“What did Ama say?” Captain’s blue eyes were bright, and Martin was struck by the hope in them.
“She doesn’t remember, Captain.”
“Doesn’t remember what? Hazel?” Captain capped a pen, and his brow descended, casting shadows on his eyes.
“Anything. Ama Chaplin doesn’t remember anything.”
MICHAEL Chapter 35 | July 1993 | Atlanta, Georgia
IT’S NEARING TWO IN THE afternoon on a Sunday. Dumpsters should be heaped with new scraps in the coming hour. I can’t bring myself to linger like a stray dog, but I will walk by and lift my nose, sampling the air like I might be strolling once again through Tarson Woods, the end of my father’s walking stick marking a leisurely cadence on the asphalt.
“Didn’t think I’d see you again,” a woman’s voice calls out. Garnet is standing in the frame of the back door to a bar, old grease emanating from behind her. She has a lacy apron tied around her waist and a full trash bag in her hand, red hair piled on top of her head. “I heard what happened. You should’ve said my name straightaway,” she says.
I tighten my grip on the walking stick and stare at her. Her advice nearly cost me everything, but the mention of her name saved me the stick. “I can’t feed you, but I know someone you might want to talk to. He has a recording studio, and he’s looking for somebody to clean after hours. He’s good, honest. That’s harder to find than a free meal around here. If you want, I can introduce you.”
“He makes music?” I ask, interest sparking a sharp and sudden feeling in my chest like the first note struck in a silent, waiting concert hall.
“So you do talk.” Garnet smiles. She pulls a little notepad and a pen from her apron front and jots down something on a piece of paper before handing it to me. It’s a name and an address. “Do you have a name so I can tell him who I’m sending?”
I don’t answer.
“Just tell him Garnet sent you. But this time, it better come out of your mouth the second you get there. None of this scared, quiet-mouse nonsense. You can be scared. We’re all scared. But you can’t let it show. Not if you want to survive.” She tosses the trash into the dumpster and wipes her hands. “I think for now I’ll call you Sticks,” she says. “I gave myself a new name when I came here. You could do the same. No harm in that.”
AMA Chapter 36 | 6:00 PM, December 2, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
AMA RAISED THE HEAD OF her new bed. Now that she was stable, they’d moved her to the maternity ward on the police department’s order, to better shield her from press and public access. The added security was a bonus, but a baby was constantly squalling, and in the hallway, visitors and siblings and new grandparents squealed and whispered.
Her mind was louder. Every time she let her focus wander, her mind’s eye ran to the picture of Eddie Stevens, not his cloaked face peering at her through the dark and rain but the mug shot of him from the Tarson Police Department, his face full and empty at the same time.
“They are going to lock him up and throw away the key,” Detective Martin had said. “He admits to shooting you. The gun was registered to him. He was covered in gunpowder and your blood. You’re a defense attorney. This is as slam dunk as it gets. There is only one way this man gets off.”
Witness testimony. They both knew it.
Martin had gripped the railing on her bed, his skin drawn tight over scarred knuckles.
“If you can’t remember what happened, Eddie Stevens’s life is over, and from the way he tells it, he shot at someone to try to save you. He just hit the wrong target.”
She’d stared at him, remaining blank. He’d pushed back and turned away from her, the soles of his shoes squeaking on the tile.
“What did he say he was doing out there?” Ama had called out as he left.
Martin had paused near the door, his chin over his shoulder, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“He said he went in looking for you.”
“Why?” She’d leaned forward. Baited, she realized, but didn’t care.
Martin’s eyes flicked to her for the briefest of moments, and then he’d walked out.
She watched the doorway now, imagining him there even though the conversation had taken place in the ICU hours before. She had a feeling Martin was really the one behind her move to the maternity ward instead of a general floor. He must feel pretty certain there was another man in the woods aside from Eddie Stevens.
A new nurse walked in and scrawled his name on the board—Nathan—before he checked her blood pressure and took her temperature. Ama realized she’d never asked Michael his name. Not when he was butchering that song in the hotel bar and not when she’d seen him on the path in Tarson. He’d just offered it. And she was annoyed. She didn’t ask—hadn’t cared. She’d spent entire nights with men whose name she never learned. Names weren’t important—a string of letters like beads on a necklace, so we know when to turn around when someone behind us calls.
Ama was worried about only one voice at her back. Even all these years later, she could still feel Michael’s frigid stare penetrating the seam of her jacket and burrowing under her skin as she did her best not to run from that dumpy little courthouse. She remembered the relief she’d felt when she’d heard Michael was dead, the exhale, the little laugh that followed. She’d giggled, for Christ’s sake, went out for drinks with an old friend, paid for the rounds, and didn’t tell him why.
But Michael wasn’t dead.
And now there was a girl locked up somewhere in those godforsaken woods, and even if Ama told someone about Hazel, no one would find her. Michael might just be an even bigger mystery than that evergreen labyrinth. No one knew him. His mother was blind and had been well around the bend even seventeen years ago. If she was still alive, she’d be little help. The only person who had any idea how Michael ticked was Ama, and he’d had two decades to sharpen his tools since using a paring knife to slice neighborhood pets and peel back their throats and lungs to look like butterfly wings.
The only tools she’d sharpened in those same years were weapons meant to fight back against those who would hold Michael accountable for what he’d done. She’d positioned herself between defendants and their accusers for so long that she wasn’t sure if others saw any difference between the people who committed these crimes and what her role was in the aftermath. She knew she wasn’t an accessory after the fact. So why now, with a bullet wound in her chest, a brace on her foot, and a nurse checking her vital signs every three hours, did it suddenly feel like it?
MICHAEL Chapter 37 | October 2004 | Atlanta, Georgia
I SIT AT A CORNER booth in a Waffle House, my third cup of black coffee steaming between my hands, the entrance ramp to the interstate a quarter mile away, and Ama Chaplin’s business card on the table.
Chaplin.
She must’ve married. I close my eyes and recall her hand as she shoved a wad of cash in my face at the hotel bar. She wasn’t wearing a ring. Then again, she doesn’t seem the type. She was different than I remember. Something about her was equal parts emptier and more weighted down, worn dull and yet sharp enough to slice through bone in a single stroke. But it was her, striding away to the cadence of an imaginary snare drum, right between the two trees that framed the doorway to the patio, their leaves impossibly yellow.