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Paris slammed the door and they started back to the car, but before they could get in, Francesca heard her name.
“Ms. Moretti?”
Elaine Wheeler had come to the door. Francesca turned back. “Yes?”
“You…you have a message for me? From my boy?” Dressed in a flowery summer shirt and what Francesca’s mother would call culottes—longish shorts that looked more like a skirt—she could’ve been taken for a sweet grandma except for the obvious signs of distress. Gone was the wig she normally wore, revealing a few wisps of gray hair pinned tightly to a pink scalp. And red-rimmed eyes peered through cat-eye glasses with bifocal lenses.
“He’s scared, Mrs. Wheeler,” Francesca said. “He wants you. He wants to come home.”
“Are they…are they treating him okay? He needs to be segregated, you know. A man like Dean wouldn’t be safe circulating with other inmates. He’s…too eager for friends, tries too hard to fit in.”
“I’m sure the police will do all they can to protect him, but…until he’s convicted and sent to prison, they have limited housing options.”
“I realize that.” And, apparently, it weighed heavily on her. Her lips quivered, then pursed as Paris’s voice rose behind her.
“Come on in, Mom. There’s nothing you can do for Dean. Maybe he’ll finally get the care he needs.”
With a sniff, Elaine raised her chin. “It’s my care he needs. I’m the one who’s always been there for him. I’m the only one he trusts.”
Jonah beckoned her outside. “Come and take a ride with us, Mrs. Wheeler. Maybe we can arrange for you to see your son.”
“Don’t do it!” Paris cried. “You know Butch told us not to talk to anyone, especially them. He’ll handle it.”
“Butch doesn’t give a damn about Dean, and sometimes I don’t think you do, either,” her mother said. “Tell your father where I went,” she added, and walked to the Jeep Cherokee without bothering to get her purse.
* * *
Jonah parked in the shade of a cypress tree at Willow Lake Park. RVs in orderly rows extended to their right, but only a few stalwart golfers walked the adjacent course. It was too hot to be outside for long, even with the sun in rapid descent, but this gave them a quiet place to talk.
“Do you believe your son murdered Julia?” he asked Elaine as he turned off the engine and shifted in his seat to face her.
She stared into the distance.
“Elaine?” Francesca prompted from the backseat.
Lifting her glasses, she dabbed at her eyes. “I know he didn’t.”
Elaine wanted to talk. She was dying to rescue her son. She’d already spent most of his lifetime doing it. All they had to do was give her the opportunity to speak.
“So…are you willing to let him take the rap for it?” Jonah asked when she didn’t say anything.
“That’s what Butch thinks we should do.”
When she lifted her glasses again, he delved into the jockey box for the napkins he’d stuck there after grabbing some fast food on his way from the airport. “Here you go.”
She didn’t thank him. She was too immersed in her own worries for that, but she accepted the napkins.
He rolled down the windows. “What do you think you should do?”
“Some of what Butch says makes sense. But…I’m not sure I can keep silent. It shouldn’t have come to this. It was just a—a terrible accident.”
April Bonner’s death, and the deaths of those women in Dead Mule Canyon, was no accident, but Jonah held back, hoping she’d feel comfortable enough to reveal what she knew. “If it was an accident we can work it out.”
She seemed to forget that Francesca was even in the car. “Can I depend on that?” she asked as if it was just the two of them. “Will the police believe me if I tell the truth?”
“They’ll do what they can. No one’s out to get anyone here.”
Seeming to take solace in his response, she blew her nose. “You already know that Butch likes the ladies.”
