Chapters (38)
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- epilogue
I smacked my hand on the table, startling the girl who approached with our pizza. “Wait a minute! I know the name of one man who worked with Chet back then. He dropped Chet off at Violet’s one day after Tolly died. His name was Jerry Lee, like Jerry Lee Lewis. Or maybe Lee was his last name. It’s all written in her fancy purple journal, the one Chet gave her.”
“I’ll look into it and see if I can get you a full name,” Jeff smiled and reached for a slice of double pepperoni.
A week later Rick told me Jerry Lee was eighty-three-year-old Jerry Lee Urban and he lived with his son in a dilapidated old house in Anniston. He’d spoken to the man earlier, which involved lots of yelling as he was nearly deaf.
“The first thing I asked him,” Rick began, “was if he’d worked on the hospital’s roof years ago. The guy squirms in his nasty old recliner and lights a cigarette. I wish I’d worn my uniform, Ronni, because he would’ve spontaneously combusted. Anyway, he tells me yeah, you had to be on the roof to access the electrical back then and he remembers the job. So I stared at the guy and told him a doctor was killed on the concrete steps there and I think his old boss Chet may have known him.”
“Oh my gosh, Rick, what did he say?”
“He laughs, Ronni, and says yeah, he was the husband of that woman Chet nearly drove himself crazy over, I know that much. But Chet’s dead and gone. Why are you askin’ me ‘bout this? So I went on and said he must’ve been there that day. Of course, he says he wasn’t and he knows nothin’ about it. Then he starts coughing hard and tells me all he remembers is that it was a terrible accident. He keeps hacking and shaking his head. Says he’s not well and needs to rest. I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything else, so I thanked him and left.”
“Do you think . . .?” I started.
Rick cut in. “Yeah, I do. At the very least he knows something. I heard him laugh himself into another coughing fit as I walked to my car.”
thirty-six
VIOLET
Two weeks after he came to her house, Chet and Violet boarded an American Airlines flight to San Francisco. Genny had told her over and over about her glorious honeymoon traveling down California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Violet thought it a perfect beginning for her life with Chet, whom she’d held to caressing her body and no more. She felt like a teenager again, giddy at the thought of their first time. She literally trembled with desire every time he stood close to her. It was delicious and daring to run away with him, the most outrageous thing she’d ever done.