Homecoming (20 page)

Dana held onto Tyler, feeling his elation, his joy. “I’m crazy, too. I’ve known you exactly two weeks and I here I am accepting your proposal of marriage.”

“I guess I changed your mind, didn’t I?”

“About what?”

“Love at first sight.”

“You don’t have to be so smug about it,” she teased.

He laughed softly, the warm sounds rumbling in his chest. “When do you want to go look at rings?”

A shock flew through her when she realized the import of his question. A ring symbolized commitment, announcing to the world that she had pledged her future to Dr. Tyler Cole.

You are just like your mother!
The taunting inner voice screamed at her. She was repeating her mother’s life because like Alicia, she would also marry a doctor—a doctor who practiced medicine in Hillsboro, Mississippi.

“It doesn’t matter when we go,” she said.

Tyler was too euphoric to register Dana’s flat response. “I’ll check out some jewelers in Jackson, then we can drive down and look at a few stones and settings.”

“I’d like that,” she said as if in a trance.

“I want you to meet my family.”

“I’d like to wait a while before I meet them. Things are moving so fast that I find it hard to think straight.”

He gave her long, penetrating look, his heart turning over when he saw the apprehension in her eyes. He knew he come on strong, but he did not want to lose her.

“Of course, darling.”

The Four Tops’ “Baby, I Need Your Loving” came through the speakers, and Tyler spun her around, and then threw her out before bringing her up close to his chest, their hips rocking in perfect rhythm.

Dana pulled out of his loose grasp, snapping her fingers and gyrating in front of him. He stood completely still, watching her lush body as she seduced him. Leaning over, she displayed a generous amount of breasts, then turned and wiggled her hips. Tyler thought he was going to lose it completely when she
eased the hem of her dress up her thighs and over her hips, flaunting her firm buttocks and a red-lace thong to his shocked gaze. She continued her exhibition, kicking off her sling-strap sandals before unzipping her dress and shimmying out of it.

She stood before him naked, except for the tiny triangle of red lace that revealed more than it covered. Closing his eyes, Tyler swayed, moaning like a wounded animal. Even with his eyes closed, he still could see the lushness of her golden breasts with their large nut-brown nipples perched high above her narrow waist.

He finally opened his eyes, passion glittering in their depths like bits of coal. Who or what had he planned to marry?

Dana Nichols was a tease. A beautiful, provocative tease he’d love until his last breath. Taking two steps, he bent down and picked up her dress, holding it over her breasts.

“Count yourself lucky, Miss Nichols, that I’m a doctor, because if I wasn’t I’d take you right here—standing or reclining. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I have to take care of myself.”

Dana’s jaw dropped when she realized what he was about to do. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she struggled not to laugh as he shot her a murderous look.

“It’s not funny, Dana.” This time she did laugh until tears rolled down her face. His fingers snaked around her arm, pulling her up close. “There’s an expression about payback,” he growled against her moist face.

“I … I know,” she said, hiccupping.

Mumbling curses under his breath in Spanish, Tyler retreated to the house, hoping he would be able to ease the bulge in his slacks without resorting to an act he hadn’t had to perform since adolescence.

Dana blotted her cheeks with a cloth napkin before she put her dress back on. She did not know what had possessed her to strip for Tyler, but she had enjoyed the freedom she felt taking her clothes off for him; she knew she’d shocked him, but more than that, she knew she felt comfortable enough with him to become an exhibitionist.

A dazzling smile curved her lips. She’d been able to do it because she’d trusted him to accept her—anything and everything about her.

Nineteen

Dana did not get the opportunity to strip again for Tyler because by the time her tender fleshed healed from their initial lovemaking, her menstrual cycle had begun. The first night she lay beside him, he tossed and turned all night, keeping her awake. She slept in her own bed the following night, promising to return when they were able to make love again.

She’d spent several hours at the
Herald
printing out a copy of her column. She handed gave it to Ryan, pleased with the results of the research she’d done on her great-grandfather.

Dr. Silas Jeremiah Nichols had moved to a little town outside Hillsboro, Mississippi, from his native Tennessee, where he worked at a local Colored Soldiers Hospital. He’d lived in a boardinghouse until he purchased a large imposing mansion from the widow of a Confederate Civil War officer. The woman had put the property up for sale because of back taxes. Silas paid the asking price, taking up residence two weeks after the widow and her unmarried daughter vacated the premises. He lived alone until at the age of forty-two, he married a pretty young nurse, twenty years his junior, who’d come to work at the hospital. She bore him one child—a son whom they named Jeremiah.

An article in the
Herald’s
archives hinted that Silas had saved the lives of a wealthy white couple
who had
been set upon by a trio of Coloreds roaming the countryside bent on robbery
. During that time in the South, it was illegal for a black doctor to treat white people, a white woman in particular, so the rumor remained just that—a rumor.

Jeremiah Harry Nichols followed in his father’s footsteps when he also attended and graduated from Meherry Medical College in Tennessee. He returned to Hillsboro and the house he’d eventually inherit. It was Jeremiah who had taken to calling the property Raven’s Crest—the original name listed on an 1805 land grant. By this time Hillsboro had become an all-Negro town. Dr. Jeremiah Nichols also married later in life: forty-six. His wife was a pretty light-skinned woman from a well-to-do family from Baltimore, Maryland. Rebecca Nichols miscarried three times before she gave her husband his first and only child—a son whom they named Harry.

Her column on Tyler wasn’t as colorful as the one on her great-grandfather, but his accomplishments in medical research were outstanding. She concentrated more on Dr. Cole than Tyler Cole, and when she read him the final edit, he was quite pleased with what she’d written.

Dana sat in Eugene Payton’s parlor, waiting for an answer to her question. “Did my grandmother ever discuss my mother’s murder with you?” she repeated, thinking he hadn’t heard her the first time.

Running a bony hand over the thinning, straight silver hair brushed off a high forehead, Eugene stared at Dana with a pair of intelligent gray-green eyes.

“I heard you the first time, child,” he said in a soft drawling voice.

She flushed under his perusal. “Forgive me, Mr. Payton.”

He smiled. “Nothing to forgive. I still marvel at how much you look like Alicia. It’s as if Harry Nichols had nothing to do with conceiving you.”

Dana froze, her eyes narrowing. “Are you saying Harry wasn’t my father?”

“I did not say that, child.”

“What are you saying, Mr. Payton?”

“I haven’t said anything yet, have I?”

She wanted to shake the man. He was playing word games with her. She’d come to him because she suspected her grandmother might have confided in him. After all, he had been her attorney and her friend.

Crossing one knee over the other, Eugene fingered the sharp crease in his tan slacks with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “Georgia and I talked about a lot of things.” His head came up and he gave Dana a direct stare. “And with Georgia the topic of Alicia was off-limits—to everyone, including me. After my wife died, she’d invite me over for dinner and we’d talk.” He shrugged a narrow shoulder. “We’d talk about the weather, baseball, the little wars going on all over the world, and we’d talk about you.”

“Me?”

Eugene affected a sad smile. “Yes, you. Georgia adored you. There were times when she said you should’ve been her daughter instead of Alicia’s. She always left explicit instructions for me whenever she left to spend the summers with you. I had to come twice a week to water her plants, pay the yard man, and check to make certain the water was running and the electricity was on. The thing she was most concerned about was her grandfather clock. It had to be wound once a week very, very slowly until the spring
tightened just a little. She claimed the clock had never stopped in all the years it had been in her family.”

Nodding, Dana said, “I remember her always talking about that clock. She taught me how to wind it the year I turned six. We made a game of counting the number of revolutions whenever I turned the key.”

She wanted to tell Mr. Payton that Georgia was not only concerned about her clock, but also about every piece of furniture in her house, which was filled with pieces that had been passed down to Georgia after her marriage to Daniel Sutton. Dana did not think of them as antiques, but as family heirlooms.

Her maternal great-grandfather, a talented cabinetmaker, had crafted all of the tables, chairs, stools, headboards, and footboards by hand. The distinctive design of a soaring eagle with several spears in his beak had been carved into every piece he’d created during his lifetime.

The story handed down over several generations was that Moses Sutton symbolized his ancestors as spear-carrying eagles prepared to smite any proponent of racism. Whether the tale had any merit, Dana had to decide what she was going to do with the furniture. Each piece was heavy and constructed of solid oak or mahogany. The furnishings in the modest two-story house were a part of her legacy—a legacy she did not want to sell or give away.

“What can you tell me about my father?” She refused to leave without getting some answers to her questions.

“What is there to say about Harry? He was Dr. Nichols: healer, comforter, and the consummate gentleman. We once had an influenza epidemic, and I watched Harry go from house to house tending the sick without stopping to eat or sleep for more than
twenty-four hours. It was a miracle he didn’t come down with the virus.

“You ask me about your father, and I can tell you the man was a saint. He would’ve given up his own life to save someone else’s.” He held up a hand. “And before you ask me—the answer is an emphatic
NO!
Dr. Harry Nichols did not kill Alicia Sutton Nichols because he’d taken an oath to preserve life, not take it.”

“But there are doctors who do take lives.”

“That may be true, but not Harry Nichols.”

Closing her eyes, Dana rested the back of her head on the cushion of the rocker, trying to bring her fragile emotions under control. She felt as if she’d asked a hundred questions and not one had been answered.

She opened her eyes, staring directly at Eugene Payton. “Why weren’t you a material witness at my father’s trial?”

“I’d asked to be one, but the defense attorney refused my request.”

Sitting up straighter, she shook her head. “Why?”

Eugene did not drop his gaze. “I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you defend Harry Nichols?”

“I couldn’t because he’d turned down my offer in favor of Ross Wilson’s cousin, a hotshot attorney from Jackson who’d earned a reputation of never losing a case after he’d sued an insurance company and won because they reneged on paying blacks death benefits they were entitled to. I told Harry that he was going to be tried before small-town folks who would resent him hiring a big-town lawyer. He wouldn’t listen, and in the end his plan backfired.”

“I’m going up to the Greenville courthouse tomorrow to pick up a transcript of the trial. I would like your assistance when I go over it.”

Eugene shook his head. “Save your time and your money, Dana.”

She sat up straighter. It was the first time the elderly attorney had called her by her given name. “Why, Mr. Payton?”

“Because it will yield absolutely nothing. I have some notebooks I’m going to lend you which should answer some of your unanswered questions. I attended every session of Harry’s legal proceedings, from the grand jury hearing to the actual trial and finally his sentencing. Not only did I want to support a friend, but I also wanted to see firsthand what Sylvester Wilson had planned for Harry’s defense, because if the jury had come back with a guilty verdict, I was preparing myself for Harry’s appeal. None of that mattered after Harry hung himself.” Placing his hands on the arms of his chair, he pushed to his feet. “Let me go and get the notebooks for you.”

Dana picked up a glass of sweet tea, taking a sip, realizing she’d been away from the South too long to appreciate the preferred beverage of most Southerners. She took another sip, finding the brew too strong and too bitter for her taste, despite the sugar settling in the bottom of the glass.

Eugene returned, his arms filled with a stack of leather-bound notebooks. He placed them on a table. “I have to get the rest.”

Dana picked up one, thumbing through it. The writing was small, neat, and precise. Eugene Payton’s notations were more detailed than a court transcript. Each day was noted with date, time, and weather. On each day he’d describe all the jurors, their clothing and attitudes—whether they were alert or lethargic. Her pulse quickened. Mr. Payton’s notebooks would give her what no official court transcript could—an instant replay of her father’s trial.

* * *

An hour later, Dana completed setting up her office-in-the home on the back porch. She’d picked up her laptop computer, installed several programs that were not factory-installed, called to activate her newly purchased cellular telephone, unwrapped a package of legal pads, sharpened a dozen of the half gross of pencils she’d decided to buy at the last moment along with an electric pencil sharpener.

When she had changed out of her dress and into a pair of shorts, tank top, and a pair of leather thongs, she noted the chipped nail polish on one of her big toes. Dialing the number to Hot Chocolate, an upscale salon in downtown Hillsboro, she set up an appointment for Friday morning for a wash, set, manicure, and pedicure. She and Tyler planned to celebrate their recent engagement over dinner at a trendy restaurant near Greenville.

Sitting down on the glider, she opened the first page of the first notebook she’d put in chronological order, shivering when she read the opening line:
I received a telephone call at 10:11 this morning that Dr. Harry Nichols is being held and questioned about a fire which destroyed Raven’s Crest less than two hours after Alicia Nichols was found dead in her bedroom. Alicia had been shot three times in the head, at close range. Dana, the couple’s only child, is reported to be staying with her grandmother
.

Tyler massaged the back of his neck with one hand, and then rolled his head from side to side. He had both the Connellys on the phone, trying to convince them to have their premature son transferred to a hospital in the capital that specialized in low-birth-weight babies.

“Your son cannot get the care he needs here that he can get in Jackson.”

“But I don’t want to be away from my baby,” Miranda wailed into the receiver.” She went to the hospital every day to look at her tiny son.

“Don’t cry, Mandy. We’ll work something out,” Charles crooned on an extension. “Dr. Cole, I’d like to say yes, but there’s no way Mandy can travel to Jackson every day to see Chuck, Jr. And I we don’t have any relatives in Jackson who she can stay with.”

“I think I can help you out,” Tyler said before he could censor himself.

“How?” Miranda and her husband had spoken in unison.

Thinking quickly, Tyler said, “There’s a fund set up for a situation just like the one you’re facing. I’ll call you tomorrow with details.”

“What kind of fund?” Charles asked. “We’re proud people, you know. We ain’t asking for no handouts.”

“This is not going to be a handout, Mr. Connelly. The money will come from a foundation.”

“What’s the name of this foundation?”

Tyler cursed under his breath. Why didn’t the man just accept his offer? “The SCC Foundation for Medical Research,” he said quickly.

“Okay. We’ll wait for your call. Won’t we, Mandy?”

“Yes, Chuck.”

“Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Connelly.”

Tyler hung up quickly before he’d be forced to tell another lie. There was no SCC Foundation for Medical Research, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be in the near future.

Glancing at his watch, he noted the time. It was almost nine-thirty, and he had yet to prepare to go home. It was Thursday, the clinic’s late night. Rising from his chair, he walked over to a shelf and picked up a telephone book. Thumbing through the business section, he found a listing of hotels.

After ten, he turned off the lights, set the alarm, and walked out of the Hillsboro Women’s Health Clinic to where he’d parked his truck. He’d made a reservation for Miranda Connelly to stay at a hotel near the hospital where her son would be transferred until he received medical clearance to come home. Tyler had given the clerk at the reservation desk his credit-card number with explicit instructions the hotel not disclose his name. The clerk reassured him his personal data would remain privileged information. Chuck Connelly may be a proud man, but he wasn’t a proud fool.

Dr. Tyler Cole had come to Hillsboro to lower the infant-mortality rate, and even if he had to use his own money to make the project a success, he would.

He started up his truck and backed out of the lot. He waited until he was on the road before he activated the hands-free phone in his vehicle. Tiny lines fanned out around his eyes when he heard the break in the connection followed by Dana’s husky greeting.

“Hi, darling,” he said.

“Hi yourself, lover.”

“Are we still on for tomorrow night?”

“Are you calling to cancel, Tyler Cole?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“How was your day?”

“Quite eventful. I’ll tell you everything when I see you.”

“Tell me now.” Tyler wanted, needed to hear her voice. It had been four days since he last saw her.