“There’s nobody here but us,” he said gently. “Won’t you call me Tom now?”
She shook her head almost involuntarily, and Tom wondered what troubled her so about crossing that formal boundary. “What if I called you Nurse Price out here? How would that make you feel?”
Blood rose into Melba’s dark cheeks. After some thought, she said, “If I call you Tom, will you let me stay until Captain Garrity comes back?”
“No. I can’t make you leave, but I’m asking you to. My heart will beat a lot easier if you go.”
Melba picked up her fork and tapped it on the china plate. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. All those good works you’ve done, and it’s come to running like a common criminal.”
“We never outrun our sins, Melba. None of us.”
“And you tell me you don’t believe in God! How can you believe in sin, if you don’t believe in God?”
“I don’t know what I mean, exactly. I just use the words I know.”
A tear rolled down the nurse’s cheek. “I still have hopes for you … Tom. You’ve always done God’s work, whether you know it or not.”
His throat tightened so much that for a moment he couldn’t breathe, much less speak. “Thank you, Melba. Now, you give me a good, long hug, and then walk out to your car and drive home. Walt will be back soon, and we’ll resolve this mess.”
“Do you really believe that? Don’t lie to me.”
“I do. That old dog still has a trick or two left.”
Melba looked grateful for the lie. After a moment, she rose from the stool, and once he’d followed suit, she took him into her arms and hugged him, taking care not to put pressure on his wounded shoulder. At first the embrace felt awkward and stiff, but then Tom felt something let go in the nurse’s frame, and it was as though they’d been married for thirty years. In a way, he supposed, they had—just as he and Esther Ford had, and of course Viola, though their relationship had crossed into something far more intimate.
“Don’t you sit here studyin’ ’bout Viola and that boy of hers,” Melba said in his ear. “You don’t know for sure he’s yours. And even if he is, you never knew about him. Viola made that choice. And if that boy hates you now, well … if you let him know you, he’ll come around.”
“He’s not a boy anymore.”
Melba drew far enough back to look into his eyes. “Yes, he is. Down deep, he is. And a black boy is a hard thing to be, especially without a daddy. Take it from me.”
“I believe you, Mel.”
The nurse hugged him tight again. “I feel like I’m never going to see you again.”
“You will. I promise.”
She shook her head stubbornly. “I feel it. And I want to say something to you.”
“What?”
She finally released him and stepped back, but she kept hold of his arthritic hands. “Don’t give up. Please. Don’t let them take you without a fight. Nobody’s perfect. Not even you. You deserve all the time you’ve got left.”
Tom felt his eyes getting wet. “Thank you, Mel. You go now.”
“I will. But I’m only going because I know you’re not alone here.”
As his nurse turned and walked to the door, Tom felt the familiar and terrible weight he had borne all his life, the faith of simple people who had believed too much in him.
CHAPTER 88
AS SOON AS Caitlin got back to the Examiner building, she’d found herself in the eye of a hurricane. Not only was her full staff working frantically to finish the stories they planned to run on various threads of Henry Sexton’s murder investigations, but the editors of her father’s satellite papers were screaming for the stories they’d been promised by a deadline that had passed an hour ago. After passing a taped copy of her phone recording to Penn, Caitlin had deflected her staff by issuing a quick barrage of orders, then told Jamie to call his counterparts at the satellites and tell them thirty minutes of overtime had been authorized. It was a lie, but one she was banking no one would test by waking her father in Charlotte. As everyone left to implement her instructions, she’d retreated to her private office and locked the door.
She was confident that the six stories on Henry’s murder investigations had been well written; she trusted Jamie to make sure of that. But without her master story to provide historical context, readers would have no way to place the dramatic events that her reporters had dealt with elsewhere. And her master story had one major problem. If Brody Royal agreed to Penn’s demand, and Penn asked her to leave Royal out of her story—even for one day—the resulting gaps would be like antitank trenches dug in the highway of her narrative. She didn’t know if she could bear to butcher her story that way. Reality was fast overtaking Penn’s concerns anyway. The rumor mill had already spread the news of Katy Royal’s attempted suicide to every corner of Adams County and Concordia Parish. Speculation about her motive was rampant, and right now Caitlin was the only journalist in the world who knew the truth. Better still, she understood how that motive fit into the forty-year-old matrix of rape and murder that had divided the community and triggered two assassination attempts on one of the South’s best journalists.