Page 11 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

Nikki had put in a call to the attorney’s office, left a message, and was working on finding a phone number or address for Niall O’Henry. “In time,” she told herself and kept digging. Since she’d arrived at the newsroom, the information had started streaming in, and yes, she’d broken down and texted Reed, but he hadn’t responded to her bold question: “Any news on Blondell O’Henry case?”

No surprise there.

As for Blondell, it appeared she was keeping her silence. No one had any idea yet what she thought about her son’s turnabout and recanting of his story. Nikki had already sent an e-mail to the warden at Fairfield Women’s Prison near Statesboro, requesting an interview, though she didn’t hold out much hope that it would be granted. Over the term of her incarceration, Blondell O’Henry had been moved from one women’s facility to another and, since her one escape years before, had been kept under maximum security at Metro State Prison in Atlanta until it had closed. Afterward she’d landed in Fairfield, which was a little more than an hour’s drive from Savannah. No matter what, Nikki determined, as she left the offices of the Sentinel, she was going to get a private interview with the state of Georgia’s most notorious femme fatale and murderess, if it killed her. And, oh, yeah, she was going to get it first.

She was already out the door when her phone chirped, the sound of her preset reminder. She checked the screen after she settled behind the wheel. “Right,” she said when she saw the quick text that told her Mikado was ready to be picked up from the groomer’s.

Fortunately, Ruby’s Ruff and Ready was on the way to City Hall, where Niall’s lawyer, after he’d filed the necessary papers at the courthouse, planned to hold an impromptu press conference. She wondered, as she backed out of the lot and eased into traffic, how the police department was handling all the unusual events in a case that had been decided nearly twenty years earlier.

Traffic was snarled in the historic district, but she knew the back roads and side streets over by the parkway. She took side streets to an alley where Ruby Daltry had her little shop. Hurrying, Nikki made her way through a short gate and along a brick walkway to the back porch. Over the screen door, hung a hand-painted sign, RUBY’S RUFF AND READY, in script, with colored paw prints of various sizes surrounding the letters.

She rang the bell and stepped onto the porch, where several dog crates and beds had been placed. A large, tile sink dominated one corner, and unmoving paddle fans hung from the elevated ceiling.

“Comin’,” a voice called from inside, and Ruby, a fiftysomething woman with fading red hair pinned into a knot on her head, appeared in one of the three, small, descending windows in the door, walking awkwardly before reaching forward to unlatch the door. A child of about three, her hair in pigtails, was wrapped around one of her grandmother’s legs and seemed fastened there. “I was wonderin’ if you’d show up,” Ruby said, offering a gap-toothed smile.

“Sorry about yesterday,” Nikki apologized, stepping into a large open room to be greeted by a chorus of barks and yips. Three or four dogs, tucked into crates, peered through the mesh of their doors, and within his carrier, Mikado, ecstatic at the sight of her, was turning in tight, little circles.

“I’m glad to see you too,” she said to him, leaning down and wiggling her fingers through the mesh. “Hang on for a sec.”

Mikado yipped excitedly as Nikki straightened.

“You’re not the only one who left a pup here. I don’t know what people are thinking. Must be the rain . . . or maybe all that business about Blondell O’Henry. You’ve heard about that, haven’t you?” Ruby was always one for juicy gossip.

“Only that she might be released, that testimony is being recanted.”

“Unthinkable what that woman did,” Ruby said. “Those poor kids. One dead, the other two growing up knowing their mother tried to kill them.” She sighed heavily. “I just can’t imagine.”

“Blondell has always claimed that she was innocent, that some intruder came into the cabin.”

Ruby’s eyes met Nikki’s in an “oh sure” stare. “What else was she going to say? That she did it? I don’t think so. Nope, she’s guilty as sin, and if you ask me it was all because of a man. She was involved with that

. . . oh, what was his name?” She let out her breath in a low whistle.

“Roland Camp,” Nikki supplied.

“Right!” Snapping her fingers, Ruby added, “A nasty one, him. Good-looking, I suppose, but a real lowlife. Don’t know what she saw in the likes of him when, in her day, she could have had any man in Georgia, let me tell you. I’m a little older than she is, but I’m telling you all my brothers had their damned tongues hanging out at the thought of Blondell. Sickening the way men acted around her. Boys, men, she dated them all.”

“You knew her?” This was news. Good news, actually. Another source of information. Even if it was, at the worst, suspect and, at the best, laced with gossip.

“I knew of her. She went to the school across town, but the boys, they knew all the hot girls in the area, and by that time, I was out of the house and set on marrying Seth. Blondell, she had her eyes set on someone to get her out of a crappy home life, I think, and I swear she was involved with some older guy who was rumored to be the baby-daddy of her first kid.”

“Calvin O’Henry,” Nikki said, distracted; she clipped Mikado’s leash to his collar and held him back as he strained forward.

“Uh-uh. He wasn’t the father of her first baby, as I understand it.”

“Yes, you’re right. Sorry. Amity was adopted,” Nikki corrected herself. “Mikado, slow down!”

“Who knows who the real father was?” Ruby went on. “The truth is, I didn’t really think much about Amity, you know, until she . . .” Ruby glanced down at the girl still wrapped around her big leg and decided to let that thought go, but Nikki made a mental note that Ruby and her brothers had known Blondell as a young girl. Before she’d married. Before she’d had children. Before she’d become involved with Roland Camp and the horrid tragedy had occurred. Background information.

Ruby said to her granddaughter, “Come on, Janie, give me a break here.”

Janie was having none of it, her waifish face twisting as she wound up for what looked to be a colossal wail. “Noooo!”

In a hurry, Nikki asked, “How much do I owe you?”

“Seventeen fifty. I clipped his toenails too.”

She fished in her wallet and came up with two fives and a ten. “Keep the change.”

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