At twenty-two, Sylvie Carson has known a lifetime’s worth of trouble. When she was a child, her baby brother was shot to death by a man named Preacher Eli. Orphaned in her teens, Sylvie is now raising her own baby with no partner in sight. For all these reasons, Leah Teal, the only police detective in Alvin, Alabama, tries to be patient when Sylvie calls the station day and night, always with some new false alarm. But now, Preacher Eli is out of prison and moving back to town.
As far as the law is concerned, the old man has paid his dues, although Leah’s twelve-year-old son, Abe, vehemently disagrees. Between that and his relentless curiosity about the daddy he hardly knew, Abe’s imagination is running wild. While Leah struggles with how much of the past to reveal to Abe, she’s also concerned about Sylvie’s mounting panic. Something in her gut tells her the girl might be a target after all. For as Leah knows well, there’s danger not just in the secrets others keep from us but in the lies that corrupt from within. It’s a hunch that will be tested soon enough as tensions on both sides mount.
Evoking the South with depth and grace, Michael Hiebert’s poignant, gripping novel captures the strength wrought by heartache and lost innocence—and the transformative power of forgiveness, wherever it comes.
Release date:
December 27, 2016
Publisher:
Pinnacle Books
Print pages:
320
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“Dewey,” I said, “if I say it was blue, it was blue. Why the heck would I say it was blue if it was some other color? It’s not like the important part of the story has anything to do with it bein’ blue.”
“I just ain’t never seen one that’s blue,” Dewey said. “That’s all, Abe.”
“You ever seen one any other color?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, have you ever even seen one at all, blue or not? This one was the first one I’d ever seen. I mean other than in movies and on TV an’ all that. It’s not like you see ’em every day.”
This question seemed to stump Dewey for a bit as he thought it over. Least, I think he was thinking about it. He may have been pondering the aluminum foil he was unrolling around my mother’s living room floor. “Not sure,” he said. “Not that I can remember.”
“I think that’s enough aluminum foil, don’t you?” I asked. “How much is in a roll?”
He read the side of the box. “Fifty feet.”
“And you had four boxes? That’s two hundred feet, Dewey.”
“I know, but when I paced off your livin’ room, it was ten by twelve. Right there we have a hundred and twenty feet. And it ain’t like the foil’s gonna be laid down flat. And I reckon for this to work, Abe, we’re gonna need to go into your dinin’ room, too.”
“Well, there ain’t no more foil,” I said. “My mom’s already gonna be mad we used up two brand-new rolls.”
“I took two from my house, too,” he said. “At least we’re sharin’ responsibility.”
“But the difference is that you reckon this is gonna work. I don’t.”
“It’ll work.”
I sighed.
“We need two more rolls,” he said.
“We ain’t got two more rolls, Dewey. I reckon if two hundred feet don’t do it, two thousand feet ain’t gonna make no difference.”
He thought this over. “You might have a point. At the very least we should see some indication of it workin’. Then we can show your mom and she’ll gladly buy us two more rolls.”
“My mom ain’t gonna want aluminum foil runnin’ around the inside of her house, Dewey.”
“She is when she sees what it does for her television reception,” he said. “Think of how much money we’re savin’ her.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“On a satellite dish.”
“She ain’t buyin’ no satellite dish.”
“Exactly.”
“Why aren’t we doing this at your place?” I asked him.
“Abe, my mom’s home. It’s hard enough to do anythin’ at my place when my mom ain’t home,” he said. “You’re lucky your mom works all day shootin’ people.”
“She don’t shoot people all day,” I said. “I don’t reckon she’s ever actually shot anyone.” My mother was the only detective the Alvin Police Department had, and, if she had shot anyone, she certainly hadn’t told me about it. And it seemed like the sort of thing she’d probably mention.
“I reckon she has.”
“She hasn’t,” I assured him.
“I bet she thinks about it, though,” Dewey said. “A lot.”
“Can we just get this finished so I can have it cleaned up ’fore she gets home?” I asked him.
Dewey was taking the aluminum foil and rolling it into a sort of shiny rope. He made sure all the new pieces fit tightly against the old ones, making one solid snake that ran around the inside of my living room, starting and ending at the back of the television set.
“So why was they all blue?” Dewey asked. “The knights, I mean. Or was there other colors, too? They can’t all be on the same side. Be awful confusin’ if they was all blue.”
“The other ones were red. I saw one of them later.”
“Which ones were the good guys?” Dewey asked.
“How do you mean?”
“There’s always a good side and a bad side, Abe. Were the blue ones the good ones or the bad ones? These colors make it hard to know. Usually they use somethin’ obvious like black and white. Then you know who you should be rootin’ for.”
“Do you root for the good guys or the bad guys?” I asked.
Dewey stopped laying down his aluminum foil pipeline and considered this. “That depends on when in my life you had asked me. When I was little I always wanted the good guys to win. Then I went through a phase where I secretly hoped for the bad guys.”
“And?” I asked. “What about now?”
“Now I guess I just want to see a fair fight,” he said. “Did the blues and the reds both have swords?”
I started to get excited. The swords had been the best part. “You shoulda seen the swords,” I said. “The red blades actually glowed the same color as the knights, and they were huge. They looked so big I doubt I coulda lifted one off the ground. And each sword had a different gem in its pommel and smaller ones all over its hilt. They actually had real swords for sale in Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, but Mom refused to buy me one. She told me I’d wind up takin’ somebody’s eye out with it or somethin’.”
“Wow,” Dewey said, looking off into the distance and seemingly speaking to himself. “A real sword. That would be somethin’.” His attention came back to the living room and all the foil. He looked me straight in the eyes. “Especially if we both had one. We could have sword fights.”
“Are you even listenin’ to a word I’m sayin’?” I asked him. “These were real swords, Dewey. We couldn’t have sword fights with ’em. We’d wind up killin’ each other.”
“Still, it’s fun to think about.”
I hesitated. “You’re right. It is fun to think about.”
Dewey’s aluminum foil rope ran along the walls of the entire living room, running behind the big stuffed chair and coming right up to the back of the TV. We’d even pushed the sofa away from the wall so that we could make sure it was as long as possible.
“Okay,” I said, just in case Dewey had other ideas, “I think we’ve done as much as we’re doin’ with the foil. Now what?”
“Now I unhook the cable from your TV and attach the foil antenna with these alligator clips,” he said.
“Can I ask where you got this idea?”
He shrugged. “While you was at Disney World I started an inventor’s notebook. Turns out I’m pretty smart. I got lots of great ideas. They’re probably worth a million dollars.”
I glanced around the room. My mother was going to have a conniption when she saw what we’d done to it, and especially when she found out we’d used up two brand-new rolls of her aluminum foil. “Probably,” I said. “You give off a glow of genius, that’s for certain.”
The light falling in through the window above the sofa was starting to turn purple and orange, which meant it was getting late. This further meant my mother would probably be home soon—unless she wound up working late like she sometimes did. I took another look at Dewey’s tinfoil snake and hoped this was going to be a late night for her.
Dewey hooked up the alligator clips to the screws attached to the electronic box where the Cable Vision wire normally attached to the television. “That should do it,” he said.
“So now what?”
“Now we turn on the TV and enjoy havin’ all the stations folks get with satellite dishes without payin’ a cent. All it cost us was the price of four rolls of aluminum foil.”
“It didn’t cost us nothin’,” I reminded him. “We stole the foil from our moms, remember?”
“Even better,” he said, rubbing his hands together. He pulled the button on the television that turned the set on. For a minute the screen stayed dark, then it slowly grew into a picture of white static.
“Works well,” I said sarcastically. I snuck another glance out the window. The weather had cleared up considerably from this morning. It had been four days since we’d gotten back from Disney World, and every day since we’d returned had been full of pouring rain, including the beginning of this one. This afternoon, though, the sun had finally broken through the clouds and cleaned up the sky.
Dewey changed the channel to more static. “Somethin’s wrong. We didn’t hook somethin’ up properly.”
“You know what’s wrong?” I asked. “You’re tryin’ to get satellite TV with aluminum foil.”
“Wait, this has to work. I had it all figured out.” He started rapidly switching channels. Then he came to a channel that was clear as Mount Bell on a brisk autumn morning, as my mother would say. “Look!” he said, nearly screaming it. “It works! Look how clear it is!”
I had to admit it was clear.
“Told you it would work!” He went around the dial the entire way and found three more channels we could get. All tremendously clear. This seemed to satisfy him immensely.
“So you’re happy with your invention?” I asked.
“I’ll say.”
I looked at him and blinked. “I’m a little confused.”
“About what?”
“Who exactly you’ll be marketin’ this to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is this for folk who can’t afford Cable Vision but happen to have a surplus of aluminum foil and one or two favorite channels they simply cannot live without?” I once again looked at the foil running along the edge of the floor everywhere. “Or will you try and make it some sort of home décor product? Not to mention the fact that you can’t really charge more than the price of four rolls of aluminum foil for it or people will just go out and buy their own and set everythin’ up for themselves.”
Dewey frowned, perplexed by my complex questions. “It’s a start, okay? I have many inventions. I’ve already filled half a notebook,” he said. “You may have been wastin’ time in Disney World with blue and red knights, but at least I was doing somethin’ productive.”
Nodding, I said, “Okay. Now, do you mind if we try to get all this put away and see if we can make the television work properly again ’fore my mom gets home from work?”
Dewey glared at me. “You just don’t know genius when you see it.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t. I’ve never really been much of a noticer of brilliance.”
He unhooked the alligator clips. I began to roll up the two hundred feet of foil.
Just then my sister, Carry, came into the living room. She’d been out with some friends all day and I hadn’t even heard her come home. “Abe?” she asked quietly. I looked up into her blue eyes. Her blond curls swayed on either side of her face. “What the hell are you two doin’?” she asked.
“Preparin’ ourselves for the future,” I said. “It’s comin’. And it’s full of aluminum foil.”
“And other inventions!” Dewey said. “Wanna see my notebook?”
“Mom’s gonna kill you,” Carry said.
“I know,” I said.
Leah Teal pulled her squad car into the driveway of the home of Sylvie Carson. She was attending because of a call Sylvie made to the station saying something about somebody illegally trespassing on her property. Leah wasn’t entirely sure of the report that was taken because she hadn’t taken it. Her partner, Officer Christopher Jackson, had. Like most times when Sylvie Carson called, Officer Jackson laughed after hanging up the phone.
“Guess who that was . . . again,” he had said.
It bothered Leah when Sylvie was made fun of, especially when it was by Chris. She had a pretty good hunch as to why it irked her so much, too.
“You know,” she had told Chris, “it wasn’t so long ago that I can remember folks makin’ all sorts of a ruckus ’bout you bein’ hired by the department.”
“Yeah, well, those folks were wrong. They just like to hate people,” Chris said. “Especially black people. This is different. The woman is nuts. She calls the station every week.”
“This isn’t much different, Chris. Sylvie can’t help the way she is no more than you can help the color you is.”
“What’s wrong with the color I am?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” Leah looked back at Police Chief Ethan Montgomery’s office for a little backup but his door was closed. She could see through the partially opened blinds hanging down over the window in his door that the chief was sitting back in his chair with his hands behind his head watching the television that hung from the ceiling in the corner of the room. The chief loved to watch his sports.
Chris wouldn’t let things go. “Leah, most people get better over time. But Sylvie’s gotten worse, far as I can tell. Her calls are coming in at an all-time high.” That was likely true. Leah had at least noticed them more, and she was the one who usually ended up attending to them.
“And every single one turns out to be some sort of false alarm,” Chris said. “I don’t know why you even bother showin’ up. I stopped takin’ her seriously a long time ago.”
“Because it’s our job to show up, Chris. Because for every hundred or so false alarms, there might actually be one real emergency and it’s for that real emergency I attend to the ninety-nine others. Besides, what else do I have to do? We live in a town of barely two thousand people; it’s not like our phone’s ringin’ off the desk.”
“I’d rather do the crossword than deal with Sylvie,” he said. Leah couldn’t believe how heartless he was being. She was about to tell him that when he started talking again. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ve just reached the end of my wits with her. I think it’s on account of the baby. I think she must be all hormonal or somethin’.”
Okay, Leah knew then it was time to end her conversation with Officer Christopher Jackson, or she would say something she definitely would regret.
Grabbing her pistol from her desk, she headed for the door. “Well, I’m gonna go see what she needs. At least one of us is gonna represent this department.”
Chris laughed behind her. “Have fun.”
It was the part about the baby that had almost pushed Leah over the edge. Even now, sitting in her car in front of Sylvie’s house, thinking about that baby kept Leah worked up to a degree that wasn’t healthy for nobody.
Generally, Leah tried not to think about Sylvie’s baby, especially when she was off shift. It was the sort of thing that would lodge itself into her head and wouldn’t get unstuck for hours while she lay in bed trying to fall asleep. To make matters worse, she couldn’t even refer to it as anything but “The Baby” because Sylvie Carson hadn’t given it a name yet. It had been three months now, and the girl still called her daughter “The Baby.” Whenever Leah asked her why she hadn’t named her, Sylvie told her, “It’s so much responsibility. I get too overwhelmed thinkin’ that whatever I come up with is gonna be with this girl for the rest of her life. It’s a huge decision that’s gonna affect everything. Nothin’ I think of is good enough. Not for my daughter. Not for her whole life.”
Leah couldn’t argue with her. It was pointless telling Sylvie that anything was better than “The Baby.” So Leah just let it lie as best she could. But her brain wouldn’t let go of it quite so easily. It hung on to things like the baby not having a name and how that might affect the rest of her life. Or what effect having a mother who could barely manage to keep herself together an entire day might have.
Some babies come into the world with better chances than others right from the start. This one seemed to come in with a pretty bad poker hand, at least in Leah’s eyes, which was probably one of the big reasons Leah felt compelled to take Sylvie’s calls seriously.
Leah also suspected she had a soft spot for Sylvie because deep down she felt they weren’t so different. If fate had changed up some of the pitches Leah had been thrown, her life might have turned out very similar to Sylvie’s. In some ways it had.
They were both single mothers. Sylvie had The Baby and Leah had two children: a fifteen-year-old daughter named Carry, and a twelve-year-old boy named Abe.
Both Leah and Sylvie had lost the fathers to their children unexpectedly. Sylvie’s was named Orwin Thomas and he had been barely an adult when Sylvie got pregnant. He just up and disappeared one night without even leaving so much as a note. There was no indication the day before that anything was wrong. He took Sylvie’s car, a few dollars cash they’d kept in a jar, and some clothing. He left her three months along in a pregnancy she then had to face all alone.
Leah’s husband, Billy, coming home from work after pulling an overnight shift, had accidentally run his car—headlights first—into an oncoming car while passing an eighteen-wheeler. Abe had only been two. Those had been very hard times for Leah. She didn’t like to think about them, even now.
Neither Leah nor Sylvie had living parents. Sylvie’s had died tragically when she was in her teens; her mother was murdered and her pa took his own life shortly thereafter. Leah had lost her parents when they were older; her ma from a stroke a year after Leah had lost her husband, and her pa to cancer three years later.
But that was where the similarities ended, because at least Leah could cope with life. Sylvie was a different story. Sure, she had emotional problems (yet another reason for Leah being upset at Chris. Although, comparing her disorder to him being black would probably not be a good idea on Leah’s part). Possibly it was post-traumatic stress disorder brought on from what happened when Sylvie was a kid. She’d actually seen her baby brother get murdered just a few feet away from her. It happened long before Leah became detective, back when she was only fourteen. But Leah’s father had been on the force then, and he had handled the case, so Leah knew a lot about it.
After Leah’s husband, Billy, died, there were times Leah didn’t think she would make it. And she hadn’t had to deal with any of the psychological trauma Sylvie faced. Leah tried not to forget that. No matter what it looked like from the outside, this girl was rising above herself—or at least trying to—and that was something to be applauded, not laughed at.
Leah couldn’t imagine what her own life would’ve been like had she been in the same shoes Sylvie was during her childhood. Leah tried to picture what it would be like watching her own uncle, Hank, get shot to death right in front of her when, not ten minutes earlier, she had been ready to enjoy a happy supper with her family.
She shivered. It was so horrific, she couldn’t even think about it.
Yet it was something Sylvie had to live with every single day of her life. And everyone seemed so surprised the girl was a little messed up. Something like that had to do strange things to your mind. It had to haunt you in unimaginable ways.
Sylvie was a lost soul trying to navigate in a world she always seemed to be trying to catch up with.
Leah got out of her squad car and headed for the few wooden steps that rose to the landing in front of Sylvie’s front door.
Sylvie’s house was small and old. It would be considered a shotgun shack if it weren’t for the hallway and bedroom someone had added on some time ago. Shotgun shacks were normally fewer than twelve feet wide with no more than three to five rooms, all arranged one behind the other.
The outside had once been painted white, but most of the paint was flaking off the siding, leaving the bare wood showing underneath. The picture window that looked out of the living room beside the front door had the drapes pulled shut, but Leah could see the yellow light of a lamp through the crack between them. Leah had been inside enough times to know that was the only light in that room. At times like this, after the sun was down, that light cast everything inside with an amber glow that threw long, eerie shadows.
It certainly didn’t help the atmosphere any.
Leah stepped up and knocked on the wooden door. Like the siding, the paint on the door was also starting to peel. “Sylvie?” she called out. “Sylvie, it’s Detective Teal. Alvin Police.”
It didn’t take long before she heard the chain slide and the dead bolt shoot. Like always, Leah waited while Sylvie opened the door a few inches and made sure Leah was who she said she was. Leah didn’t really mind this behavior. She would rather see somebody overly protective than the other way around, although Sylvie’s protectiveness crossed the line well into paranoia.
“Hi,” Sylvie said. Her dirty blond hair hung straight down over her eyes. For a brief moment, those eyes caught the moon, and Leah saw its reflection in their speckled blue pools.
Sylvie Carson looked and dressed like a homeless person. She’d gotten worse since Orwin took off. It was funny, because Leah could tell if the girl dressed in nice clothes and wore proper makeup she could be really pretty. Maybe she looked this way intentionally. Like a victim.
Yet the baby seemed clean enough. That had been a huge worry of Leah’s when Sylvie first brought her home from the hospital. Leah really hadn’t wanted to involve the state with the child’s care, but part of her suspected she would eventually have to step in given the way Sylvie was.
So Leah had kept a close eye on the baby for the past three months. Sylvie had given her many opportunities to do so with all her calls. Every time Sylvie called into the station, Leah just chalked it up as another chance to check on the welfare of the baby.
Leah heard Sylvie slide the chain again. Then the door opened completely. “Thanks for comin’ out,” Sylvie said.
“Not a problem,” Leah said stepping inside. “Glad to see you’re okay.”
Sylvie immediately locked the door again behind Leah. “Yeah,” she mumbled. She was always very quiet when she talked. Quiet, pensive, and uncertain. It was very much like dealing with a child.
Which, Leah assumed, Sylvie probably still was. Chronologically, she wasn’t much older than a teenager. What had she turned on her last birthday? Twenty-two? And hadn’t Leah read somewhere that when something traumatic happens in childhood the person emotionally stays at whatever age they were at when the event took place?
Leah was pretty sure wherever she had read that fact they’d gotten it right because Sylvie had been five when she lost her brother and, in many ways, Sylvie still seemed like a five-year-old trapped in a twenty-two-year-old girl’s body.
Surprisingly, given her appearance, Sylvie’s home always had that just-tidied-up-in-a-rush look when Leah showed up. That might be because she just had tidied it after calling the station—Leah had no way of knowing. But at least she kept it fairly neat. Each of these little things—the clean house, the clean baby, and other little changes—gave Leah some hope that Sylvie might have it together enough to actually be a proper mother. God knew she appeared to love the child enough. If love was all you needed (like that Beatles song said) then Sylvie was like a billionaire.
Unfortunately, Leah didn’t think John Lennon had taken everything into account when he wrote that song. He’d probably never met anyone like Sylvie Carson.
“So what’s the problem?” Leah asked.
“Someone’s been in the yard,” Sylvie said.
Leah sighed. This wasn’t a surprise. The girl always thought someone was in her yard, or spying on her, or something.
“Place looks nice,” Leah said, for now tabling the “someone’s been in the yard” discussion.
“Thanks.”
“Baby okay?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. A bit colicky, I reckon.”
“That’ll go away,” Leah said.
“I think so,” Sylvie said.
“You okay? You look pale,” Leah said.
“I’m fine.”
“So,” Leah asked, “what exactly makes you think someone’s been trespassing on your property? Who’s been where?”
“The yard,” Sylvie said. “Someone’s been in the backyard.” She was wearing an old oversized LSU Tigers T-shirt that hung untucked over gray sweatpants. Her hands trembled as she wrung them together while speaking. Leah could tell she was scared. She was hoping her little conversation diversion might settle Sylvie down.
Leah knew enough about Sylvie and her calls to know this would undoubtedly turn out to be another false alarm.
The living room had a dark hardwood floor that creaked when you walked across it. The drapes in the window were missing some hooks, and that made them hang awkwardly from the inside. They were once white, but now they looked a more pale washed-out yellow than anything else. Dark stains covered one.
Tattered magazines were stacked on the oval glass coffee table in the room’s center. An old TV with wood panel trim sat on some plastic crates on one side of the table. Two paintings of clowns hung crookedly on the chestnut-paneled wall behind the TV.
“Been cleanin’, I see,” Leah said.
“I like it clean for The Baby.”
“That’s good. Babies need things clean. You should clean yourself up, too.”
“What do you mean?”
Leah pointed to the oversized LSU shirt with the ripped holes in it. “Don’t you have any clothes of your own? Orwin’s stuff’s gettin’ a mite old.”
“These are comfortable. Besides, my money goes to The Baby.”
The Baby. It made Leah cringe every time Sylvie said it.
A small white cat came in and brushed up against Leah’s leg, purring.
“Oh, she’s all right,” Leah said, bending down and lifting up the cat. She’d come here enough times that she knew the animal well. It was an indoor/outdoor cat that had surprised Leah by lasting as long as it had. Sylvie had gotten the cat as a kitten after Orwin left her. Normally, cats allowed to go outdoors in these parts became prey to other animals pretty quickly.
There were two small unmatched sofas in the room: one was green and threadbare, the other was taupe, with silver duct tape covering up tears in the upholstery. The only light in the room—a black metal floor lamp—stood beside the sofa. Its bulb shined a circular pattern on the white textured ceiling.
“You know, this place would look a lot better if you had more light,” Leah said.
“I only have one lamp.”
“I’ll see if I can dig up somethin’ for you.”
“That would be nice.”
“This one makes the room too dark.”
“I don’t mind it,” Sylvie said.
The baby was asleep on a small blanket on the green sofa. She was wearing pink pajamas that appeared to be as clean as she was. So clean, they didn’t even look like they’d ever been washed. The baby’s brown skin shone in contrast to those pajamas. She’d inherited that skin color from her daddy.
Leah walked over with Snowflake in her arms and looked down on her. She appeared healthy. Leah hoped to God she was doing the right thing leaving this baby with this girl. “New PJs?” she asked Sylvie.
“Salvation Army,” Sylvie said.
The living room looked into the kitchen. The kitchen lights we. . .
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