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“Yes, yes,” Bell whined. “That’s what happened.”
Judge Varney pounded with his gavel. “That is not true!”
Police Chief Sherman was on his feet, about to protest, but the FBI agent said, “Chief, you’re under arrest. And you too, Judge Varney.”
I don’t remember getting to my feet, only that I was, suddenly, and staring across the courtroom at Drummond as if down a vast tunnel of time.
“Who are you, Sergeant?” I said, realizing that Nana Mama was standing up beside me. “How do you know all these things?”
Tears streamed down Drummond’s expressionless face as he withdrew the shotgun barrel from Bell’s head and looked toward me and my grandmother.
“I know these things, Alex,” he choked out, “because in another lifetime, my name was Jason Cross.”
Chapter
100
Nana Mama gasped, reached for her heart, and toppled against me. Her frail ninety-pound body almost bowled me off my own liquid feet. I had to take my eyes off Drummond to regain my balance and hold her up.
“Is it true?” my grandmother whispered into my chest, as if she couldn’t bear to look Drummond’s way.
“That’s impossible,” Bell said, craning his neck to look at Drummond. “Jason Cross took a bullet, went into the gorge. He never came out.”
“Yes, he did,” said Pinkie, who’d also gotten to his feet. “My uncle Clifford found him down on the river that night. Nursed him back to health.”
“Is Clifford here in Starksville?” Drummond called to Pinkie. “I would sure like to see the second best friend I’ve ever had. Maybe take him to Bourbon Street like we always talked about.”
“Oh my God.” My aunt Hattie gasped.
“It’s a miracle,” my aunt Connie cried.
I looked down at Nana Mama, saw my grandmother dissolving through sheets of tears.
“It’s him,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but it’s him.”
When I looked up, Drummond had left Bell in the witness stand, handed the shotgun to Detective Frost, and was coming toward us with tears streaming down his blank face and his arms cast open.
“You don’t know how much I missed the both of you,” he said. “You have no idea of the loneliness without you.”
I slid into my father’s arms and he slid into his mother’s as if they were the most natural and familiar acts possible.
We bowed our heads into one another, suddenly apart from everyone else in that courtroom, like a miniature universe unto ourselves. I don’t think any of us managed to utter an intelligible word in those first few moments of reunion. But I know we were communicating deeply in a whole other language, like people embraced by holy spirits and speaking in tongues of fire.
Chapter
101
Two weeks and two days after we’d arrived in Starksville, on a warm, clear Saturday afternoon, we had ourselves a proper reunion in Aunt Hattie’s backyard. Everybody who mattered to me in life was there.
Damon had flown into Winston-Salem the day before to meet his grandfather, which had been as emotional and satisfying as every other moment of my dad’s return to my life. Naomi’s mother, Cilla, and my brother Charlie had come in the day before that.
At first, Charlie had not believed Nana Mama and me when we’d called him with the news. Then he’d gotten angry and said he wasn’t interested in meeting someone who’d cut out on us thirty-five years before. But Cilla and Naomi had insisted, and when Charlie laid eyes on our dad, all had been forgiven. The only thing that would have made it better was having my late brothers Blake and Aaron there too, and we all shed tears over those tragedies.
My best friend, John Sampson, and his wife, Billie, had come in that morning. Sampson and my dad had hit it off immediately, and when Drummond wasn’t sitting by my uncle Cliff, he and John were trading cop stories and laughing.
Stefan Tate was there with his fiancée, Patty Converse, the two of them looking as in love as any couple I’d ever seen. Special Agent Wolfe was there as well.
Evidently, the FBI had been looking at Starksville with suspicions of judicial and police misconduct long before my father called Wolfe and told her to come listen to the shocking testimony about to come out in the courtroom of Erasmus P. Varney.
