Page 15 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

“Of what? I’m not going to compromise your case, I swear.” She held up three fingers and mouthed, “Scout’s Honor.”

“I just don’t like the idea of you at the prison.”

“I won’t be in any danger.” She saw the doubt in his eyes and loved him even more. He wouldn’t tell her what to do, but he’d worry a bit. “This isn’t a case like the Grave Robber, nor is Atropos at large any longer,” she said, citing the most recent incidents in which a deranged serial killer had stalked the streets of Savannah. “This is a cold case where a woman was charged and convicted of killing her kids. Family members. No one else was hurt.” She paused. “That is, unless you don’t think Blondell O’Henry is guilty?”

“I haven’t studied the case, but since she was tried and convicted, yeah, I think she did it.” He leaned over and brushed a kiss against her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Before he could reach for the door handle, she took his face in both her hands and pressed her lips to his. A warmth fired her blood as his tongue touched hers and her bones immediately began to melt.

“You’re causing trouble,” he whispered into her open mouth.

“I know.”

He lifted his head again and winked at her. “Hold that thought, would you? Tomorrow.”

“Sure, Detective.”

This time he escaped, opening the door and sliding outside. As he jogged into the old brick building housing the police department, she nosed her way into the flow of cars and headed home. Traffic was thin, and she easily drove past the wrought-iron fence of Colonial Park Cemetery. In the darkness, she caught only a glimpse of the headstones, but even so her skin crawled, reminding her of her ordeal a few years earlier. Glancing into her rearview mirror, where the reflected headlights nearly blinded her, she made her way toward Forsyth Park and, across the street from its perimeter, the antebellum building she called home. The tiered fountain was illuminated, the tall trees with their canopy of branches ghostlike as Spanish moss swayed in the breeze.

“It’s charming,” she said aloud, “not scary.” But she couldn’t ignore the little drizzle of fear that slid down her spine as she parked, locked her car, and hurried up the interior staircase. On the third floor she was greeted by Mikado’s sharp barks as she let herself into her apartment. The little dog spun circles and did a happy dance that always ended up near his food bowl, just in case she felt generous. “You’re a little pig,” she teased, picking him up and petting him, only to be rewarded with a tongue to her face and the not-so-pleasant odor of doggie breath. “First, outside with you, then I’ll think about it.”

Jennings had shown up as well and was pacing across the back of her couch. “Yeah, you too,” she said to the yellow tabby before she found Mikado’s leash and, as promised, walked him downstairs and into the backyard, where the porch light offered soft illumination and the patio furniture and shrubbery cast weird shadows. She stood on the old brick veranda, shifting from one foot to the other, a cool breeze cutting through her light jacket, her mind on the article that was forming in her mind.

All the while, as she waited for the little dog to sniff and take care of business, she thought of Niall O’Henry and how she would spin the story about him.

“Are you about done?” she asked and looked around for the dog, who had disappeared into the shadows. “Come on, Mikado! I’m freezing.”

No answer.

“Buddy?” Her gaze scoured the magnolia and crepe myrtle lining the brickwork, but she couldn’t see the dog, nor did he respond. All she heard was the hum of traffic in the city. “Mikado?” Whistling, she walked toward the fence line, hoping he hadn’t found a space to crawl under. “Come!” Her heart started to pound a little faster when she finally saw him, unmoving, staring toward a corner of the yard. “What is it?” He growled, and her nerves tightened, even though she knew he could be focused on a cat on the other side of the fence, or a squirrel or some other rodent.

Hearing the soft rustle of something moving through the undergrowth, the hairs on the back of her neck raised. Reed’s warning, “Be careful,” echoed through her mind. Shivering, she said, “Let’s go, buddy,” and quickly picked up the dog. His little body was tense, his ears cocked, his eyes trained on the encroaching darkness. “Give it up,” she said, and scratched him behind the ears as she hurried into the house and up the stairs.

Once in her apartment, she snapped off the lights and moved into the kitchen to look down at the garden below. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. When she squinted into the darkness beyond the fence, she thought she saw movement, someone hurrying through the shadows of the yard and alley behind her property, but she couldn’t be certain and chalked the image up to her overactive imagination.

Mikado barked for a treat, and she broke a small doggie biscuit into two pieces before making a cup of hot tea. She then headed up the stairs to her writing alcove and computer.

The article came together easily, but there wasn’t a lot of meat to it, nothing special, and she frowned at her cell phone as Niall O’Henry’s lawyer hadn’t deigned to return her call. “Par for the course,” she grumbled and made the best of the information she had.

Tomorrow. If she could just get in to see Blondell, then she’d have a real story. Somehow, she had to make it happen. For now, she logged onto her e-mail account at the paper, found the pictures Jim Levitt had turned in and picked two. One was a close-up of Niall as he stood solemnly at the podium. The second was a broader shot that showed the crowd that had convened around the steps of City Hall. It still wasn’t enough, so she searched through the paper’s archives and located several pictures of Blondell O’Henry at the time of her trial. Even in grainy black and white, she’d been a striking, petite woman with dark hair that framed a heart-shaped face. Her features were even, her cheekbones sculpted. Her large, smoky-gray eyes were rimmed in thick lashes, and her full lips were parted, showing perfect teeth and creating a slight enigmatic smile that could only be called sexy. Despite having three children, she’d been thin, with a few curves that were, as her father had said often enough, “in all the right places.”

After attaching the digital photos she’d chosen for the piece, she sent everything to the Sentinel, then started work on a synopsis of the book she planned to write. It would take her a week or two to put the idea together and then to flesh it out enough so that Ina and her editor, Remmie Franklin, would approve.

After working for two hours straight, she decided to call it a night, but as she was starting down the stairs, she spied her high school yearbooks piled on the bottom shelf of her bookcase. Her copies of the Robert E. Lee High School Traveller, named after the Southern general’s famous horse, had collected dust since she’d moved in. Now Nikki walked up the stairs again and sorted through the four volumes to find the school year she was looking for—the last year of Amity O’Henry’s life. Almost gingerly, she pulled the volume from its resting place to carry it downstairs.

Once she’d changed into an oversized nightshirt, she plumped up the pillows on her bed and settled in. Mikado curled up beside her, and Jennings found a spot near the footboard. Carefully, she turned the pages, spying pictures of classmates as they’d been twenty years earlier, wearing eager, fresh faces, once-cool fashions, and hairstyles that were no longer in vogue. She found Amity O’Henry’s junior-year picture, and Nikki’s throat tightened as she studied it.

As beautiful as her mother, Amity looked into the camera. Her dark hair fell past her shoulders, her big eyes a cool blue and the smile that touched the corners of her lips sensual. Not yet seventeen, she appeared to be a grown woman with almost innocent eyes. There had been something about Amity that had caused heads to turn and boys to fantasize.

And one had done more than that, obviously.

Amity had dated a lot of boys, her relationships as volatile and short-lived as a firecracker on a rainy Fourth of July, sputtering out quickly.

So who had gotten her pregnant? Flipping through the pages of the yearbook, Nikki saw the faces of the boys who had openly dated Amity. Brad Holbrook, the baseball jock, and Steve Manning, a do-nothing stoner who was Hollywood handsome, were the two Nikki remembered, but that was because Amity tended to date older guys, in their twenties—“men,” she’d called them, though the ones Nikki had met hardly seemed like adults. Nikki, a year and a half younger, had been given strict curfews, and boys who dared to take her out learned very quickly that Judge Ronald Gillette expected his daughter to be brought home and walked to the door. She remembered one particularly excruciating experience. Tate Wheeler had asked her out, and upon his arrival at the house, they’d both been summoned into her father’s den.

“You will have her home by midnight,” he’d said, eyeing Tate as if he might be a deadly rattler ready to strike.

Standing in front of the desk where the judge had been seated, both Tate and Nikki had squirmed. Leather-bound books filled several tall cases that flanked the windows, while family photos, law degrees, awards, and antique weapons vied for the remaining wall space. Half-glasses at rest on his nose, the judge had selected a cigar from his humidor but hadn’t bothered to light it, just fingered the rolled tobacco, as he repeated, “Midnight.”

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