Devils & Rye (Top Shelf Book 4)

by Alta Hensley

  “I’m proud. Your father died for his cause, and now I get to tumble down after him.”

  I had finally learned all about my father after my mother was arrested. Not from my momma, but by the television. The media had informed me that my father—who I was simply told was ‘gone’—had died in a blaze of police gunfire when he refused to surrender after trying to blow up a nuclear power plant. He was a leader of a terrorist group. He had died that day, leaving behind a grieving widow and a three-month-old baby. I can still remember the news anchor who stared into the camera while video of my father played behind his profile. The anchorman’s gray hair, perfect suit and blue-striped tie, his firm, emotionless expression as he spoke into the camera were still so clear in my memory. Did he know that behind his head on the television screen was a gruesome image playing of a man losing his life as he was gunned down? A man who was my father? Did the news anchor have any idea there was a young woman watching her father—who she knew nothing about—for the first time while he died on old video footage? I often wonder if that news anchor had any idea a piece of me died that day. I had to meet my father, watch them describe my mother as the devil, and come to terms with the fact that I was nothing but an orphan with a dark and twisted family tree. I was a fool. Fooled by my past.

  “When?” I asked, swallowing the lump in the back of my throat. “When do you die?”

  “They said two o’clock tomorrow.”

  Two o’clock.

  Two o’clock and my mother would be dead.

  How odd it must be to know the exact time you are going to die.

  Was she afraid? I would be afraid.

  The first hot tear fell from my eyes. “So this is it? The last time I get to talk to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Momma…” The rest of the tears followed as I slipped into a deep hole. At that moment, I wanted to be a little girl with her mother’s soothing arms around her, comforting her, telling her it was all going to be okay. But nothing was going to be okay. Nothing at all.

  “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise me you’ll find your Jack, and you will climb that hill. You deserve happiness and love. You deserve so much more than I was able to give you.” She cleared her throat. “I have to go now.”

  Panic attacked. “Wait! Now?” Oh God! Was this the last time I would ever hear my mother’s voice? Would these be our last words? “Is there anything we can do? Can we hold it off a little bit longer? Maybe hire another lawyer? Get a new judge? Anything? There has to be something!” I felt as if I was hanging on a cliff by my fingertips and the weight of my body was just too much. I was about to fall into the abyss.

  “No. The time has finally come. Just know that though you may not have agreed with my cause or what I did, I at least stayed true to myself. True to what your father and I believed in. All I ask is you stay true to yourself, Demi.”

  “Momma…”

  “Goodbye.”

  With a short metallic click, the phone went dead, and Jill came tumbling after.

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