I said, to stop the bickering. “You are absolutely right.” That shut them both up. “I have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m still trying to get it all together inside. I know you think I should have it all figured out by now, but I haven’t.”
Jack’s heart attack and my subsequent discovery of his affair with Robyn had indeed played a huge part in my inability to direct my own future. I hadn’t told my family about the affair. I wouldn’t ruin my daughter’s vision of her father. But Nana had her own ways of discovering the truth, and she had eventually found out. I pushed thoughts of the past away.
“All I can say is, I always wanted to be a nurse and I’m still nursing. I’m just not nursing exactly the way you wanted me to, working in the county hospital with Wallace Chadwick as my boss and surrounded by family. I want more, and I’m not sure what kind of more. So I’m trying new things, going new places. And I’ll find myself.”
“Jack left you enough money to sit and play pinochle all day if you wanted to. You don’t have to drive into that dangerous city to work. Next thing you’ll be moving there, taking Jas with you.”
Ahhhh. Understanding nestled in me. Nana was worried about my health a lot less than she was worried about the possibility that I might move to the state capital. Leave home in my midlife crisis. Cleave a chasm in her comfortable world “Crime is everywhere, Nana,” I said softly. “Even on Chadwick Farms. We can’t hide from danger or troubles. And I promise I’ll find myself. Without moving away.”
“Tole you she figure out what you doin’. Ash got your number.”
“Shut up, old woman.”
Before the bickering could start up again, a small truck pulled into the yard and cut its lights. Jas was home. I felt something inside lighten as she slid from the truck, something tight and frightened that I hadn’t even been aware of. Jas skipped up the steps and stopped when she saw us. “What’s up?” she said, trepidation in her voice. My Jas was smart. Smart enough to know that there was trouble just by reading our body language in the deep dusk light.
“Nothing. We going home. Jist stop by to say good-night to your mama.” In a slow and ponderous process, Aunt Moses stood, crossed the porch and enveloped Jasmine in a mama-bear hug. Nana hugged right behind her and they were both gone, slow steps crunching across the gravel, leaving me to explain to my daughter about a body, cops and a task force.
Once she got over the shock of hearing that a child had been buried at the old family homestead, my daughter thought it was cool to have a crime scene on the property and even cooler that she would be questioned by the FBI. Youth, I thought, disgusted. So tired I weaved when I walked, I made my way to my room, showered the stink of the grave off me and fell into bed.
7
Tuesday
By noon I had found my way through horrid traffic to the South Carolina FBI field office. Luckily, I discovered a parking spot close by, not that easy in a metropolitan area that was growing so congested. The inner city had been designed with gracious living and farming in mind, rather than good use of government resources, and many of its streets were narrow and twisting. And I was sure its belt loop and interchanges had been designed by a caffeine-charged five-year-old with a box of crayons.
Inside the entrance, my ID was carefully checked, twice, my photo compared to my face, and my reason for coming to feeb headquarters questioned by a guard with the personality of a block of stone. Finally I was given a name badge with a security locator device attached so I couldn’t get lost or misplaced, and directed to a room on the second floor.
I passed large rooms, some full of frenetic activity and ringing phones, and offices with closed doors. I heard a variety of languages, though most conversations were in English or Spanish, and foreign-sounding names interspersed with names Bubba might have been born with. Everyone I passed or glimpsed wore a look of intense concentration or anger or some combination of the two. The expressions seemed unrelieved by even brief moments of levity or relaxation, and I was glad I didn’t work here.
As a forensic nurse, I was expected to work with law enforcement. I had toured the local LEC—law enforcement centers—in three counties surrounding Dawkins, and had even taken a tour through SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division. But no one who set up the training had envisioned a forensic nurse needing to work with FBI, so that locale had not been on my list of suggested places to visit.
I entered a conference room and nodded to the officers gathered around a coffeepot and three boxes of glazed Krispy Kremes. How trite was that? Cops and doughnuts. As I walked across the room and looked out the dirty window into the street below, they inspected me from head to foot, cataloged and filed me under Not a Cop, and promptly went back to their muted conversation.
I was glad I had opted for basic khaki-green woven trousers and a hip-hiding darker brown jacket with short-heeled pumps. With an amber necklace dangled between my breasts, and with my ashy-blond hair up in a French twist—which pretended to give me some height—and gold hoops instead of pearls, I blended, at least, though the cops seemed to go for black and blue with power-red ties. Even the women wore dark, subdued clothing. Unlike the TV heroines, none of these women showed cleavage or wore Armani. Jas would be distraught.
I caught sight of Jim as I took a seat at the long table in the room’s center. He looked secure and confident, even when wearing the same intense look as the other cops. His suit coat was tailored and his own power-red tie was knotted in a full Windsor. I recognized it for several reasons, chiefly because Jasmine’s father had had difficulty knotting his ties himself and I had always tied them for him. But Jim wasn’t Jack. I felt some unidentified tension begin to uncoil inside me at that thought.
“Afternoon, Ash,” Steven said, pulling out the chair beside me and easing his frame into it. The big cop was a weight lifter, the kind who went into the sport with the intention of building muscle mass, not simply getting into shape. Beside him, I looked like a matronly housewife, something he might break in half with two fingers and thumbs. Steven passed me a cup of coffee, a cream and pink packet of sweetener.
I didn’t drink coffee often as it upset my digestion, but I mixed, stirred and sipped to have something to do with my hands. Steven bit into a glazed doughnut and washed it down with half a cup of coffee, cop-style. “We should have driven up together,” he said. “Traffic is worse today than downtown Charlotte.”
“I thought about it, but I’m on call this afternoon and might have to leave at any time.”
“You’re like a combination of nurse and cop now, aren’t you? Doing both jobs?” The chair groaned as he shifted around, trying to find a comfortable position.
“Sort of,” I said. “I still have my job at CHC in the Majors Emergency Department, but the forensic nursing position is taking more and more of my time. My callback hours are starting to look like another full-time job.”
“Welcome to my world,” he sighed, sounding tired. “But you’re making big bucks, not a lowly cop salary.”
Steven was fishing, and I grinned sourly. “Yeah. Mega bucks. Call time for forensic nurses is about what you made as a first-year beat cop.”
“Now that sucks.”
Of course, that was on top of my nursing salary. I wasn’t hurting, at least not financially.
“Thank you all for coming.” Jim Ramsey stood at the front of the room, which had filled up while Steven and I talked. He bent forward, hands flat on the table, a position that said, I’m offering you all I have. I’m just one of the guys, and then he stood and seemed to take over the room. Nice ploy. Effective. I had seen Jas’s father do the same thing in business meetings. I wondered for a moment why I was thinking so much about Jack, but I pushed the question away. I wasn’t ready to look at the fact or the question, knowing both were snarled up with my evolving feelings for Jim Ramsey.
“The investigators from the Criminal Investigative Analyst Unit from the National Center for the