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“What big pools?” I asked.
“You know. Where your father swam.”
I stopped and came around the front of the chair. “What do you mean? Where did my dad swim?”
My uncle looked at me in renewed confusion, said, “In those pools. All the time when we was kids. Where is he? Jason?”
Aunt Hattie and Pinkie caught up to us. My cousin was carrying the remnants of a pie, and Hattie had two bags of chicken legs.
“Jason’s dead, Clifford,” Hattie said.
My uncle’s expression twisted into shock. “When did he die?”
Hattie said, “Jason died a long time ago. In the gorge.”
Uncle Cliff started to cry. “He was like my brother, Hattie.”
“I know, Cliff,” Hattie said, patting him on the arm and then looking at me and Pinkie, who was upset by the whole thing. “I don’t know what it is. He just gets confused and upset sometimes. I’m so sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.
She came around behind the wheelchair, said, “It’s probably better if I take him from here. Pinkie, can you bring the leftovers?”
My cousin nodded, and I stood there in the street looking after them until they’d gone inside and the lights flickered on.
Hoping to clear my head, get some perspective on the day, I texted Bree that I was going for a walk. Wandering down Loupe Street, I admitted that the evidence against Stefan felt overwhelming. My niece must have thought so too. She’d gone straight to confer with Stefan after adjournment. How was Naomi going to explain the semen? How was she going to cross-examine Sharon Lawrence?
Was Marvin Bell right? Was this a lost cause? Or were my aunts and Ethel Fox right? Were Bell and his adopted son, Finn Davis, involved? Had one of them killed Sydney Fox? Were they behind the criminal enterprise that Stefan suspected was ongoing in Starksville? How would I even go about answering any of those questions?
I still had no clear idea by the time I realized I’d walked all the way to the dark, arched bridge that spanned Stark River. Standing there, hearing the water roaring down in the gorge, I flashed on that dream I’d had of my younger self on the night my father died: running along the tracks through the rain, seeing the police cars with their lights flashing, and what I hadn’t told Nana Mama, what I hadn’t remembered until recently—my father out there on the bridge rail, the gunshot, and my dad falling.
I walked out onto the bridge to roughly where my father had been in my dream and looked down into the blackness, hearing the river at the bottom of the gorge but unable to see it.
A car pulled onto the bridge. The headlights swung over and past me. I ignored them, staring down into the void, and—
The car skidded to a halt right behind me. I pivoted in time to see three men jump out of an old white Impala.
They wore hoods and carried crowbars and a Louisville Slugger.
Chapter
44
I had no time to go for my backup pistol in the ankle holster. They were on me that fast.
The most important thing you can do in a situation like that is pay attention to the open space rather than to attackers or weapons. The more space you have or can create, the safer you are.
I had the bridge railing at my back and three men closing in on me trying to fan out, trying to limit my space. I moved hard to my right, along the rail and at an angle to one of the guys with a crowbar.
He grunted with laughter, raised his weapon, and made to club me down. I stepped forward off the curb with my right foot and spun my left foot back and behind me so the crowbar was no longer headed for my upper back but my face.
Before it could get there, I threw up my hands, reaching in and under the weapon’s arc to grab the guy by the wrist. With my left hand, I twisted the wrist and the crowbar away from me. With the heel of my right hand, I hammered up under the left side of his jaw.
He reeled.
I hit him again, this time with my fist, this time in the throat. There was a crunching noise and he dropped, gagging. I stripped him of the crowbar and took four steps backward, trying to create space again.
One of the other two, the one with the baseball bat, understood what I was trying to do. I looked over and saw there was another guy in the car, behind the wheel of the Impala. The driver threw the car in gear. Tires squealed at me at the same time the guy with the baseball bat jumped forward, the bat raised high over his head like it was an ax.
