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“Will one of you please let me down!” he demanded in a voice far too arrogant for someone who was suspended 30 feet above the ground. “I demand to be released!”
“Sir,” said the policewoman standing underneath him, “your complaints aren’t going to get you down from that tree any sooner.”
“Then tell me what will!” Scott insisted. “Tell me what I can do to convince you to hurry!”
The policewoman took on the tone of a bored DMV worker. “Sir, the closest cherry-picker is two counties over. It’ll be here in half an hour.”
“That’s—no! That’s too long!”
“If you’d prefer we leave you up there…”
Scott’s mouth hung open. “That’s not what I’d prefer! That’s not what I’d prefer at all!”
“You know how to pick ‘em, Peaches,” Jayce said, turning away from the sight. I followed him back to the police car.
“In Scott’s defense, this is the first time he’s ever been strung up naked by his ankles. Usually he won’t be caught dead in anything less than a button-down.”
Dad was staring up at Scott with a small smile. “What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Seems obvious to me,” Jayce said.
But I shook my head and pointed. “I know that look, Dad. You did something.”
He gave a long, nonchalant shrug. “It’s possible,justpossible, that there’s a cherry-picker one county over that could have been here in five minutes. And it’s also possible that a certain sheriff made sure to call in thefarthestcherry-picker because he wanted to see the man who dumped his daughter suffer a little bit longer.”
I gasped. “Dad!”
Jayce snickered and gave my dad a friendly pat on the shoulder. “I can see where Charlotte gets her attitude.”
My dad’s smile slowly waned. “Is it correct that you were a member of the Copperheads?”
Jayce’s face went serious. “Yes sir. Quit them a month ago, once I realized they were moving drugs.”
“He’s telling the truth,” I said.
Dad examined him a long time. It was both the look of a sheriff interrogating a suspect, and the look of a protective father sizing up a new boyfriend. Jayce stared back calmly, unfazed. An unspoken conversation passed between them, one in a language I didn’t understand.
“You’ll have to tell the police everything you know,” Dad finally said. “But I think we can classify you as an outside witness, rather than an active participant like the rest of the Copperheads.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“You’ll testify against the sheriff and judge, too?” Dad asked. “We need witnesses to their corruption, in case we can’t find the paper trail we need to put ‘em away.”
Jayce grinned. “Nothin’ would make me happier.”
We drove back to the station so Jayce could be formally questioned. Mindy had the diner kitchen working overtime to make sandwiches for all the police officers, so Momma and I stopped in to get some food and relax. I spent the next hour telling her details about Eastland that I’d omitted on the phone. The Copperheads, the violence around town, the drugs they moved across Georgia in big cement mixers.
“There’s one thing you’re not telling me,” she said calmly. “Jayce.”
A lump formed in my throat. “What about him?”
Momma gave me a look that saidDon’t play dumb with me.
“We’ve sort of been seeing each other,” I said carefully.
“Sort of?”
“Pretty much every day. Outside of our community service work.”
