Betty looked at Rose. “You raised that boy right, and don’t you ever believe anything else.”
Several others spoke. One story made Mike laugh; another brought him to the edge of tears.
Finally, Rose wiped her eyes with a tissue and spoke.
“Thank you for coming.” She turned to Mike. “I appreciate you telling me to do this. I hadn’t seen Danny for several months before he got killed, and listening to y’all makes him seem more alive to me.”
Later, Mike and Rose were standing beside each other in the kitchen.
“You know,” Rose said, “Danny didn’t believe me at first when I told him you was going to school to be a preacher. He said Mr. Andrews didn’t have to go to school to be a good preacher. He already was one.”
“And I want to be a better one.”
“You did a good job today.”
“It’s not hard when it’s about someone like Danny.”
Mike lingered until everyone except Rose’s sisters had left. He gave Rose a hug, took the shoe box from her, and put it in the passenger seat of the car.
“Can I give you the cross?” he asked.
“No, but thanks for showing it to me. He meant it for you.”
Rose put the cross in the top of the box.
WHEN MIKE ARRIVED HOME PEG MET HIM IN THE KITCHEN.
“How was it?” she asked.
“I hope Rose felt loved and comforted. For me, it was like stepping back in time.”
“What did you find when you went back?”
Mike set the shoe box on the kitchen counter. “This.”
While Peg leafed through the letters and legal paperwork, Mike spoke.
“As a lawyer I met people from all across Barlow County. That doesn’t happen anymore. Our church congregation is a lot more homogeneous than I’d realized.”
“Do you miss it?”
“A little,” Mike admitted, “but not enough to go back.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s the reason I’m representing Sam Miller. He should be different enough to satisfy my itch for the peculiar for a long time.”
THAT NIGHT MIKE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS WHEN HE awoke. He glanced at the clock. The numbers were blurred, and he blinked his eyes several times. It was 3:18 a.m. There was no notebook or PDA on the nightstand, but the dream was so vivid that he could easily remember it until morning. He yawned and closed his eyes before waking up again. It was 3:38 a.m. Trying to make it through the rest of the night in twenty-minute intervals wasn’t going to work. Mike rolled out of bed and walked barefoot downstairs. Judge rose from his bed in the kitchen and greeted him with a loud woof.
“Quiet!” Mike said. “Don’t you know what time it is?”
Mike opened the back door so Judge could go outside then retrieved his PDA from its place in the kitchen beneath where he hung his car keys. Returning to his chair in the living room, Mike opened a blank screen and entered the date. Judge scratched at the door, and Mike let him in. The dog always received a treat when he went out in the morning.
“Remember this in a few hours,” Mike said as he deposited a large dog biscuit between Judge’s teeth. “If I only get one scoop of ice cream, you only get one dog biscuit.”
Finally settling down in the chair, Mike started to record what he’d heard and seen, but the sequence of events and words spoken in the dream was hazy. It had been as vivid as the dream about Danny, but he couldn’t recall it as clearly. He could remember talking to a group of men. He didn’t recognize any of them, but knew they were affiliated with the Craig Valley Gospel Tabernacle. Sam Miller was also present.
“What was it?” Mike muttered.
It had something to do with finding out information about Sam’s case. Everyone was sitting in a dimly lit room. The atmosphere was very tense and no one spoke. Then something happened that changed everything, and the light in the room increased. However, in the midst of waking up, dozing a few minutes, going downstairs, and taking care of Judge, the details of the dream now escaped him. Mike furrowed his brow until it wrinkled like Judge’s forehead, but all he could muster was a general sense of the scene. Closing the PDA, he returned to bed.
And slept the rest of the night.
Thirteen
“I HAD A DREAM,” HE TOLD PEG IN THE MORNING. “BUT I LOST the details before I could write it down.”
“What do you remember?”
Mike told her what he could recall. Peg poured him a cup of coffee.
“Maybe it will come back to you later in the day,” she said.
“If anything can help, it’s this coffee,” Mike replied, taking a sip. “It should wake up my lazy brain cells.”