The Last Breath

Prologue

Ella Mae Andrews, April 1994

SOME GUY ON Oprah last week said there is no such thing as an accidental lapse of memory. That every phone call you forget to return, every errand you forget to run on the way home is a whisper of your subconscious.

Listen really hard, he said, and you’ll hear the reasons behind your resistance. Why do you keep putting off calling Marla Murphy back about the church bake sale? Why should your husband have to wear last week’s dirty slacks? Why did you allow your misery about Dean to distract you from the fact that the letter you wrote is still upstairs, lying forgotten on the bed? Ella Mae Andrews would especially like to know the answer to that last one.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear a thing her subconscious was trying to tell her over all Ray’s sobbing.

You’d think that when confronted with concrete evidence of your wife’s infidelity with the next-door neighbor, there’d at least be some screaming. Screaming and cussing and angry accusations and blame.

You’d think Ray would have tossed her out and changed the locks and shredded her clothes, that he would have marched next door to Dean’s house, fists slinging, or maybe even shoved her onto the bed for a heated round of revenge sex.

But there was none of this. There was only sobbing, which was so, so much worse.

Ella Mae may have not been able to hear the whispers of her subconscious, but her conscience was roaring, and it was telling her this was wrong. Wrong to have spent her afternoons in bed with a married man who was not her husband. Wrong to have let Dean talk about a future together, after divorces have been settled and families have been broken to pieces. Wrong to stay in a marriage with a man she no longer loved.

By now it was dark out, and Ray and Ella Mae spooned on top of the very same sheets that still smelled of Dean. The full spring moon outside the window acted like a night-light, bathing the room in a buttery glow. Ray’s tears had finally petered out but he was awake, his mouth pressed against her ear. She closed her eyes, and tried to process what he was asking.

Let’s give it a month before either of us makes any decisions. Ray buried his face in the damp hair at the side of her neck. Please?

A month won’t change anything.

We’ll go to therapy. Cal will know the best person to talk to. His voice was hoarse, his tone recklessly hopeful. And we’ll get away, just the two of us. Drive to the coast. Fly to some island in the Caribbean. We’ll figure things out. We will. Till death do us part, remember?

She twisted on the bed until she was facing him, not bothering to mask her answer. Ray’s eyes flickered, and it was a full five seconds before he said anything.

Can we— His voice broke, and he clutched her tighter. Can we please just sleep on it?

She didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Now that she had made her decision, the thought of another night in this house, in this bed, in this town, sent an army of insects skittering under her skin.

One more night. That’s all I’m asking.

She balled her hands into tight fists, buried her face in his wrinkled dress shirt and willed herself not to squirm. Ray Andrews had given her seven good years and three stepchildren she loved like her own. Surely she could give him a few more hours. At the very least, she owed him that much.

Okay, she whispered into his chest. But just one more night.

Ray’s arms relaxed with the realization he’d just bought himself some more time. Ella Mae knew he’d spend all of it trying to come up with a way to make her change her mind, and she wanted to tell him not to bother, that it was too late for magic words.

Instead, she closed her eyes and allowed them both this little respite.

Tomorrow would be here soon enough.

* * *

Ella Mae had just drifted off to sleep when Ray gave her arm a little jiggle, his voice barely a whisper. Did you hear that?

She cleared the sleep from her head and listened to a feverish wailing outside, from somewhere over the hill in the direction of Bill Almaroad’s farm.

It’s just a barn cat in heat. She allowed herself a little yawn, melted deeper into the mattress. Go back to sleep.

Not that. Ray lifted his head from the pillow. It came from somewhere downstairs.

Ella Mae stiffened, her senses stirring to high alert. Could it be Gia?

Shh. He sat up, swinging his feet onto the floor without a sound. Gia’s in North Carolina with the McCallisters.

Ray craned his neck, turning his ear to the door. That horny cat next door was still trying to summon every male feline in a fifty-mile radius, and Ella Mae struggled to hear around its wailing. And then Ray stabbed the air with a finger. There! There it was again.

Alarm prickled her skin. Had she heard someone moving around downstairs? She thought so, but she couldn’t be certain.

Ray, however, was. He rose, creeping on bare feet to the closet where Bo’s old baseball bat stood propped in a pair of steel-toed yard boots. He clutched it in a fist by his side and crossed the room. He stopped at the doorway to the hall, turned and pressed a finger to his lips. Stay here, he mouthed. And then he slipped into the darkness.

Ella Mae rose onto her elbows, straining to hear. The stairs creaked under someone’s weight, and then the noise faded into nothing. The only sound was the rhythmic pounding of her heart. She lay there for what seemed like an eternity, willing herself not to panic, her eyes wide and glued to the bedroom door.

From somewhere downstairs, there was a yelp followed by a muffled thump. Blood roared in her ears, and she scrambled across the sheets to Ray’s side of the bed, reaching for the phone with a shaky hand. It wasn’t there. The phone wasn’t there! For a brief moment, an irrational wave of anger replaced her fear. How many times had she told Ray to return the handset to the charger? A million, at least. And now, thanks to Ray, she’d landed in the middle of a Stephen King novel without a phone.

And then she heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, and her breath caught in her throat. Because if there was one thing she knew with an icy certainty, it was that if the person approaching the bedroom door were Ray, he would have called out to her by now.

She cast a panicked glance around the room, searching for a place to hide. The closet—no, not the closet, that’s the first place he would look. The footsteps grew closer, too close. Out of time and options, she slid noiselessly off the bed and crawled under it.

Two large feet stepped into the room, gleaming black Reebok runners under dark denim cuffs, and Ella Mae knew she was in danger. She knew it by the terror that rolled through every part of her, searing her chest and clawing at her throat and setting her skin on fire.

Ella Mae dug her nails into her palms hard enough to draw blood and willed herself to think. Think! But the only thing she could think of was please God let me get out of here. Please God don’t let him see me.

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

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.

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 affects him, while Lexi prefers to pretend he’s already dead. How can I let my siblings off the hook when neither of them are willing to acknowledge there is one? It seems as if the only person not getting off the hook around here is me.

Cal pulls me in for a hug, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. Call me anytime, okay? Day or night. I’ll pick up, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

Promise?

I promise. His tone is reassuring, but he’s already backing away, already moving toward the door. I’ll see you Saturday morning.

He gives my shoulder one last squeeze and disappears into the hallway, and I’m slammed with a wave of panic. Disasters and destruction of global magnitude I can handle. Facing my father alone, not so much.

I rush down the hall in his wake. Uncle Cal?

The desperate note in my voice stops him at the door, and he turns to face me.

Explain to me again why you can’t stay. Why you won’t be here tomorrow when Dad gets here.

He scrubs a hand through his hair, now salt-and-pepper but still thick and shiny as ever. Because I’m busy stalling the retrial. God willing and the creek don’t rise, your father won’t spend another second of his life in either a courtroom or a prison cell.

A casket sure seems like the ultimate prison to me.

A few seconds later he’s gone, leaving me to wonder how I ended up here. In a town I vowed never to return to. In a house filled with ghosts and memories I’ll never outrun. In a life I have spent the past sixteen years trying to escape.

But most of all, I wonder how I ended up here alone.

2

BACK IN THE house, I put on a kettle and rummage through the cabinets for tea. Cal’s assistant must be either misinformed or seriously delusional about the number of mourners we will be expecting because she bought us a 312-count, industrial-sized box of Lipton tea bags. If we get through even one row of them, it will be a miracle. I rip open the cellophane wrapping with my teeth, pull out a bag and drop it into a yellow ceramic mug.

The sharp, bitter scent reminds me of some of my British colleagues, who are convinced a spot of tea is the cure to all emotional ails. My boss, Elsie, a hard-nosed type, drinks enough of the stuff to poison her liver...thanks to the generous splash of bourbon she adds when things in the field get really hairy. If only life were that easy.

Unlike the satellite phone I carry in the field, Cal’s iPhone has only a handful of contacts, most of them people I’ve never met and, after burying my father, will probably never think of again. It doesn’t take me long to find Bo.

His cell goes straight to voice mail, so I leave what must be my fifth message in as many days, careful to keep my voice level. Five years older and light years more serious, my brother has always preferred that people reserve their zeal for backyard fireworks and the Nature Channel, and he doesn’t respond well to gushing.

I have better success with Lexi, who picks up on the second ring. I abandon my tea and squeal, Lexi!

Unlike Bo, my sister welcomes enthusiasm. Demands it, even.

Is it true? Is it really true? Lexi’s familiar voice, the same gravelly one that used to give boys all over Hawkins County wet dreams. Did my do-gooder little sister finally come home from Lord knows where?

It’s true that I’m here, yes. But nowadays, home is in Kenya.

Well, laa-tee-daa. She stretches out her words, loads them up with an extra serving of Tennessee twang. Don’t that sound fancy.

I snort at what I know to be a joke. Lexi is no dummy. She has a master’s in finance from Stanford, runs a local chain of banks and could kick even Alex Trebek’s ass at Jeopardy. Not only is she aware of my latest whereabouts, she knows Dadaab is pretty much the polar opposite of fancy. My chest seizes with a wave of sudden affection for my sister, who I haven’t hugged in...six years? Has it really been that long?

Where are you? I say, switching gears. Because I’m coming there right after I lock up the house.

I’m going to need a little more time than that. Her tone takes a serious turn, matching mine, and her voice and vowels soften into the more generic timbre she perfected in college. Less country hick, more Southern belle. Unlike me, Lexi can turn her accent on and off like a faucet. I’m about to head into a staff meeting, but I could meet you after for a late dinner. Say, seven-thirty?

I check my watch. Three and a half hours I can fill with a nap and a shower, in that order. Perfect. So where’s the place to be on a Wednesday night these days?

It’s Thursday, actually, not that it matters. And there’s only one place to be every night, and that’s the Roadkill Bar and Grill in town.

Roadkill? I make a face. Do I have to bring my own rodent, or do they run it down for me?

She laughs, a throaty, musical sound that makes me wish I’d called more often. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your roots, young lady.

I haven’t forgotten. My palate has just evolved to more refined creatures, like stray animals. And last month in the Philippines I tried this thing called balut, a fertilized duck embryo that’s boiled alive and eaten shell and all.

Lexi makes a retching sound. I think I’d rather starve to death.

Now it’s my turn to laugh. Though I’ve always been adventurous with food and my sister the pickiest eater in Appalachia, Lexi does have a point. Balut tastes just as bad the first time as it does the second, on its way back up.

A girl’s got to eat. And besides, my rule wherever I travel is to eat or drink whatever is offered to me, even if it does end up turning my insides to gurgling water. Sharing a meal, no matter how vile, fosters trust between my team and the people we’re there to help.

Good Lord. Your job sucks worse than mine.

"Mostly, my job is pretty awesome, especially for a wanderer like me. I’ve flown around the globe more