Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

“I’ll call his mother. I assume she’s the more flexible of the two?”

“She’s torn between Dawson and his dad. But she doesn’t want to lose another son.”

“If I get her permission—and Dawson’s, too—we’ll find a way to work together.”

“Together. I like the sound of that.” The lone dimple deepened.

Despite a lifetime of caution, she was afraid that she liked it, too.

Chapter Nine

“MA’AM, ARE YOU all right?”

Cristy wasn’t all right. Her stomach was still churning, despite having nothing left inside it, and her legs were threatening to buckle.

She stood her ground anyway. “Why are you here?”

Deputy Jim Sullivan, the same Jim Sullivan who had arrested her last year, didn’t move forward, although Cristy could see rain gusting across the porch in his direction. “Are you all right?” he repeated.

She was absolutely certain she would never be all right again.

“Did you come with him?” she demanded. “Did you come to torture me, too?”

Then a new thought occurred to her. Was it possible Jackson was still in the house? Had he slipped upstairs while she was in the bathroom? Was he waiting until he could be alone with her?

“I came by myself, not with Ford,” he said. “I came to be sure you’re all right. Are you?”

She didn’t know how to answer. She couldn’t think. As incongruous as it seemed, was she being flanked by a pair of sociopaths? Would Jackson sneak up on her any moment and attack from behind?

The deputy obviously saw her distress. He stepped inside, but he didn’t close the door, as if he knew that would send her over the edge.

“Look, I know you got out of prison on Friday, and your sister told me you were up here somewhere, although she didn’t have an address. I figured Ford had learned where you were, so I decided to keep an eye on him over the weekend. This afternoon when he took off in this direction, I followed him up here. I could see what was going on from down below, enough of it, anyway, to think maybe somebody ought to break it up.”

“Did you?”

He cocked his head in question and frowned. Jim Sullivan, Sully, as his friends called him, was a serious young man, and the frown looked right at home on an otherwise ordinary face. He had been perfectly serious about arresting her in the parking lot of the local jeweler close to a year ago now, and perfectly serious about making sure his idea of justice was served.

“Did I what?” he asked, when she didn’t elaborate.

“Did you break it up?” She lowered her voice. “Is Jackson...gone?”

“Right after I honked, he came out of the house and drove off. I came in my own car, so I doubt he figured out who I was, but he wasn’t taking any chances.”

Sully wasn’t in uniform today. He wore faded jeans, a heavy canvas jacket with a hood, and athletic shoes that were probably soaked. Even if they had passed on the path, it was probable Jackson wouldn’t have recognized him.

She had to sit before she collapsed. She made it to the sofa and dropped to the farthest corner.

“Did he hurt you?” Sully asked.

“I don’t get it. Why would you care?” Her voice was trembling now, and so was she.

“It’s getting cold in here. I’m going to close the door, okay? But I’m not here to hurt you. Can you give me that much credit?”

She was trying so hard not to cry that she couldn’t answer. She put her face in her hands and took deep breaths.

“Here.”

She lifted her head and saw he was three feet in front of her, an afghan that had been draped over a nearby chair in one hand. He held it out to her, but he kept his distance.

She snatched it and wrapped it around her, too cold, too miserable, to pretend she didn’t need the warmth.

“It was dark outside, and the lamps were on in here. It looked like he was threatening you,” Sully said. “You could file a complaint.”

“Oh, right. I have such influence with law enforcement.” She pulled the afghan tighter. “He didn’t hurt me. At least not the way that would worry somebody like you.”

“Good.”

She looked up at him, finally focusing on what he had said earlier. “Clara? You’ve been talking to my sister about me?” Clara was in school in Oklahoma training to be a missionary. Unlike Cristy, she had found solace and comfort in their father’s religion.

Sully pulled down his jacket hood, and his short brown hair glistened with rain. “More like she’s been talking to me about you. Calling every day or two. We were in school together. She’s worried about you being up here all alone, and she wanted me to find you. She’s no fan of Ford’s.”

“Really? You mean there’s another person in the universe who doesn’t think Jackson Ford ought to run for president?”

He didn’t answer.

Cristy still wasn’t thinking straight. Nothing he’d said rang true. She started with the obvious. “So my sister says she’s worried about me, and all of a sudden you’re keeping an eye on Jackson? A year ago I told you and Sheriff Carter that Jackson framed me when he put that ring in my bag. Neither of you paid a bit of attention. So you’ll have to excuse me, but I’m having problems believing a word you say.”

“Look, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that if Jackson came looking for you, his intentions wouldn’t be the best? You said it yourself. Last year you pointed the finger of guilt straight at him. Of course he’s not going to be happy about that. I’m not even on duty today, but when I saw him heading out of town, I just figured I’d better follow, in case he was coming up to see you and got violent. Now that I’ve seen for myself that he knows where you live, I’m going to tell him to leave you alone.”

She tried to imagine Sully “happening” on Jackson driving out of town, then following him here on a whim. It didn’t make sense.

“You tell Jackson anything you want to,” she said. “He won’t listen.”

“Then maybe you’d better find another place to go.”

“Right, I have so many choices.”

“Clara says she’ll buy you a ticket to Oklahoma to be with her. She would tell you herself, but she doesn’t have your phone number.”

She felt a pang of guilt for not calling the moment she had arrived, but Clara was always sure she knew what was best for her little sister. Cristy knew if she was ever going to stand on her own two feet, she had to figure things out on her own.

“Clara already made that offer while I was still in Raleigh,” she told Sully. “I have a baby living in North Carolina. I can’t leave the state.”

“You would be safer.”

“Jackson will find me if he wants me. He told me as much today.”

He moved over to the chair he’d taken the afghan from and perched on the edge of the seat. “What else did he tell you?”

“I’m not under any obligation to report it.”

“I know. But if something happens up here...”

“If something happens? Like he tries to kill me—or does? You’d like to know if he warned me that he planned to?”

He didn’t answer.

She studied him. Jim Sullivan was older than she was, but a little younger than Jackson. He had been a few years farther along in school than she was, although she’d been held back a year, in the days when teachers still thought they had a chance of getting through to her. If he’d graduated in Clara’s class, he was probably twenty-six. She remembered that back then he’d always looked underfed, rangy, even gangly, and that he had played basketball, maybe even been a star, although she’d hated school so much she hadn’t gone to any activity she hadn’t been forced to attend.

The present-day Sully wasn’t really good-looking, but he had the bone structure of someone who would age well, the kind of face an artist lives to draw, the kind of face she had liked to draw before her father decided art classes were a privilege she didn’t deserve. Under better circumstances she might have thought Sully had nice eyes, too. But she had learned that eyes were not the window of the soul.

She didn’t know why she answered, but in the end, what difference did it make, except to encourage him to leave?

“Jackson made it clear I’d better not come back to Berle,” she said. “And he made it clear if I did, or if I said anything bad about him to anyone, that he might just take a paternity test so he can get custody of my son.”

“Could he do that?”

“What, take the test? Anybody can take a test. Will it say he’s the father? What do you think?”

“What I think doesn’t much matter.”

“I only wish it weren’t true. I wish anybody, anybody, else was Michael’s father, but it’s a little late for that.”

“The baby’s not here with you, I take it.”

“He’s with my cousin in Mars Hill.”

“That’s a long way to go to see him.”

Cristy shrugged.

“He’s doing okay?”

“I hear he is.” Then to keep him from asking, she added, “I haven’t seen him yet. Which is my business, so stay out of it.”

He switched the subject so quickly she wondered if he had planned to anyway. “Did Jackson threaten you physically?”

She gave a bitter laugh. “He’s not stupid. You don’t know him at all, do you? He just talked about Kenny—”

“Kenny Glover?”

“You do work for the sheriff’s department, right? You know Kenny Glover, Duke Howard and Jackson used to be best friends?”

“I know some, yeah.”

“Then you should figure out why he mentioned Kenny.”

“I know just about the time you were arrested, Kenny Glover killed Duke Howard in a fight in the woods, and Duke’s body wasn’t found until a hunter stumbled on it a couple of weeks later. I know Kenny admits he beat up Duke in a fight out there, even if he doesn’t admit he shot him. I don’t know what that has to do with you.”

She knew reminding Sully that Kenny, who had not yet stood trial, was innocent until proven guilty would only make things worse. Her credibility was already in tatters.

“What did he say about Kenny?” Sully asked, when she didn’t go on.

“That too many of his own friends were dying. Okay? Duke’s gone, and now Kenny’s probably going to end up on death row.”

“So that’s all he said?”

Cristy wanted this to be over. “He mentioned some woman named Nan. Probably a girlfriend I didn’t know anything about. He said she died in an accident. He was dredging up sad stories to make his point, to let me know that all kinds of people die young.”

Sully sat stone-faced. She was sure he didn’t see how any of this added up to a real threat against her life.

“So now you know the whole pitiful tale.” Cristy gestured toward the door. “He didn’t touch me. He didn’t tell me outright he would hurt me. He didn’t even threaten our son, not the usual way. He just said if I moved back to Berle, and he had to see Michael every day, he might have to ask for custody, seeing as how he’d be feeling all paternal.”

“And after all that, you’re planning to stay on here?”

“I’m going to stay away from Berle for good, and if I’m lucky, Jackson will return the favor and stay away from me.”

“Doesn’t sound like you think you can count on it.”

“Doesn’t matter. I need to stay close to Michael, and I’m in no position to take him right now and raise him on my own. The people who own this house have been kind to me.”

He got to his feet. “Then you’d better find a way to protect yourself.”

She wondered what he thought she should do. Sleep with a butcher knife? Nail all the windows shut?

“North Carolina’s made absolutely sure I can’t do that,” she said. “Jackson reminded me himself. Felon plus gun equals a return trip to prison.”

“It was more luck than anything else that I followed him here today. I’ll try to keep an eye on things, but I can’t make any promises.”

“Why should you? What does it matter? So you happen to know my sister, and she bugged you into checking on me. Knowing Clara didn’t stop you from thinking I stole that ring.”

“That was last year,” he said cryptically.

“Right. A year I lost.”

“A year is better than a life. Be careful. Keep the doors locked, the windows closed, the telephone handy.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a pad of paper, jotted something on it and handed it to her. “This is my cell phone. Call me immediately if he harasses you.”

She didn’t take it. “You have a good night, deputy.”

He met her eyes. He continued to hold out the paper until she sighed and took it. Then, shaking his head, he went to the door. When he got there, he turned. “Lock up.”

“You really don’t know Jackson Ford, do you? Not if you think the puny lock on that door would make a difference.”

He closed the door gently behind him, but she realized he was waiting on the porch for her to follow his order. She got up and locked the door, which she would have done without his advice. The lock wouldn’t stop Jackson, but at least she would know he was coming in before he got there.

Only when the bolt turned with a sharp snap did she hear Sully’s retreating footsteps.

Chapter Ten

BY FRIDAY AFTERNOON, no student had stopped by to claim the mysterious charm bracelet, and a thorough search of Georgia’s desk hadn’t turned up anything else out of the ordinary. There was no note or letter to go with the bracelet and newspaper clippings. Whoever had left them had not included an explanation.

Casual inquiries of office staff—she hadn’t wanted to stir too much curiosity—had turned up nothing new. The school office was a busy place, and papers were transferred from desk to desk as a matter of course. In addition student assistants came and went each period. No one, staff or volunteers, remembered the charm bracelet.

Georgia knew she could do one of two things. She could relegate the bracelet to lost and found, where she was almost certain it would never be claimed. Or she could face the obvious. Somebody had left the bracelet for her to find. Somebody who thought she should have it.

Somebody who wanted her to search for her mother.

The conclusion had taken days. She had rejected, then rejected again, the possibility that somebody, possibly even her mother, was playing cat and mouse. But the articles and the bracelet had appeared together, one as discordant as the other. And a more careful look at the bracelet had confirmed that it wasn’t a new one. Two charms were dated. One, an open Bible, had 6-15-59 inscribed on the back. Another, a heart—the only silver charm on a gold bracelet—said Forget Me Not on the front and 5-17-63 on the back.

Georgia had been born in 1965—on today’s date.

Staring at the bracelet after a grueling, mysterious week, she looked up from her desk when voices began a familiar song.

She smiled at her daughter and granddaughter, who were singing from the doorway.

“Happy birthday to you...”

Neither Edna nor Samantha was a talented musician, but the sentiment was welcome. She rose and held out her arms, and Edna got there first.

“Happy birthday, Grandma!”

“Now it is,” Georgia said, giving her granddaughter a warm hug.

“You didn’t think we forgot, did you?” Samantha asked. “We have such plans.”

The day hadn’t gone uncelebrated. At noon the office staff had brought in a cake, along with silly cards and a bouquet of tulips that were happily shedding petals on her desk now. But with the advent of Samantha and Edna, the big event seemed real.

“Next year I go into mourning,” Georgia said, embracing her daughter, too. “So let’s celebrate the heck out of this one.”

“Fifty is nifty,” Samantha said, “but I think you ought to end your forties in style. I’m making your favorite dinner.”

“How do you know I don’t have plans?”

“I’m sneaky. I asked Marianne to peek at your appointment calendar.”

“That was sneaky. You could have asked.”

“Well, I didn’t want you to feel obligated, in case something or someone better came along.”

She knew Samantha was referring to Lucas Ramsey, who Georgia had unwisely mentioned, and who hadn’t called or dropped by since their pizza dinner. She had hoped to talk to him about an idea she had proposed that morning to Dawson, a school literary magazine, but when she hadn’t heard from Lucas, she’d forged ahead without his input.

With some disappointment.

She ignored Samantha’s hint and moved on. “Let me get my things, then I’m out of here.”

“Hard week?”

Georgia hesitated. “An interesting week. I’ll tell you about it over some of your fabulous tea.”

“Do you want to go home and change, or can you follow us back?”

Georgia opted for the latter, and twenty minutes later she was parking in the circular driveway that took up the front yard of her daughter’s brick bungalow. The house was the smallest on the block, as if it had been squeezed in by taking slivers of the yards surrounding it. There was no place back or front for Edna to hang out with her friends, but there was a playground not too far away as a substitute. The neighborhood was safe and quiet, and the rent was cheap, virtues that had kept Samantha from looking for something larger.

Samantha and Edna emerged from their bright yellow VW, and the three women went inside together. Georgia laughed when she saw that the tiny living room had been festively adorned with streams of red-and-blue crepe paper and clusters of balloons.

“You went to so much work!” She hugged Edna again, sure this had been her granddaughter’s idea.

“I love birthdays.”

“And people will love you for making them special.”

“Take off your jacket,” Samantha said. “And I’ll make tea. Edna made some goodies to have with it.”

Georgia settled herself on Samantha’s comfortable couch. Her daughter had surprising talent as a seamstress, and she had made wonderful slipcovers and cushions to hide and dress up the unfortunate orange upholstery that had made the couch affordable. The slipcovers were a tweedy camel, and the cushions were rainbow-hued in different patterns and sizes.

Georgia had no idea where her daughter’s talent had come from. She herself had trouble threading a needle, and not because she couldn’t see. Samantha’s father had been an adoptee, so his birth family’s special abilities were a mystery.

Now she wondered if someone in her own family, some distant blood relative, had unknowingly passed on her talent with a sewing needle to Samantha. And, of course, that brought the charm bracelet to mind. Because one of the charms was a sewing machine.

Samantha brought in two glasses of iced herbal tea sweetened with honey and fragrant with lemon. Edna, who loved to cook, came out to serve something she called “devils on horseback,” which were dates wrapped in bacon, broiled and served on toothpicks. Along with them she’d made a cheese ball, which she served with crackers. Edna looked for recipes online the way most girls her age searched for news of their favorite boy band.

“I am impressed,” Georgia said. “This is amazing.”

Happy with the praise, Edna went back into the kitchen to work on something else she was creating for dinner, while her mother and grandmother enjoyed the first course.

“I made the main dish, but she wanted to do everything else,” Samantha said. “This week she’s talking about becoming a chef.”

Georgia thought of Lucas. “She can be anything she wants. Personally I’m voting for a brain surgeon who gives fabulous dinner parties for relaxation.”

“Sometimes I don’t know where that girl comes from.”

Georgia knew better than to point out that Samantha was the only one who did. Edna’s father was a mystery she never discussed. But the statement was a great lead-in to the subject she’d wanted to talk to her daughter about.

“I have something to show you. Something odd. Edna’s seen it already, but she doesn’t know how odd it really is.”

Samantha looked intrigued. Georgia reached for her purse and brought out the charm bracelet. She left the newspaper articles for later. She held out the bracelet, and Samantha took it.

“Is this yours?” Samantha examined the bracelet, charm by charm, then she looked up when Georgia didn’t answer. “I’ve never seen you wear it.”

“I found it, or rather I should say Edna did. Last week before we went out to the Goddess House. She was playing with it when I finally got back to my office. She said she’d found it on the corner of my desk.”

“Do you know how it got there?”

“I don’t. Nor this.” She took out the envelope and handed it to her daughter.

Samantha dropped the bracelet in her lap and carefully opened the envelope. She unfolded the articles and scanned the top one. Then she looked up.

“This is beyond strange.”

Georgia had been sure Samantha would see it that way, too.

“The thing is, if you look closely at the charms, you’ll see that one of them is the University of Georgia bulldog. And there are two dates before I was born. This wasn’t accidentally left by a student, as I first thought. I think it was left there for me. I think it may have belonged to my mother.”

“Whoa...” Samantha frowned. “Kind of an odd way of dropping back into your life after forty-nine years, wouldn’t you say?”

“Odd and unforgivable. All these years later to contact me with no way for me to contact her back?”

“There was nothing else with it?”

Georgia explained everything she had done so far to figure out where the bracelet had come from. “I can’t ask more questions,” she finished. “I don’t need a bunch of amateur sleuths digging into my past.”

Samantha thumbed through the other articles, then she folded them and put them back in the envelope. “Somebody went to too much trouble for this to be a prank.”

“These clippings have seen better days. They’re originals. And who would do something like this, anyway? It’s not a threat. It’s not like somebody could blackmail me with the story of my birth. It’s already out there. So, now what do I do?”

Samantha was examining each charm for a better look. “What can you do?”

“I can wait for whoever did this to reveal themselves. Maybe they’ll contact me directly, or maybe they’ll leave my mother’s diary or childhood photo albums on my desk.”

“This was strange enough, although maybe they will contact you. Maybe this was just to get you in the mood to hear the truth.”

“It’s been a week now. I think if they were going to contact me directly, they would have.”

Samantha looked up, having gone through all the charms. “So waiting’s probably not going to answer your questions.”

“I can try to find her myself.”

Samantha nodded, as if she was waiting for more.

“You know I’ve never looked. There was no reason I’d be more successful than the pros who looked at the time.”

“But now you have this. A bracelet of clues.”

“A good way to put it. Although are they good enough clues? And do I want to know?”

“I can’t answer the first question, and I don’t think you can, either, until you try to follow the trail. But can you answer the second? Because you’re the only one who has to.”

“It’s been years since I wished I knew the full story. Whoever left me in that hospital sink was probably young, probably terrified and definitely self-centered enough to worry more about what might happen to her than what would happen to me. She wasn’t checked in as a patient, so the experts guessed she came to the hospital in the final throes of labor, and from all signs, she had me in the same room where she abandoned me. I decided that’s all I ever really needed to know. But now?” She took the bracelet out of Samantha’s lap.

“Now your curiosity is piqued.”

“I look at you and at Edna, and I wish I could warn you about all the minefields in my family’s past. Wouldn’t you like to know if diabetes or breast cancer are common in the family so you can be extravigilant? Or a hundred other things? We can never know about your dad’s biological family, but maybe we could solve half the equation.”

“It would be nice, sure, but is that what’s most important? Don’t you need to put this first chapter of your life to rest? You say you have, and I think you’ve done everything you could. But now you have another chance to learn what you need to know, once and for all.”