with a fingertip and it’s all I can do not to snatch the picture away. ‘Help us. I know you know something.’
‘I’ve told you everything I can think of that might help.’ Does he know that I’m lying? Is that why he is so intense?
Smitty scoots to the edge of his chair. ‘Agent Woods. Please either sit back down or move to the other side of the room, but stop leaning over my client.’
Woods rears back like he has been slapped. He begins again, taking me through everything – my conversation with Caroline. The death of my son. The pictures of Burton Stafford. Then he moves to the three dead evangelists. Did I know them?
Yes.
Had any recent contact with them?
No.
Question after question, like playing scales on the piano, up and down the keyboard. Woods and Jones listen carefully, waiting to hear a wrong note.
Smitty purses his lips, checks his watch yet again, and holds a hand up. ‘Let’s wrap this up. Mrs Miller has answered all of your questions and told you everything she can to help. I am now calling an end to this interview, at—’
‘One more thing.’ Agent Jones has not said a word until now, just scribbled on her notepad, listening hard, watching my every twitch. It all seems to have significance – when I cross my legs, when I close my eyes. She knows I am picking at the sleeve of my jacket before I do.
‘What?’ Smitty says.
‘I’m trying to understand.’
Of the two, I think Jones has the conscience. She will be dangerous if she thinks you are guilty, and her opinion will depend upon her instinct and maybe the cut of the cards. She will be impervious to the influence of co-workers. She thought I was guilty the night she came to my door, but she has doubts now, big ones. I wonder what the cards have shown her. It does not bother me that she uses them – in fact, I find it encouraging. It is an indication that she worries about the life and death decisions that permeate her world.
‘Look at it from our viewpoint.’ From her voice and the look in her eyes, the way she curves her body toward mine, I believe she really is trying to understand. ‘Your son is murdered by your daughter-in-law – your only child, who, from all reports, you were devoted to. And yet you take Caroline’s side during her trial? Now maybe it’s the right thing to do, and maybe it’s not. But still. He’s your son, and he’s dead, and she shot him.’
I’ve heard all this before. I have no regrets. Not after watching Caroline, pregnant and swollen with child and tears, put her head on her mother’s shoulder and sob out her grief. Not after sitting beside Caro every day, during the recesses of the trial, lending presence and support. I sat to her left, her mother to her right, and she clutched both our hands.
Outsiders never get it. They don’t want to hear any of the good things about Joey. They don’t understand how Caroline could have shot him dead in self defense, and mourned his loss the next day. But I understood. Her mother did as well. I remember the things she told Caroline because there were times when I felt she was talking to me. A boy who learns from the kind of father Joey had grows up with certain consequences, but they do not absolve him from responsibility for what he does. You will always miss the good parts of Joey and, even more, you’ll grieve for the man he could have been.
‘Mrs Miller? I asked you a question.’
‘Maybe you could ask it again.’
‘I was talking about your daughter-in-law’s trial. About afterwards, when you had your breakdown. When you were hospitalized.’
‘I was not hospitalized.’
‘Are you saying you did not suffer some kind of breakdown?’
‘Not at all. I suffered the kind of breakdown that tears you into a million little pieces. The kind of breakdown that happens when your child dies.’
Agent Jones looks ready to offer me sympathy and tea. ‘Maybe. Or maybe it was the kind of breakdown that happens when you spend months helping the woman who killed your son.’
‘Where are you going with this?’ Smitty says.
Jones shakes her head at him. ‘Don’t play dumb. I think your client is a severely conflicted woman. And I think this kind of conflict is a kind of pattern in her life.’
‘What on earth are you getting at?’ I say.
Smitty gives me a warning look.
Mavis Jones leans back in her chair. There is something like a smirk on her lips. ‘Tell me about your cousin, Marsha Dewberry.’
I’m aware that Smitty is tensing up beside me and I have the peculiar feeling that everyone in this room knows something I don’t. But I cannot imagine that even the FBI cares about the private and petty irritations between my cousin Marsha and me. Do they really want to know that my mother made me hang out with her year after year because Marsha never had many friends?
Mavis Jones flips through the file, finding what she wants suspiciously fast. ‘This is from Caroline’s diary.’ She clears her throat.
‘“Thursday, nine p.m. Never in my life could I have imagined how lonely marriage can be. I know Joey loves me. I used to think that if two people cared for each other they could work things out. Now all I know is that he and I are fighting every single day and nothing I do seems to help. Getting him just to listen or talk to me is impossible. He’s always tired. He comes home, eats dinner and watches television until he falls asleep. Those are the good days. The other ones he’s spoiling for a fight. I try to understand in terms of Joey’s childhood. Joey never gets worked up over the stuff his dad did to him, but he obses
ses over the way his father treated his mother. Then he turns around and does the same thing to me. I know Joey feels guilty about his dad’s affair with that cousin, Marsha, who has always worked for his mom. They were actually doing it on the living room couch one afternoon when he came home from school. His dad made him swear not to tell his mother, but I think she already knew. I think his mom was going to divorce him, and that’s why his father killed himself. Some kind of twisted—”’
‘That’s enough.’ Smitty does not even raise his voice. There are tears dripping down my cheeks and I realize I am on my feet. I think I was going to run out of the room, but Smitty takes my arm. My mind is like a Rolodex of memories as things begin to fall into place.
‘You people are out of your minds.’ Smitty stacks his papers. Clearly, we are done, and leaving with dignity. ‘None of this has any bearing on Caroline and Andee Miller’s kidnapping. If this kind of unprofessional nonsense is any indication of how you’re running this investigation, I have serious concerns over your ability to find my client’s granddaughter. I will be making a formal request to have both of you taken off this case. You can expect the paperwork in twenty-four hours.’
‘You can leave if you want,’ Mavis Jones says, ‘but it doesn’t change the facts. Your client is betrayed – first by her cousin and her husband. Then by Caroline.’ She looks over at me. ‘You stand beside her after she murders your son, and it breaks you. You stop the cable show, you live like a hermit. And she doesn’t exactly include you in her life, does she, this daughter-in-law you stood up for in court? Not a lot of gratitude there, that I can see. So you crack. You’ve had enough.’
Smitty’s voice is cold and hard. ‘If you’re making an accusation—’
‘How do you explain the newspaper articles about the trial arriving in Caroline’s mail on the anniversary of Joey Miller’s death? How do you explain the Lexington postmarks? How do you explain Caroline and Andee’s disappearance that very same night?’
‘What about the pictures my client got in the mail? What about the three dead evangelists? You going to tell me that’s not connected, or are you telling me she killed them too? Because you know damn well she didn’t. You know because you don’t have a motive, or a shred of physical evidence. You’ve got a missing child and her mother, and another evangelist—’ now Smitty is pointing at me ‘—in peril. Oh, and two incompetent investigators.’
‘It’s not too late,’ Mavis Jones tells me, and she is so calm that you would think Smitty and Woods weren’t glaring at each other over the conference table, close enough to mingle sweat. ‘You can stop this whole thing. Tell us who you hired to do it. Stafford is dead, but stop this now. Help us bring Andee home safe, and we can work something out. I promise.’
My knees are like jelly. ‘Who have you people been talking to? Who says these kinds of things about me?’
Mavis Jones opens her mouth, but I never do find out what it is she is going to say.
‘This interview is at an end.’ Smitty pulls me away, and I follow like a lost child. Like any good attorney, Smitty knows to shut things down when they really get interesting.
NINE
Smitty and I are silent as we ride the elevator down from the offices of the FBI – he is tense and unhappy, and I am almost too shaky to walk. He keeps a hand on my elbow, and leads me to my car. Physically, he is not the sort of man to turn a woman’s head. Roundish of figure, heavy eyebrows, brown hair, straight and very short. His eyes are a sort of muddy brown. But Smitty Madison has presence, intellect, and a can-do attitude. Born, raised and educated in Chicago, he has honed his edgy intolerance of southern mannerisms and cultural courtesies to a vague, impatient stoicism, though I’ve heard him refer to dealings with local lawyers as a ‘pokey party’. Abrasive though he might be, he is protective and attentive to women, and during the single years between his first and second marriage he was hotly pursued.
It rained while we were in the building; the pavement is dark in patches, and it’s cloudy out, and cool. Smitty looks at his watch like he wants to kill it and walks with fast, jerky steps.
‘Look, I’d like to talk about all of this, but I need to be in court at one, and I’m barely going to make it as it is.’
I grit my teeth. I understand that Smitty is busy and on the run, but it does seem to be a habit of attorneys to disappear when things get sticky. I point to my Jeep which is parallel parked on Main Street. ‘This is me. Look, I know you’re in a hurry, but I want a quick run down on what you think went on in here.’
Smitty nods, and I wait for him to tell me that all is well, in spite of the intensity of the interview, and that I have nothing to worry about. He hesitates, rubs the bridge of his nose.
‘Looked like an ambush to me.’
I brace my legs and rest a hand on the hood of my aging Jeep Cherokee, which I immediately regret because the cold metal is wet and gritty with dirt.
‘Joy, do you remember in our phone conversation yesterday, when we talked about trial defense and finances and levels one, two and three?’
I nod at him. There’s a weird buzz in the back of my head.
‘You need to know that you’re at level two.’
I bite my tongue and frown very hard. I need to pay close attention and I really don’t want to cry. My voice goes all husky and deep.
‘You really think it’s that bad?’
Level two means a thirty thousand dollar retainer. It means Smitty will do everything he can to prevent my indictment, and if that is not possible, he will orchestrate my arrest and try for bail. Any left over monies will constitute a down payment on the one to three hundred thousand I will need for him actually to represent me at trial.
I don’t have that kind of money. It would take my house and all of my retirement and even then it would be a close-run thing. But Smitty had covered that as well. ‘If something unforeseen develops,’ he had told me, ‘it’s going to come down to some kind of nutcase with a religious obsession. It will have roots in your ministry, like an occupational hazard. So you will go to the board of your ministries and get them to foot the bill. And they will. It’s the Joy Miller Ministries. And you’re Joy Miller. Everything stands on your reputation.’
Smitty puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Joy, listen to me. Caroline and Andee are mysteriously kidnapped on the anniversary of Joey’s death. Three evangelists you were in seminary with have been executed. There is one common denominator in all of this, and that common denominator is you.’
‘But—’
‘Just listen. You had, in your possession, pictures of the executions of the evangelists. Pictures that had to have come from the killer. Both the package of pictures you received in the mail and the package sent to Caroline have Lexington postmarks.’
‘But I have an alibi. There’s no way I could possibly have—’
‘They’re going on the premise that you paid to have it done.’
I take a step backward. ‘Like I hired a hit man? That’s ridiculous.’
‘That’s right, it is, but that’s where they’re heading. I need to find out if they’ve got anything else.’
‘But how bad is this, Smitty? Are they going to put me under arrest?’
Smitty takes some time to think the question over. He squints his eyes tight, which means his mind is in high gear. ‘You’re not without influence, Joy. You’re a well known religious leader, your ministry is known for its good works and contributions to the community. And hit men don’t just fall out of trees. They’re going to have to connect you up with the actual killer, or they’re not going to have a case. You don’t know any professional killers, do you, Joy?’
‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘Of course not.’
Smitty is thinking out loud. ‘If I were them, I’d be looking at people you counseled, people in your congregation. Crazies drawn in by your show. I’m surprised they didn’t ask for a handwriting sample, but they will. Look, let’s be prepared for three things. Turning over the records of your c
ounseling clients—’
‘I can’t do that. Those files are confidential.’
‘… a sample of your handwriting.’
‘They got one already. From Marsha.’
He stares. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I forgot.’
His expression tells me that this sort of thing has happened with clients before, and he still doesn’t understand it. But he recovers quickly and moves on.
‘I want you to agree to a lie detector test.’
‘No.’
He puts a hand on my shoulder, and his voice is soothing. ‘We got somebody who can coach you through it, Joy. We’ll use our people, not theirs.’
‘I don’t trust those things. I’ll be nervous and that will screw it up.’
He hesitates, gives me a second look. I recognize the lawyer-sidestep, that little dance an attorney does when he thinks the client may be guilty of something. The legal profession is almost as judgmental as mine.
‘How about we discuss this when we have more time? I’ve got to be in court.’
‘Fine.’
Smitty gives me a second look. He hears the edge in my voice, and he’s been in Kentucky long enough to know that when a southern woman says fine it’s code for fuck you.
He takes two steps backward. Gives me a little wave. ‘I’ll give you a call.’
I know I’ve given him something to think about. I didn’t mean to.
TEN
Traffic is heavy for a Wednesday, which means that as I sit daydreaming and the traffic light turns from red to green, I am pummeled with a cacophony of horns. The people behind me have places to be. I’m content right where I am. I don’t want to go home.
True tragedy can be measured by the scars of those of us who are left behind – the sleepless nights, the loneliness, the memories, good and bad. I used to think I had caught things in time. That Carl’s death, however tragic, had freed my son and me from the darkness that my husband always brought in his wake. And I think we came close, Joey and I. I was not blind to the uneasy ripples – all those years with Carl had affected us both. It wasn’t until afterward, and the things that happened with Caroline, that I understood my mistake – that standing between your child and a bad parent is never enough. That the damage had already been done.
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