The Last Breath

The shoes moved to the closet—thank God she hadn’t hidden in the closet!—and an arm swept aside the shirts and pants and dresses, arranged by type and color on matching plastic hangers. She shimmied across the carpet to her side of the bed, the side closest to the door.

And then she waited.

The shoes stepped around to Ray’s side of the bed, not bothering to tread lightly anymore, and she heard a swishing of hand against sheets, she assumed feeling for warmth. She pushed herself out from under the bed on the opposite side from him, keeping a careful watch on the shoes.

When the feet turned toward the wall, she snatched the chance, scurrying on hands and knees toward the hallway. At the door, she broke into a sprint, not turning and not pausing at the stairs, which she took by threes and fours.

Somewhere about halfway down, a hand made contact with her curls and tugged, snapping her head back hard enough for Ella Mae to see stars. Her bare feet caught air and she landed with a sickening thud on her back, aware of a sudden, piercing pain in her left temple, right before her world went black.

Moments later, Ella Mae’s world came flooding back at the bottom of the stairs, where she lay sprawled, her body steamrolled. Something warm and sticky—she knew viscerally that it was blood and that it was her own—pooled in the hair behind her left ear. She would have checked how much, but her wrists were bound and her arms had gone numb beneath her. She couldn’t scream around the cloth in her mouth, turning her tongue to sandpaper and gagging her with its sour smell. She tried to work it out with her tongue, but there was too much of it, and it was in too tight.

Ray! Where was Ray?

There was movement to her right, a dark shadow coming at her in a snow mask, a long object in a fist. A fist covered with surgical gloves. When she saw what he was holding, a box of saran wrap, her blood pressure spiked and her pulse jackhammered in her ears. She tried to wriggle away, but he stopped her with a palm to the ankle. He gave it a jerk, and her head hit the floor with a gargled moan.

Her captor pulled a long strip of plastic from the roll and pressed the end against her mouth. She shook her head, frantic and flailing, and he slipped a palm under her neck, plowing his fingers into her hair and holding her there with a thumb across her windpipe. He wrapped the plastic, once, twice, three times, around her head. She struggled and his grip on her neck tightened.

And then his eyes flashed across hers, and her entire body went still. Ella Mae’s captor was no stranger, and this was no random crime.

This was a crime of passion.

On the fourth or fifth time around her head, his work turned sloppy. A fat strip of plastic pressed across her nose. For one brief but electric moment, she thought this all must be a mistake. Surely he wasn’t trying to suffocate her on purpose. She writhed on the floor at his knees, unable to breathe through either her nose or her mouth, desperate to make him understand. If only she could catch his eye, she could make him understand.

Their eyes locked, and what she saw there stopped time. For however long he watched her, nothing mattered but their silent conversation. Not his children or hers. Not what had happened before or what would happen next. Not space or time or reason. He pushed to a stand, and something ignited in her chest—her heart or her lungs or both—an explosion of acid and fire. And then he walked away.

That was when Ella Mae knew that for her, tomorrow would never come.

1 (#ulink_84e2caeb-6cd2-5668-88fa-e6dcab34dd9e)

FOR AID WORKERS, home can mean a lot of things. A two-bedroom ranch with a picket fence. A fourth-story walk-up in the city. A mud hut under a banana tree. A country listed on a passport. It can be big or small or anything in between.

One thing all these homes share, though, is that aid workers miss them. They long to go there. They are homesick.

Not me. I’ve spent the past sixteen years running from my home, and what happened there. Could have lived the rest of my life never returning to the place where I will always be known as the murderer’s daughter.

And yet here I sit in my old driveway, in a rental parked behind a shiny new Buick. More than thirty-six hours into this new disaster—my disaster—and I’ve accomplished exactly nothing more than a crusty coffee stain down the front of my jeans and a mean case of jet lag.

Embrace the chaos, Gia. Over the course of the past seven thousand miles, it has become my mantra.

Uncle Cal climbs out of his car, and he’s wearing his usual outfit: gleaming reptile skin stretched across pointy cowboy boots, Brooks Brothers suit of smoky pin-striped wool, black leather jacket worn soft and supple. Here in the hills of Appalachia, it’s a look perfectly suitable for church, a fancy restaurant or a courtroom. As one of the highest paid criminal lawyers in Tennessee, Cal’s worn it in all three.

I follow his lead and step out of the rental. It’s mid-February and Rogersville—a tiny blip on the Eastern Tennessee map—is in the death throes of winter. My ancient fleece is not equipped to handle the Appalachian Mountain cold, and I long for my winter coat, still in mothballs in a London suburb. Cal opens his arms and I step into their warmth, inhaling his familiar scent, a combination of leather, designer aftershave and Juicy Fruit gum.

“Welcome home, baby girl,” he says into my hair.

Home.

I twist my neck to face the house I’ve not seen for sixteen years, and a shudder of something unpleasant hits me between the shoulder blades. Once a place that instilled in me a sense of refuge and comfort, this house now provokes the exact opposite. Grief. Fear. Dread. This house isn’t home. Home shouldn’t give you the creeps.

Cal’s hands freeze on my protruding scapula and he steps back, his gaze traveling down my frame. Thanks to a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning last month, it’s a good ten pounds lighter than the last time he hugged me, back when I was already high-school skinny. “I thought you were putting an end to the famine, not succumbing to it.”

“If you’re ever on the Horn of Africa, you should probably stay away from the street stalls in Dadaab. Just because they claim their meat is fresh doesn’t mean it’s true. Or for that matter, that it’s even meat.”

“Good tip.” He pulls the toothpick from his molars and gives me his trademark squint, but there’s a smile in his tone. “I’ll try to remember that.”

A lucky break Cal had called it when he finally tracked me down in Kenya. There was more, something about a perjury scandal and a diagnosis that required full-time, in-home hospice care, but by then I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy wondering on what planet capping off sixteen years of high-security confinement by coming home to die would be considered lucky.

I swallow a sudden lump. “Is he in a lot of pain?”

Cal doesn’t have to ask who I mean, and at the reminder of the cancer squeezing his only brother’s pancreas, grief muddies his brow. “Not yet. But he will be very soon.”

The lump returns and puts down roots.

“For 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.