Chapter Twenty-Six
Tuesday
This was more than T.R.’d bargained for, and he willed his jaw to relax.
He swiped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes from the glare of the computer screen, glanced at Cindy through the window of the records room, typing and answering calls, and seamlessly putting paperwork in mail slots without missing a beat.
He glanced down at his shorthand notes.
Then he pulled out his phone and tapped on CUZ in his contacts. It rang.
“What’s up?” Tyler said in lieu of a greeting, background laughter and chatter loud in the receiver as he added to someone else, “Stevie, get off of Heart’s railing before you break your arm, too…”
“I’m at the courthouse. Got a minute?” T.R. said, jaw tight.
After last night’s bombshell, he wasn’t ready to hear his cousin’s voice yet, but he needed his expertise.
Tyler’s boots crunched away, and the din faded.
“What the hell’d you do, Thaddeus?”
“Nothing, asshole. Cindy hooked me up and, well, I got a problem. Something ain’t right, and I don’t know how to find out why. Of the thousands of divorces and custody cases Calvin Mitchell’s presided over, he always takes a hardline position on the parent paying child support.”
“And?”
“I crunched the numbers. He demands parents pay what they oughta and goes after the deadbeats.”
“But?”
“But then there’s Jason Thompson.”
“What d’you mean? Jason Thompson? That fool who tried to defraud you? I thought you were looking up stuff about Charlie.”
A door closing through the cell shrouded Ty’s voice in stillness. A moment later, a chair creaked.
“Yup. Jason. And yup. Charlie.”
“What do the two have to do with each other?”
“Mitchell was the judge who told me since I’d mixed up my court dates, my case was dismissed. And Mitchell just so happened to preside in Charlie’s divorce from Jason.”
“No shit…” Tyler fell silent with surprise. “Jason is her ex?”
“Yup.”
“Who’s been deciding their custody disputes since?”
T.R. leaned back and swigged coffee from his thermos. “I’ll give you one guess.”
Silence.
“Mitchell? Coincidence that in two jurisdictions, yours in Travis County, and Charlie’s here in Nacogdoches County, the same judge gets assigned to the same guy?”
“Yeah, I’m thinkin’ not,” T.R. said.
A tapping sound in the background clicked. Tyler was typing.
“That’s gonna be tough to prove.”
“Maybe,” T.R. said. “But Charlie and Daisy are gonna keep suffering for it if they can’t get before a different judge.”
“And if Mitchell is playing the system to get Jason’s cases … is he tough on Jason too?” Tyler’s question sounded as if he already suspected the answer.
“Nope. Like night and day. Mitchell ain’t once thrown the book at Jason.
Charlie’s taken him to court three times asking for sole custody.
Denied each time. And each of her bids to get him to pay child support or adhere to the rules he don’t drink when Daisy’s with him?
Jason has excuses each time about his employment.
Mitchell doesn’t do a damn thing to increase Jason’s accountability.
“And that ain’t all. When it comes to these thousands of custody cases Mitchell has heard, in the ones where one parent is volatile, Mitchell was swift in curtailing a parent’s visitation or in a few cases, severing it all together.”
“Lemme guess. Except when it comes to Jason.”
T.R. gritted his teeth. “Hit the nail on the head. Charlie never told me about how he hurt her, just that he has.” His teeth clenched, because now she didn’t need to; he’d read the details of the divorce for himself.
“But now I know, he gave her black eyes, a fractured rib once, countless bru … bruises.” His voice vanished on that one and he cleared his throat to find it again.
“Driven under the influence with Daisy in the truck. Few times she’s gone on dates, he’s stalked her, tellin’ the courts he wants to remarry.
Can’t seem to let her go but won’t treat her right neither.
Not once have his visitations been curtailed or supervised despite Charlie begging.
When Jason resurfaced demanding visitation after being MIA for a year, his parental rights were restored with no guardrails. ”
“Looks like our boy gets away with murder.”
Yeah, that … was the worst possibility. He clicked open the record number he’d earmarked, sliding his glasses back on.
“In fact, aside from a few verbal censures to abstain from drinking—not even that has been enforced. When she first called the police and got the divorce ball rolling, charges were suddenly dropped. She should have pressed charges.”
“Unless she was pressured not to.”
“The question is, why is Mitchell showing favoritism?”
“Who posted bail?” Tyler asked.
T.R. navigated his way through the computer software and landed on the information. Squinting, and holding up a paper to cover each letter until he could focus on it. Damn this strained the eyes and brain. “EZ Bond LLC fronted the money for him.”
More typing in the background as Tyler took notes.
“D’you see who presided over his bail hearing on Sunday?”
“Man, you know who presided over it.”
“Damn, Mitchell works all hours, it seems. Wonder who’s gonna be on the bench for her restraining order hearing?”
They both knew the answer. Which meant … Charlie was at risk of her temporary restraining order being lifted. Just like she’d feared.
“Okay. Get a printout,” Ty said. “We’re heading back to Nacogdoches.”
Shoot, that might be a hundred bucks or so, and he was already down some from the parts he’d needed for Charlie’s Rover, which would only put him further behind getting the award show registration fee paid.
But what was some cash when it came to a woman’s safety and a little girl’s security? Certainly worth more than a contest fee.
*
Walking among her blooms with her tablet, Thad’s words from the night before kept running through Charlie’s mind.
As she tapped the syncopated rhythm he’d suggested, that she’d still not given an opinion on, but yeah …
it would sound great with a one-two from Bo, but only with a lead-in from the banjo, she realized!
She set aside the tablet and snatched up the notebook she’d been jotting notes in all morning and hummed the banjo refrain. Daring herself to just … go all in. Put herself out there. Take the risk. Ignore Thad’s past. Trust his present.
So often she felt as if she were atrophying. But last night, she’d come alive. Thad had once more dragged her out of anonymity and thrust her into his fray and they’d all … clicked, picking and singing around the fire.
All morning over breakfast and on the way to school, Daisy had begged to go back. To do that every night. How much Daisy wished they could live there because there, it had felt happy and safe. She didn’t want to live like this anymore. In constant hide, fight, or flight mode.
She didn’t want her beautiful Daisy wilting, becoming an angsty, untrusting teen, or a young woman sucked into the same cycle with her own lovers one day.
She snagged up her tablet again and put down the notebook, tapping one of the angiosperm’s progress in the data fields, and moved onto the next, when her phone rang.
She fished it out of the sterile suit pocket, bracing herself for Jason or maybe the school. She exhaled with relief.
Trouble.
She wedged it into her shoulder to keep working. “Hey.”
“You home?”
She furrowed her brow at his abruptness. “Is something wrong?”
“Where’re you at?”
“In my tunnel. Why?”
“Got something to show you.”
She frowned. “I’ll be out in a minute—”
The phone went dead.
She returned to her tablet, hurrying to finish the next plant, when the door to her greenhouse opened. Her head whipped up as T.R. popped his head through the door—
“Sterile zone, Thad!” she called, and hurried down the controlled rows to the door.
T.R. held his hands up as she barged into the decontamination zone, filtration fan droning, and closed the air-tight door.
He took in her sterile jump suit, blue disposable bonnet, and gloves.
She must have left the gate open when she’d dragged the hose around the house to water the back flowerpots.
“Don’t shoot. Forgot,” he said as he took a jumpsuit off the wall and fished his legs in.
It was then that she saw a thick folder in his hand. “What’s all that?”
“Wanted to show you.” He hitched his chin at the door. “You done?”
She shook her head. “Three more data points to enter. Then I’ll be. Summer school releases today, and I have to get Daisy soon.”
“Okay.”
He took a blue hairnet from the box bracketed to the greenhouse, stretched on his booties over his shitkickers, and followed her back inside.
She returned to her specimen, measuring it, tapping in the information into her pad, moving on to the last two, but he was making her nervous, and she side-eyed him. Except his folder was hanging at his side as he held … her notebook?
“You’re … right,” he muttered, lifting his eyes to hers.
She shoved to her feet and hurried over to him. “Oh, those are just, you know, some thoughts that I had, they’re probably nothing—”
“Naw, if you hammer on the banjo right at Bo’s one-two, that syncopation will be perfect.” His eyes lifted to hers.
Awed. Not angered. Not insecure that she’d upstage him.
He pulled out his phone and strode back toward the decontamination room with it in hand. She dashed after him. “It’s nothing, Thad, just something I woke up thinking about—”
The door snapped shut. She pulled it open to see the folder he’d brought discarded on the shoe bench, the roar of the fan loud, only to see him aiming his phone at her notes, tapping a picture, and had he just hit Send?