The Last Breath. Kimberly Belle

words are electric, shooting a paralyzing current from my crown to the tips of my toes and melding my sneakers to the icy pavement. Wrongful conviction? I pivot my head to meet his gaze. “Excuse me?”

      He bites off a mitten and digs around in a coat pocket, then crosses the driveway and hands me a card. “I’m Jeffrey Levine, by the way.”

      I blink at the paper between my fingers, thick white linen with raised letters and a crest embossed in blue. “It says here you’re a professor of law.”

      He slides his bare hand back into his mitten and nods. “For Emory. I’m taking a semester sabbatical to work on my book. It’s called True Crimes, False Convictions: Criminal Injustice in America.” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Yeah, it’s a working title.”

      “And you think my father’s case is one of them?”

      His head bobs in a decisive nod, and those ridiculous bangs flop over one eye. “Let me put it this way—your father’s case is a textbook on what not to do. How to ignore leads. How to sweep conflict of interest under the rug. How to miscarry justice and send an innocent man to prison.”

      “But there was a witness.” I pivot now to face him, purposefully playing devil’s advocate. It’s one thing to say my father’s conviction was wrongful, another thing entirely to believe it. There was too much evidence to the contrary.

      “One who thought he saw him breaking and entering his own house two hours after the time of death, not standing over the body with a smoking gun.”

      “Ella Mae was suffocated.”

      He gives me a look. “It was a figure of speech. And between you and me and everybody else who’s going to read my book, I think Dean Sullivan’s testimony was coerced. Did you know the police held him for six and a half hours? That screams gross misconduct to me.”

      Six and a half hours? Is that even allowed? But still. “The judge and jury believed him.”

      “Of course they did. Mr. Sullivan was an upstanding, God-fearing citizen.” He points past me to the ramshackle ranch where the Sullivans once lived. “Just look at him now.”

      I gape at the neighboring property, so neglected I’d assumed it was abandoned. Front steps, rickety and rotting, lead to a front porch littered with trash and a ripped brown leather sofa. The yard, a foul-looking patch of dirt and rock, has seen neither fertilizer nor lawn mower since sometime last century. Even Dean’s prized rosebushes have hardened into brown and scraggly branches jutting up from the frozen earth, a tangle of sticks and thorns.

      “People actually still live there?” I say.

      “Dean Sullivan lives there. Alone. His family won’t have anything to do with him. His only friend is Jack Daniel’s. His house, his yard, his entire life is a mess.”

      A mess might just be the biggest understatement on the planet. Dean’s house makes some of the shanties in Dadaab look like palaces.

      “What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jeffrey asks.

      I don’t know what to say to that. I’d never considered the possibility Dean was still living there, much less hiding from something.

      I think for a moment. If everything Jeffrey said is true, then why not tell me this right away, when he stopped to ask for directions? Or better yet, why not tell Uncle Cal? I was barely eighteen when Ella Mae was murdered, and I’ve had practically nothing to do with the case since.

      “What do you want from me? You should be talking to my uncle Cal. He’s the one who handled everything.”

      “I’d love to talk to him, but unfortunately, he wants nothing to do with me.” He gives me a wry smile. “It might have something to do with me telling him I’m devoting an entire chapter to his shoddy defense of your father.”

      His words echo in my ears, bounce around my brain, feel foreign on my tongue. I don’t get it. Uncle Cal is known as the Tennessee Tiger, as tenacious and tireless in the courtroom as he is with his girlfriends, an endless string of gold diggers and social climbers. There’s no way his defense of my father—his own brother, for Christ’s sake—was shoddy. What is this guy talking about?

      Jeffrey arches a brow, seeming almost amused at my reaction. “This surprises you?”

      “Yes, this surprises me, and it also infuriates me. Cal is a brilliant lawyer, and he worked his ass off to put together Dad’s defense. He barely ate, he didn’t sleep and nobody—nobody—was more upset than Cal when his brother, the one he defended, went to prison.”

      He lifts his shoulders in a don’t-blame-the-messenger gesture. “Then why didn’t he try to appeal?”

      And here, I think, I have him. Lawyer, my ass. He doesn’t even have all the information. “You should check your sources, because I know for sure he did appeal.”

      “Once.” Jeffrey points a mitten to the sky. “Just one time, to the Court of Appeals.”

      “And it was declined.”

      “Denied.”

      “Same thing.”

      “But why did he stop there? Why didn’t he keep going?”

      “I don’t...” I take two steps to my trunk, pause and turn back. “He could have done that?”

      “Of course he could have. He definitely should have, but he didn’t.”

      My heart misses about five beats. Cal slacked on my father’s case? I still don’t believe it. Dad is his only brother. There’s no way.

      Jeffrey points to his card, still clutched between my fingers, and turns to go. “Think about it, and give me a call when you’re ready to hear more. And I hope you’ll be ready sometime soon, because in the spirit of full disclosure, you should know I’m writing this book with or without your family’s input. You can help me write it, or you can sit back and wait for your copy.”

      He waves one last time, and I watch him climb into his car and drive away, my mind swirling, humming, tripping over his message. About Cal’s shoddy defense, about Dean Sullivan’s coerced testimony, but mostly about Jeffrey Levine’s steadfast belief in my father’s innocence. How is it possible to have that much blind faith in a person he’s never met? How can a complete stranger be so unequivocally certain Ray Andrews did not murder his wife, while I—his own daughter—can’t?

      Turning back to the rental, I slip his card into the front pocket of my jeans and push it with two fingers until it’s as deep as it can go, flush against the bottom seam.

      Maybe sometime soon I’ll work up the nerve to call Jeffrey and ask.

       3

      Ella Mae Andrews, September 1993

      ELLA MAE THUNKED her empty mug onto the wooden floor planks and gave her porch swing another shove with the heel of a foot. The metal chains squawked in time to her movement. Back. Forth. Back...

      Somewhere in the distance a lawn mower whined, and Ella Mae envied both its gusto and its purpose. With two stepchildren in college and the third headed that way next fall, she found herself with more and more time to fill in her already spotless house, in her increasingly aimless day. She checked her watch. Ten o’clock, and already she was bored as hell.

      A green truck crested the hill, heading in her direction, and the sight of it made her feel like dancing. Even if the driver was merely turned around, maybe she could strike up a conversation. By the time she’d given him precise, detailed directions, she would have killed a good fifteen minutes, maybe more. Would it be completely pathetic if she offered him a cup of coffee?

      Good Lord. When had life become so dreary? She should probably think about getting a hobby.

      Ella