I hustled back to my office, grabbed my belongings, and headed for my car. Working beside me would be the least of Maxwell Lumpkin’s problems when I was done with him.
*
I wound through late-evening traffic in Midtown. A cold, icy rain pelted the hood of my car. Every time I thought about Max, my head shook with fury. I had only given him credit for being a racist. His being a murderer had never occurred to me. I turned off Peachtree Street onto Collier Road, barely making it through a yellow light. A silver sedan and a black Escalade followed me right through the light. Atlanta traffic.
I drove for a bit when I noticed the Escalade was still on my tail. Suddenly, I remembered the black Escalade that had been parked in front of Sam’s house the night I was attacked. My pulse quickened. It was nightfall and the dark tint of the windows and the glare from the headlights made it impossible for me to make out the driver. I made a right turn onto Northside Drive. I slowed down, waiting for the car to pass me. It didn’t. I sped up. The Escalade sped up. I drove faster, weaving in between a minivan and a Range Rover. I blew through another yellow light. The car never let up on my tail. Who was in the car behind me? Sam’s killer?
If Max or Jonathan wanted to play games, then I could play games too. Slick currents of rage and fear ran through my entire body. I gripped the steering wheel and floored the gas. The car hummed with the steady climb in speed as I raced through traffic. The Escalade never lost pace. I raced past the Atlanta Girls’ School and through the intersection of West Paces Ferry Road. I sped through another light before I suddenly hit the brakes. Tires screeched behind me and I watched in my rearview mirror as the Escalade swerved to the right to avoid rear-ending my car. A few seconds later, the hulking SUV backed up before speeding around to the side of my car.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” A young blond guy stuck his head out the driver’s-side window of the Escalade. The guy sped off but not without a parting good-bye. “Crazy bitch!”
A couple drivers honked their horns now that I was blocking traffic. I dropped my head onto my steering wheel.
I was becoming unhinged.
Chapter 31
My heart was still pummeling by the time I arrived inside my condo. The first thing I did when I stepped inside was to slip off my coat and heels in the foyer and pull out my laptop at the kitchen table. I inserted the thumb drive from Max’s office. Two files popped up on the screen. One titled “The Brethren” and the other titled “Ellice Littlejohn.”
My stomach was a knotted mess. I clicked on the file with my name and there it was. The sordid and shameful past that I had spent nearly my entire life running from. This was the Savannah dossier that Jonathan was talking about. Newspaper articles in the Tolliver County Register about Willie Jay’s disappearance and his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter as a person of interest, along with the sheriff’s investigation report with police photos from that shack on Red Creek Road. Just like he said, Jonathan’s investigators had even collected my school transcripts going back as far as Coventry Academy, along with my transcripts from Georgetown and Yale. Birth certificates for me and Sam. A death certificate for Martha. Sam’s assorted arrest records and a tax assessment on his house. They’d even collected my medical records for an appendectomy ten years back. All the peaks and valleys of my entire life.
And Jonathan’s Savannah friends were thorough too. They’d collected information I’d never seen before. There were mug shots of my mother before her life with Willie Jay, a myriad assortment of solicitation and DUI arrests. And scattered in the midst of all this, a 1967 black-and-white mug shot and arrest record for Violet Richards—or as I knew her, Vera Henderson—from Monmouth Parish in Louisiana. Manslaughter. I studied the mug shot for a minute—the same picture left in the envelope in Vera’s room at Beachwood—then clicked on the arrest record. Vera had been arrested for killing a man whom she reported as her rapist. She’d obviously skipped bail and made a run to Georgia.
Everybody has a secret.
My entire life was corralled onto this small digital device. Every secret I ever kept, every lie I ever told, every shame I tried to bury was stored here. The violation was obscene. Jonathan and Max, working together, peeping through all the cracks in my perfect little lawyer life. The two of them working in concert to bring me to my knees and make me a part of their criminal enclave. It wouldn’t work.
I closed the file on my sordid life and clicked on the file marked “The Brethren.” A Word document sprang to life. The first thing that caught my eye, an emblem of two waving flags and a red heart between them. Max’s lapel pin, the same pin worn by the board members, the senators, and the Fox News commentator at Nate’s party. The rest of the document nearly took my breath away: