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“Why can’t we go home again, Dad?” Ali, my soon-to-be-seven-year-old son, asked from the backseat.
“It’s just an expression,” I said. “If you grow up in a small town and then move away to a big city, things are never the same when you go back. That’s all.”
“Oh,” Ali said, and he returned to the game he was playing on his iPad.
My fifteen-year-old daughter, Jannie, who’d been sullen most of the long drive down from DC, said, “You’ve never been back here, Dad? Not once?”
“Nope,” I replied, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Not in…how long, Nana?”
“Thirty-five years,” said my tiny ninety-something grandmother, Regina Cross. She sat in the backseat between my two kids, straining to look outside. “We’ve kept in touch with the extended family, but things just never worked out to come back down.”
“Until now,” Bree said, and I could feel her gaze on me.
My wife and I are both detectives with the DC Metro Police, and I knew I was being scrutinized by a pro.
Really not wanting to reopen the “discussion” we’d been having the past few days, I said firmly, “The captain ordered us to take time off and get away, and blood is thicker than water.”
“We could have gone to the beach.” Bree sighed. “Jamaica again.”
“I like Jamaica,” Ali said.
“Instead, we’re going to the mountains,” I said.
“How long will we have to be here?” Jannie groaned.
“As long as my cousin’s trial lasts,” I said.
“That could be, like, a month!” she cried.
“Probably not,” I said. “But maybe.”
“God, Dad, how am I going to stay in any kind of shape for the fall season?”
My daughter, a gifted track athlete, had become obsessive about her workouts since winning a major race earlier in the summer.
“You’re getting to work out twice a week with an AAU-sanctioned team out of Raleigh,” I said. “They come right to the high school track here to train at altitude. Your coach even said it would be good for you to run at altitude, so please, no more about your training. We’ve got it covered.”
“How much attitude is Starksville?” Ali asked.
“Altitude,” corrected Nana Mama, a former English teacher and high school vice principal. “It means the height of something above the sea.”
“We’ll be at least two thousand feet above sea level,” I said, and then I pointed up the road toward the vague silhouettes of mountains. “Higher up there behind those ridges.”
Jannie stayed quiet several moments, then said, “Is Stefan innocent?”
I thought about the charges. Stefan Tate was a gym teacher accused of torturing and killing a thirteen-year-old boy named Rashawn Turnbull. He was also the son of my late mother’s sister and—
“Dad?” Ali said. “Is he innocent?”
“Scootchie thinks so,” I replied.
“I like Scootchie,” Jannie said.
“I do too,” I replied, glancing at Bree. “So when she calls, I come.”
Naomi “Scootchie” Cross is the daughter of my late brother Aaron. Years ago, when Naomi was in law school at Duke University, she was kidnapped by a murderer and sadist who called himself Casanova. I’d been blessed enough to find and rescue her, and the ordeal forged a bond between us that continues to this day.
We passed a narrow field heavy with corn on our right, and a mature pine plantation on our left.
