back door. I thought he might be leaving, so I sneaked out to the rail. I didn’t see anything, but after a while I heard somebody laughing. It sounded exactly like her.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, Jamie. Let’s talk about something else.”
The boy hung his head. “That’s easy for you to say. Why don’t you just come get me? Dad wants to be with her, not me. I’m not sleepy at all.”
“I can’t just come get you. We talked about that. But your father wants you, Jamie.” Alex wasn’t sure whether this was true. “He wants both of you.”
The boy shook his head. “After the game, all Dad talked about was my strikeouts. And what else I did wrong. Nothing about my double.”
Alex put on a smile and nodded as though she understood. “I think a lot of dads are like that. Your granddad did that when I played softball.”
Jamie looked surprised. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. He didn’t hesitate to tell me what I did wrong.”
This wasn’t quite true. Jim Morse could give constructive criticism, but he knew how to do it without making you feel bad. And most of what Alex remembered from being ten years old was unconditional praise.
“Your dad’s just trying to help you improve,” she added.
“I guess. I don’t like it, though.” Jamie reached down, then lifted a heavy book onto his desk. “I was supposed to do my homework earlier, but I didn’t feel like it. Can I do it now?”
“Sure.”
“Will you stay on while I do it?”
Alex smiled. “You know I will.”
Now Jamie was grinning. They had done this many times since Grace’s death. While Jamie read his assignment, Alex sat watching him, her mind roving back through the past. For some reason her father was in her mind tonight. Jim Morse had loved his grandson more than anything else in the world, and that might have included his own daughters. When Grace and Alex were young, Jim had been building a business, and despite putting real effort into being a father, he had seen them mostly in passing. But with Jamie, he’d had endless hours to spend with the boy. Jim had taught him to hunt and fish, to water-ski, to fly kites, and not just to throw a baseball but to pitch one for real. Jamie Fennell could throw a curveball when he was eight years old. Jim had spent all this time with Jamie despite the fact that Jim and Bill Fennell did not get along. In Alex’s eyes, her father had proved his manhood for all time by compromising as much as was required to keep close contact with his grandson.
One thing Alex knew in her bones, though: if her father had been alive to hear Grace’s deathbed accusation of murder, the events of the past weeks would have unfolded differently. That very night, Bill Fennell would have been hauled into an empty room, slammed against a wall, and made to cough up all the sediment at the bottom of his soul. Had that treatment not proved sufficient to dredge up the truth, Bill would have been taken on an involuntary boat ride with Jim Morse, Will Kilmer, and some of the other ex-cops who worked for their detective agency. One way or another, Bill would have spilled all he knew about Grace’s death. And Jamie would not be living in Bill’s ugly mansion on the edge of the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Jackson. If the courts didn’t save Jamie, his grandfather would have taken him somewhere safe to be raised by people who loved him. And Alex would have gone with them. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
None of that had happened, of course. Because like his daughter Grace, Jim Morse was dead. Alex had studied all the eyewitness accounts, but none of them ever dovetailed exactly—unlike the accounts of her own act of lunacy at the bank, when Broadbent was killed. Everybody had seen exactly the same thing on that day. But with her father’s death it was different. At age sixty, Jim had walked into a dry cleaner’s late on a Friday afternoon. He normally used the drive-through window, but that day he chose to go inside. Two female clerks stood behind the counter. A young black man wearing a three-piece suit was waiting in the store, but he was no customer. The real customers were lying flat on their stomachs behind the counter, beside a grocery bag filled with cash from the register.
Jim didn’t know that when he walked in, but Alex figured it had taken him about six seconds to realize something was wrong. No one was going to bluff Jim Morse out of a robbery in progress, no matter how old he was. The girls behind the counter were so scared they could hardly speak when Jim walked up to the counter and started a monologue about the weather: how warm the fall had been, and how it used to snow once or twice a year in Mississippi, but nowadays almost never. One clerk saw Jim glance behind the counter without moving his head, but the other didn’t. What she did see was Jim take his wife’s clothes from the hanging rod and turn to leave the store. As he passed the waiting “customer,” Jim flattened him with a savage blow to the throat. The clerk was shocked that “an old gray-haired dude” had attacked a muscular man in his early twenties. No one who knew Jim Morse was surprised. He’d often carried a gun after retirement, but he hadn’t on that day, not for a short run to the cleaner’s. Jim was digging in the fallen robber’s jacket when the plate-glass window of the store exploded. One clerk screamed, then fell silent as a bullet punctured her left cheek. The other dived behind the counter. After that, few facts were known.
The medical examiner believed that the shot that killed Alex’s father had been fired from behind the counter, not from the getaway car parked out front. Not that it mattered. After a lifetime spent courting danger, Jim Morse had simply run out of luck. And despite relentless efforts by the police department, by his old partner, and even a large reward offered by the Police Benevolent Association, his killers were never caught. Alex knew that her father had not wanted to die that day, but she knew something else, too: he would rather have died like that than the way his wife was dying now—in agony and by inches.
The sound of Jamie closing his book startled her from her reverie.
“I’m done,” he said, his green eyes still on the screen. “It’s way easier when you’re with me.”
“I like being here with you. It helps me work, too.”
Jamie smiled. “You weren’t working. I saw you. You were just sitting there.”
“I was working in my head. A lot of my work is like that.”
Jamie’s smile vanished, and he looked away from the screen.
“Jamie? Are you all right? Look at me, honey. Look into the camera.”
At length, he did, and his sad eyes pierced her to the core.
“Aunt Alex?”
“Yes?”
“I miss my mom.”
Alex forced herself to repress her grief. Tears were pooling in her eyes, but they would not help Jamie. One thing she had learned the hard way: when adults started crying, kids lost all their composure.
“I know you do, baby,” she said softly. “I miss her, too.”
“She used to say what you said. That she was working in her head.”
Alex tilted back her head and wiped her eyes, unable to shut out the memory of the night Grace died, when she’d snatched up Jamie and raced out of the hospital. She hadn’t gone far, just to a nearby Pizza Hut, where she’d broken the news of Grace’s death and comforted Jamie as best she could. Her own
