She blew out a breath. “Hah! It’s an act. I feel like…” She shook her head and took a different tack. “One of the friends I made once I delved into the Innocence Project stuff, he’s an attorney in a small former Soviet country and things are horrible for him. He defends people the government picks up and tosses into jail for months or years at a time. Sometimes without ever even charging them. So people disappear off the street in the middle of the day, and six years later that same person, only forty pounds lighter and near death, gets tossed back on a front step. Sometimes they never come back at all. And my friend, he gets death threats all the time. Like on a monthly basis. He’s been kidnapped twice. Picked up and arrested. Beaten and interrogated. And he gets up every day he’s not in jail, he packs his case and he goes to work. I admired that before, but now? Now that I’m scared out of my skin all day long every day from some threats? Now that I know just a small slice of what he must deal with I guess I’m having a learning moment. This shit is crazy scary, Shep. I’m freaked out all the time. And I can’t stop living, but at the same time, I want to hide. I’m not perfect. I save all my strong for when people are looking at me.” She smiled at him. “I hope this is different. I want it to be different. It might even feel different. Shane will hopefully have at least part of an answer soon enough.”

Shep nodded as he put his hands in his pockets. She thought of him at two, toddling around, laughing and giggling as their father had teased that he was going to eat him up.

“I’ve read six years of letters so far,” he said quietly and quickly.

She hugged him.

“I couldn’t decide to start at the beginning or the end. But then I felt like I needed to start at the beginning and get to know him that way. Who he was at that time. I spend hours every day just reading them. I’m paranoid Grandma will find them and take them away so I have them in my trunk.”

“If you like, you can keep them here. Or at Royal’s house.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I just know I’m so sad.” His bottom lip wobbled, and she scooted next to him on her couch, her arm around his shoulder. “He loved me. Oh my God, Caroline, he loved me and they always told us he didn’t. It hurts to read his words. It hurts to know how alone he was. I didn’t know him two weeks ago. And now I know him a little bit. Did he write you little stories?”

She smiled at that memory. “He did. For like three years he’d send me a paragraph here and there until he finished one of them. Sometimes poems. A memory he had that he wanted to pass on to me. He did love you. Don’t be sad about it.”

“I feel so guilty for not helping him.”

“Sweetie, you’re not even a legal adult yet. There wasn’t a damned thing you could have done. Anyway, I’m just saying, be sad. Feel bad and miss him. Be angry or curious. But don’t be guilty.”

She went home, and then got dragged out to bowling where she was thoroughly trounced by Beth and consoled herself with a five-gallon jug of sugary sweet icy stuff and a giant pretzel.

She’d been busy trying not to recoil from the bag of fresh crackling handed her way when her phone rang.

“Give those to Royal. He loves them.” And that she still allowed him to kiss her after knowing he ate them was a true testament to her love for him.

She answered.

“Caroline? It’s Shane.” Pressing a hand against her other ear, she moved away from the lanes to hear better.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve found out quite a bit about Vernon Hicks. I wanted to talk to you about it. It sounds like you’re out, though. We can talk about it tomorrow too.”

“Are you kidding? I’m at the bowling alley with our goofy friends, or as they’re also known, your family and extended family.”

He chuckled. “That’s right. I forgot it was moved to Thursday this month. I’m not too far away.”

Royal came into her line of sight, and he moved to her, concern on his face.

“We can meet you at the station or the office or whatever. I’m really interested to hear what you’ve got.”

“I’ll meet you at the bowling alley in ten minutes, I can give you the rundown then.”

“Thank you, Shane.”

And ten minutes later, she and Royal were sitting in the back of the café area that no one ever used.

“Vernon Hicks moved away from Petal six years after the murder to Porter, a city just outside Macon. He’s been arrested seven times for domestic violence, including violating protection orders. He did a two-year stint for nearly killing someone in a bar fight. I have calls into the cops on the DV stuff for more detail, but it looks like Vernon has himself a stalking problem. Those seven arrests were for four different women.”

“Four? And this guy is free to stalk Caroline? After he did all that? You tell me how that makes a lick of sense.” Royal was pissed and she sure didn’t blame him.

“I don’t make the laws. I don’t handle the trials or the sentences. I just uphold the laws other people create. And I don’t think his history started the moment he moved away from Petal either. But I didn’t find much about him here. Our recordkeeping sixteen years ago wasn’t always as thorough as it could have been. But I spoke to a few old-timers. They routinely had to haul him to the drunk tank. He liked to hang out near the old beauty college that used to be out where the big-box hardware store is between here and Millersburg. I also think he might have changed his name when he got here. I can’t find anything on him before he arrived.”