He smiled back in spite of himself.“I don’t have issues with yourbook.I haveissues.Period.Like an entire mountain of issues, and some of them happen to stem from…” He trailed off, looked beyond Jill.Glenda had gone outside, so surely she couldn’t hear.“Your grandmother.”
Jill looked over her shoulder, chewing on her bottom lip.“Yeah, I get that.”Her eyebrows were drawn together, forehead creased in worry.“I… I hired Sam to try to find out what happened.”
He blinked, taken aback.“What?”
She turned back to him.Her eyes were closed as if she were in a kind of pain.“I don’t know why I told you that.I haven’t even told Aly that.”She opened her eyes, shook her head.“I know it’s kind of… wrong, maybe, but I need to know what happened to her, and she won’t tell me.”
He stared at her.Her dark eyes were miserable and lost.
“Jill…”
“Somethinghappened.It had to have.Don’t you think so?”She looked up at him imploringly, a little lost and… hell, he was a sucker for lost.Mostly becausehewas.
But he shook his head.“Did it ever occur to you that if somethingdid, and she refuses to tell you what it is, you might be better off not knowing?”
“Of course it occurred to me.It’s done nothing but occur to me forthreeyears.But… Cal, she’s unhappy.She’s trapped in her own mind in a way.Even with the occasional word spoken since the trial, she’s… she’s not an active participant in life.Maybe whatever happened should stay buried, butmaybemy grandmother has a chance to heal and she’s too afraid to face it.”
“So, you’re going to make her?”Was that his own voice sounding so… incredulous?Like he had a right?
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.Sam hasn’t found anything.”She inhaled deeply.“But if you’re worried there’s something you might remember, if you’re somehow connected…”
“I don’t,” he said flatly.
Which was a lie.
She didn’t call him on it.She stared at him like she wasgoingto, but in the end, she didn’t.She turned to a little table next to the couch, picked up a binder.
“I gave it a lot of thought last night, and I want you to read it.”She held the binder out to him.“It’s just the beginning.Just fifty pages, but I think if you see what I’ve done, it won’t feel quite so uncomfortable for you.”
He didn’t take the binder.Just eyed it like it might bite.“I’m not much of a reader.”
“Cal, you’re alawyer.”
He tried to come up with some other excuse.Tried to think ofanyreason not to read… this.
But she shoved the binder at him.“Please.Just read it.Believe me, I don’t share my work before it’s done lightly.But I think it’ll put your mind at ease.”
He wanted to tell her he didn’t need hereasing his mind, but he supposed that wouldn’t be altogether honest.It was justnothingwould ease his mind.
“Fine,” he muttered.
Agreeing was the only way out of this.Just because he said he was going to read it didn’t mean he had to do it.
She looked so relieved when he took it.She even smiled at him.
And yeah, she was pretty.Nice without it being all saccharine.
But she was Glenda Harrington’s granddaughter, and he’d do well to stay far, far away from this particular forgotten nightmare.
Chapter Seven
Marietta Library
Sam’s eyes weregritty, and a faint headache pounded at the inner corners of her eyes.It was tedious work to go through microfilm of old newspapers, searching for a needle in a haystack.She was aided by some online indexes, but it was still tedious, tedious work.
She’d found a story about Gerald getting drafted in 1965, along with a few other boys from the county.She’d made a few notes about what to look into when it came to his Vietnam service, because she just didn’t have the time or patience to read every scanned newspaper from the time period.
She’d found his and Glenda’s wedding announcement just a few days later.Getting married at eighteen and seventeen before he was deployed.Sam truly couldn’t imagine.After that, she hadn’t known quite where to look, so she’d skipped ahead to the day Gerald had died.
