Page 119 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

December 17th

Last Interview

Now I know the truth as I stare through the smudged glass at the broken woman, a maniac whom I once thought I loved. It’s hard to imagine that hatred could rot a person’s soul to the point that now, this woman I cared for, is nearly unrecognizable to me.

“Good bye, Aunt Penelope,” I say.

“Go to hell!” is the sharp, concise response. She’s recovered from her snake bites but never again will find peace, if she ever had it in the first place.

“Sorry. I’ve already been there, thanks to you.” I give her a hard smile and get off of my stool. “But now I’m back and have my life again. I’m getting married tomorrow.”

“That’s a mistake,” she snarls.

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll find out,” Penelope says with a bitter, hard-edged cackle, as if she knows better, just as the guard reaches for her. “Men,” she advises with a pinched face. “They’re all the same.”

She seems so sure of herself. So convinced. And yet she is on the other side of the bars; she is the one who is caged. Who is she to give out any kind of advice?

“Blondell’s finally spoken,” I say. “She was dumbfounded to learn you were the stranger who attacked her. She really did have car trouble on the way to the hospital. Turns out she loved her children, as best she knew how. She loved Uncle Alex and kept silent rather than implicate him in any way, even with his betrayal with Amity.”

Penelope’s face devolves into a mask of hatred.

I leave then, get up from the uncomfortable chair and walk down the long hall, hearing the gates clang shut with finality as I pass. I won’t miss the smells or the sounds or the sights or the feel of this place, and I know I won’t be coming back.

As I gather the things I left at the admittance area, I close my mind to my childhood and the hours I spent with my cousins and aunt and uncle, the halcyon days that now I realize are just a nostalgic figment of my imagination, a fragmented and unreal part of my family history.

I’m escorted out of the prison area to freedom, and as the final gates close behind me, I draw in deep, cool breaths. Bars and cages, tight places and locked doors—not my thing.

Roland Camp died on the way to the hospital, but Penelope survived. Is that justice? Maybe there is no such thing. I don’t know. Donny Ray Wilson is talking, and he’s agreed to be interviewed for the book, so that’s a good thing. As for Calvin O’Henry, he and June refuse to acknowledge me, and they resent the fact that Blythe is willing to be a part of the story. Niall feels vindicated, of course. He didn’t see his mother shoot him as she was struggling with a stranger for the gun that Aunt Penelope hid for twenty years and Uncle Alex never admitted was missing. Uncle Alex was as guilty as she in many ways, though I don’t believe he ever knew his wife was a murderess. I won’t let myself think that horrid thought. My mother never liked Aunty-Pen and wasn’t all that surprised, though my sister, Lily, found the scandal “delicious.” Yeah, well, she didn’t have to live through exposing it.

Uncle Alex lives in an ever-deepening twilight world. Is it payback? Karma? Maybe.

In the end, the snakes were captured, and it was determined that Roland Camp had killed Alfred Necarney, though why Roland was so upset with my digging up the past will remain a mystery.

I wonder about Effie Savoy, but I’ll never really know her. Not now.

It’s mind-boggling.

I leave the prison behind me. Forever.

Reed is waiting for me. Wearing jeans and a light jacket over a long-sleeved T-shirt, his hips leaning against the dirty fender of his ridiculous Cadillac, his hair teased by the winter wind, he smiles as I approach—that slow, sexy smile that always gets to me. “Hey, Hot Stuff,” he says as I draw near.

Damn—I can’t help but grin.

“What do you say we elope?”

“Tonight?” He’s got to be joking, right?

But the spark in his eye says differently. “I’m talking about right now. You hop in and I drive.”

“Seriously?” I can’t believe it. “But . . . the wedding and . . . the guests . . . and the church and the country club . . . My mother will be mortified. She’ll kill me. And she’ll kill you too. Both of us.”

“So what? I want to just get married, the two of us. You and me. No muss. No fuss.”

“Romantic.”

“It could be.” Again, that irreverent grin stretching across his beard-shadowed jaw. I really can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.

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