Instead of reassuring her, I seemed to be making her more miserable. The worst thing about bucket seats is that you can't scoot over and hug somebody easily. Nevertheless, I unbuckled my seat belt and tried, but she was stiff in my arms. At this point, Annie Sue or any of my nieces would have their faces snuggled into my neck, bawling their eyes out, and already feeling better; but Paige couldn't let herself melt into the comfort of a sympathetic hug. She was choking on silent sobs and painful tremors shook her hunched shoulders.
It broke my heart to think of her going almost sixteen years without a best friend to giggle and cry with, to talk girl talk and swap secrets; and now that she did, she felt that she had somehow let her friend down, had failed Annie Sue when—
Wait a minute... both times?
"You left, took Cindy home, and then you went back to the WomenAid house, didn't you?"
Her eyes were dark pools of terror as she pulled away. She tried to deny, to shake her head, but no sound came out.
"You hit Carver Bannerman?"
Paige's eyes dropped and a long shudder ran through her. "I didn't mean to kill him. Honest!"
Across the broad expanse of concrete, cars pulled in and out at the gas pumps under a bright white shelter, and their headlights flashed onto Paige's pale face.
"When I got up on the porch and went through the doorway, I saw Annie Sue fighting him."
Her words began in hesitant spates, then quickened into a torrent.
"At first I didn't know if they were, you know, fighting or playing. And then, just as it hit me what was going on and I saw her trying to pull away, the light smashed and I could barely see them anymore. I couldn't hear either. Not her anyhow. Just him. Grunting like an animal. It was awful!"
"A hammer was lying there on a crosspiece and I grabbed it up—all I could think was he was hurting her and I had to make him stop. He had pulled her shorts down and was squirming all over her and she wasn't moving and when he started undoing his own pants, I yelled at him and he came up at me with a roar and I just hit him and hit him and—"
At last the sobs tore through her words and she clung to me while wave after wave of terror and anguish crashed through her body.
"I was so scared," she whispered as the first storm eased. "And my hands were all bloody. He just lay there across the sawbench and didn't move. I could feel the walls closing down on me and I had to get out. Wash my hands. Get clean. I even forgot all about Annie Sue till I was in the car and halfway down the street. It was still raining and getting dark and I drove around the block trying to think what to do. There were some paper napkins under my front seat and I wet one in a puddle by the side of the road and got the worst off my hands and off my steering wheel."
As she talked, she twisted the tissue I had given her into shreds. I fished another out of my pocket and watched it, too, come apart in her restless fingers.
"I couldn't leave Annie Sue there, maybe hurt bad, so I drove back just in time to see you getting out of your car. I knew you'd take care of her, so I went home. I was still in the shower when Cindy called and I just acted like I'd been there the whole time."
"Your mother didn't notice how upset you were? Your clothes?"
"She wasn't there. She spends a lot of time with my Aunt Faith now that Dad's gone."
Paige swallowed past the lump in her throat and looked at me fearfully. "What'll they do to me, Miss Deborah?"
I sighed. "Who's your family attorney?"
CHAPTER 17
CHALK LINES
"Long straight lines between distant points on surfaces are marked by snapping a chalk line... For an accurate snap, never snap the chalk line over a twenty-foot distance."
Perry Byrd's attorney was a man who'd run against me in the primary, Edward "Big Ed" Whitbread, from Widdington over in the next county. They were old pat-fanny teammates from way back, but when it came to defending her daughter, Mrs. Byrd showed that she'd been paying attention over the years and ignored any cronyistic instructions Perry might be trying to send from the grave. As soon as Paige finished telling her what she'd told me, Eleanor Byrd pulled herself together and called Zack Young, the best criminal lawyer in Colleton County and the man who'd tied a knot in her husband's tail more than once over the years.
At Paige's urging, I went with them to the courthouse. Gwen Utley was the magistrate on duty that night. She arraigned Paige on a charge of voluntary manslaughter, then set such a low bail that she might as well have not bothered, just gone on and released her into Eleanor's custody.
Zack emerged from his first conference with Paige and immediately announced his young client would not be pleading guilty.
"This is justifiable homicide, pure and simple," he told me as we walked through the dim echoing halls afterwards. "As clear a case of self-defense as you'll find in any textbook."
He cut his eyes at me. "Conflict with anything she told you earlier?"
I set his mind at rest. "No. When she tried to pull him off Annie Sue, she said he came up toward her with a roar. She may well have thought he'd knock her out and rape her, too."
"You'd testify to that?"
"Certainly."
We came out onto the side street next to the parking lot and he slouched off toward his car. "See you in court, Judge honey."
Zack or Dwight. Bound to be one of 'em picked up on it. * * *
I'd been up since six. A long physical day. Emotionally draining as well. Yet I was too wired to go home.
But I had more than one home, didn't I?
And a lopsided moon was halfway up a star-studded sky, wasn't it?
Without hardly thinking twice, I turned the car toward Cotton Grove; and once I was on Old Forty-Eight south of town, I just let it find its own way back to the farm.
Unless you're from the area and grew up knowing, there's nothing much to indicate that a house might be somewhere up the rutted lane, only a battered tin mailbox with a faded number and no name. The hogwire fence is overgrown with cow-itch vine and Virginia creeper. The posts that once held it are rotted away and the fence is now supported by jack oaks and pines that have grown up and through the rusty hog wire.
The lane curves abruptly through such a thick stand of unkempt trees that even in wintertime, you won't see house lights from the road unless you look back over your shoulder just as Old Forty-Eight crosses Possum Creek. In summer, you won't see that glimmer unless there's a party going on with the whole house lit up like a Christmas tree. Even then you'd have to look hard.
All my car windows were down, and as soon as I turned off the paved road, I killed my radio and doused my lights. Moonlight was enough to pick out the sandy lane. I drove slowly, quietly, slipping into the old game, but the air was too cool and clear for me to win.
Only Saturday night traffic back out on New Forty-Eight between Cotton Grove and Makely let me get as close as I did before the dogs let loose in their pens on the far side of the house, yipping and howling as they heard me approach.
I topped a low ridge and there was the homeplace spread out before me.
White rail fences gleamed in the moonlight. Beyond a broad expanse of grass—new-mown by the smell of it—swept across the level ground and disappeared in thick dark shadows cast by a grove of huge old oaks and fifty-year old pecans. The house itself was just a plain old two-story white wooden box, nondescript and ordinary except that it was surrounded on all sides by deep porches upstairs and down.
Despite the racket the dogs were making, there were no lights in any of the windows. Only the tin roof shone like worn silver in the moonlight.