“What are you saying, exactly, Mrs. Walton? Do you feel you mistreated your son?”
“Oh, yes. I blame myself for everything.”
“Are you referring to the trial?” Martin asked carefully. “Or your son’s suicide?”
A smile broke over Mrs. Walton’s wrinkled face. “My son didn’t jump to his death in that river,” she said. “I know people think so. I let them think so. But I can tell you that river would not see my son dead. I tried, Detective.”
“You tried what, exactly?” Martin reached for his pad and pen.
“Early one morning, when Michael was twelve, I heard him open the refrigerator then leave the house. I watched him from my window. He went to our neighbor’s property, stood behind a tree, and lured her cat to him with a piece of sandwich meat. I wasn’t seeing well—my peripheral vision was all but gone, and what was left had double imaging. But then later that week I found a dead cat in the yard, eyes plucked out, heart in a Dixie cup, belly split open. The next morning, I heard him leave again, earlier this time, and I followed him. He went into Tarson Woods. I caught up with him. I took him to the river, and I pushed him in.”
“Mrs. Walton, it’s my understanding that Michael died in Cold River when he was eighteen.”
“I didn’t say he drowned. I pushed him in. I chased him downstream, waiting for him to go under and stay under, but the river spat him out. I told him… I told him he had to prove his life was destined for something great to keep it, that I wouldn’t let him suffer this town for no reason, and I made him jump two more times. But the river wouldn’t keep him. And come dawn, what was left of my vision had gone dark. You see, it doesn’t matter how many times he jumped into Cold River. He could’ve tied cinder blocks to both feet, and the river would still have found a way to save him. And I swear, it punished me for trying to keep him in it.”
“I thought you said the tumors affected your sight.”
“They were part of it, to be sure. But you aren’t from around here, are you, sir? You don’t know the way this town works, the way it holds on to people. For a few months after my diagnosis, I thought all of it was tumors. But now my tumors are gone and the light treatments I do have helped me regain minimal sight. But I still hear the river. I still feel nervous every time I get close to the county line.”
Martin smiled, nearly disregarding her suspicions, but then he remembered the pull of the Tarson police station, the little job post on a message board, the way he couldn’t stop staring at it. But his obsession with this town had everything to do with Toni Hargrove… didn’t it?
“So if you don’t think Michael drowned in the river, what do you think happened to him? Why would he carve I’m not sorry into a tree?”
“I used to teach piano, and I thought I could make him better than I had been, find him a ticket out of this town if he could just play well enough. But he had no ear for music. Utterly talentless, and to hear it would just rile my blood. He would cry and snot and say he was sorry, and I would bark at him, ‘Don’t be sorry, be better. Sorry doesn’t do anything for me!’ ” She was yelling by the end of the recollection, her face distorted.
Martin sat back. If this was a cancer-free Mrs. Walton, Martin couldn’t fathom spending time with her and her tumors.
“The message was for me,” she concluded. “I believe he was telling me goodbye. He was leaving… to be better.”
“So why let people believe he’s dead if you think he’s still alive?”
“I owe him that much. After what I did, what he did, the trial, the way his father died… there was no life for him here.”
“What do you think Michael would mean by ‘better’? What would his dream be?”
“A doctor, maybe. Or a coroner.” A bitter smile pulled at her face. “He liked to understand how things worked. I really think that’s what he was doing with those animals. Maybe he found them dead.”
“You don’t really believe that,” Martin pressed.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. But I do know he wanted to be great. I could feel it in him. He got that from me. He just didn’t get the talent to back it up.” She held up her hands and stretched her spindly fingers wide. “I was made for the piano. Michael had the deck stacked against him—a short reach, no ear, no feel for the keys. He just needed to find his instrument.
“Before I lost my sight, I found a few blank pages of composition paper in his room. He was going to try to write a song. He’d titled it ‘Molly’s Song.’ Molly was his sister’s name. She lived a matter of minutes. The silence in the house, in the nursery, when there should have been coos and squeals and cries, it was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. I think he wanted to fill that silence for me.”
Martin jotted down some notes, until a thought struck him between the eyes and he put his pen down.
“Mrs. Walton, do you think there’s any chance your son would ever come back to Tarson?”
“Not of his own free will,” she started. “But Tarson has a way of drawing people back, and that river… I swear that water runs in his veins. Detective, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Martin answered.
“Do you believe in Fate?”
AMA Chapter 59 | 10:00 PM, December 5, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
AMA SAT ON THE FLOOR of her motel room. Beside her was a nearly empty suitcase. Before today, she hadn’t opened it in over a decade. It was hard to imagine that ten years had passed since the day she organized all the evidence and information she’d ever found on her father’s case and filed it inside this piece of luggage. Five hours ago, Lindsey had brought it to her motel room on her request, along with a takeout container of chicken soup Ama hadn’t asked for. Now, the soup sat untouched where Lindsey had left it, and most of the contents of the suitcase were arranged around Ama in a circle, organized in chronological order.
The room was silent, a Do Not Disturb tag hung on the outside doorknob, the motel phone unplugged from the wall, and Ama’s cell phone switched off. Her mind roared. She jotted down thoughts as they came, typed fragments of information into a search engine, and wrote down anything that stuck out, desperate for a linchpin, a foundation stone: the beginning of this thirty-year-old crime, something neither attorney had ever been capable of providing at trial.
She wanted to believe now like she had then that her father hadn’t known what was going on, that all he took in that deal gone bad was the fall. But she also remembered the two-story house they’d moved into, the four-poster canopy bed she’d slept in, the gleaming new car her father had driven home one Friday evening and the look on her mother’s face when he’d pulled into the driveway and said he was taking them out to eat. If he hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected, had he at least wondered why he was being paid so much to route freight trucks?
She wished her mother were alive to sit on this floor with her and sort these pieces of her father’s life. She had only been nine when he was arrested, eleven when he was convicted, fifteen when he died. As an adult looking back, she knew she was remembering only the very best and very worst moments—that there were days’ and months’ and years’ worth of moments that had faded from her memory. But from a young age she’d known her father was innocent, good, wrongly put away, and this truth had made her who she was, what she was, had steered every step of her path.