Deadline

“You can’t quit. You have a contract.”

“My contract’s up for renewal at the end of next month. I’ll ask the GM to release me early,” Tess told her, hating that it had come to this. She liked her job, liked Ronnie and the people she worked with, but she had to find out the truth. And to do that she was going to need time to go back to Mississippi. She stood. “I’m sorry, Ronnie.”

“Oh, stop with the dramatics and sit down.” Once Tess had done so, Ronnie said, “Now tell me what in the hell is going on and why you’re threatening to quit on me.”

“I don’t want to quit,” Tess told her. “But there’s something I have to do, something personal, and I need the time off to do it.”

“That’s it? That’s all the explanation you’re going to give me?”

“I told you. It’s personal.”

Ronnie leveled a “give me a break” look at her.

Tess sighed. “It has to do with my mother, about when she died. And about my father’s suicide,” Tess said finally.

“So that’s what’s been bothering you,” Ronnie said, and Tess suspected the remark was more to Ronnie herself. “Which I suppose is understandable. I mean, it hasn’t been all that long since that stuff happened with your father. I’m sure that whole suicide thing brought up some bad memories for you.”

“Yes.”

“But, kiddo, instead of taking off you should be keeping busy, and trying to put all that stuff out of your mind.”

“I can’t,” Tess told her.

Ronnie narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Have those dirtbags from the tabloids been hounding you again? Because if they have—”

“No. You know how this business is, everyone’s moved on to the next scandal and forgotten all about me and my family.”

“I would hope so,” Ronnie told her. “You poor kid. All that mess, then breaking up with Johnny and me loading you down with work. No wonder you’ve been having trouble sleeping. It’s a miracle that you haven’t been having nightmares.”

But there had been no nightmares. At least not in a very long time. That hadn’t always been the case. For months after her mother had been murdered, she did wake up screaming, unable to get the image of her father kneeling over her mother’s body, blood on his hands and shirt, the bloody bookend in his hand, out of her mind. But with time, the nightmares had grown fewer, the memories less sharp. Thanks in large measure to the psychologists her grandparents had insisted she see when she first came to live with them in D.C. Also, it had helped that she’d been so close to her grandmother, a bond that had only strengthened when she had feared she might lose the older woman to cancer. Thank heavens Grams had beaten the disease. But in those months and the years that followed they had clung to each other.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Then they talked about it. Tess began by telling Ronnie about the phone call she’d received claiming that Jody Burns’s death hadn’t been a suicide. She told her about her own inquiries at the prison, about the questions that had been running through her mind since then. Questions that she found she could no longer ignore.

“I don’t know, Tess. It all sounds pretty far-fetched to me, you getting a call out of the blue like that. I’d be willing to bet that woman was a reporter working for one of those supermarket rags. She probably told you that garbage hoping to get a story out of you,” Ronnie reasoned.

“I thought so, too, at first. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I am that she was on the level. I can tell you for certain that her accent was real.”

“A lot of people can fake a Southern accent,” Ronnie pointed out.

Tess shook her head. “My grandparents are from Mississippi and I’ve met enough people from there over the years to recognize a Mississippi drawl when I hear one. Hers was genuine.”

“That still doesn’t mean she was legit. You and I both know it wouldn’t be the first time a tabloid has used an out-of-state stringer to pull a fast one in order to nail a story.”

“I know. But my gut tells me she was telling the truth.” Tess recalled the fear she’d heard in the woman’s voice when she’d mentioned calling the police. “She wasn’t acting, Ronnie. She was genuinely afraid.”

“Of what? You said the report from the prison ruled your father’s death a suicide.”

“I know what it said. But after talking to that official at the prison and reading the report, I don’t know, something just doesn’t feel right.”

“Is that the reporter in you talking, or the child who’s lost her father?”

“Probably a little of both,” Tess admitted. “All I know is that if the woman was telling the truth and Jody Burns was murdered, then I have to ask myself why. And why try to make it look like a suicide?”

“You’re making some pretty big leaps on the basis of one anonymous phone call, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. But what if she was telling the truth? What if he didn’t hang himself in that cell? What if someone else did it for him? Think about it, Ronnie. He was coming up for parole in a few weeks and he stood a good chance of being released. So why, after all these years, would he decide to kill himself? Why now, when he was so close to gaining his freedom? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Neither does murder,” Ronnie pointed out. “Yet people keep on committing it.”

“There’s also the woman’s claim that Jody Burns wasn’t the one who murdered my mother,” Tess reminded her.

“Tess, I’m sorry. But you seem to be forgetting one very important fact.”

“What?”

Ronnie stared into her eyes. “You were the one who told the police that he killed your mother.”

What Ronnie said was true. And her accounts of finding her father over her mother’s dead body had been recounted in the press again when the report of her father’s suicide had hit the airwaves. “I was four years old at the time,” Tess defended. She dragged a hand through her hair. “I was a child. A child who woke up because I heard loud voices and a woman’s scream, then stumbled out of bed and found my father kneeling over her body. But I never saw him actually hit her with the bookend. I just assumed that he did it because he was the only one there,” Tess argued. “Suppose I was wrong? What if he didn’t kill her? What if he came in and found her dead, just the way he claimed?”

“I don’t know, Tess.”

Tess read the pity in Ronnie’s face. “You think I’m wrong, don’t you? That this is all some Freudian thing that’s going on inside my head where I’m having to deal with my mother’s murder again because my father is dead now.”

“You know me better than that. I don’t buy into all that psychobabble stuff. So don’t go putting words in my mouth.”

It was true. When she had done a story on how up-bringing factored into the problems of today’s young adults, Ronnie had been the first to scoff at the notion of blaming the parents for everything that went wrong in a person’s life. “Then what do you think?”

“Exactly what I said. That you shouldn’t jump to any conclusions based on a single phone conversation with a stranger.” Ronnie sighed. “Look. You said yourself you had no contact with the man, not even a letter or a phone call from him for over twenty-five years. How could you possibly know what his state of mind was—whether he was suicidal or not?”

“You’re right. I don’t know. And that’s why I want to go to Mississippi, so I can find out the truth.”

“As your friend, I’m telling you I think your going there is a mistake.

“But, as your producer, I say if you need to, take a few days off, go see the people at the prison and satisfy yourself that your father’s death was a suicide. Then put it behind you and come back to work.”

“It’s not just the people at the prison I want to see. That’s why I need more time off.” She wasn’t sure how much more she would be able to learn from the prison staff. “I want to talk to the people who were involved in my father’s case—the prosecutor, the witnesses who testified against him at his trial and the attorney who handled his defense. If my father did find some evidence that could prove he was innocent the way the woman claimed, the chances are he contacted his attorney.”

“Tess, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish, but I can tell you right now no judge is going to reopen a twenty-five-year-old murder case based on an anonymous phone call.”

Ronnie was right. The claims made in an anonymous phone call and her own gut feelings weren’t evidence. “I’m an investigative reporter, remember? I know how to look through things, dig up information. I can find the truth.”

“And suppose what you find out is that your father really did kill your mother and that he really did commit suicide? Will you be able to accept that?”

“I’m not looking for redemption for my father or myself, Ronnie. I just need to know if I’ve spent the better part of my life hating and blaming the wrong person for my mother’s death.”

“And if you did?”