”Nothing will happen if we stick together,” Erlene told them. ”Do you girls have any idea what getting caught up in a big murder would do to this business? People would stay away from this place in droves. We’d all wind up on the street, including you, Miss Julie. All that money you’ve been making? Gone.
”Besides, I’m sure nobody in this room killed that gentleman, and I doubt very seriously if any of you has any information that would help the police. The man was a drunken fool. Every one of you saw the way he acted. He probably went somewhere else after he left here and ran into somebody who wasn’t as tolerant of his behavior as we were. So why do we need to get involved in it? If the detective asks you, just tell him the man wasn’t here and let him move on to people who can help.”
”Where’s Angel?” Julie said. ”She’s the one who waited on him.”
”Angel’s at home. She and I have decided that she’s not really cut out for this business. Don’t worry about Angel. She won’t say a word.” Erlene paused for a minute and looked at all of them again. ”Girls, are we all on the same page?”
They all sat quietly, but they were nodding. Erlene knew mentioning the money they were making would get their attention, and besides, she treated them good. She expected a little loyalty in return.
”Julie?”
Julie popped her gum and shrugged her shoulders.
”All right, then, let’s get ready to go to work.”
April 12
6:00 p.m.
After I left the nursing home, I spent the next hour driving to Mountain City to stand next to a client who was entering a guilty plea to a reduced charge of negligent homicide in what had originally been a second-degree murder case. My client, a thirty-yearold man named Lester Hancock, had come home unexpectedly one evening to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. Lester had initially handled the dispute admirably. He simply told his buddy to get the hell out of his house and never come back. His friend left but returned fifteen minutes later and began yelling insults at Lester from the road in front of Lester’s house. Lester yelled back. His friend grabbed a baseball bat from the bed of his pickup and started towards the house. Lester stepped out on the front porch and blew a hole in him with a black powder rifle. He probably would never have been charged had he not dragged the man inside his house and then lied to the police about the way things really happened.
The drive was spectacular in April. The mountain peaks reflected off of the shimmering water of Watauga Lake, and the mountains themselves were coming to life. Dogwood, redbud, Bradford pear, and azalea blossoms dotted the slopes with pink and white. As I wound slowly through the beautiful countryside, I thought about the question Ma had asked me earlier: ”What did Raymond ever do to you?”
Almost immediately following the rape, I started overreacting to anyone whom I perceived was trying to bully me. Over the next year, I got myself thrown out of school three times for fighting, and I was only in the third grade. I was afraid of being left alone and had nightmares all the time.
The nightmares eased after a while, but then, when I was in the eighth grade and just starting to hit puberty, I threw my helmet at a football coach who grabbed my face mask and screamed at me when I made a mistake on a play during practice. The helmet hit him in the head. They threw me off the team and out of school for a month.
My freshman year in high school, during the time when the hormones were pouring and I felt like I wasn’t in control of anything, including my own body, I went days without sleep and fell into deep depressions. It was the first time I remember having the dream of floating down the turbulent river towards the waterfall.
And then, during my sophomore year, I met Caroline. She was beautiful, smart, funny, and optimistic, and at first, I had a lot of trouble believing she wanted to have anything to do with me. But she did. She saw something in me that I didn’t see, and while I didn’t understand, I was grateful. She’d flash a smile at me or give me a sideways glance and wink and my heart would melt. Gradually, the nightmares stopped and for the next few years, I actually started to enjoy life.
Caroline and I were inseparable all through high school. We both worked hard. I was an athlete, she was a dancer, and we were both good students. We both had part-time jobs. I worked on the weekends stocking groceries at a supermarket and she taught dance to kids at the studio where she took lessons.
Caroline’s father was a long-haul truck driver who was hardly ever home and her mother was almost as emotionless as mine, but she never complained about either one of them. We had each other, and that seemed to be enough.
The only serious problem we had was around graduation time. Caroline wanted to get married-
and so did I-but I had something else I wanted to do first. I had trouble explaining it to her, but I wanted to join the army. Caroline said I was crazy, that I was somehow trying to forge a bond with my dead father. She was probably right, but it didn’t matter. I’d made up my mind. I enlisted a month after I graduated from high school and left for boot camp the same week Caroline entered college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She said she’d wait for me, and she did. I wrote to her almost every day and I came home to see her every time I went on leave, but it was the longest three years of my life.
By the time I got out of the army, Caroline was almost finished with her undergraduate degree in liberal arts. We were married in her mother’s Methodist church in Johnson City the same weekend I got back, and I enrolled in school at U.T. in the fall. Caroline went to work part-time at a dance studio owned by a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. She taught jazz and tap and acrobatics and choreographed routines for the dance recitals. I majored in political science and knew what I wanted to be. I was going to be a prosecutor. I was going to put people like my uncle Raymond in jail.
Marrying Caroline was the best decision I ever made. She was so beautiful, so full of life, and she taught me the most important lesson I’d ever learned-how to love. Over the next two years, we had two healthy children, and Caroline helped me learn how to raise them. She nudged me when I needed nudging, held me back when I needed holding back, and did her best to keep my outlook optimistic.
Unfortunately, I brought more than my duffel bag home with me from the army. The Rangers are gungho, small-unit specialists who pride themselves on being able to fight in virtually any environment on a moment’s notice. I trained all over the world for three years but didn’t see any combat until two months before my enlistment expired when my unit was sent to Grenada. Terrible images from the short but bloody battles I fought there haunted me through college and law school. I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming, covered in sweat, with my wife talking softly to me, trying to calm me down.
As with Sarah’s rape, I eventually managed to suppress the memories, at least most of the time. I even managed to make excellent grades and graduate from both college and law school, despite the fact that I always held a part-time job and was doing my best to be a good husband and father along the way.
I kept myself so busy I didn’t have time to think about the past. I don’t think I slept for seven years.
By the time I graduated from law school, my son, Jack, was just entering kindergarten. When I interviewed for a job at the district attorney’s office back in Washington County, I was disappointed to find that the starting salary for rookie prosecutors was less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and that it would take me at least ten years to get to the fifty-thousand-dollar range. It seemed like such a waste to have spent all that time and effort for so paltry a salary. Caroline was starting up her own dance studio and we knew she wouldn’t make much money. I figured I could make at least twice what the DA was offering by practicing on my own, even as a rookie, so I set up shop in Johnson City. I told myself that after I’d made some serious money and gained some experience, I’d close down the office and go to work for the district attorney.