The Last Breath Read online

  I stuff my icy hands into my front jeans pockets and shiver, not merely from the cold.

  Cal takes the gesture as his cue and reaches into his pocket, where a set of keys jingles. “Ready to get inside before you freeze to death?”

  No. My heart races, and every tiny hair soldiers to attention on the back of my neck, commanding me to run. Never again. No.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  I follow Cal up the five steps to the wraparound porch, summoning the detached efficiency that’s made me one of Earth Aid International’s top disaster relief experts. I can’t manage even an ounce of objectivity. This disaster is too close, its aftermath still too painful. I can’t detach from its reality.

  A reality that, according to the doctors, could last anywhere from three weeks to three months.

  “The renters moved out about six months ago,” Cal says without turning his head, searching through his key ring for the right one. The sisal mat under his feet mocks me with its cheery message: Welcome, Guests. As if anyone but me and Cal will be stepping on it, waiting to be invited in to pay their last respects. Not in a Million Years would be more like it.

  “Good timing, I suppose.”

  “I’ve had the house painted. And all the furniture is new. Appliances, too.”

  “What happened to Dad’s old stuff?”

  “I donated most of the furniture and clothes to Goodwill after the trial. The rest is in a storage facility in Morristown. I’ll get you the address and the access combination if you want to head over there.”

  “I doubt I’ll have the time.” Or the inclination. Digging through old memories sounds like torture to me.

  Uncle Cal twists the key in the handle and the door swings open with a groan, a sound I find eerily appropriate. He steps inside like he owns the place, which I suppose by now he probably does, but I don’t follow. I can’t. Somebody switched out my sneakers for boots of lead. My knees wobble, and I grip the doorjamb to keep from falling down.

  A strange thing happens when a home turns into a crime scene. Its contents are labeled, cataloged and photographed. Walls become scene boundaries, doors and windows, the perpetrator’s entry and exit. Seemingly ordinary objects—dust bunnies behind the couch, scuff marks on the stairs, a tarnished nickel under the carpet—take on all sorts of new significance. And the people living there, in a place now roiling with bad memories and even worse juju, no longer think of it as home.

  But what about that one spot where the victim took her last breath, where her heart gave its final, frantic beat? What do you do with that place? Build a shrine on top of it, wave a bouquet of smoking sage around it or pretend it’s not there?

  At the foot of the stairs, Cal stops and turns, studiously ignoring my distress. My gaze plummets to the fake Persian under his feet, and a wave of sick rises from the pit of my belly. Just because I can’t see the spot doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened there.

  Or for that matter, that I’m ever stepping on it.

  “Shut the door, please, Gia.”

  I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and follow him into the house.

  “My assistant Jennie did all the shopping,” he says, gesturing with his keys toward the living room. Except for the unmade hospital bed in the corner, the decor—oversize furniture, silk ferns in dark pots, framed paintings of exotic landscapes on the walls—looks plucked from the pages of a Rooms To Go catalog. “I hope it’ll do.”

  I finger a plastic pinecone in a wooden bowl on the dresser and peer down the hallway toward the kitchen. There’s literally nothing here that I recognize. Probably better that way. “She did a great job.”

  “The bedrooms are ready upstairs. Thought we’d let the nurse take the master. You don’t mind sharing the hall bath with me on the weekends, do you?”

  I smile, hoping it doesn’t come across as forced as it feels. “I’ve gone months with nothing but a bucket, a bar of soap and a muddy stream. I think I can handle sharing a bathroom.”

  One corner of Cal’s mouth rises in what looks almost like pride. “You’d make someone a fine huntin’ partner.”

  He motions for me to follow him into the kitchen at the back of the house, where he points to a credit card and iPhone on the Formica counter. “Jennie stocked the kitchen with the basics, but there’s enough money on that account to buy anything else you need. You probably won’t need it for a couple of days, though.”

  I peek into the refrigerator, check the cabinets above the coffee machine, peer around the corner into the open pantry. “There’s enough food here to feed half of Hawkins County for weeks.”

  Cal smiles. “That’s the great thing about Jennie. She always goes above and beyond.” He plucks the iPhone from the counter and passes it to me. “She also programmed all the numbers you’ll need into the phone. The lead officer assigned to the case will be calling to set up a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. The hospice nurse arrives tomorrow morning at eight, and the motorcade and ambulance with your father, sometime before noon. And the local doctors, hospitals and the funeral home have been notified.”

  “Sounds like everything’s been taken care of.”

  He smiles, and his voice softens. “Just trying to make things as easy as possible for you, darlin’. I know you’d rather be anywhere but here.”

  I think of some of the worst places I’ve been sent. Overpopulated Dhaka, where if the water doesn’t kill you, the air will. The slums of Abidjan after floods and mudslides have swept away too many of its children. The dusty streets of Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, where malnutrition and cholera compete for leading cause of death.

  Uncle Cal has a point.

  “And don’t think you’re completely out here on your own,” he says after a long stretch of silence. “I’m less than an hour down the road, and so are your brother and sister. Do me a favor and don’t let either of them off the hook, okay? This concerns their father, too.”

  I half nod, half shrug. When it comes to our father, Bo would rather bury himself in his work than admit the situation affects him, while Lexi prefers to pretend he’s already dead. How can I let my siblings off the hook when neither of them are willing to acknowledge there is one? It seems as if the only person not getting off the hook around here is me.

  Cal pulls me in for a hug, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “Call me anytime, okay? Day or night. I’ll pick up, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.” His tone is reassuring, but he’s already backing away, already moving toward the door. “I’ll see you Saturday morning.”

  He gives my shoulder one last squeeze and disappears into the hallway, and I’m slammed with a wave of panic. Disasters and destruction of global magnitude I can handle. Facing my father alone, not so much.

  I rush down the hall in his wake. “Uncle Cal?”

  The desperate note in my voice stops him at the door, and he turns to face me.

  “Explain to me again why you can’t stay. Why you won’t be here tomorrow when Dad gets here.”

  He scrubs a hand through his hair, now salt-and-pepper but still thick and shiny as ever. “Because I’m busy stalling the retrial. God willing and the creek don’t rise, your father won’t spend another second of his life in either a courtroom or a prison cell.”

  A casket sure seems like the ultimate prison to me.

  A few seconds later he’s gone, leaving me to wonder how I ended up here. In a town I vowed never to return to. In a house filled with ghosts and memories I’ll never outrun. In a life I have spent the past sixteen years trying to escape.

  But most of all, I wonder how I ended up here alone.

  2

  BACK IN THE house, I put on a kettle and rummage through the cabinets for tea. Cal’s assistant must be either
misinformed or seriously delusional about the number of mourners we will be expecting because she bought us a 312-count, industrial-sized box of Lipton tea bags. If we get through even one row of them, it will be a miracle. I rip open the cellophane wrapping with my teeth, pull out a bag and drop it into a yellow ceramic mug.

  The sharp, bitter scent reminds me of some of my British colleagues, who are convinced a spot of tea is the cure to all emotional ails. My boss, Elsie, a hard-nosed type, drinks enough of the stuff to poison her liver...thanks to the generous splash of bourbon she adds when things in the field get really hairy. If only life were that easy.

  Unlike the satellite phone I carry in the field, Cal’s iPhone has only a handful of contacts, most of them people I’ve never met and, after burying my father, will probably never think of again. It doesn’t take me long to find Bo.

  His cell goes straight to voice mail, so I leave what must be my fifth message in as many days, careful to keep my voice level. Five years older and light years more serious, my brother has always preferred that people reserve their zeal for backyard fireworks and the Nature Channel, and he doesn’t respond well to gushing.

  I have better success with Lexi, who picks up on the second ring. I abandon my tea and squeal, “Lexi!”

  Unlike Bo, my sister welcomes enthusiasm. Demands it, even.

  “Is it true? Is it really true?” Lexi’s familiar voice, the same gravelly one that used to give boys all over Hawkins County wet dreams. “Did my do-gooder little sister finally come home from Lord knows where?”

  “It’s true that I’m here, yes. But nowadays, home is in Kenya.”

  “Well, laa-tee-daa.” She stretches out her words, loads them up with an extra serving of Tennessee twang. “Don’t that sound fancy.”

  I snort at what I know to be a joke. Lexi is no dummy. She has a master’s in finance from Stanford, runs a local chain of banks and could kick even Alex Trebek’s ass at Jeopardy. Not only is she aware of my latest whereabouts, she knows Dadaab is pretty much the polar opposite of fancy. My chest seizes with a wave of sudden affection for my sister, who I haven’t hugged in...six years? Has it really been that long?

  “Where are you?” I say, switching gears. “Because I’m coming there right after I lock up the house.”

  “I’m going to need a little more time than that.” Her tone takes a serious turn, matching mine, and her voice and vowels soften into the more generic timbre she perfected in college. Less country hick, more Southern belle. Unlike me, Lexi can turn her accent on and off like a faucet. “I’m about to head into a staff meeting, but I could meet you after for a late dinner. Say, seven-thirty?”

  I check my watch. Three and a half hours I can fill with a nap and a shower, in that order. “Perfect. So where’s the place to be on a Wednesday night these days?”

  “It’s Thursday, actually, not that it matters. And there’s only one place to be every night, and that’s the Roadkill Bar and Grill in town.”

  Roadkill? I make a face. “Do I have to bring my own rodent, or do they run it down for me?”

  She laughs, a throaty, musical sound that makes me wish I’d called more often. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your roots, young lady.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. My palate has just evolved to more refined creatures, like stray animals. And last month in the Philippines I tried this thing called balut, a fertilized duck embryo that’s boiled alive and eaten shell and all.”

  Lexi makes a retching sound. “I think I’d rather starve to death.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. Though I’ve always been adventurous with food and my sister the pickiest eater in Appalachia, Lexi does have a point. Balut tastes just as bad the first time as it does the second, on its way back up.

  “A girl’s got to eat. And besides, my rule wherever I travel is to eat or drink whatever is offered to me, even if it does end up turning my insides to gurgling water. Sharing a meal, no matter how vile, fosters trust between my team and the people we’re there to help.”

  “Good Lord. Your job sucks worse than mine.”

  “Mostly, my job is pretty awesome, especially for a wanderer like me. I’ve flown around the globe more times than anybody on my team, and been to more than a hundred and twenty-five countries. The consulate has had to add pages to my passport now, twice.”

  “I thought your job was to make the world a better place.”

  “Well, duh. That goes without saying.”

  Lexi covers the receiver with a hand, muffling her voice when she tells a colleague she’s on the phone, but will be right there.

  “You’ve got to go?” I ask.

  “Sorry. We’ll catch up on all the rest tonight, okay?”

  “Okay. And, Lex?” She pauses, but I hear papers shuffling around her desk, and even though I know I’ve probably already lost her, I say it anyway: “I’ve missed you.”

  “Same here. See you at seven-thirty.” And then she’s gone.

  I plunk the phone on the counter by my mug and head outside to retrieve my suitcase, still in the trunk of my rental. In the past hour, the temperature plummeted and the air turned metallic, thick with invisible frost and crystals. I cast a glance at the darkening sky. No clouds yet, but I know what that scent means. I inhale enough of it to give my lungs freezer burn. God, how I’ve missed the smell of promised snow.

  Up at the street, a silver Escort slows, tires crunching in the dirt and gravel on the side of the road. Any other day, any other place, and I probably wouldn’t have paid the car a bit of attention. But I lived on Maple Street long enough to know strangers don’t typically happen down this way by accident. I keep it in my periphery as I make my way up the concrete drive.

  The car pulls to a sudden stop with a piercing squeal of brakes, and I freeze, gaze glued to the passenger side window. It whirrs and lowers to reveal a dark-haired man about my age. He leans across the seat, ducking his head to get a clear view through the window.

  And though he may be wearing a friendly smile, I’m not.

  “Sorry to bother you.” His bangs flop over an eye, and he pushes them back with a palm. “But can you tell me where the closest gas station is?”

  The breath I’d been holding makes a thick cloud before it dissipates into the air. I take two steps across the frozen grass to his car, keeping a careful distance, pointing him in the opposite direction. “You’ve got to go back toward town, but it’s not far. Only two miles or so.”

  “Two miles?” He draws out the last word, stretching his mouth wide to fit the vowels. I get this a lot in the field, people trying to imitate my Tennessee drawl as if there’s something funny or quaint about an accent. But their teasing only comes across as condescension, or at the very best, surprise that I’m not as dumb as I sound.

  Which is why I lay it on thick now. “Two miles, yeah. Take a left at the four-way stop, and then it’ll be on your right. You can’t miss it.”

  “There wouldn’t happen to be a decent hotel near there, too, would there?”

  I take in his longish hair and battered leather jacket. Scruffy chic or penny-pincher? I can’t tell. “There’s the Hale Springs Inn in town, but it’s pretty swanky. Take the highway either way, though, and you’ll find some more affordable places a little farther out.”

  He gives me a smile of thanks, but I detect something more to it—there’s something more than just fuel and shelter he’s looking for. A chill that has nothing to do with the February air brushes my shoulders, and I think of my cell, lying useless inside on the kitchen counter. I glance behind me, eyeing the distance to the front door, my senses on high alert.

  He points over my shoulder. “Nice place. You live here?”

  “Only temporari—” I swallow the last syllable, realizing a second too late I shouldn’t have admitted to living in a semi-deserted house at the end of a
semi-deserted street.

  He stretches his neck to get a better look, and then his gaze returns to mine. He smiles again, and I back up a step. “You’re Gia Andrews, right?”

  Something like relief that he’s not a rapist or armed robber washes over me, quickly replaced by fury. A journalist. A goddamn journalist. You’d think after all my interactions with them in the field, I would have recognized him as one immediately.

  I turn and stalk to my car. “I don’t talk to journalists.”

  “Fine by me, because I’m not a journalist.” I don’t slow, and he bolts out of the Escort, his voice booming over its hood. “I’m a writer. I’m writing a book about America’s most shocking wrongful convictions.”

  His words are electric, shooting a paralyzing current from my crown to the tips of my toes and melding my sneakers to the icy pavement. Wrongful conviction? I pivot my head to meet his gaze. “Excuse me?”

  He bites off a mitten and digs around in a coat pocket, then crosses the driveway and hands me a card. “I’m Jeffrey Levine, by the way.”

  I blink at the paper between my fingers, thick white linen with raised letters and a crest embossed in blue. “It says here you’re a professor of law.”

  He slides his bare hand back into his mitten and nods. “For Emory. I’m taking a semester sabbatical to work on my book. It’s called True Crimes, False Convictions: Criminal Injustice in America.” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Yeah, it’s a working title.”

  “And you think my father’s case is one of them?”

  His head bobs in a decisive nod, and those ridiculous bangs flop over one eye. “Let me put it this way—your father’s case is a textbook on what not to do. How to ignore leads. How to sweep conflict of interest under the rug. How to miscarry justice and send an innocent man to prison.”

  “But there was a witness.” I pivot now to face him, purposefully playing devil’s advocate. It’s one thing to say my father’s conviction was wrongful, another thing entirely to believe it. There was too much evidence to the contrary.