Cross Justice Read Free

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 saidit 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.
    Deep in my memory, I recognized the place and felt queasy because I knew that at the far end of the cornfield there would be a sign welcoming me back to a town that had torn my heart out, a place I’d spent a lifetime trying to forget.

CHAPTER 2
     
    I REMEMBERED THE sign that marked the boundary of my troubled childhood as being wooden, faded, and choked by kudzu. But now the sign was embossed metal, fairly new, and free of strangling weeds.
     
    WELCOME TO STARKSVILLE, NC
    POPULATION 21,010
     
     
    Beyond the sign we passed two long-abandoned, brickwalled factories. Windowless and falling into ruin, the crumbling structures were surrounded by chain-link fences with notices of condemnation hanging off them. In the recesses of my brain, I remembered that shoes had once been produced in the first factory, and bedsheets in the other. I knew that because my mother had worked in the sheet mill when I was a little boy, before she succumbed to cigarettes, booze, drugs, and, ultimately, lung cancer.
    I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw from my grandmother’s pinched face that she too was being haunted by memories of my mother, her daughter-in-law, and probably also of her son, my late father. We drove by a seedy strip mall that I didn’t remember and then by the shell of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store that I distinctly recalled.
    “Whenever my mom gave me a nickel, I’d go in there and buy candy or a Mr. Pibb,” I said, gesturing to the store.
    “A nickel?” Ali said. “You could buy candy for a nickel?”
    “In my day, it was a penny, young man,” Nana Mama said.
    “What’s a Mr. Pibb?” asked Bree, who’d grown up in