by Diane Capri
“After Peter was taken, I’ve tried to help other parents like me get justice. The system favors the criminals over the victims most of the time, or so it seems to me. I guess in the end the Wards did get some justice, and maybe the Crawfords, too.”
“You can’t blame or applaud the legal system for any of that.”
Jess was always prepared to argue. “But Tommy Taylor shouldn’t have been executed when he was. He didn’t kill Mattie Crawford. That’s the real bottom line.”
“True.”
“I helped to make that happen,” Jess said. She looked at the ground, “And I’m having trouble dealing with it.”
Helen sighed. “Remember what I told you about the American creed. We can’t focus on everything that’s wrong with the world that we can’t fix, everything we failed to do right. You’d be paralyzed with indecision and do nothing worthwhile with your life. That would be a shame, Jess. A waste. The good will outweigh the bad. You have so much yet to accomplish.”
Jess jerked her head up, eyes blazing. “That’s a nice philosophy, Helen, but we killed an innocent man.”
Helen sighed again. Jess seemed world-weary and wise in most respects, but she still had much to learn. Helen put an edge into her voice, too. “Tommy Taylor wasn’t innocent. You said that yourself. The system didn’t fail him, people failed the system. People who didn’t give us a chance, who didn’t trust us to do our jobs. Ben Fleming and Arnold Ward built Tommy’s conviction into an air-tight legal box. You and I didn’t do that. And Tommy’s dead. We can’t bring him back.”
She thought about something Mac Green had said to her, too. “If you could bring Tommy Taylor back to life now, would you want to let him loose on the community again?”
Jess considered Helen’s words, perhaps unwilling to concede, but she let the point go. “So what do we do now?”
“We ask God and Tommy’s mother to forgive us. We go on. We learn from our mistakes. We do better next time.” More than words she’d been raised by, these were the words Helen lived by, the only reality she knew or wanted to know.
Silence reigned for a bit before Jess’s impatience took hold again. “What are you going to do?”
“Take care of Oliver. He’s beginning to communicate with me. The doctors say he’ll improve. So I’ll just wait to see what happens.”
Jess said, “Good. I’m glad.”
Helen nodded. “I’ll probably go back to practicing law. I miss the work, fighting the good fight every day, you know? The only way to make the system work is to have dedicated people working within the rules. I can do at least that much.”
Jess nodded this time. “No more politics? Even without the party’s endorsement, I think you’d be elected, hands down. And no one would serve Florida better in the Senate than you.”
“Maybe. I just don’t have the heart for it right now.” She noticed that Jess was about to argue with her, so she said, “I may change my mind one day.”
Jess bent to give Helen a strong hug. “Take care of yourself.”
“You, too,” Helen said, squeezing her back. “Keep in touch. Come back as soon as you can.”
“I’ll call,” Jess promised, as she disappeared around the corner of the house on her way back to the car.
Helen wondered if she’d ever hear from Jess again, but when she could see Jess inside the car in the driveway, she shouted, “Happy New Year!”
Jess waved from the car.
Helen waved back.
Then Jess rolled down the window and shouted, “I’ll bring Peter next time I come. He’ll love it here.”
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thank you for reading my books. You’re the reason I write! If you liked my books, you can help keep my work going by “liking” the books on Amazon and everywhere the option is offered, and by posting your honest reviews of the book to help other readers decide whether it’s worth their reading time. I hope you will. You can find a complete list of my books with links to the book pages for reviews and other information here: Diane Capri Amazon Author Page
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That said, the criminal activities herein depicted are pure fiction, as are the characters. Any events or real places mentioned are used fictitiously. As we all know, truth is stranger than fiction.
Thanks again for reading!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Diane Capri is a lawyer and multi-published author.
She’s a snowbird who divides her time between Florida and Michigan. An active member of Mystery Writers of America, Author’s Guild, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime, she loves to hear from readers and is hard at work on her next novel.
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Lee Child
THE REACHER REPORT:
March 2nd, 2012
....The other big news is Diane Capri—a friend of mine—wrote a book revisiting the events of KILLING FLOOR in Margrave, Georgia. She imagines an FBI team tasked to trace Reacher’s current-day whereabouts. They begin by interviewing people who knew him—starting out with Roscoe and Finlay. Check out this review from Amazon: “Oh heck yes! I am in love with this book. I’m a huge Jack Reacher fan. If you don’t know Jack (pun intended!) then get thee to the bookstore/wherever you buy your fix and pick up one of the many Jack Reacher books by Lee Child. Heck, pick up all of them. In particular, read Killing Floor. Then come back and read Don’t Know Jack. This story picks up the other from the point of view of Kim and Gaspar, FBI agents assigned to build a file on Jack Reacher. The problem is, as anyone who knows Reacher can attest, he lives completely off the grid. No cell phone, no house, no car...he’s not tied down. A pretty daunting task, then, wouldn’t you say?
“First lines: “Just the facts. And not many of them, either. Jack Reacher’s file was too stale and too thin to be credible. No human could be as invisible as Reacher appeared to be, whether he was currently above the ground or under it. Either the file had been sanitized, or Reacher was the most off-the-grid paranoid Kim Otto had ever heard of.” Right away, I’m sensing who Kim Otto is and I’m delighted that I know something she doesn’t. You see, I DO know Jack. And I know he’s not paranoid. Not really. I know why he lives as he does, and I know what kind of man he is. I loved having that over Kim and Gaspar. If you haven’t read any Reacher novels, then this will feel like a good, solid story in its own right. If you have...oh if you have, then you, too, will feel like you have a one-up on the FBI. It’s a fun feeling!
“Kim and Gaspar are sent to Margrave by a mysterious boss who reminds me of Charlie, in Charlie’s Angels. You never see him...you hear him. He never gives them all the facts. So they are left with a big pile of nothing. They end up embroiled in a murder case that seems connected to Reacher somehow, but they can’t see how. Suffice to s
ay the efforts to find the murderer, and Reacher, and not lose their own heads in the process, makes for an entertaining read.
“I love the way the author handled the entire story. The pacing is dead on (ok another pun intended), the story is full of twists and turns like a Reacher novel would be, but it’s another viewpoint of a Reacher story. It’s an outside-in approach to Reacher.
“You might be asking, do they find him? Do they finally meet the infamous Jack Reacher?
“Go...read...now...find out!”
Sounds great, right? It’s available and you can get it HERE. Check it out, and let me know what you think.
So that’s it for now ... again, thanks for reading THE AFFAIR, and I hope you’ll like A WANTED MAN just as much in September.
Lee Child
