He dropped me on a corner not far from the courthouse. I walked north several blocks to a familiar street with lights blazing in some of the town houses and big dumpsters out in front of the ones that were dark.
There were a few lights on in one of the duplexes, which did and didn’t surprise me. Bernie Aaliyah had been fixing up the place.
As I climbed the stairs to the porch and the front door, my mind fled back to the last time I’d been here. I remembered being outside Tess Aaliyah’s bedroom door, hearing the gunshot, and jumping back in shock and despair. And poor Bernie Aaliyah pounding on the door, begging the silence for an answer, some hope.
I shook off the memory, hesitated, and then knocked. A few moments later, the dead bolts were thrown and the door opened.
“Dr. Cross?”
“I wonder if I could talk to you.”
“I’m doing good since we last spoke,” Tess said, and she smiled. “We have another meeting set, don’t we?”
“This time it’s not about you,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, and frowned. “Well, then, of course, please come in.”
CHAPTER
61
I FOLLOWED HER inside, remarking to myself how good she looked after only a month off the various interacting drugs that had helped put her behind a locked door with her backup pistol talking about rats, and her father and I outside thinking suicide.
It turned out that the construction projects up and down the street had disturbed the neighborhood’s urban rat population and caused a migration. Tess had seen rats twice in her closet upstairs earlier that day. After her fight with her dad, and in a semidelusional state due to the drugs, she decided she’d clean out the closet, put crackers and birdseed in a pile, and then sit back and wait for a shot. It was why she’d insisted on talking quietly. She’d been hunting.
After Tess shot the rat, the ringing in her ears was so loud that for several long, agonizing moments, she didn’t hear her father pounding on the door. Then she’d opened the door and looked at us with bloodshot, drug-puzzled eyes, as if she couldn’t imagine what we were so upset about.
It had taken several hours to convince Tess to enter a psychiatric facility in Virginia so she could be properly evaluated. But she eventually agreed and spent a week there getting clean and undergoing tests. She’d gone into the psych ward taking a multi-pill cocktail and left on a single drug for depression. The doctors said that in her effort to forget, she was lucky she hadn’t done permanent brain damage.
“You want a beer?” Tess said. “Dad left some.”
“Water if you’ve got it,” I said.
“Coming up,” she said and got me some chilled from the fridge.
I sat in Bernie Aaliyah’s favorite chair. Tess gave me my water, curled her feet under her on the couch, and said, “Thank you again for helping me, Alex. You were the only one who saw I was a danger to myself.”
“I’m glad you agreed to get help,” I said. “Which is why I came to see you.”
“Okay?”
“Have you been following my trial?”
She shook her head. “My therapist advised me to go on a no-media diet for a few months.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, but then I brought her up to speed on the latest trial developments, including the video and Rawlins’s contention that it had not been doctored.
“But you saw those pistols?”
“Every time I close my eyes, I see them,” I said.
“Any chance you imagined them?”
I started to tell her absolutely not but then said, “Part of me doesn’t know anymore, Tess, and it’s got me scared that I did something heinous and that my mind has somehow erased it and put something else in its place to justify my actions. Does that make sense? Has that ever happened to you?”
Pain flickered on her cheeks before she shook her head. “I remember every detail, the first shots, me returning fire, and then hearing the Phelps’s nanny wailing beyond that apartment door. I can’t forget a second of it.”
“That’s how the other part of me feels.”
“Then those pistols were there and removed from the videos. You just have to prove it.”
My cell phone dinged, alerting me to a text. I pulled it out, saw it was from Bree: Where are you, Alex? I’m worried.
I texted back, Talking to an old friend. On my way.
I looked at Tess and said, “I have to go. Thanks for talking.”
“One good deed deserves another.”
We both stood and headed toward the door. I opened it and looked back at her before leaving.
“I forgot to ask. How are you keeping busy?”
Tess smiled wistfully and said, “Running twice a day, reading, and trying to learn how to forgive myself without a bunch of drugs in my brain.”
CHAPTER
62
AT TEN THE following morning, I was in the stands inside the Johns Hopkins University field house with Damon, a sophomore now. We were watching Jannie take her last warm-ups. She’d been quiet on the ride up for the meet, so quiet that I had finally asked her what was going on.
Jannie didn’t want to talk at first, but she eventually admitted that she was upset because someone had uploaded the shooting videos to YouTube. Social media was incensed. Terrible comments had been directed at her and at the boys.
That only made the day worse. When I’d told Bree the night before that Rawlins said the videos had not been doctored, I’d seen something in her eyes that I swore I’d never see there. Doubt. Not open suspicion, not a lack of faith, but doubt about the facts of the shootings as I’d described them.
“How are you doing, Dad?” Damon asked.
“Let’s focus on Jannie,” I said. “I’m sick of thinking about everything else.”
“How’s our girl looking?” Ted McDonald asked, breaking into my thoughts.
I was surprised to see him. “Thought you couldn’t make it, Coach.”
“My plans changed last night.”
“Does Jannie know?” Damon asked.
“She will after the race.”
“You mean after you see if she executes your race plan,” I said.
“That too,” McDonald said. “The field’s pretty much the same as last time, including Claire Mason, so we can kind of hit reset today.”
“Same tactics you recommended before?”
“A few tweaks based on her recent practice times,” he said, and he dug in his pocket for a stopwatch.
Jannie had pulled the inside third lane. Claire Mason, the Maryland state champion and future Stanford athlete, was two wide in the fifth slot.
Whatever frustration and hurt Jannie might have been feeling on the ride to Baltimore appeared to be bottled and corked when the race starter called the young women to their marks. Our girl went to the blocks bouncing, shaking her arms, and rolling her head, all the while staring into the middle distance.
McDonald lowered his binoculars, said, “She’s good.”
I thought so too. She looked like the old Jannie out there, especially when she smiled after the starter said, “Set.”
At the pistol crack, my daughter came out of the blocks well, more smooth power than explosive. Her stride lengthened, her legs found a relaxed cadence, and her arms were driving fluidly by the end of the first straight. She ran the curve cleanly and confidently, no sign of foot pain.
Exiting onto the backstretch, Jannie was exactly where she’d been in the previous race, in fourth, just off the shoulder of the girl in third, with Claire Mason leading by two body widths. But there was no move for the front. Jannie stayed right in her groove through the second curve and back up the near straightaway.
“Nice,” her coach said, clicking his stopwatch as she flashed by. “I like that number a whole lot.”
Claire Mason tried to run away with it coming out of the third turn, but the three athletes chasing her, including Jannie, reeled the state champion in down the backstretch. They were running in a tight bunch entering the final, far turn.
“Well done,” McDonald said, watching through his binoculars. “Now gallop for home, girlie-girl.”
Jannie seemed to hear her coach’s words in her head because he’d no sooner said them than she found another gear. She passed the girl in third and was right off the shoulder of the athlete in second coming out of the last curve.
I couldn’t help it; I started yelling, “C’mon, Jannie!”