“Jake, we talked about this yesterday—”
“Please just let me finish,” he interrupted and emphasized the point by kissing her softly on the lips so that she couldn’t speak anymore. “I was going to say that I support you, even though I may not agree. You know I’ll worry about you over there. It’s not a safe place.”
“The world’s not safe anymore.”
“I don’t agree, Amanda. We’re safer today because of men like your father who go out and make the people who want to do us harm go away.”
Amanda leaned into him, turning her head so that she could lean on his chest. “I believe that now.”
“I know you do. That’s probably part of what this Africa trip is about. You have to promise me, though, that you will be safe, okay?”
She pulled away and smiled that beautiful grin. “I promise.”
With that, Jake got into the back seat of the Lincoln, which drove away, leaving Amanda standing alone in the front yard.
She had one task left to complete before she caught a ride from Riley Dwyer to the airport.
CHAPTER 85
Amanda summoned her courage, studied the Mapquest directions, and headed southwest toward the Georgia border.
She demonstrated her apprehension by missing the first parking attempt as her car straddled the yellow line of a visitor’s space in front of the Leath Correctional Facility for Women in Greenwood. Harlan had mentioned to her that Leath was the primary facility for women in the state of South Carolina.
Before departing for Africa, she wanted to say good-bye to her mother and grandmother. As horrible as they had been to her and her father, she now realized, they were still a large factor in her life. She recognized if she were ever to be able to understand what had transpired during her childhood, that understanding would begin with her matriarchal lineage. She was also cognizant of the fact that one of the prime lessons she had learned was that no one was ever as bad or good as they may initially seem.
That point, though, was rather difficult to accept at this moment. She smoothed her khaki shorts and tugged at the collar of her preppie shirt as she exited the Benz. Having the lighter knocked from her hand onto the accelerant-soaked carpet wasn’t supposed to happen. She had never intended for the house to burn. She just wanted the threat to be real enough to test her mother’s motives. She had convinced herself that it was her mother’s hand that had converted threat into reality.
Partly because she had chosen to press charges, Melanie and Nina were confined while the criminal fraud units continued to dig through the insurance claims. Not only health insurance, but jewelry, automobile, and homeowner’s policies were all being reviewed. Harlan had told her that the initial report was that her father had uncovered only a portion of the racket that her mother and grandmother had nicknamed The Free Money Club.
“I’m here to see Melanie Garrett and Nina Hastings,” Amanda said through the glass window in the outer foyer of the Metro. An African American woman smiled at her as she shuffled through some papers and then clicked a mouse on a computer.
“Number 945473…” The woman stopped, recognizing Amanda’s confusion. After a moment she asked, “First time?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Amanda was embarrassed, but maintained her strength to continue with this process. It would be so easy to walk out now, but it wouldn’t be right. And today she was all about doing the right thing.
“It’s okay, honey. Let me see some ID.”
Amanda promptly displayed her South Carolina driver’s license, which satisfied the woman whose name she could see was Brenda.
“Okay, now, you’re going to go right over there, and that nice man is going to open a door for you and sit you down at a table. After that, he will bring your mother in. The guard will be outside the door if you need him.”
If I need him? All these years she had needed protection from her mother, and now the system was finally going to provide it when she was in jail. Her mind wrestled with the irony of that for a moment when she realized that the woman had said nothing about Nina.
“What about my grandmother?”
Brenda looked at the computer screen and asked, “Name?”
“Gabrielle Hastings.”
After a moment, Brenda looked up and said, “Her lucky day, I guess. She was released this morning.”
Amanda stood motionless in the center of the tiled foyer. One moment the double-lock barred door to her right seemed directly next to her, then far away, only to be followed by the thick clear ballistic door to her front zooming in and out.
How could this happen, she asked herself? She had provided the e-mails that clearly showed her grandmother had prostituted Brianna to Dagus as a way to blackmail him into cooperation in the nefarious scheme. What more did they need?
“Wouldn’t they have both been released?” she heard herself ask Brenda.
The woman seemed to study the computer for a moment and then smiled.
“No two-for-one specials today, hon. Your grandma looks like she got herself that Russell guy. They tell me he can convince a judge to make a fish walk out of a pond.”
Unable to even politely smile at the weak attempt at humor, Amanda chewed on that fingernail again, thinking. Okay, she had come this far. This was just an unexpected chess move. What was it that her dad always said? Something about the bad guys.
“The enemy always gets a vote,” she whispered.
She determined that she had come here to see her mother, and so she would.
“Thank you.” Amanda smiled at Brenda. She then nodded to the guard who had been patiently waiting while Amanda digested the new information. The guard was a tall man with a shaven head. Easily he could have been mistaken for a dark Mr. Clean, including the biceps.
They walked through a heavy-gauge steel door into a single room with a barren table and a chair on either side.
“This room’s usually for attorneys and the prison — uh… and their clients, but the main visit area is maxed out. She’ll be with you in a sec.”
She sat nervously at the table, crossed her legs and began kicking the elevated foot to burn the adrenaline. What am I doing here? she kept asking herself. Springing forth was a new, or perhaps rejuvenated, sense of nobility. That’s what she was doing here. She wanted to look her mother in the eyes and ask her, “Why?”
Why did she divorce her father? Why did she chase him away? Why did she love the house more than her? It was really that simple. At the critical moment when Dagus had held the gun to her head and the foyer was on fire, her mother chose to try to save her investment.
Perhaps she would never get an answer, but she had to try.
As much as she was prepared for the moment, her mother’s presence shocked her. Melanie Garrett came into the room escorted by the dark Mr. Clean, his hand on her elbow. Her wrists were shackled with handcuffs that seemed longer than normal ones to her. She was wearing a flat gray jumpsuit with a number on the front. She looked down as she considered the thought that her mother was now number 945473. The number for some odd reason reminded her of when she and Jake had gone to see Les Miserables. Jean Valjean’s prison number was 24601, she remembered.
Sitting in the chair across the table, she could feel her mother’s stare locked onto her face. Slowly she looked up and their gazes fixed, mother and daughter, prisoner and escapee.
That’s how she viewed the situation, anyway. It occurred to her that she had been the one in emotional shackles, cheated of the freedom to love her father. She weighed two competing emotions within her. First was enormous guilt about the role which she had played in attacking her father. Riley Dwyer had convinced her that it wasn’t her fault, that she had never been given the chance. She had been imprisoned.