Miss Trego, this is U.S. Marshal Boyd Mansur. Please return my call at your earliest convenience.

“You need to stop pouting and help me figure out what we’re going to do!” When I didn’t answer, Mom squinted over her shoulder at me. Then she put her hands on the arms of her chair like she was going to stand up. “What are you doing?”

“What I’m going to do is go to the Goodwill and buy you a couple china hutches and a bookcase. I’ll get some guys to bring them into the house, and you can fill them up. Everything else has to go,” I said.

“I told you to leave it alone. I’ll get it cleaned up.”

“Mom, please. We only have three weeks. If we don’t take care of this, the city is going to come, and they are going to throw everything away.”

“Don’t you worry about it. Come here.”

When I didn’t do it fast enough, she snapped her fingers at me and held out her arms. I bent down over her, and she put her arms around me. I wasn’t sure if it was a hug or if she wanted me to help her up out of her chair.

“We have to help your sister. With a decent lawyer, there’s no way she’ll serve time,” Mom said.

The way she could flip from one subject to another, I knew we were never going to have a real conversation about any of it. Nothing I said was going to sink in.

“Mom, I know you hope that, but you need to be realistic.”

“Or at least not much time. Help me up.”

“If the prosecution can convince a jury that LaReigne was in love with him, the jury’s going to believe that she helped him,” I said. I bent my knees a little deeper and pulled hard enough to get Mom out of her chair. Hard enough that my back and my hip lit up.

“So what if she helped them? She can’t have been very much help! It’s not like she’s a criminal mastermind.”

“It doesn’t matter how much. If she helped them at all, that makes her an accomplice to at least two murders.” I didn’t want to be angry at Mom, but I was. She had stood by Dad for so long because she could twist everything around until it fit with what she wanted to believe. Mom still had her arms around me, and it felt like she was trying to hold on to me and push me away at the same time.

“That wasn’t her fault. She didn’t kill those guards. I just need my baby to come home. I want LaReigne to come home.”

“I want LaReigne to come home, too,” I said, but it was a lie. “But I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

“Don’t you say that.” Mom pushed me away, and I was glad to get free. “If you move in, we can use your rent money. That might be enough to hire a better lawyer.”

“No,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not moving in.” I thought of how Leon was so stubborn, and in my mind, I put my head down and tucked my tail.

“Can we please not go through all that drama again?” Mom said.

“I’m not going through any drama, and I’m not moving in. You can call Aunt Shelly, and you can call the bank, but I’m not giving you my rent money.”

“This is not the time to be selfish! Your sister needs your help, Zhorzha! You owe her that!”

I thought about that pile of cash in the safety-deposit box. Lawyers ain’t cheap, Uncle Alva had said, and at the time, I’d nodded, but as I walked out of Mom’s house, with her yelling after me, I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to spend a dime of that money on a lawyer for LaReigne. To get Mom’s yard cleaned up, yes. To hire a family court lawyer to get visitation with Marcus, yes. But for LaReigne, no. I didn’t care if half of it was supposed to be for her. She chose Tague Barnwell. Let him hire her a lawyer.

I went back to my motel, took Leon around the block, and fed him some real dog food. Then, even though it was only noon, I took a big dose of THC and got in bed. There was a Bewitched marathon on TV, and I laid in bed with Leon next to me, watching Bewitched and making lists on my phone. I’d already made a huge list of things to do for Mom, but I started one for myself, too. I needed a lawyer, a job, a veterinarian, and a place to live with a yard.

Toward the end of the afternoon, when I was looking at houses for rent, my phone rang again. I let it go to voicemail and a few minutes later, there it was: Miss Trego. Boyd Mansur. We need to talk.

CHAPTER 49

Zee

   Mansur’s voicemails started out polite, but I knew he would get around to threatening me eventually. A week later, while I was standing out in Mom’s yard watching the truck driver park the dumpster, I got the message I couldn’t ignore.

Miss Trego. Boyd Mansur. I would prefer not to issue a warrant for you as a material witness, but if that becomes necessary, I will.

After I signed for the dumpster, I called Mansur back.

“So let’s talk,” I said. “I don’t know anything, but I guess you need to hear it from me personally.”

“Why don’t I come to your mother’s house, so I can talk to you both? Two birds, one stone.”

“That saying is actually kill two birds with one stone. Are you trying to kill my mother?”

“Miss Trego, I don’t wish to distress your mother or you, but I do need to talk to you both.”

I didn’t want to meet him at Mom’s and he wouldn’t talk in public, so I went to his hotel room, which was a lot nicer than mine. He had a suite at the La Quinta on Kellogg, and it even had a little kitchenette and a table, which was where we sat.

“Before we talk about anything, I have one question,” I said. “Are you going to arrest me? Because I’d need to find somebody to take care of my dog.”

“No, Miss Trego. Unless you plan to make an unexpected confession to something pretty substantial, I’m not going to arrest you.”

I knew he was getting ready to lay some shit on me, because he set up his laptop. The first thing he showed me was black-and-white footage from a surveillance camera, showing LaReigne standing outside a door.

“There’s LaReigne,” Mansur said, and paused the video. “Waiting at the rear door to the education building, where the volunteer ministry meets. Normally this door would have been locked, but your sister’s ministry group got permission from the chaplain to use the yard for part of their . . . ritual. This is just as the riot started and after the first corrections officer was killed in the education building. At that time, a few inmates and the volunteers locked themselves in a classroom. All of the volunteers except Molly Verbansky and LaReigne. I want you to look at the time stamp on it—seven-sixteen P.M.—because here’s footage from a different camera at the same time.”