Wim Wimbley had been the richest bachelor in Bigler. She was the prettiest woman. Was she supposed to settle for anything less?
The old Tanyalee had thought not.
She entered the visitors’ waiting room. The green-painted cinder-block walls closed in on her while she sat primly at the end of a row of hard plastic chairs bolted to the concrete floor. She wondered if that was to prevent anyone from using them as weapons. The thought made her heart beat faster.
The jail smelled of bleach, stale coffee, and misery. The smell made her throat want to close up tight as a tick. And the bad taste in her mouth wasn’t just because she was here to see Wim. It did not escape Tanyalee that she, herself, could have languished in the feminine version of here, which she knew was painted in a horrible shade of puce under unflattering lighting. If not for her family name and the Cataloochee County legal system’s susceptibility to large blue eyes swimming with tears, she might call that place home today.
She would forever be grateful that she hadn’t appeared before one of those lady judges!
Her name was called. Tanyalee walked past the intimidating armed guard posted at the door to the visitation room. The space was cut in half lengthwise by a long counter, a thick Plexiglas partition running from the tabletop to the ceiling.
On one side of the clear plastic sat a few nominally regular people, talking on phone handsets attached to the counter by thick unbreakable cords. On the other side of the plastic were men in pale blue coveralls hunched forward hungrily.
The place gave her the willies. She couldn’t imagine the horrible conversations that had taken place here over the years, all the tears and yelling, all the pain caused by a loved one’s stupidity. The cheap Formica surface of the counter was pitted and carved with initials, reminding her of the desks from high-school detention—not that she’d ever been sent there! The thick Plexiglas wall was riddled with scuff marks and dents, and Tanyalee couldn’t imagine how much force someone would have to use to inflict such damage. She glanced behind her at the bolted-down chairs and shuddered.
“Ma’am?”
Tanyalee had no choice. She nodded politely to the guard and headed in the direction he now pointed. I have to do this. If I want to leave the past behind me, I have to face Wim fair and square. I have to face them all.
Because Wim meant so little to her, she figured asking him for forgiveness would be good practice as she went on to the more challenging amends. Yes, Tanyalee had ordered her in-person amends from the least difficult to the most—just as Dante suggested—but she would not be thinking of Dante today. She was angry at that man and hadn’t answered any of his calls in the last three days, which served him right.
With a sigh, she lifted her chin and stepped right up to her past and sat down opposite it.
A man stared at her from the other side of the glass. For a minute, she thought the jail officials had made a mistake. The Wim she remembered sported a hundred-dollar haircut and a five-thousand-dollar suit.
The man in front of her had longish hair that was shaggy and thin enough on top that she detected a gleaming beneath. His skin was pasty and his expression was weary and careful.
Then he smiled at her and she saw a glimpse of the old, cocky Wim Wimbley, rich kid, frat boy, and eventually the most successful real estate mogul in all of Cataloochee County. His plans for the Paw Paw Lake luxury waterfront retirement village would have made him one of the richest men in the state, but that was not to be. Construction workers unearthed a dead body and the truth began to tumble out of the past: Wim’s father had killed an innocent girl and dumped her in the lake, and the resulting cover-up led to the destruction of many lives over the course of many years, including her own.
As the dominos began to fall, long-buried evidence showed that Wim’s father was responsible for the murder of Tanyalee’s own parents and a host of other crimes, some of which Wim continued decades after his father’s death. When faced with the end of his privileged life, Wim came unglued, and lashed out by pointing a gun at Tanyalee, Cheri, and Candy.
That had been a particularly bad end to a particularly bad day, since