“Just get her to talk about her family. Start there.” That was Detective Layne’s final word of advice before I left, but nobody takes kindly to questions about personal family stuff.
I was going to drive all the way to her in Oxford, but she agreed to meet me in Tupelo, which was nice. Detective Layne set the entire thing up without me having to do anything. He said he had a good rapport with her because their girls had played on the same volleyball team, and apparently, she owed him a favor. He’d busted her once after a school dance in the parking lot. She’d been drunk and trying to drive home. He’d gotten one of her friends to take her home and said nothing of it to her mom, so she owed him a favor, and a favor means something around here.
Either way, he said she seemed eager to talk to me and not worried by it at all, but what if he was just saying that to get me to meet her? I have no doubt he’ll do whatever needs to be done in the interest of the greater good, even if it means tweaking the truth at times.
The bell on the door jingles as a young woman enters the restaurant and heads toward me.
I’m glad Savannah told me where to sit, because I never would’ve recognized her on my own. She’s a stark contrast to the pictures in her childhood home, where her blonde hair was perfectly curled in spirals flowing down her back as she stood in fifth position with a Miss Preteen Alabama sash around her, smiling proudly. This is her antithesis. The tight curls are gone, along with the blonde hair. It’s raven black, cut short and shaved high on the sides. The black in her hair travels through her outfit and all the way down to her combat boots. Her neon-pink laces are the only piece of color on her.
I wave awkwardly as she strides in my direction. She slides into the other side of the booth. I stick my hand out. “Hi, I’m Casey, thanks so much for meeting me.” Her fingers are freezing.
“No problem,” she says, sweeping her hair off her forehead. “Is this mine?” She points to one of the water glasses on the table.
I nod, waiting until she’s finished taking a drink to ask, “So first year of college, huh? How’s it going?”
She’s barely over nineteen and gives the classic adolescent shrug. “Not too bad. Classes are pretty easy so far.”
I hold back the urge to pummel her with stories about my freshman year in college. I’m not trying to make myself look any older than she already thinks I am. Instead I say, “I didn’t order you a coffee or anything else because I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”
“That’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” She smiles and takes another drink of her water. She has the same strong jawline and high cheekbones as her mom. Her green eyes light up when she asks, “How’s my brother?”
“Mason?”
“Do I have another brother?” She cocks her head to the side teasingly.
“Sorry, it’s just . . . I don’t . . . ,” I stammer, caught off guard. Heat flushes my cheeks.
She interrupts. “Don’t worry about it—it’s okay.” She drops her eyes to the table, looking embarrassed about teasing me. “Is he doing all right?”
“From what your mom says, he seems to be.” It’s strange being called onto a case because of my experience with autism but having so little interaction with the child who has it.
“I guess the one good thing about being at Ole Miss is that I can be close to him if he needs me.” The black hair makes her face so pale. The dark liner circling her eyes does more of the same. Her hands tense on the edge of the table.
“You say it like Ole Miss is a bad thing.” Ole Miss is one of the oldest schools in Mississippi and on a gorgeous campus. They call it the Harvard of the South, and nobody does football like they do, except maybe us.
“Ole Miss wasn’t my first choice.” She offers an apologetic smile.
“It wasn’t?”
“No.” She crosses her arms on her chest. The sleeves on her shirt slide up, revealing bright, colorful tattoos spiraling their way up both arms. I spot Mason’s birth date in between two symbols I don’t recognize.
“Where’d you want to go to school?”
“I wanted to go to UCLA.”
“Wow. UCLA. That’s far.” And hard to get into, but I leave out that part just in case she didn’t make the cut.
“I got in too,” she announces as if she can read my mind.
“You did?”
She gives me a huge smile, and for a second, the little girl from the pictures in her childhood home flashes on her face. “I really wanted to go. Like, really wanted to. I love the school, but I also love California. I always have. Ever since I was little. We used to go to Disneyland every year when I was a kid, and I pretended I lived there.” She giggles, then covers her mouth like it’s embarrassing to laugh in front of me, or maybe she’s just trying to be hard. “Whenever I was off by myself, waiting in line somewhere to get cotton candy or a snow cone, sometimes even the bathroom, I would tell people that I lived there. I was always like, ‘Hi, I’m from Los Angeles.’” Her eyes sparkle with the memory. “It just felt so glamorous.”