Ama’s voice slipped into his head—I don’t remember anything. She was lying, he knew. It was the way she said it, so sure about not being sure. He wanted to take her by her shoulders and shake her, to show her a picture of Hazel and Eddie and make her understand what she was costing them. If this woman had been willing to tell the truth, this case could be cracked wide-open. Hell, it could be solved and done. What could a stranger in the woods have said to her in a matter of hours that would spook her—a defense attorney, who had no doubt seen some shit in her career—so bad?
His ears rang. The floor beneath him began to tilt. He walked unsteadily to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. It was empty. Of course it was. There was no pill fairy that would magically conjure a prescription and fill it. Martin shut the mirrored door and took stock of his reflection. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin sallow and hanging from the peaks of his cheekbones. It had been two days since he’d eaten something that hadn’t come out of a vending machine.
He didn’t want to eat. He wanted to work. He turned his back on the mirror and took out his cell phone. No service. He tilted his chin to the ceiling and closed his eyes. Did he have any prescriptions with refills left?
Stop it.
He needed something. A meeting, maybe. But he hadn’t looked into NA since arriving, and to look it up he’d have to drive back to the station. If he got in his car, it wouldn’t be a meeting he’d go looking for. It would be a fix. And even though he didn’t yet know much about Tarson, he knew the usual places to start asking. Push came to shove, he could always go drown himself in a case of cheap beer.
Get it together, Martin.
He returned to the living room, and his eyes caught on the picture of Ama he’d printed out at the station—her gray eyes, her tight-mouthed smile. He growled down at her, then moved out the door, down the steps, past his car, to the end of his driveway, and into the middle of the road, his breath and footsteps punctuating the quiet of the night. He pulled his phone from his pocket and selected the only number left on his speed-dial list.
“Hello?” his ex-wife’s voice was groggy with sleep.
“Don’t hang up,” he said.
The line went dead.
Martin pressed the phone to his middle and doubled over, hunger and desperation churning in his stomach. He wanted to scream or throw the phone or run into the darkness and not stop. He was chasing a ghost—a theory. Was it any wonder he couldn’t catch it?
Martin stared at the ground, his hands in fists. He’d have a better chance sleeping at the station than he would here, and at least if he locked himself inside, he’d have to think a little longer before going to hunt down some kid with a backpack pharmacy.
He climbed in his car and cranked the ignition. His phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and answered it without looking.
“This is Martin.”
“What did you take?” his ex-wife, Stacy, asked.
“Nothing.” A tremble began inside him. “I’m clean, I swear. I didn’t want to be. I’m still… I’m fighting it.”
“What’s wrong?”
The burn of tears came to Martin’s eyes, and he had to stifle a laugh of relief at the sound of her. Someone who knew him. Someone who had once loved him.
“It’s… it’s a case,” he started.
“Go ahead,” she said, and he could hear her settling into her favorite chair, the creak of leather, the shift of a heavy blanket. Only his wife was cold year-round in Savannah.
Ex-wife, he reminded himself; then he relayed everything he knew about the case.
“Go to sleep, Martin,” she said once he was finished. “It’s three thirty in the morning. You sound delirious. Go to sleep, and when you wake up, tell Eddie what Ama said. He’s known all this time what no one else has seen.”
“Or he killed his daughter and shot Ama in cold blood,” Martin countered, Stacy’s sudden certainty somehow having the opposite effect on his own.
“He didn’t. At least, you don’t think he did,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. I know you, Marty. I still know you. Can you imagine how upset he’d be if he found out from anyone else that you have evidence Hazel might still be alive?”
Martin breathed out, weighted down and buoyant at the same time. “Okay. So I tell him. Then what?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, her voice soft and far away. Martin caught himself pressing the speaker tighter against his ear, closing his fingers around the phone. “You’ll just have to wait and see,” she said. “Go get some rest.”
“Okay,” he answered, knowing full well he wouldn’t.
“I mean it. Eddie is going to have questions, and maybe good information you’ll miss if you’re tired when you hear it. He deserves to have you at your best.”
Martin breathed in, out, remembering all the times she’d tried to save him from himself, tried to save what they had. How she deserved to have him at his best and how he had let her down.
“Okay,” he said again. This time, he meant it.
MICHAEL Chapter 43 | October 2004 | Tarson, Georgia
SOMEONE HAS LAID FLOWERS AT the foot of my tombstone, which relays only my name and the dates of my birth and death. I cannot imagine who might have brought these here. My father’s and sister’s graves each have a single flower propped up on their markers. Mine is different, a cluster of blossoms tied with a ribbon. There’s no fourth tombstone for my mother. I’m not yet sure whether she’s still living in my old house, but it would seem she’s still alive.
My gaze lingers on my sister’s grave, and I can still imagine the boundary line of where they pulled the earth up, how short it was compared to all the other visible graves. By way of comparison, my father’s grave seemed impossibly long, the mound of dirt behind it a mountain. How would he claw his way through all of that when at last he woke up and came home?
I know now that he was working to prepare me. Mother, too, in her own way.
“You were wrong, Mother. The third time isn’t mastery. We don’t master. Not in this life. The very best we can hope for is to understand how to allow Fate to work her plan, to forfeit control. Three isn’t mastery. Three is Fate.”
I find myself wishing I was speaking to her grave.
A gust of hot air sails across the cemetery, and in it I hear echoes of my mother’s wail the day we put my sister in the ground, her hands and forehead pressed to the wet earth, her black dress hunching around hips still wide with recent pregnancy.
G. My mother grieves in G.
MARTIN Chapter 44 | 7:30 PM, December 3, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
MARTIN AWOKE FACEDOWN ON HIS mattress, still wearing his work clothes, his shoes dropped on the floor at the foot of his bed, the heavy curtains drawn across his window shrouding the room in darkness. He felt around for his phone and, squinting, brought it to his face. The screen was black, the battery dead.
“Shit.” He struggled to sit up. Even though he’d spent most of the past couple of days sitting down or standing still, he felt as though he’d lost a boxing match and then been hit by a truck on the way home. He slid out of bed, plugged his phone into the charger, and shuffled into the kitchen to check the time. The clock on the microwave read seven thirty. Martin stared at it, then swung his gaze to the window, where morning sunlight should be streaming through, but it was black as night outside.