Chapter Twelve
Emmy squinted at the road until the yellow line came into focus.
She was exhausted. Her eyelids felt like sandpaper.
She glanced over at her sister. For once, she wasn’t peppering Emmy with questions and talking about load ratios on horses.
Instead, she was staring out the window, sunglasses hiding most of her face.
Jude had been crying about Myrna when Emmy had walked into the kitchen.
Maybe all the losses were hitting her harder than she was letting on.
She wouldn’t be the first Clifton who trafficked in stoicism.
Emmy had lost each of her parents once. Jude had lost them twice.
That she was still helping on the case either pointed to a need for distraction or a selfless kindness.
Either way, Emmy felt the familiar battle between gratitude and irritation.
Maybe she was mad at her sister for leaving forty years ago.
Maybe she was mad at her for coming back.
For some inexplicable reason, Emmy couldn’t let go of the pendulum.
She had felt so grateful to Jude for listening to her in the kitchen.
Now, she was filled with regret for inviting her to ride along to Allison’s house.
Especially when Jude started talking.
“When Tommy and I were kids, Dad had a man named Chip Cuddy who was his deputy chief. They were inseparable. Chip always knew what Dad was thinking. They did everything in lockstep. We called him Dad’s shadow.”
Emmy felt her jaw clench as the pendulum veered toward the negative.
“Virgil took over when Chip retired. You were there. You know they were always hand in glove. Then you were promoted to deputy chief when Virgil retired, and Dad brought you into his confidence.”
Emmy tried to relax her jaw. She didn’t need a flow chart.
“Georgia has one-hundred-fifty-nine counties. Roughly one hundred of them recorded more deaths than births over the past few years.” Jude had taken on her Quantico lecturer tone again.
“In the southwestern region, the textile mills are closing. Farms are consolidating, automating. Older people are staying put and younger people are moving to larger cities. Clifton County has the auto parts factory, the technical college and the outlet malls, which are the only reasons it’s still thriving. ”
Emmy was trying not to be an asshole, but she couldn’t stop the sharp glance she gave Jude.
“The point is, Clifton is going to keep growing. All this farmland will eventually be turned into neighborhoods, which will bring more people, which will mean more neighborhoods. Your department oversees the four bigger cities that all the younger people will move to. Bigger cities have bigger problems.”
Emmy especially didn’t need a lesson in land development. “How does this tie into Allison?”
“It ties into investigating. You can’t keep everything in a tight circle the way Dad did. At the very least, if something happens to you, there needs to be a team who can take over. You need to learn how to delegate.”
“To Brett?” Emmy snorted a laugh. “I’ve got half my squad against me and the other half thinks I’m not up to the job.”
“They need to feel like they’re part of a team. You can’t tell them everything, but you have to let them know some things. Make them feel useful. Give them a sense of purpose.”
“Is this about Cole?” Emmy was going to have a long talk with her son about whining to his long-lost aunt. “His purpose is to follow orders. All of them just need to do what I tell them to do exactly the way I tell them to do it.”
“You can’t micromanage them. They have their own thoughts and ideas. You have to let the person who does the job decide how to do the job. As long as you get results, that’s all that matters.”
“Time matters. You know that better than anybody else. You can’t be out spinning your wheels when there are leads that need to be chased down.”
“Who’s chasing down leads right now?”
Emmy’s jaw ratcheted tight again. Brett was guarding Mandy at the hospital.
Gregg was parked outside the Guthrie house waiting for the family to come home from church.
Cole was asleep if he knew what was good for him.
Her other deputies were catching speeders and tackling the mystery of the soup can some bored middle schooler had left in Penley’s mailbox.
Meanwhile, Emmy was probably driving into yet another brick wall.
“Talking through a case with a team gives you a different perspective on the evidence. You can’t keep it all in your head.
” Jude dropped the stern lecturer tone. “Emmy, this is not an easy job. You’ve already figured that out.
But it’s also incredibly stressful. The anxiety it causes can be crushing. Why do you think Dad started drinking?”
Emmy gave her the side-eye. “Dad wasn’t anxious.”
Jude’s laugh sounded like a cat sneezing. “Of course he was. That’s why he never talked. He was terrified of saying the wrong thing.”
Emmy laughed, too, because Jude couldn’t have been more wrong. “Maybe your version of Gerald Clifton was that way. Not mine.”
“People don’t get blackout drunk every night because they’re emotionally well-balanced,” Jude said.
“You never saw Dad anxious or worried? Or watched him avoid difficult questions with silence? Or walk away when he was afraid his emotions would get the best of him? Or completely shut down instead of saying he needed help?”
Emmy kept shaking her head, but she thought about all the times she’d found Gerald quietly staring into space with a pained look in his eyes. She’d never asked him what was wrong because she’d figured he would tell her if he wanted her to know.
Still, she insisted, “Dad talked. If something was bothering him. Or me.”
“How often did that happen?”
Emmy didn’t answer, but the fact was it had happened so infrequently that they’d had a phrase for it—talk it out.
Gerald would say the phrase or Emmy would say it and the two people who never talked to anybody would talk to each other, usually when they were alone together in this very same cruiser.
Jude said, “Anxious people try to control things. Dad controlled the flow of information. It made him feel like he had a handle on his cases. But it came at a deep psychological toll. And now, it’s making your job harder, because if he’d let you have more control, the men on your force would know that you could do the job without him. ”
“I was running the whole department for at least a year before Dad died.”
“Did they know that? Or did they think you went running back to Dad every time you had a question?”
Emmy forced her jaw to loosen so the muscle didn’t cramp. This entire conversation felt incredibly disloyal to her father, especially coming from Jude. Their father hadn’t been perfect, but he’d been one of the most respected law enforcement officers in the region. That had to count for something.
“So what you’re saying is I need to either learn how to delegate or become an alcoholic.”
Jude groaned. “Yes, Emmy Lou. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
The GBI’s crime scene unit van was no longer parked in front of Allison’s house when Emmy turned onto her street.
Allison’s blue Toyota SUV was still in the driveway.
The garage doors were closed. The girl’s bike was still in the front yard.
Except for the missing suitcase and the closed trunk, the scene was identical to the day before.
Jude said, “I’ll follow your lead.”
Emmy let the pendulum fly, because of course Jude would follow her lead.
She felt a sharp twinge in her back when she got out of the cruiser.
Emmy had taken a handful of Advil in the kitchen, but her body still ached from lack of sleep and her tailbone was bruised from hitting the ground.
She saw Darla Bell weeding the flowerbed in front of her porch.
The woman was in a wide-brimmed hat and sitting on a wheeled gardener’s seat that she spun around so that she could look across the road.
“Emmy Lou?” Her voice was more of a coach’s bellow across a soccer pitch. She used her gloved hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “Everything okay over there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Emmy called back. “Thank you.”
Coach Bell glared at Jude before spinning back to the flowers.
Emmy asked, “What’s that about?”
“Something happened between her and Celia in high school, so we all hate each other.”
It was one of the few things Jude had ever said about growing up in North Falls that felt relatable. Emmy hadn’t let Dervla McClatchy skate on a speeding ticket last year because she’d embarrassed Hannah in seventh grade.
They both walked toward Allison’s front porch.
Neither of them went up the stairs. Jude stood with her hands on her hips and looked up at the house.
Emmy crossed her arms. Despite the urgency, she felt reluctant to go inside.
What had seemed like a good idea back in her mother’s kitchen suddenly felt like a waste of time.
They’d both walked through the crime scene once already.
She wasn’t sure what a second go-round would accomplish.
She said, “Sherry’s on her way up to GBI headquarters with Mandy’s Nike. She’s got the director of forensic sciences coming in to dig the GPS tracker out of the heel. Hopefully, there’s a serial number or something they can use to chase down the purchase.”
Jude nodded toward the house. “What’s the status inside?”
“The team needs another couple of days to finish Allison’s bedroom. We’re good without suits everywhere else. They found the fourth bullet casing under Allison’s bed. They still haven’t found the fifth shell casing from the bullet that grazed you, or the bullet that exited Mandy’s skull.”
Jude reached up to touch the Band-Aid on the side of her head. If she was bothered by the fact that she could’ve died, she didn’t show it. “What about out here? Do you see anything?”