“Nothing. I was just . . .” The words were on the tip of her tongue to ask about the night he’d arrested Jaxon, but she couldn’t seem to get them out. And she knew why. Asking that question would be like doubting her daddy. And she had never doubted him. Not once. She wasn’t going to start now. “I was just going to tell you that I sat and talked with Birdie for a while and she seems to be just fine.”
He smiled. “Ahh, so you’re worried about your grandmother. Well, there’s no need to be. It will take more than a whack with a door to take her out. But if it makes you feel better, I planned on driving out there and checking on her before I head home.” He hesitated. “Did you call your mama and tell her?”
Her mama was a sensitive subject between them. “No, but I will . . . unless you want to.”
He shook his head. “No, you go ahead. I don’t think she wants to talk to me.”
There was so much Tully wanted to say. So many questions she wanted to ask. The main one being why he hadn’t fought harder for his wife? Why had he just let her leave? But instead, she only nodded.
“I guess I’ll go get caught up on some paperwork.”
Once she was seated at her desk, she sat there staring at the county sheriff’s department logo screensaver on her laptop for several long minutes before she tapped her mouse pad and opened her browser.
It didn’t take her long to pull up the arrest records.
She had never read them. There hadn’t been a need to. She’d been listening at the vent when her daddy had gotten home that night and told the entire story. He’d been convinced Jaxon had robbed the gas station.
He’d convinced Tully too.
But as she read his report, she understood why he’d had to release Jaxon the following morning for lack of evidence. Her daddy hadn’t followed protocol that night. He hadn’t turned on his car camera as soon as he saw Jaxon’s truck barreling out of the gas station. He’d turned on his lights and started to follow when he’d spotted the tire fire. He’d given up the chase and pulled into the gas station. Once he’d called the fire department and Mickey, he’d discovered the back door of the garage opened and the missing money. Then and only then, had he headed over to the Hennessys to arrest Jaxon based only on seeing his truck leaving Mickey’s . . . from two blocks away.
Only Superman could have been sure who was driving the truck from that far away.
Why had her father been so sure it had been Jaxon?
Had he just seen what he wanted to see?
Tully had been taught at the police academy that what you think you see and what is actually the truth can be two different things. Preconceived notions affect how people perceive things. Tully’s instructors had told numerous stories about eyewitnesses who have sworn under oath that they saw someone commit a crime and it turned out the person had just been an innocent bystander. After years of dealing with the Hennessys’ rebel rousing and law breaking, how could her father not have preconceived notions?
The entire town had them.
Tully had them.
While she had thought it was unfair how the townsfolk treated the Hennessys, she had done the same thing. As soon as she’d heard her father’s story about what happened that night, she’d believed Jaxon was guilty. Because if she had believed him not guilty, she would have had to believe her father was wrong.
She hadn’t been able to do it.
She still couldn’t do it.
But what if her granny was right? What if things weren’t always black and white? Right and wrong? What if both her daddy and Jaxon weren’t totally right or totally wrong?
What if there was a gray area where good girls stole Nutty Buddys and bad boys were falsely accused?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Before they were old enough to help out at Honky Tonk Heaven, the Hennessys spent a lot of time looking for ways to entertain themselves. Which usually meant getting into trouble in town, but occasionally they would find something less ornery to do.
It had been Huck’s idea to build a boat after he discovered an old ship’s wheel in the attic. Huck had always loved to build things. He’d built igloos with ice blocks and birdhouses with Popsicle sticks and a roofless doghouse for their old mutt, Samson, out of nothing but mud and straw bricks he’d made and dried in the sun. He was convinced that if they built a boat, they could sell rides down the river to kids in town and make a boatload of money.
It had taken an entire summer to complete the boat, or not a boat as much as a raft with a ramshackle hut sitting on top that they’d made out of wine and liquor crates. The moment they launched it from the shore, it sank like a stone. Luckily, it had been a dry summer and the water was only a foot deep. So Jaxon, Dawson, and Huck had all clamored into the river and dragged the raft to shore while Poppy had run back to the house in tears that she wouldn’t get a ride on a boat.
Daddy had been home at the time. To soothe his little princess, he’d arrived at the bank of the river. After looking at the raft his sons had built, he’d declared it unseaworthy.
At least in water.
He’d looked at Poppy and winked. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t sail through the skies.”
He’d rigged up a pulley in a huge pecan tree that grew in an open meadow just north of the river and they’d hoisted the raft into it.
