Chapter 10 #2
Birdie snorted. “You’ve let the townsfolk feed you a bunch of cock and bull. It was just a country bar like any other country bar. It certainly wasn’t more important than family.” She got up. “Now I’m heading home. I have some fields of cotton to plant.”
“You know you’re not supposed to be out in the fields—especially after getting conked in the head. You have sharecroppers to do the planting.”
“It’s still my farm. Like your granddaddy, I’ll work it until the last day I draw breath.”
Once she made sure her grandmother got to her truck, Tully headed back across the street to the sheriff’s department. Beatrice, the receptionist and dispatcher, greeted her as soon as she stepped through the door.
“I hear that rebel rouser claimed it was an accident.” She popped the Juicy Fruit gum she was always chewing. “As if. Once a bad egg, always a bad egg.”
Tully had always thought that. Now after talking with her grandma, she was feeling some doubts. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all.
“Is Daddy in his office?”
Beatrice nodded. “He’s catching up on some emails.”
She headed down the hallway. Since her daddy never kept his door closed, she could see him sitting behind his desk hunting and pecking at his computer. The department had bought him a new laptop, but he still preferred his old desktop computer with the huge keyboard and monitor.
He was a handsome man. She had grown up watching the townswomen stammer and blush when he directed his deep blue eyes at them. As a kid, she had thought those eyes were like Superman’s and had x-ray vision that could spot a criminal from a mile away.
But could he?
He glanced up and those eyes narrowed above the small-lensed reading glasses he’d just started using. “Did you need something, Tully?”
She moved into the office. “I was just going to ask if you wanted me to run to Sloppy Joe’s and get lunch.”
He shook his head. “No, I’m good.”
He waited for her to say something else. When she didn’t, he took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I was just . . .” The words were on the tip of her tongue to ask about the night he’d arrested Jaxon, but she couldn’t seem to get them out.
And she knew why. Asking that question would be like doubting her daddy.
And she had never doubted him. Not once.
She wasn’t going to start now. “I was just going to tell you that I sat and talked with Birdie for a while and she seems to be just fine.”
He smiled. “Ahh, so you’re worried about your grandmother.
Well, there’s no need to be. It will take more than a whack with a door to take her out.
But if it makes you feel better, I planned on driving out there and checking on her before I head home.
” He hesitated. “Did you call your mama and tell her?”
Her mama was a sensitive subject between them. “No, but I will . . . unless you want to.”
He shook his head. “No, you go ahead. I don’t think she wants to talk to me.”
There was so much Tully wanted to say. So many questions she wanted to ask. The main one being why he hadn’t fought harder for his wife? Why had he just let her leave? But instead, she only nodded.
“I guess I’ll go get caught up on some paperwork.”
Once she was seated at her desk, she sat there staring at the county sheriff’s department logo screensaver on her laptop for several long minutes before she tapped her mouse pad and opened her browser.
It didn’t take her long to pull up the arrest records.
She had never read them. There hadn’t been a need to. She’d been listening at the vent when her daddy had gotten home that night and told the entire story. He’d been convinced Jaxon had robbed the gas station.
He’d convinced Tully too.
But as she read his report, she understood why he’d had to release Jaxon the following morning for lack of evidence.
Her daddy hadn’t followed protocol that night.
He hadn’t turned on his car camera as soon as he saw Jaxon’s truck barreling out of the gas station.
He’d turned on his lights and started to follow when he’d spotted the tire fire.
He’d given up the chase and pulled into the gas station.
Once he’d called the fire department and Mickey, he’d discovered the back door of the garage opened and the missing money.
Then and only then, had he headed over to the Hennessys to arrest Jaxon based only on seeing his truck leaving Mickey’s . . . from two blocks away.
Only Superman could have been sure who was driving the truck from that far away.
Why had her father been so sure it had been Jaxon?
Had he just seen what he wanted to see?
Tully had been taught at the police academy that what you think you see and what is actually the truth can be two different things.
Preconceived notions affect how people perceive things.
Tully’s instructors had told numerous stories about eyewitnesses who have sworn under oath that they saw someone commit a crime and it turned out the person had just been an innocent bystander.
After years of dealing with the Hennessys’ rebel rousing and law breaking, how could her father not have preconceived notions?
The entire town had them.
Tully had them.
While she had thought it was unfair how the townsfolk treated the Hennessys, she had done the same thing.
As soon as she’d heard her father’s story about what happened that night, she’d believed Jaxon was guilty.
Because if she had believed him not guilty, she would have had to believe her father was wrong.
She hadn’t been able to do it.
She still couldn’t do it.
But what if her granny was right? What if things weren’t always black and white? Right and wrong? What if both her daddy and Jaxon weren’t totally right or totally wrong?
What if there was a gray area where good girls stole Nutty Buddys and bad boys were falsely accused?