Lena pressed the phone to her ear. She listened to the rings that were going unanswered at the station.
“Lena …” Brad whispered. “Don’t tell my mom I messed up.”
“You didn’t mess up.” She used her hand to shield the rain from his face. His eyelids fluttered, trying to close. “No,” she begged. “Please don’t do this to me.”
“I’m sorry, Lena.”
“No!” she yelled.
Not again.
CHAPTER THREE
SARA LINTON NO LONGER THOUGHT OF GRANT COUNTY AS HER home. It was of another place, another time, as tangible to her as Rebecca’s Manderley or Heathcliff’s moors. As she drove through the outskirts of town, she couldn’t help but notice that everything looked the same, yet nothing was quite real. The closed military base that was slowly reverting to nature. The trailer parks on the bad side of the railroad tracks. The abandoned box store that had been converted into a storage center.
Three and a half years had passed since Sara had been home, and she wanted to think that her life was okay now, getting closer to a new normal. Actually, her current life in Atlanta looked a lot like it would have if she had stayed there after medical school instead of moving back to Grant County. She was the chief pediatric attending in Grady Hospital’s emergency room, where students followed her around like puppy dogs and the security guards carried multiple clips on their belts in case the gangbangers tried to finish the job they started on the streets. An epidemiologist who worked for the Centers for Disease Control on Emory’s campus had started asking her out. She went to dinner parties and grabbed coffee with friends. Occasionally, on the weekends, she would take the dogs to Stone Mountain Park to give the greyhounds space to run. She read a lot. She watched more television than she should. She was living a perfectly normal, perfectly boring life.
And yet, the minute she saw the sign announcing that she had officially entered Grant County, her carefully constructed façade started to crack. She pulled over to the side of the road, feeling a constriction in her chest. The dogs stirred in the back seat. Sara forced herself not to give in. She was stronger than this. She had fought tooth and nail to climb out of the depression she’d spiraled into after her husband’s death, and she was not going to allow herself to fall back in just because of a stupid road sign.
“Hydrogen,” she said. “Helium, lithium, beryllium.” It was an old trick from her childhood, listing out the elements from the periodic table to take her mind off the monsters that might be lurking under her bed. “Neon, sodium, magnesium …” She recited from memory until her heart stopped racing and her breathing returned to normal.
Finally, the moment passed, and she found herself laughing at the thought of Jeffrey finding out she was chanting the periodic table on the side of the road. He’d been a jock in high school—handsome, charming, and effortlessly cool. It had tickled him no end to see Sara’s geeky side.
She reached around and gave the dogs some attention so they would settle back down. Instead of starting the car again, she sat for a while, staring out the window at the empty road leading into town. Her fingers went to the collar of her shirt, then lower to the ring she wore on a necklace. Jeffrey’s Auburn class ring. He’d been on the football team until he got tired of warming the bench. The ring was bulky, too big for her finger, but touching it was the closest she could come to touching him. It was a talisman. Sometimes, she found herself touching it without remembering putting her hand there.
Her only consolation was that there was nothing left unsaid between them. Jeffrey knew that Sara loved him. He knew there was no part of her that did not belong wholly and completely to him, just as she knew that he felt the same. When he died, his last words were to her. His last thoughts, his last memories, all were of Sara. Just as she knew that her last thoughts would always be of him.
She kissed the ring before tucking it back into her shirt. Carefully, Sara pulled the car off the shoulder and back onto the road. The overwhelming feeling threatened to come back as she drove farther into town. It was so much easier to push away the things that she had lost when they weren’t staring her right in the face. The high school football stadium where she had first met Jeffrey. The park where they had walked the dogs together. The restaurants where they ate. The church that Sara’s mother had occasionally guilted them into attending.
There had to be one place, one memory, that was untouched by this man. Long before Jeffrey Tolliver even knew there was such a thing as Grant County, she’d had a life here. Sara had grown up in Heartsdale, gone to the high school, joined the science club, helped out at the women’s shelter where her mother volunteered, done the occasional odd job with her father. Sara had lived in a house Jeffrey had never stepped foot in. She’d driven a car he’d never seen. She had shared her first kiss with a local boy whose father owned the hardware store. She had gone to dances at the church and attended potlucks and football games.
All without Jeffrey.
Three years before he entered her life, Sara had taken the part-time job of county medical examiner in order to buy out her partner at the children’s clinic. She had kept the job long after her loan had been paid off. She was surprised to find out that helping the dead was sometimes more rewarding than saving the living. Every case was a puzzle, every body riddled with clues to a mystery that only Sara could solve. A different part of her brain that she hadn’t even known existed was engaged by the coroner’s job. She had loved both her jobs with equal passion. She had worked countless cases, given testimony in court on countless suspects and circumstances.
Now, Sara could not remember one detail from any of them.
What she could vividly recall was the day that Jeffrey Tolliver had strolled into town. The mayor had wooed him away from the Birmingham police force to take over for the retiring chief of police. Every woman Sara knew practically tittered with joy whenever Jeffrey’s name was mentioned. He was witty and charming. He was tall, dark, and handsome. He’d played college football. He drove a cherry red Mustang, and when he walked, he had the athletic grace of a panther.
That Jeffrey set his sights on Sara had shocked the entire town, Sara included. She wasn’t the type of girl who got the good-looking guy. She was the type of girl who watched her sister or her best friend get the good-looking guy. And yet, their casual dates turned into something deeper, so that a few years later, no one was surprised when Jeffrey asked her to marry him. Their relationship had been hard work, and God knew there had been ups and downs, but in the end, she had known with every fiber of her being that she belonged to Jeffrey and, more important, that he belonged completely to her.
Sara wiped her tears with the back of her hand as she drove. The longing was the hardest part, the physical ache her body felt at the memory of him. There was no part of town that didn’t slap her in the face with what she had lost. These roads had been kept safe by him. These people had called him friend. And Jeffrey had died here. The town he’d loved so much had become his crime scene. There was the church where they mourned his death. There was the street where a long line of cars had pulled over as his casket was driven out of town.
She would only be here for four days. She could do anything for four days.
Almost anything.