The Prodigal's Return
“Buford,” Neal said through clenched teeth, biting down hard on a curse. He never cursed. He never lost his cool. To the world he now ruled, he was buttoned-down, spiffed-up professionalism at its best—with just enough of the hardness he hid deep edging through, to keep people conveniently off balance at work, and happy to leave him to his privacy everywhere else.
“Yeah?” The lawyer’s faceless reply was hope at its gotcha best.
Neal stared at the folders sprawled across his desk. Paperwork representing the lives of people he barely knew who’d turned to him for help because they’d exhausted all other possibilities. He was their last hope. Atlanta’s prince of saving lost causes. All of them but his own.
Damn it!
“Give me the name of my father’s doctor,” he heard himself say.
“Doc Harden’s the only one your daddy would ever go to.” Neal could hear the sly smile that warmed each Southern-tinged word. “But even if Doc knows something, I’m not sure he’d talk it over with you. He certainly wouldn’t with me, the closed-mouth son of a gun. Whatever’s going on, someone’s pretty much going to have to bust your daddy’s door down to get to the bottom of it.”
“I’ll make a few calls, that’s it,” Neal said. The phone slamming into its cradle cut off Buford’s next sentence.
Just a few calls, that was all. One to the doctor, one to his father. Simple enough, and he’d be done. Except contacting his old man would result in the kind of backlash no one wanted, him least of all.
He’d had his reasons for shutting down. Shutting the world out. Damn good ones. And his old man had bailed, too. If Nathan was lonely now, it was by choice, same as Neal. And alone suited Neal just fine.
The arguments were solid. Logical. Best for everyone.
So why did he suddenly feel like a class-A bastard for allowing the silence between him and his old man to drag on for seven years?
Whatever it takes, that had been his mantra in prison. He’d been a vulnerable kid who hadn’t a clue what he’d set himself up for. A pretty boy, and everything his father had feared would happen had come at him like a demented welcome party as soon as he’d been placed in general population. He’d learned fast to do and say and fight however he’d had to, until the filthy predators with filthy hands, and the memories screaming how much he had lost, finally let him be.
In a matter of months, the pretty boy had died and the man he was never meant to be had taken the kid’s place.
A man rumored to have no emotions, no fear. Only here he was, turning chicken-shit at the thought of making a couple of phone calls to check on the father he supposedly hadn’t cared about for years.
Rivermist, Georgia
JENN GARDNER nearly ran over the old man before she saw him wandering down the middle of the road. Screeching to a halt mere inches away, she tracked his unsteady, weaving journey across North Street.
“Critter,” he yelled into the evening’s darkness. “Where the heck did you get off to this time? Crrritterrrr…”
She glanced at the clock on her ancient Civic’s dashboard. She’d only been back in Rivermist for three months, and she hadn’t yet gotten acclimated to how early things shut down in small Southern towns. By nine-thirty, most of Rivermist was already in bed, or at least at home in their pajamas. But there was still enough intermittent traffic on the road that the bum she’d almost made roadkill might walk headfirst into oncoming traffic if he weren’t careful.
Since he looked about a fifth-of-scotch past sober, careful seemed a long shot.
Grateful she was alone—that she’d just dropped her six-year-old, Mandy, off at a sleepover—she locked her doors and lowered her window enough to talk through the crack.
“Sir, do you need some help?” she asked, pulling alongside him.
“Gotta find Critter,” he mumbled, walking right past her in his search for what sounded like a lost pet.
Something in his voice, something about his threadbare plaid coat, seemed oddly familiar.
That in itself was nothing new. Déjà-vu moments lurked behind every corner of this place she’d sworn as a teenager never to return to.
So why was she rolling forward, lowering the window a little more?
“Are you looking for your dog, mister?”
“No, damn it. Got no use for dogs. Crritterrr…” he groused, stumbling into her fender, then shuffling off again.
Got no use for dogs.
The phrase churned up more unwanted memories. Another man, sitting on a porch swing, had said exactly the same thing to her when she was a little girl. He’d been holding a cat named—
“Critter?” she said out loud. “Mr. Cain?”
It was hard to tell, looking through the darkness and the unkempt hair that partially hid his face. But as she drove closer and set the hand brake, the resemblance was unmistakable.
“Mr. Cain!” She rolled the window the rest of the way down and grabbed him by the arm. Good Lord. “Mr. Cain, Critter’s been dead for over ten years.”
“What?” He rounded on her. Bleary, bloodshot eyes glared. “Who are you, and what the hell do you know about my Critter?”
“It’s me. Jennifer Gardner.”
The man who used to jokingly refer to her as his daughter didn’t recognize her. Little wonder. His and her father’s friendship hadn’t survived the first year after Neal’s sentencing. It was as if he hadn’t been able to look at her anymore, or spend time in her home, with her parents. With anyone, really.
“I was there when you and Neal buried Critter, remember?” she prompted.
“What?” A tear trickled down his cheek, breaking her heart. “Critter’s dead?”
She pulled to the shoulder and got out. Hurried to his side, the frigid night air blasting away at the lingering warmth from the Honda’s rattling heater. “It’s freezing out here. Why don’t I take you home? You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“No!” From the smell of his breath, beer had been his best friend tonight, not scotch. He wiped his eyes and looked wildly about. “I’ve got to find Critter.”
She steadied him as he stumbled, steering him toward the car. “Why don’t we check your house? Critter’s probably waiting at the back door, wondering why you’re not there to let her in.”
“You think so?” Hope spread like sunshine across his face, pushing away the sick pallor of too much alcohol and years of dissipation. “You think she went home?”
“I bet she’s there now, crying for her dinner. Why don’t we get her some milk?” Jenn opened the passenger door and turned him until he fell backward into the car. He cursed when he bumped his head on the way down.
“Critter loves milk. That’s what Wanda started giving her when she was just a kitten. Critter was always Wanda’s cat.” His voice roughened, and his tears made a return appearance at the mention of his long-dead wife. “I’ve gotta take care of her. I promised Wanda.”
Jenn made sure his arms and legs were out of the way and shut the door. Shivering, she slid behind the wheel and reached over to secure his seat belt. “Don’t worry, Mr. Cain. We’ll take care of Critter.”
“You’ve always been such a good girl.” He patted her hand. Then seconds later, he began to snore.
Wealthy, indomitable Nathan Cain, the Howard Hughes of Rivermist, was sleeping it off in her car. Her heart turned over as she absorbed his deteriorated condition.
It was an unwritten rule that she and her father never discussed the Cain family, not after her parents’ final falling out with Nathan only a few months after Neal’s conviction. And she hadn’t exactly pushed the issue since moving home for the first time since she’d run away at seventeen. She and her dad had enough to deal with, just trying to learn to live together again. They didn’t interact with or discuss the Comptons, either, except for the odd runins she kept having with Bobby’s younger brother, Jeremy.
All that avoiding took a buttload of work in a town this size. Only in Mr. Cain’s case, it had been easy. He’d been holed up in his empty mansion for years, she’d heard, grieving his son, angry at the world. But nowhere near as angry, she knew from personal experience, as he probably was at himself.
And she of all people hadn’t even bothered to stop by and check on him. She glanced at the bum beside her. Panic attacked as swiftly as the rush of shame. She couldn’t look at Nathan Cain, she realized, even in his current condition, and not see Neal.
Cut it out! Give the smelly man a ride home, and be done with it.
Squaring her shoulders, sliding the heat lever to High, she checked for oncoming traffic and made a U-turn across the center line. The Cain place was at the other end of town, amidst the avenue of homes that had been built before the Civil War, yet somehome survived destruction.
No doubt her dad would still be up, keeping track of her comings and goings as carefully as he had her last year at home as a teenager—the year she’d been hell-bent on destroying her and her parents’ lives. The year before she’d ditched the memories and the nightmares, and everyone who came along with them.
He would want to know why she was home late. There’d be no point in dodging his questions. By morning, Rivermist would be abuzz about her giving the town pariah a ride home. Heaven knew how the news would spread at this late hour, but it would. And Reverend Gardner was going to freak.
But easing Mr. Cain’s mind about a long-dead cat was the least she could do for this man she’d run from the longest. A man who’d lost everything and, just as she had for too long, chosen to give up.
CHAPTER TWO
“NO,” NEAL BARKED over the cell phone, about twenty minutes before the butt crack of dawn. “I don’t want anyone talking with Edgar Martinez but me. I’ll be there in half an hour to go over your notes. But I’m taking the meeting.”
He’d be there in half an hour? Since when did Stephen Creighton get into the office first?
Since Neal had started falling further and further behind, his everyday caseload turning into one unheard-of delay after another. Since he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, from thinking about the nonconversation he’d had two weeks ago with a certain Dr. Wilber Harden. Then Nathan had hung up on him the one time Neal had gotten through to the man over the phone, saying nothing but a few choice curses.
And what did Neal have to show for the aggravation? Finishing his Friday morning run with the added bonus of the wet-behind-his-ears lawyer he’d hired a year ago chewing on his ass.
“I don’t know what’s going on, man,” Stephen said, taking another bite. “This case is a no-brainer. If you don’t have time for it, let me take over. Edgar Martinez—”
“Martinez is my problem until he goes to trial. And if I thought it was a no-brainer, I would have advised him to settle.”
“The D.A.’s offer is a gift.” Not intimidated by Neal’s ex-con rep, Stephen plowed forward where other colleagues treaded more delicately. The kid had the pedigree of a philanthropist, but the guts of a street fighter. Neal’s kind of guts. “The public defender wanted Edgar to take the plea a week ago.”
“It’s a crap offer, and we’re not taking it.” Neal’s legal-aid center, funded first by his mother’s exceptionally well-invested money, then by grants and donations from several silent partners from Atlanta’s legal community, had become the bane of Georgia’s prosecutors. He took the cases of people who couldn’t afford pricey defense attorneys, and he never plea-bargained until he’d squeezed the last ounce of concession from the district attorney’s office.
The best lawyer he’d ever known had taught him that tactic.
“Push too hard on this one,” Stephen argued, “and our client’s going to end up with no deal at all. This is a county D.A., and he’s not taking kindly to being put on hold. Neither is the public defender.”
“And Edgar shouldn’t take kindly to them railroading his son. The public defender wants to plead this one out, to save herself a trip to Statesboro for the court date.”
“You don’t know that. You won’t even take her calls. I have, and—”
“Well, don’t! You’re making us look anxious to settle, and that cuts me off at the balls. Be ready to bring me up to speed, then stay the hell away from the meeting if you can’t stick with the game plan.”
Neal ended the call and flipped the cell phone onto the heap of tangled sheets atop his bed, more angry at himself and his increasingly bad mood than anyone else.
Stephen was right. He’d let the Martinez case slide. Meanwhile there was an eighteen-year-old kid sitting in a south Georgia jail, counting on Neal to get him out. Only Neal had spent more time away from the office than he’d been there ever since Buford’s call, as he tried to first ignore, and then come to grips with, the reality that his father was sick. Damn sick, even if Doc Harden wouldn’t say any more than it was about time Neal up and paid attention to the man.
Oh, he was paying attention all right. He was standing there soaked to the skin from the near-freezing rain outside, his teeth chattering for a hot shower, when where he should have been hours ago was in the office doing the job he did better than anyone else in town.
He kicked off his shoes and peeled out of his sweats. Turning the shower on full blast, he cursed every hour he’d let slip though his fingers since Buford’s call. He should have followed up with Martinez days ago. Should have worked out Juan’s release, and be pushing for a pre trial settlement the D.A. would hate but be inclined to live with. Whatever it took not to be dragged into court to face the very talented, but anal retentive, Stephen Creighton, who was an ace at slow-playing the proceedings, drawing them out indefinitely, if that’s what it took to get their client the best deal.
Neal caught his expression in the mirror gone hazy with shower steam. On the job, he put himself out there one hundred percent. No holding back. He manufactured Hail Mary deals that changed the lives of those people who got snared in the churning cogs of an overburdened legal system. He cut through the bull, found the truth, then hammered away until the courts bent to his will.
Only this time, instead of forcing a solution, he’d become part of the problem. One more person Edgar Martinez and his son couldn’t trust to put their interests first.
Because the battle he should be fighting wasn’t here. And it refused to be dealt with over the phone, no matter much he needed to take care of things long distance. The life he’d made in Atlanta wasn’t working anymore. He’d lost his focus and there was no getting it back. Not until he’d dealt with the sick old man, and all the memories that came with him, that Neal no longer had the option of avoiding.
CHAPTER THREE
“YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS.” Joshua Gardner slouched at the kitchen table, taking the news of Jenn’s plans to visit Nathan Cain about as well as his granddaughter did a second helping of spinach.
Jenn breathed deeply to steady her resolve, then finished cleaning up after the French toast from Mandy’s Saturday breakfast. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched her father shift restlessly in his age-worn chair. Conflict didn’t suit the good reverend. It kinda bit, then, that she’d been rattling his views of the world and his faith since she was sixteen.
He was trying to make her being back work, she’d give him that. And the effort was far more than she’d expected.
“I can’t ignore what I saw any longer.” She turned to the pantry and plucked boxes of macaroni and cheese and instant soup from the lined shelves, making a mental grocery list of what she’d need to replace. “How anyone in this town can look at that lonely old man and not do whatever they can to help him is beyond me. The least people can do is make sure he has something to eat. I’m taking him some food. What’s the harm in that?”
She’d spent two weeks trying to forget. Had accepted her father’s silence as a warning to avoid the topic entirely for the sake of preserving the peace. But the reality of Nathan Cain’s disheveled appearance and deplorable hygiene, and the sty of a kitchen she’d glimpsed when she’d helped him through his rotted-out back door, refused to be ignored any longer.
“The people in this town tried to help him, Jenn. He’s made it more than clear he isn’t interested. The man disowned his own son while the boy was still in prison, he wanted to be left alone so badly.”
“And that makes how he’s living all right?”
“No,” her father boomed in an uncharacteristic shout. “It makes it his choice.”
They hadn’t talked about faith and religion since she was a kid, but her father still held tightly to the beliefs that had stopped comforting her years ago. Beliefs so totally contradicted by his continued rift with his former best friend, Jenn bit her tongue to keep from calling him on it. Having it out with her father about a long-dead relationship that didn’t matter anymore held the appeal of a bikini wax.
Except it did matter. After seeing Nathan again, how could it not? Even if helping him meant letting in more memories that she could frankly do without.
“Nathan’s exactly where he wants to be,” her dad said, inching a bit closer to his calm, reasonable self. “Alone. If he wants to live the life of a bum, leave him be.”
“If you’d only seen how terrible that house looked….”
A spark of concern flashed across her dad’s face, erased all too quickly by a wince of resignation that turned her stomach. She’d had her part in these two men’s estrangement. A starring role.
“I don’t think you should be going over there.” Salt-and-pepper grayed his dark hair now. A flurry of lines were etched across his fifty-five-year-old face, helped along by recent bypass surgery. “And I don’t think it’s appropriate for Mandy to go with you. Why not leave her home with me?”
Because, I’m not putting my daughter in the middle of our problems any more than she already is.
“Are you worried about Mandy because Mr. Cain’s a drunk and hasn’t been to church in years?” she asked. “Or because us being seen there will start even more talk around town?”
“Is it so terrible that I’m concerned what people think about my granddaughter? This is a small town. I’m the pastor of a conservative congregation. I’m just asking for a little discretion while the two of you settle in.”
If only his concern were that simple.
“We’ve been back for three months, Dad. We’re as settled as we’re going to be.” Jenn counted the buttons down the front of his oxford shirt. Anything but looking him in the eye. Nathan wasn’t the only man she’d become a pro at avoiding. “Mandy has the town eating out of her hands. I’m the one you’re worried about, and we both know it.”
Silence was her father’s only response, when she’d give her world for an encouraging you know I trust you, honey.
Her teenage tantrums and public antics—her determination to burn through the pain and the loneliness after Neal’s conviction until she’d felt nothing at all—had turned her father into this careful, cautious man. Because of her, he’d become the patron saint of playing it safe.
She’d come back after all these years to help, because he’d asked her to. He’d actually called her after his heart attack and asked for help. She’d been blown away, and determined to do things right this time. Mandy and her grandfather deserved this chance to know each other. But running into Nathan had shown her there was a limit to how much playing it safe she could stomach, how much confrontation she could avoid and still live with herself.
She crossed her arms and stared down both her father and her moment of truth.
“I’m doing everything I can not to make waves for you again,” she said. “But—”
“Grandpa, Grandpa!” Mandy flew into the kitchen, a colorful bundle of creative energy dressed in the pink and lime-green overalls Jenn had bought in the dead of winter, because they made her think of lemonade and watermelon on a summer afternoon. “Grandpa, guess what!”
The six-year-old hovered in front of the table, her hands braced on her grandfather’s knees. If it weren’t for Jenn’s careful instructions that Grandpa wasn’t to be jostled or bumped, the child no doubt would have launched herself into his lap.
“What?” Jenn’s father smiled down at the living miniature of both his daughter and his late wife.
Green eyes sparkling, golden hair pulled back in a curling ponytail, Mandy held up a wrinkled sheet of paper covered in unintelligible hieroglyphics. “I wrote a letter to read to Grandma tonight.”
He took the paper. Ran a shaking hand across its surface.
“Grandma’s gone, sweetheart. She’s gone to heaven.”
Jenn blinked at the sound of her father’s grief for the high-school sweetheart he’d lost to breast cancer just three years ago.
“Mommy reads my letters to God when I say my prayers,” Mandy replied in a stage whisper. Her hand cupped her mouth as she leaned forward to share her secret. “She says He passes my letters on to Grandma.”
Jenn’s dad looked at her over her daughter’s head. He set the letter aside and hugged Mandy. He started to speak, swallowed, then cleared his throat. “Amanda Grace, I know how much you want to talk with Grandma—”
“I wish I’d met her before she left for heaven.” Mandy’s head dropped. “Mommy says she would have liked me.”
“Of course she would have. And I’m sure she wishes she’d met you, too.” He waited for Mandy to look up. Then his grandfatherly understanding rearranged itself into the earnest gaze of Reverend Joshua Gardner, champion of finding spiritual meaning from any and every situation. “But as much as we want to talk to the loved ones we’ve lost, we need to remember what our prayers are supposed to be for.”
“But—”
“Our talking time with God shouldn’t be about Grandma,” he said with a gentle firmness that had won countless souls.
Jenn couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
He produced a smile she was certain he didn’t feel, then tried to give Mandy another hug. Her stiff little body refused to melt into him this time.
“Grandma’s happy in heaven,” he said. “God’s taking excellent care of her, so we can stop worrying.”
“But Mommy said God talks to Grandma for me.” Mandy pulled away, planting her hands on her little girl hips. “She said—”
“Sweetie.” Jenn turned her by the shoulders. “Go find your shoes and put them on. Mommy needs to be on time for her Teens in Action meeting.”
Dragging her feet, shooting her grandfather an exasperated, why-won’t-you-ever-listen look, the deflated child walked from the room, her letter trailing from her hand.
Olivia Gardner’s funeral had been Jenn’s first visit back to Rivermist after she left as a pregnant runaway—and it had only been a day-trip at that. She had found a way to mourn the loss of her mother, as well as the years they hadn’t had together. But she would send singing telegrams heavenward if that’s what it took to give her child as much of the grandmother she’d never known as she could.
She waited until Mandy was out of earshot, then she rounded on her father.
“Lay off, Dad.”
“I was only—”
“You were turning something special to Mandy into a potshot at my parenting choices.”
“That’s not fair.” His gaze didn’t quite meet hers.
“Neither is telling a six-year-old she can’t write letters to her dead grandmother.”
“The letters are fine, but—”
“But nothing.” There always had to be a but. “If you have a problem with what I’m teaching Mandy, take it up with me.”
“I’ve accepted that your ideas about religion and spirituality are more liberal than mine now.” The way he said liberal had visions of defrocked televangelists swimming through Jenn’s mind. “But I won’t apologize for believing differently in my own home.”
“I never asked you to apologize.” She made herself stand a bit taller, when a younger Jenn would have sunk into a nearby chair and pretended not to care. He was right. She was wrong. Dangerously familiar territory. “But when I moved home, you agreed to let me make my own decisions about raising my daughter. And so far, you’ve done a lousy job of it. You have to stop interfering. Stop the passive-aggressive criticizing every time you don’t agree with my decisions.”
