scurrying to the area.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “What was that?”
CJ couldn’t have been more irritated at the interruption, but he’d brought it on himself. Gaining control over his breathing, he said, “Sorry, Ms. Arlene. I banged my elbow on the table.” For good measure, he rubbed his left elbow and affected a wince.
“Oh!” Ms. Arlene said, moving closer, which was the exact opposite reaction to the one CJ wanted. “Are you okay? Do you need anything? An ice pack?”
It took some convincing before the librarian was assured of his continued good health, and when she’d left, he added assaulting furniture to the list of things he would avoid doing in her presence.
Alone with his thoughts again, he reread his father’s statement. It was simple, and might well have been sincere, yet something about it rubbed CJ the wrong way. He just couldn’t put a finger on it. He looked through the rest of the paper for any other stories about the accident, finding only Eddie’s obituary, which he read through. It was remarkable only in its brevity.
He closed the file and opened the next in the series, scouring every page. No further mention of the tragedy. It wasn’t something he’d have noticed then—this absence of information. The only part of the paper he read as a ten-year-old was the comics. Now, as an adult far removed from the event, CJ found it all very odd. Small-town high school students were rarely shot to death by their best friends. One would expect a follow-up article or two.
He followed the paper through November with the same result, the same dearth of information. With a shake of his head, CJ left the computer to head to the restroom, walking past the front desk in the process. He avoided looking in Ms. Arlene’s direction. It was as he was washing his hands that an idea came.
He hurried back to the computer, finding and opening the file that held the paper that came out the week after Eddie’s death. The Baxters were politicians, regardless of the difficulty they’d had capturing and holding positions of power. From birth, a Baxter man was bred for the political arena; it was in the blood. And CJ was convinced that his father had used those skills, along with whatever cachet an influential family had, to make the whole thing go away. It was the only thing that made sense.
It would have had to have been done quickly, before an investigation could build up steam. With new eyes he scanned the pages, not sure what he was looking for. What he was confident of, though, was that few things left no paper trail. He also believed that some of the most suspect deals were done in the light of day.
He’d reached the second to last page before he found it. Two days after Eddie Montgomery’s death, the Baxter family donated two brand-new squad cars to the Adelia Police Department. A grand civic gesture lauded by both the mayor and the chief of police. Not a hint of scandal.
CJ’s smoking gun. The answer to the most important question that had dogged him for a quarter century: how much had his dad known? Apparently he’d known about all of it, and he’d known what to do to keep it quiet—to protect Graham in much the same way as Ms. Arlene thought she was protecting Adelia. What made it worse was that it was the sort of thing that everyone in town would have seen through. CJ suspected there were few in Adelia at the time who did not know what George Baxter had purchased. It seemed the only one who hadn’t known was CJ —except in some subconscious way that kept him from trusting anyone enough to tell them the truth. And he figured that this was a conditioning he’d been carrying with him since that day.
CJ sat there motionless, processing over and over again what he’d learned. The information was so new and so revealing that it jolted him, and he wasn’t sure what to do next. It was a complex question, and he doubted he could consider it properly while stuck in a library.
Chapter 19
He was beginning to think that a bar was the only place where he could think clearly. Since becoming a Christian, he’d wondered if he was supposed to find the sort of focus he found in a good bar in a church instead. He had his doubts, because even though he liked Sunday morning service