“Good timing, I suppose.”
“I’ve had the house painted. And all the furniture is new. Appliances, too.”
“What happened to Dad’s old stuff?”
“I donated most of the furniture and clothes to Goodwill after the trial. The rest is in a storage facility in Morristown. I’ll get you the address and the access combination if you want to head over there.”
“I doubt I’ll have the time.” Or the inclination. Digging through old memories sounds like torture to me.
Uncle Cal twists the key in the handle and the door swings open with a groan, a sound I find eerily appropriate. He steps inside like he owns the place, which I suppose by now he probably does, but I don’t follow. I can’t. Somebody switched out my sneakers for boots of lead. My knees wobble, and I grip the doorjamb to keep from falling down.
A strange thing happens when a home turns into a crime scene. Its contents are labeled, cataloged and photographed. Walls become scene boundaries, doors and windows, the perpetrator’s entry and exit. Seemingly ordinary objects—dust bunnies behind the couch, scuff marks on the stairs, a tarnished nickel under the carpet—take on all sorts of new significance. And the people living there, in a place now roiling with bad memories and even worse juju, no longer think of it as home.
But what about that one spot where the victim took her last breath, where her heart gave its final, frantic beat? What do you do with that place? Build a shrine on top of it, wave a bouquet of smoking sage around it or pretend it’s not there?
At the foot of the stairs, Cal stops and turns, studiously ignoring my distress. My gaze plummets to the fake Persian under his feet, and a wave of sick rises from the pit of my belly. Just because I can’t see the spot doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened there.
Or for that matter, that I’m ever stepping on it.
“Shut the door, please, Gia.”
I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and follow him into the house.
“My assistant Jennie did all the shopping,” he says, gesturing with his keys toward the living room. Except for the unmade hospital bed in the corner, the decor—oversize furniture, silk ferns in dark pots, framed paintings of exotic landscapes on the walls—looks plucked from the pages of a Rooms To Go catalog. “I hope it’ll do.”
I finger a plastic pinecone in a wooden bowl on the dresser and peer down the hallway toward the kitchen. There’s literally nothing here that I recognize. Probably better that way. “She did a great job.”
“The bedrooms are ready upstairs. Thought we’d let the nurse take the master. You don’t mind sharing the hall bath with me on the weekends, do you?”
I smile, hoping it doesn’t come across as forced as it feels. “I’ve gone months with nothing but a bucket, a bar of soap and a muddy stream. I think I can handle sharing a bathroom.”
One corner of Cal’s mouth rises in what looks almost like pride. “You’d make someone a fine huntin’ partner.”
He motions for me to follow him into the kitchen at the back of the house, where he points to a credit card and iPhone on the Formica counter. “Jennie stocked the kitchen with the basics, but there’s enough money on that account to buy anything else you need. You probably won’t need it for a couple of days, though.”
I peek into the refrigerator, check the cabinets above the coffee machine, peer around the corner into the open pantry. “There’s enough food here to feed half of Hawkins County for weeks.”
Cal smiles. “That’s the great thing about Jennie. She always goes above and beyond.” He plucks the iPhone from the counter and passes it to me. “She also programmed all the numbers you’ll need into the phone. The lead officer assigned to the case will be calling to set up a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. The hospice nurse arrives tomorrow morning at eight, and the motorcade and ambulance with your father, sometime before noon. And the local doctors, hospitals and the funeral home have been notified.”
“Sounds like everything’s been taken care of.”
He smiles, and his voice softens. “Just trying to make things as easy as possible for you, darlin’. I know you’d rather be anywhere but here.”
I think of some of the worst places I’ve been sent. Overpopulated Dhaka, where if the water doesn’t kill you, the air will. The slums of Abidjan after floods and mudslides have swept away too many of its children. The dusty streets of Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, where malnutrition and cholera compete for leading cause of death.
Uncle Cal has a point.
“And don’t think you’re completely out here on your own,” he says after a long stretch of silence. “I’m less than an hour down the road, and so are your brother and sister. Do me a favor and don’t let either of them off the hook, okay? This concerns their father, too.”
I half nod, half shrug. When it comes to our father, Bo would rather bury himself in his work than admit the situation affects him, while Lexi prefers to pretend he’s already dead. How can I let my siblings off the hook when neither of them are willing to acknowledge there is one? It seems as if the only person not getting off the hook around here is me.
Cal pulls me in for a hug, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “Call me anytime, okay? Day or night. I’ll pick up, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” His tone is reassuring, but he’s already backing away, already moving toward the door. “I’ll see you Saturday morning.”
He gives my shoulder one last squeeze and disappears into the hallway, and I’m slammed with a wave of panic. Disasters and destruction of global magnitude I can handle. Facing my father alone, not so much.
I rush down the hall in his wake. “Uncle Cal?”
The desperate note in my voice stops him at the door, and he turns to face me.
“Explain to me again why you can’t stay. Why you won’t be here tomorrow when Dad gets here.”
He scrubs a hand through his hair, now salt-and-pepper but still thick and shiny as ever. “Because I’m busy stalling the retrial. God willing and the creek don’t rise, your father won’t spend another second of his life in either a courtroom or a prison cell.”
A casket sure seems like the ultimate prison to me.
A few seconds later he’s gone, leaving me to wonder how I ended up here. In a town I vowed never to return to. In a house filled with ghosts and memories I’ll never outrun. In a life I have spent the past sixteen years trying to escape.
But most of all, I wonder how I ended up here alone.
BACK IN THE house, I put on a kettle and rummage through the cabinets for tea. Cal’s assistant must be either misinformed or seriously delusional about the number of mourners we will be expecting because she bought us a 312-count, industrial-sized box of Lipton tea bags. If we get through even one row of them, it will be a miracle. I rip open the cellophane wrapping with my teeth, pull out a bag and drop it into a yellow ceramic mug.
The sharp, bitter scent reminds me of some of my British colleagues, who are convinced a spot of tea is the cure to all emotional ails. My boss, Elsie, a hard-nosed type, drinks enough of the stuff to poison her liver...thanks to the generous splash of bourbon she adds when