Page 73 of His Wounded Heart

“The prime rib sandwich. It comes with au jus, and their homemade potato salad. You can’t go wrong.”

As soon as the server comes back, I place my order.

“So, who was the client?” I ask.

“She’s someone I’ve worked with before. She owns a workout studio here in town and she’s opening another one in Knoxville. She’s quite the businesswoman.”

“I would think that it would be the other way around. You’d start out in Knoxville, then branch out into Pigeon Forge.”

Trenda laughed. “That might have been true ten or fifteen years ago, but Pigeon Forge has made its mark here in Tennessee, and a lot of that has to do with Dollywood. Brittany, the studio owner, built her place up from practically nothing. It was a little hole in the wall, but people used to flock to her because she was a former ballet dancer and she worked some of her dance moves into her workouts. It really caught on.”

“Good for her. I can’t remember who, but one of my lieutenants was telling me that one of his men had taken some ballet training to help him with his coordination.”

Trenda giggles. “I’m going to laugh my butt off if it was Drake.” She picks up her glass of water to take a sip, but she starts laughing harder. “As a matter of fact, I’m going to say that I heard a rumor about him doing it, just to give him a hard time. It will be beautiful.”

I start laughing. I’d worked with Drake Avery a few times. I admired the man as a SEAL, and as a man. However, he really could trip over his own tongue with some of the bullshit he spewed.

“How is it you and Drake are related? I mean, you’re so precise in what you have to say, but Drake seems to…”

“Let it all hang out?” Trenda finishes my sentence for me.

“Precisely.”

“He went head-to-head with our father and our uncle a lot. Even at fifteen, Drake was huge for his age. He would protect us, and one way he would do it would be to mouth off so Dad would go after him, instead of coming after us girls. I think always having to run his mouth kind of became part of his personality.”

“Why didn’t any of you call the authorities?”

This time Trenda’s laugh is bitter. “The authorities were working hand in hand with Norville. They turned a blind eye to anything our father did. At least until he tried to kill our baby sister.”

“What?” I didn’t hear her right. There was no way she had just said that her father had tried to kill one of her younger sisters.

“Here you go.” Trenda and I both give our server a smile as she slips our plates and drinks onto the table in front of us.

“Let me know if you need anything else.”

We assure her we will.

Trenda picks up the straw for her sweet tea, pulls off the wrapper, and lays it flat on the table, smoothing it flat again and again.

“Trenda?” I prompt.

“Hmmm?”

“You were going to tell me why, in God’s name, would a father try to kill their little girl?”

“Piper was four years old when she witnessed our father kill a man in cold blood. Drake came home and heard Piper crying in the basement, so he witnessed Norville throwing her against the cement wall. There’s Drake, seventeen going on eighteen, having to fight two grown men, one with a gun, so he can get his little sister the heck out of the basement to safety.”

“What did the cops do?”

Trenda doesn’t say anything and I have to tilt my head and wiggle my hand between her eyes and the wrapper. When she looks up, I ask again. “What did the cops do?”

“You have to understand, Jasper Creek is a small town. It was even smaller sixteen years ago. Dad was in cahoots with the judge’s son, and the judge was buddies with the sheriff. It was only luck that the sheriff was out fishing that day and the deputies processed the scene and Norville and Frank Comey got arrested for murder. Because the deputies did their job, Frank and Norville got sentenced for second degree murder and ended up at Pikesville. But then Drake got framed by the sheriff and was looking at prison time because the same Frank’s dad, the judge, was going to try him. Luckily, another judge stepped in and Drake got to go into the Navy.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Nah, just a typical Southern soap opera,” she flicks her hand.

“Eat your lunch before it gets cold,” I coax. At least I hope I say it in a coaxing manner.