Page 10 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

Nikki didn’t know.

Had there even been an intruder at the cabin?

That too was murky, but it was possible.

The flattened body of a copperhead had been found in the muddy driveway. Even that was odd, for in the middle of winter snakes were commonly in a state of reptile hibernation, sluggish and dull. And then there was the cigarette butt discovered near the porch. Blondell didn’t smoke that brand; in fact, she rarely smoked at all.

Nikki wondered. DNA had just begun to be used at the time of the trials, but now . . . ?

She thought of Amity, and her heart twisted in guilt. Could she have saved her? Hadn’t Amity begged her to come to the cabin that night?

If she had, would Amity be alive today?

“Please come,” Amity had cajoled into the phone. “I need to talk to someone, and you’re my best friend.”

“I don’t think I can get away.”

“But it’s really, really important,” she’d insisted. “About . . . about my boyfriend. You have to find a way to come and please, please, please don’t tell a soul. If you do we’ll both be dead.” She’d seemed about to divulge some great secret, then said, “I just can’t tell you over the phone . . . She might be listening.” By “she,” Nikki had believed, Amity had meant her mom. “Come to the cabin, okay? I’ll meet you at the lake. After midnight. Around one, okay? She’ll be asleep by then.”

“The cabin?” Nikki had repeated. “What cabin?”

“The one by the lake.”

“My grandmother’s cabin?” Nikki had asked, feeling a little jab of guilt for once showing Amity the family’s nearly forgotten cottage on the shores of the lake when they’d been horseback riding. “How does your mother—?”

“Nikki! Just come! Nothing else matters,” Amity had interrupted. “I’m not kidding. Please! It’s a matter of life or death.”

Nikki hadn’t believed that plea. Amity had always been overly dramatic. Nonetheless, she’d reluctantly promised to show, to find a way to get to the lake, but she’d never made it. She’d set her alarm and even sneaked to the top of the stairs, but had heard her parents arguing in the den, just off the end of the staircase, so she’d waited in her room and eventually fallen asleep, only to wake hours later with the wintry Savannah sun climbing high into the sky, mist rising above the surrounding fields from the recent rain. Though she hadn’t known it then, Amity O’Henry was already dead.

It’s a matter of life or death!

She hadn’t been kidding. Nikki had felt awful. Confused. Angry. Trying to convince herself that Amity’s death was not her fault.

The news had rocked the community as it had ripped a dark hole of guilt through Nikki’s soul. Could she have saved her friend? Somehow prev

ented the horrid tragedy? Sometimes she felt as if she should have been the brave heroine who somehow averted Amity’s murder; at other times she knew with a bone-chilling certainty that if she’d made her rendezvous with Amity, she too would be dead.

As for Amity’s whispered warning, “Don’t tell a soul,” Nikki had taken that to heart, never once mentioning their conversation to anyone, not even her uncle, who became Blondell O’Henry’s lawyer. Not even when she learned that Amity had been three months pregnant at the time of her death, knowing her pregnancy had probably been the big secret she’d planned to tell Nikki.

Lots of conflicting evidence had been brought to the trial, and most of the defense’s case was called “smoke and mirrors” by the prosecution. The whole case had taken on a carnival atmosphere, possibly because of the media circus that had ensued.

The prosecution had insisted that Blondell, estranged from her ex-husband, Calvin O’Henry, was involved with Roland Camp, a shady individual at best, a man who had no interest in raising another man’s children. Speculation had run high that Camp was breaking it off with Blondell because of her kids and that, after losing her unborn child, she’d snapped. In a fit of desperation she’d tried to kill her own daughters and son, then blamed it all on a mythical stranger.

Did that make sense? No. But nothing else did either, and Blondell’s disconnect over her injured children hadn’t played well with the jury. Still, if she were truly guilty, she’d taken great pains, gone to horrifying lengths, to rid herself of her children in order to what? Hang on to the boyfriend who had sworn on the stand that he’d moved on already?

It was a terrible story. Cruel. Insidiously evil. An echo of the Diane Downs case that had taken place in Oregon ten years earlier. A case that Nikki, like many others, believed Blondell had used as a blueprint for her own heinous act.

The defense stuck with the unknown intruder scenario, the proof of which was a single cigarette butt left at the scene and the squashed body of a copperhead in the driveway. These pieces of evidence, they claimed, meant that someone else had been on the property. As for the gun residue on Blondell’s hands, it could be explained by the struggle for the stranger’s weapon.

Their take was that Blondell’s own injuries were evidence enough that she wasn’t the killer. The man she’d wrestled with, whom she hadn’t really seen, his face always in darkness, had been in his twenties or early thirties, around six feet tall, with thick, bushy hair. She’d also thought he had a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, the markings of which were unclear in the darkness; but in one of the gun’s blasts, Blondell had seen something that reminded her of a snake, or serpent, or the tail of some beast. Most of the inking was hidden by the long sleeves of his wet hoodie. She’d been allowed to search through book after book of photographs of known felons and to speak with police artists, but she’d identified no one on file, nor had she been clear enough in the details of the man’s features—partially because they were hidden by a mask—for the artist to come up with a clear picture.

The defense had insisted that despite going through the motions, the detectives in charge of the case had targeted Blondell from the get-go and had never seriously searched for another suspect, the real killer.

The prosecution’s case was circumstantial and rested on the tiny shoulders of Niall O’Henry, who, because he was old enough to know what was going on, was put on the stand. It was he who, at eight, had, in whispered horror, sent his mother to prison for what was supposed to be the rest of her life.

Now that could change.

According to the information Nikki had gathered, Niall O’Henry, along with his lawyer, was going to make a public statement, his own personal press conference, which was bizarre, but what wasn’t about the Blondell O’Henry case?

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