“At first, perhaps, we used each other. But then it turned into something more. So much more.”
Had Laney blocked the traumatic recollection of his attack the night she’d slipped out to meet him, or had the drug or hypothermia wiped clean the slate of that memory as well? Because she clearly didn’t remember that Cordero had almost killed her; she couldn’t, considering how calmly she’d been speaking to the man at Trudy’s.
Justine gave a sympathetic murmur. “You cared for her.”
Ross thought of Cordero’s reaction, so quickly covered, when Laney had said she was going to have a baby. Thought of the intimacy he’d glimpsed and misinterpreted when the man had pushed a curl from Laney’s cheek and called her “little girl.”
“I was certain she felt it, too,” Cordero said, “at least until her friends started dying. Until I helped them find the same exit my Serafina had taken.”
Justine shook her head. “
Why?
Why would you—”
“We didn’t need them, any of them. She refused to see that they were holding her back, keeping her a regional zydeco act when she had crossover star written all over her. I was going to make her understand that. I was going to win her back. I tried to warn her with the noose at her house, but then—”
“When she wouldn’t listen you fed her the drugs, too; you nearly killed her and you dumped her out here.”
He shook his head. “I…I didn’t know about our baby. My child.”
His deep voice resonated with an unbalanced brand of wonder, a narcissistic awe that had Ross praying Laney’s child would never know its father. And swearing to do whatever it took to keep that from happening.
Close enough to touch Whatley, Ross slipped one bloody hand into the pocket of the dead man’s suit jacket.
“
You
and
you
, come this way,” Cordero told Justine and the injured deputy. “As for these two—”
“No!” cried Justine just before three shots rang out in quick succession…
And Ross felt a burning, a punch of pain at his back that made his vision gray out and poured the strength from his body.
“I don’t think they’ll give us any trouble,” Cordero said. “So forget them and get moving. You, too, Deputy. We’ll need to find the right tree before it gets too dark to see what comes next.”
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!
—Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, from “The Heaviest Weight,”
The Gay Science
The moon comes on the heels of darkness and pauses to reflect upon the water’s mirrored surface. Better to look there than toward what takes place not far from the shoreline, where shards of nightfall hang stacked between the branches of huge cypress and oak trees.
Yet the chill breeze carries rumors. A loon’s wail laments the terse orders, pleas, and moaning of those invading her domain. A high-pitched cry is cut short…
And a heavy silence follows, broken only by the groan of branches and the creak of rope that hangs beneath.
“Look how beautiful, how perfect,” I whisper as I stare up at her, but the woman doesn’t seem to hear me.
Around her neck, the noose is tight and ready, her bare ankles trembling as she stands nearly on tiptoe on the mossy log, barely keeping her perch…until she loses either the strength or will to maintain her balance.
Death-still, she waits with eyes shut tight, avoiding the sight of the man who would have killed her. The man who dangles, still now, the weakling’s panic exacting its toll within seconds.
Though his frantic fear was far more satisfying than the sheep-like march to execution of drugged victims, I prefer this woman’s
silent terror, her stoic struggle to prepare herself for the death she knows is coming.
Her consecration of her own, unwilling sacrifice to me.
Like her, like my sweet Serafina…who sacrificed her barren body so I could at last sire a child of my own flesh.
Awareness has me rock-hard, the scent of the sheriff’s fear making me ache for release. But to destroy the tableau would be to destroy my pleasure, so I take myself in hand and wait for the moment of—
You are the music While the music lasts.
—T. S. Eliot, from “The Dry Salvages,” V
Startled by the bang, Justine slipped, and there was such pain. Pain immeasurable, exploding in her neck, her head—she wanted to scream but couldn’t draw breath. Wanted to die but the thrashing agony went on.
“Hurry! Get a knife,” she heard while her body jerked and pulsed around her, every muscle bursting with the need to fight this.
Fight this—why couldn’t it just stop?
Something grasped her legs and bore her higher, alleviated pressure. Body floating, she looked up toward an opening, a light so pure and brilliant, it drew both eye and soul. Gazing through, she saw beauty unimaginable, a meadow of color so vibrant that she understood she’d been living all her life in its weak shadow.
There were voices, too, a great host of voices of those she had known and loved, a growing swell of joy, of welcome. And she wanted to step through the hole torn through her darkness, to go to them and join that radiance.
But she felt warm lips upon hers, a mouth that breathed life—and pain and the memory of all the reasons she must go back—into her empty lungs.
Wednesday, October 28
The awareness of pain returned. At first no more noticeable than background static.
As discomfort deepened, he gasped and opened his eyes to escape.
And felt his hand squeezed. “I thought you’d never wake up.”
“Ju-Justine?” Hoarse and croaking, his own voice was a stranger’s. But even in hell, he would know hers, strained as it sounded.
At first, he saw only a silhouetted figure in the dim room. A woman in a wheelchair. A woman he heard weeping.
Her.
“I’m still here,” he whispered. Echoed from the last time he had seen her.
“And I love you,” she repeated, words spoken finally aloud as she rose awkwardly to stand beside his bed. “You saved me, Ross. Do you remember? Two bullets in you, and you found another gun on Whatley. And then you—before my dad got there and cut me down—you shot Cordero and saved my life.”
Her voice splintered, raw with emotion. He saw now that she wore a white robe, a match for the white brace around her neck.
Her eyes swam into focus, the beautiful dark eyes of the woman he lived and breathed for. A woman whose courage taught him to forgive himself for Anne’s death, taught him to embrace life and move on.
“I didn’t…didn’t save your life,” he told her as he pulled her onto his bed. “You saved mine, Justine. You saved
ours
, together, and the family we’ll make.”
“No, Ross. Not that,” she said. “Not until I finally talk—really talk—to the Texas Rangers. Because you might have saved my life, but it’s up to me to make sure I deserve it. No matter what the cost.”
True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Wednesday, February 10
Justine paced the hallway outside the federal grand jury room of the East Texas district courthouse, her arms crossed and her heart lodged in her throat. She needed a few minutes alone, she’d told her attorney. One last opportunity to come to terms with the dangerous tightrope she was about to walk.
Subpoenaed to appear, she had every intention of giving testimony.
Testimony that would name names, including those of her late husband, her major campaign contributors—even District Attorney Herb Stockton and County Judge Ellis Major. Whether or not she ended up indicted or imprisoned for her part, one thing was for certain: The culture of corruption permeating Preston County would be dealt a mortal blow.
Justine’s father caught up to her, touching her elbow as they walked. “However today goes, I want you to know I’m damned proud of you, Chili Pepper. Never prouder in my life.”
Justine stopped and hugged him, laying her head on his shoulder. Her heart expanded with the thought of how far the two of them had come over the past few months, how the lancing of their shared wounds with conversation had allowed
the healing of decades-old scar tissue. Had also allowed Justine to come to terms with the very real chance that he might be the one to raise her son.
But not entirely alone, she suspected, for Ross, now as well recovered from his injuries as she was hers, had begun a campaign to work his way into the family. The harder Justine tried to keep him at arm’s length, the more often he showed up to ask for her dad’s advice on some problem with the Mustang’s engine, mostly fabricated, she suspected, or to bring by his cousin Trudy’s little girls to draw Noah out, bit by bit, as they all played with his puppy.
Every time she saw Ross, that big man laughing with those little children, Justine ached to give herself over to him, mind and body, heart and soul. And every time, she held herself at a little more of a remove, thinking how unfair it would be to bind him to a woman who could be locked up for at least a decade.
But it hurt—it hurt so damned much to have him so close while she couldn’t touch him. And on today of all days, she’d been unable to hold up beneath the strain.
She sighed, worried over how she’d handled things. “Do you think I hurt Ross, asking him to stay home?”
Her dad pulled back. “The truth? Yes. I think you made him feel like Noah, being left with Gwen so he wouldn’t get upset or underfoot.”
“It’s not that. It’s just…I couldn’t bear to…”
To look at what I stand to lose.
Shaking her head, she added, “I couldn’t bear it, that’s all.”
“You don’t think he’s earned the right to see you through this?”
“He has enough on his plate already. His job, his family, Laney.” Well into the second trimester of her pregnancy—which, thank God, appeared normal in spite of the drug she had been given—Ross’s cousin was only now beginning to deal with what had happened and cope with her own role in
the tragedy. Finally in counseling, she’d decided to wait till after the baby’s birth to resume singing—and had turned down an offer that would have exploited her friends’ murders.
If it’s really meant to be, if I really have the talent,
she’d said,
success will still be there after I learn how to be a mother, and a better person, too.
Ross had been proud of that decision, and with good reason. Laney had been forced to grow up hard and fast, but with her family’s loving support, Justine thought the younger woman would come out of this stronger and better equipped to handle whatever life threw her way.
“You’ve still got it wrong.” Justine’s father glanced over her shoulder, toward the sound of approaching footsteps. “That man’s never seen you as a burden.”
“No, I don’t,” came Ross’s voice behind her as his big hand, warm and reassuring, covered her nape. Turning her to face him, he looked directly into her eyes. “I see you as my reward, Justine. No matter what happens. No matter how long it takes.”
She stared back at him, looking so steady and confident and handsome in his dark suit. And in the kiss that followed, she felt the truth of his promise unfolding, felt the dawning of a union strong enough to navigate the darkest waters…if she only dared embrace it.
More footsteps, and a throat cleared. “Sheriff Wofford? Justine?”
Reluctantly, she turned from Ross to face her attorney, Dan Henderson, who exchanged a somber look with his former college roommate before saying, “It’s time to go inside now. The grand jury’s ready for you. I know what you said, Justine. I know you need this to be over. But please…You’ve already turned over the evidence, so I’m begging you, remember what I told you when you’re in there.”
Dark haired and strikingly handsome in his own way, the
attorney flashed five fingers, imploring her to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. But Justine knew her testimony was the only chance for true justice in her county, the only chance to pull up a deeply entrenched evil by its roots.
Ross cupped her face with his hand and repeated the words, “No matter what, Justine,” before she turned away and walked into the grand jury room—not even her attorney was allowed to follow—to at long last learn her fate.
“Do you think,” Ross asked Dan for at least the tenth time in the last two hours, “do you think there’s any chance—any chance at all she listened to you?”
His old friend frowned. “I wish I could tell you I did. But she’s a stubborn woman, and the fact that she hasn’t come out once to consult with me about any of their questions, something I’ve told her repeatedly she has a right to do, isn’t a good sign.”
“She’s punishing herself,” Ross said. “I almost think she wants to go to prison for keeping silent as long as she did.”
Ed Truitt, who’d been listening, shook his head. “She’s done beating herself up like that. We made a pact, my girl and me. Do what’s right in the now instead of getting stuck in the past.”
In his brown eyes, Ross saw the old man’s fierce pride, a pride he shared. But he knew Justine’s father was terrified, as scared as he was that she would be taken from everything she loved, everyone who loved
her,
possibly for years.
The grand jury room door opened, and a bored-looking bailiff told them, “You all can go inside now. Grand jury and the judge and prosecutor’ve cleared out.”
All three men hurried inside, where they found Justine sitting alone at the end of the front row of dark wooden benches, which reminded Ross of church pews in a legal sanctuary. Her head was bent, and Ross—out-pacing the
others with his long strides—soon saw that her eyes were closed, too, as if she sat in prayer.
Was she praying for deliverance from the coming federal trial?
Ross glanced at the other two and gestured to them to stay back. Justine’s father clenched his jaw, impatience rolling off him in waves, but Dan touched his elbow and said quietly, “We’ve been waiting this long. We can give them a few minutes.”