The Last Breath. Kimberly Belle

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СКАЧАТЬ an innocent man to end his prison term like this...” He sighs, and his breath makes puffy wisps in the February air. “I’ve got lots of choice words to say about it, none of them fit for your ears.”

      From the moment Cal arrived on the scene—before my father was a suspect, before he signed on as my father’s attorney, even before Ella Mae’s body had been photographed and bagged and carried away—his belief in my father’s innocence has been unwavering.

      For me, the situation was never that clear. If I thought my father was capable of murder, that he premeditated and carried out a plan to suffocate Ella Mae Andrews, his wife and my stepmother, I’m not certain I could forgive either him or his behavior. In fact, I’m not certain I would even be here, that I would have traveled all this way for a last goodbye.

      But I came all this way because I’m not certain. In my father’s case, the evidence is unclear, the testimony conflicted. The shadows of my doubt run in both directions.

      I stuff my icy hands into my front jeans pockets and shiver, not merely from the cold.

      Cal takes the gesture as his cue and reaches into his pocket, where a set of keys jingles. “Ready to get inside before you freeze to death?”

      No. My heart races, and every tiny hair soldiers to attention on the back of my neck, commanding me to run. Never again. No.

      “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

      I follow Cal up the five steps to the wraparound porch, summoning the detached efficiency that’s made me one of Earth Aid International’s top disaster relief experts. I can’t manage even an ounce of objectivity. This disaster is too close, its aftermath still too painful. I can’t detach from its reality.

      A reality that, according to the doctors, could last anywhere from three weeks to three months.

      “The renters moved out about six months ago,” Cal says without turning his head, searching through his key ring for the right one. The sisal mat under his feet mocks me with its cheery message: Welcome, Guests. As if anyone but me and Cal will be stepping on it, waiting to be invited in to pay their last respects. Not in a Million Years would be more like it.

      “Good timing, I suppose.”

      “I’ve had the house painted. And all the furniture is new. Appliances, too.”

      “What happened to Dad’s old stuff?”

      “I donated most of the furniture and clothes to Goodwill after the trial. The rest is in a storage facility in Morristown. I’ll get you the address and the access combination if you want to head over there.”

      “I doubt I’ll have the time.” Or the inclination. Digging through old memories sounds like torture to me.

      Uncle Cal twists the key in the handle and the door swings open with a groan, a sound I find eerily appropriate. He steps inside like he owns the place, which I suppose by now he probably does, but I don’t follow. I can’t. Somebody switched out my sneakers for boots of lead. My knees wobble, and I grip the doorjamb to keep from falling down.

      A strange thing happens when a home turns into a crime scene. Its contents are labeled, cataloged and photographed. Walls become scene boundaries, doors and windows, the perpetrator’s entry and exit. Seemingly ordinary objects—dust bunnies behind the couch, scuff marks on the stairs, a tarnished nickel under the carpet—take on all sorts of new significance. And the people living there, in a place now roiling with bad memories and even worse juju, no longer think of it as home.

      But what about that one spot where the victim took her last breath, where her heart gave its final, frantic beat? What do you do with that place? Build a shrine on top of it, wave a bouquet of smoking sage around it or pretend it’s not there?

      At the foot of the stairs, Cal stops and turns, studiously ignoring my distress. My gaze plummets to the fake Persian under his feet, and a wave of sick rises from the pit of my belly. Just because I can’t see the spot doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened there.

      Or for that matter, that I’m ever stepping on it.

      “Shut the door, please, Gia.”

      I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and follow him into the house.

      “My assistant Jennie did all the shopping,” he says, gesturing with his keys toward the living room. Except for the unmade hospital bed in the corner, the decor—oversize furniture, silk ferns in dark pots, framed paintings of exotic landscapes on the walls—looks plucked from the pages of a Rooms To Go catalog. “I hope it’ll do.”

      I finger a plastic pinecone in a wooden bowl on the dresser and peer down the hallway toward the kitchen. There’s literally nothing here that I recognize. Probably better that way. “She did a great job.”

      “The bedrooms are ready upstairs. Thought we’d let the nurse take the master. You don’t mind sharing the hall bath with me on the weekends, do you?”

      I smile, hoping it doesn’t come across as forced as it feels. “I’ve gone months with nothing but a bucket, a bar of soap and a muddy stream. I think I can handle sharing a bathroom.”

      One corner of Cal’s mouth rises in what looks almost like pride. “You’d make someone a fine huntin’ partner.”

      He motions for me to follow him into the kitchen at the back of the house, where he points to a credit card and iPhone on the Formica counter. “Jennie stocked the kitchen with the basics, but there’s enough money on that account to buy anything else you need. You probably won’t need it for a couple of days, though.”

      I peek into the refrigerator, check the cabinets above the coffee machine, peer around the corner into the open pantry. “There’s enough food here to feed half of Hawkins County for weeks.”

      Cal smiles. “That’s the great thing about Jennie. She always goes above and beyond.” He plucks the iPhone from the counter and passes it to me. “She also programmed all the numbers you’ll need into the phone. The lead officer assigned to the case will be calling to set up a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. The hospice nurse arrives tomorrow morning at eight, and the motorcade and ambulance with your father, sometime before noon. And the local doctors, hospitals and the funeral home have been notified.”

      “Sounds like everything’s been taken care of.”

      He smiles, and his voice softens. “Just trying to make things as easy as possible for you, darlin’. I know you’d rather be anywhere but here.”

      I think of some of the worst places I’ve been sent. Overpopulated Dhaka, where if the water doesn’t kill you, the air will. The slums of Abidjan after floods and mudslides have swept away too many of its children. The dusty streets of Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, where malnutrition and cholera compete for leading cause of death.

      Uncle Cal has a point.

      “And don’t think you’re completely out here on your own,” he says after a long stretch of silence. “I’m less than an hour down the road, and so are your brother and sister. Do me a favor and don’t let either of them off the hook, okay? This concerns their father, too.”

      I half nod, half shrug. When it comes to our father, Bo would rather bury himself in his work than admit the situation СКАЧАТЬ