He’s a good shot. Ama’s words bloomed inside his mind, drawing all focus. Eddie was right—Ama had jumped in front of that bullet, and now she was aiming for her abductor or Hazel, or maybe both. He had to admire her. She was pulling off a socialite extravaganza in a matter of days, all to cover up a bigger, more important move. There was no way the department could’ve moved as fast.
He also hated her guts. It was very likely that she was going to get very close to a serial killer’s location, and Martin didn’t want to come with just an old, limping man and two guns. He wanted to bring down the fires of the GBI and a SWAT team so they had every chance to take the perp into custody and survive doing it.
“Damn that woman,” he said. He wondered how she would react when he told her he’d interviewed Mrs. Walton… when he told her Mrs. Walton was very sure Michael was still very alive.
“Who was it? And why’d they want my number?” Eddie asked.
Martin nearly lied, but he couldn’t bring himself to mislead the poor man again. “It was Ama Chaplin. She wanted your phone number so she could invite you to the fundraiser personally.”
“Can I go? Are you going?”
“Eddie, you’re not a prisoner. This isn’t house arrest. It’s just an arrangement, for now. We’re trying to limit the outside world’s access to you, and we promised the DA we’d keep you under supervision. It’s the only way they’d delay charges.” A drop of sauce from Eddie’s slice of pizza landed on the floor. Eddie dabbed his napkin into his water cup and scrubbed it clean before it could stain.
“Sorry about the lack of furniture. I picked up an air mattress for you, but honestly, it’s probably less comfortable than the sofa at the station. My ex-wife was more the decorator than me. The house needs a woman’s touch,” Martin said. He felt a pang of guilt in his chest, remembering how sure he’d been that Eddie was cold and calculating, manipulative of the entire justice system and every heart in two towns.
Eddie snorted. “Between me and my wife, I was the decorator. But the yard was her territory. She’d tend a garden like most women fawn over a baby. Had the greenest thumb in Texas. I’m a homebody, though. I want to like the way my house looks, and she said if I liked it so much, it was my responsibility to keep it that way. Heck of a woman.” Eddie’s eyes shone with emotion, and he cleared his throat. “I know people thought me moving right after she died was bad, bad for Hazel especially. But I realized my wife is what made that house a home. Not the furniture, not the paint or the pictures. Her voice, her laughter, her dirt all over my clean floor. I couldn’t walk through the front door of that house anymore without her in it.”
“Why was she up on a ladder?” Martin asked.
“It was my fault. She’d asked me to hang flower boxes under the bedroom windows, had been after me for weeks about it. The windows were on the second story, but there was a little pitch roof under them that shielded the front porch. Best I can figure she’d made it up to the roof. I never told her how slick the shingles are when they’re wet, and it was springtime, dewy in the morning. Hazel got home from school, found her in the yard, ladder on its side.” His voice broke, and he stopped, shook his head. “That’s the other reason we left. Hazel was so scared to come home and find something bad again that she stopped leaving the house. We pulled out a map and tried to find somewhere as far and as different as we could. We just needed… we needed to start over.”
“That makes plenty of sense to me,” Martin said, remembering how he’d fit what he could of his old life in two boxes and a duffel bag and left the rest behind. His thoughts returned to Ama. When he’d mentioned Michael’s name on the phone outside her motel room, he would’ve sworn she dropped the phone. Maybe she’d just hung up on him. He’d never know. But either way, she’d let him in. If in her mind Michael was a closed book, a dead body, would she have been as affected by the mention of his name?
Martin knew she did have to uphold confidentiality even after death, but she’d shut down completely. He thought back to how she’d reacted when he asked about what she remembered from her attack. She’d given him the same stonewall. She was protecting someone. Whether it was herself or someone else, Martin wasn’t sure. Ama would no doubt be faster to hide the identity of someone she knew. Someone she had feared not for just a matter of hours but for years.
Maybe Michael Walton wasn’t a victim at all.
MARTIN Chapter 66 | 7:05 AM, December 7, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
IT WAS DAWN WHEN MARTIN pulled up to the school, hoping to fit in an interview before classes started. Eddie sat in the passenger seat. He was reading Hazel’s journal again. It had spent the previous night tucked under his arm.
“It’s probably best if I go in alone,” Martin said. “I don’t want anyone seeing you in police presence and making the wrong assumption.”
“Okay.” Eddie’s voice was distant, and he didn’t look up.
There were two teachers currently employed by Tarson High School who had also been there when Michael Walton was a student, and only one, Mrs. Jacobs, had had Michael in her classroom. Martin went inside and found her room, tapping on the doorframe.
“Mrs. Jacobs, Detective Locklear. Thanks for meeting me so early.”
“Yes.” She sat up and swiped her blond bangs to the side, smiling. “Please, sit in any of the desks.”
Mrs. Jacobs had an obvious warmth about her, a softness evident from twenty feet away, and Martin half expected to see a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of warm milk on her desk.
“You’re here about Michael,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Anything you can tell me about him. Nothing is irrelevant or too small a detail.”
“Well, I had him for biology. He liked my class, I could tell. He was always reading his textbook, even when he was supposed to be listening to me. He did well on his tests. But his semester grades were average at best. He seldom turned in homework, didn’t participate in class except for during labs. I don’t know that I ever heard him say more than three or four words at a time, but to read his essays, you’d think you were reading the work of a college student. His vocabulary was well beyond his years—well beyond Tarson, to be frank. And he had a memory like a steel trap, incredible mind for details.”
“What about his personality? Did he talk much? Did he have a friend? A hobby?”
“He wrote music notes in the margins of his textbook, even though they aren’t supposed to mark inside the books at all.” Her expression changed, becoming heavier. “I tried not to get after him too much, though. You could tell a raised voice meant something to him.”
“Can you explain that to me?”
“I… I don’t want to speak ill of someone who isn’t here to defend herself.”
“You mean his mother,” Martin prompted.
Mrs. Jacobs nodded. “Nowadays I’m sure a student in his condition would be reported. But back then, it just wasn’t something we did, especially after everything his family had been through. I tried to bring him a little extra food, send him home with a new pencil. He’d wear these oversize long-sleeve shirts, even in August. He would tell me he was wearing them because they belonged to his father, but one time one of the sleeves was pushed up, and I saw burn marks in a line up his arm.”