Travis Starnes
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Going Home - Chapter 26
🕑 Added 2022-06-24 20:14:14 +0000 UTCOrville showed up five minutes after I’d shot Lonnie. Thankfully, by the time Lonnie had shown up, pretty much everyone had gone. Beyond Tessa, Rosita, my mother and myself, the only person still in my parents’ house when everything had happened was my mother’s best friend, who wouldn’t have left even if I’d wanted her to. That was actually good, since the entire front yard had become a crime scene, which meant no one could leave the house until Orville showed up to begin the investigation.
“Jesus,” Orville said, scooting around the body, careful not to step in any of the blood.
“Yeah, it’s a mess. I tried to get him to drop the shotgun and go home, but he was determined to get to Tessa, with the gun. I had him at gunpoint as soon as he came through the fence, but when he started to bring up the shotgun, he left me no choice.”
“I’m going to need your sidearm,” Orville said. “You’re also going to be off rotation until we finish our investigation. You’ll probably also have to sit down with the DA.”
“I get it,” I said, handing over my gun in its belt holster. “I’m sorry to keep the schedule screwed up. You two have already been covering me for several days, and this will probably drag out for a week or more. Tell Al I’ll make it up to him.”
“He’ll understand. Did anyone see the shooting?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Rosita was out here with me when he first drove up, but I told her to go inside, call you, and keep Tessa out of view, hoping if he didn’t see her I could talk him into leaving.”
“We were looking through the window,” Rosita said behind me. “So was Mrs. Brewer and her friend. We all saw him screaming at the house for Tessa to come outside, and Henry telling him over and over to put down the shotgun. Henry didn’t shoot until that man started to raise the shotgun, like he was going to shoot.”
“Okay,” Orville said, holding up a hand. “Let’s do this one at a time. If everyone could just sit up on the porch and not talk to each other, I’ll get each of you to give statements. I’m going to call the DA now and the coroner, but it’ll be at least an hour until they can get here.”
“The DA’s going to come out?” I asked.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing a DA show up at a crime scene, so it was a little surprising.
“Probably one of his investigators. There was a shooting by an officer in Charleston last year that went sideways and became a whole media circus thing and more, with marches and everything. Buxton isn’t exactly Charleston, but the DA put out a memo shortly afterward that any shooting involving an officer had to be investigated by his office, so it’s procedure, now.”
Not being able to talk to Rosita or anyone sucked. Tessa was still crying, although it was hard to tell how much of that was residual fear that she’d come so close to being murdered, or some remaining, however misplaced, feelings she’d had towards Lonnie.
What this did do, was reinforce my original uneasiness with rejoining law enforcement. All I wanted to was to live my life. I might not feel bad about killing Lonnie, since I knew if I hadn’t others would have died, but that didn’t mean I felt good about taking a human life. Lonnie was the first person I’d ever shot, and I didn’t know if I wanted to keep doing a job that could make something like this happen again.
If anything, it just got worse when the investigator got there. I was put in the back of Orville’s car while he spoke with Orville and everyone who’d watched what happened before he’d finally interrogated me, and interrogated was the right word. I was already getting a bad feeling about him after seeing the clear hostility he showed Orville when he demanded I be put in the back of Orville’s cruiser, but I hadn’t dreamed how far downhill things would go.
Opening the door to the cruiser, he jumped right into question without preamble.
“Deputy, could you describe the situation leading up to your shooting Mr. Moss?”
“Sure,” I said. “Mr. Moss drove up in front of the house shortly after the end of the funeral reception for my father. He was already holding a shotgun when he exited the vehicle. Because he was armed, I pulled my service weapon and ordered him to put down the weapon. He demanded to see his ex-girlfriend, whom he’d been arrested for assaulting, just days prior. I again told him to put the weapon down, and he repeated his demand. The third time I ordered him to put down the weapon, he screamed towards the house and began lifting the weapon in a threatening manner. Fearing for my safety, and the safety of the people inside the house, I fired two shots. Once he fell, I kicked the gun away and ascertained his condition, which was fatal. At that point I kept everyone away from the body and had someone phone the sheriff to begin an investigation into the shooting.”
“I’ve been told that the person he was here to see has been staying at your parents’ home and is now working for your girlfriend, is that correct?”
“Yes, you see she …”
“All I need is a yes or no. Did you know this woman prior to the arrest of Mr. Moss?”
“No, I’d never met them before.”
“So you had no relationship with her before arresting her then boyfriend?”
“What? I have no relationship with her now. She was injured and had nowhere to go, because …”
“Again, a yes or no is all I need.”
“No, I have no relationship with her.”
“So you are claiming to have no personal stake in her disagreements with Mr. Moss before murdering him?”
“Murdering? Did you hear the part where he showed up carrying a shotgun?”
He ignored me, continuing to look at his notes as he fired off questions.
“Is there a reason you didn’t try to disarm him in a non-lethal method?”
“Does it look like I have a Taser on me?”
“Deputy, this is a serious situation so please just answer the question.”
“I know this is a serious situation, which is why these bullshit questions are starting to piss me off.”
“Deputy …” he said, warningly.
“I didn’t try and disarm him because one, the only weapon I had on me was my service weapon, which I was obligated to carry under department policy, and two, because he posed an imminent threat to everyone around him, including myself, and any attempt to disarm him without using my weapon would have ended in someone being hurt.”
I was pissed off and being snide, but the investigator didn’t even seem to notice. He made a few more notes and closed the door on me again, which meant I remained locked in the back of the cruiser until Orville let me out.
While the coroner showed up and began processing Lonnie’s body, the investigator went back and questioned everyone on the porch again before getting in his car and driving away. Once he was gone, Orville finally came and opened the door to his cruiser.
“What the fuck, Orville?” I asked, hot from being closed in the back of the car in the west Virginia heat and pissed off for being treated like shit for doing my job.
“Calm down, Henry. It’ll be okay.”
“Calm down? Do you have any idea what kind of questions this guy asked? He wanted to know what decisions led up to me MURDERING Lonnie, like I didn’t give him every chance to put down his fucking gun. He wanted to know if I was somehow secretly dating Tessa. I did my job when I arrested him and I did it again when I kept him from killing his ex-girlfriend. This isn’t what I signed up for, Orville.”
“I promise you this isn’t as bad as it seems. I know his questions were out there, but I talked to the DA already and I told him you were just doing your job. Let’s just let them look into it, and I’m positive you’ll be cleared.”
“Unless I’m not, then what?”
“You will be. Please just trust me, if nothing else. You’ve been doing a great job and I’d hate for you to leave without seeing what really happens here. Just promise me you’ll wait until we hear what the DA has to say, okay?”
“Fine,” I said.
I still wasn’t happy, but Orville had been a straight shooter, so it wouldn’t be fair to take out my frustrations with the investigator on him. Besides, I still wanted time to see if I could convince Rosita to move with me if I left, and since I’d already agreed to give over my savings towards the food bank, I couldn’t go without a job for very long.
“Take the next few days off. Be with your family. I was thinking about having a BBQ on Sunday. Al was scheduled to work anyway, and if it’s slow he can still come by for a bit. Why don’t you come, spend some time with Sarah and me, and I promise I’ll have some kind of answer by then, okay?”
Since I was under investigation, policy said I was suspended with pay until the investigation finished, which meant it wasn’t so much taking the next few days off as not being allowed to work again until this cleared up, but I didn’t think Orville was being clever.
I nodded and he backed up so I could get out of the cruiser. Clapping me on the shoulder, he went to the coroner, who was putting Lonnie in a body bag, leaving me to go back to my family.
I didn’t even make it to the porch before Rosita rushed down the steps to hug me.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just pissed off. What kind of questions did the investigator ask you guys?”
“Just what we saw and if we heard anything he was saying before you shot him.”
“How about Tessa. Did you hear what he asked her?”
“The same things, plus if Lonnie had been in contact with her after he was released but before he came here.”
“He didn’t ask about anything else?” I asked, surprised.
“Like what?”
“Like if I knew her before I arrested Lonnie and brought her here the other night.”
“No. Why would he ask that?”
“I don’t know, but he grilled me pretty hard, like I’d done something wrong. I’d assumed he’d asked you all something similar.”
“No. He seemed pretty straightforward. I didn’t get the feeling he was being hostile or anything.”
“Huh,” I said, confused.
I couldn’t figure out what game he was playing, since if he was really trying to trap me, he’d be asking hard but straightforward questions to witnesses but playing the good cop with me, to see if I said anything voluntarily. I’d never heard of someone doing it reverse like this, since coming at a witness hard like that was a good way to get them to put their defenses up and stop talking.
Tessa, who’d been waiting on the porch came down to where Rosita and I were standing, and stopped a few steps away.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“I’m sorry about Lonnie. I know …”
“I’m not. I left him a long time ago, at least up here,” she said, pointing to her head. “If you hadn’t shot him, I’d be dead right now. So fuck him.”
I wasn’t sure I believed she actually meant that, at least the second part. Although she really hadn’t opened up that much to me year, I’d gotten the impression she was a gentle, caring person, which didn’t really match that kind of attitude. It might be better if she was more like that, though, so I wasn’t going to try to talk her out of it.
I spent the rest of the week at Mom’s. Tessa was still staying there, but she went back to work at Rosita’s, and I didn’t want Mom to be alone. I don’t know if it was the shock of what happened at the funeral reception or just time, but she’d broken out of the fugue state she was in, although that had become some weird combination of trying to pretend dad wasn’t really gone and being angry at the smallest thing. Sometimes she’d be busy going about her normal routine, acting like nothing had changed and other times she’d snap at the smallest inconvenience.
Of the two, I think I preferred the anger over the denial, since with anger there was something I could do. Giving her a target seemed to let her vent out some of her feelings. I knew she didn’t mean anything she was saying, and I could take it. Plus, it was better to take it out on me than Tessa, who’d had enough abuse heaped on her for a lifetime.
Sunday came around and all four of us went to the BBQ. Tessa tried to beg off, saying she didn’t know anyone and hadn’t been invited, but we made both her and Mom go. I thought it would be good for Tessa to start making friends that weren’t just us, since she needed to start building her own life, and that started with knowing more than just us. Mom, I just wanted to get out of the house. There were a lot of reminders of dad there, and I didn’t think it was healthy to just stay cooped up in there day after day.
The turnout was larger than I expected. Besides Orville and Sarah, Al had made it, in uniform and with his radio on, but Sundays were usually pretty quiet. There was also Mr. Greer from the hardware store and his wife, Reverend Dalton, a couple of the high school teachers, two of whom had been teaching when I’d been in school, and a handful of others.
The thing about this kind of thing in a small town like Buxton was that none of the people were strangers. I might not have been friendly with some of them, but we all knew each other. Of course, that made Tessa stand out, since until recently, she’d been kept isolated from the rest of the town. Worse, between the arrest at the gas station and Lonnie’s shooting, she might not have known most of the people, but everyone knew who she was. It was an uncomfortable way to meet people, but I figured once she started talking to them instead of being talked about by them, she might become less of a source of gossip and more of a real human being to everyone.
I was still a little annoyed at Orville for not standing up to the DA’s investigator, but I tried to make the best of it for Rosita, Mom and Tessa, all of whom needed this kind of thing, even if for different reasons.
Part way through, Orville pulled me aside and said, “I’ve got good news. The DA has agreed the shooting was good and you’re approved to come back to work.”
“I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I want to after the way I was treated.”
“I know you’re angry, but give it a chance. Fred’s not a bad guy and he had good reason for what he did.”
“Really? What good reason could there be for treating me like a criminal when I’d done exactly what I was supposed to.”
“Henry, you’re a smart guy, smarter than a lot of people gave you credit for. Hell, even back in the day I knew you weren’t the dumb jock you liked to pretend to be. There have been a lot of incidents with police-involved shootings over the last few years, some of them on the up and up but portrayed like the officer did something wrong, and some of them very much dirty. Either way, it means every officer-involved shooting needs to be treated like it’s going to be combed over by journalists and people determined to fit it into whatever they’re trying to push. To counter this, he’s specifically told his investigators, whose notes more often than not, eventually end up in a freedom of information act request, give no chance for claims of favoritism or cover-up. If anything, he wants them to be seen as unfair to the officer, so that, if the officer is in the clear, accusations have harder time sticking.”
That made sense, in a way. Orville wasn’t wrong about the way police shootings had become big news. Some were bad and probably would have been swept under the rug or covered up, so it wasn’t entirely a bad thing, but movements like this had little room for things like nuance and context. For every dirty cop who’d been caught violating someone’s right, I’d watched two good ones, who’d done exactly what they were supposed to, forced out because they’d ended up in the public eye, where the truth rarely mattered.
I could see the benefit of a policy like that, but it still sucked to be on the other end of it.
It apparently wasn’t that hard for Orville to work out what I was thinking, because he said, “It’s okay to be pissed about it. I know I would be, but I figure it’s better to use something like this to your advantage than to just stew about it. I talked to Fred about the problems you’re having with Dixon and their attempts to get Rosita to sign over her land to them, and he said he knows some people over there and is willing to help. He’s going to come down on Tuesday and the three of us are going to go have a chat with them and make it clear the property isn’t for sale, and they need to back off. I’m just a county sheriff, so I doubt they’d listen to me any more than they’d listen to you, but Fred is popular in both counties, has the party behind him, and Dixon has several operations in the area. He swings a bigger stick than either of us, so hopefully he’ll have more of an effect on them.”
“Ohh,” I said, surprised by the offer. “I hadn’t thought about that, but yeah, that would be helpful. Thanks for having my back.”
“No problem, but give Fred a chance. He’s a good guy, in spite of what happened, and he’ll have your back, too.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
I was mostly just being sullen. Once Orville broke it down, the actions of the investigator made sense and, even though I didn’t enjoy it, I understood in the long run it was for my benefit. Lonnie might have been a piece of shit, but who knows if he had a family member or friend with enough contacts to make this whole thing a problem. Besides, the fact that the DA was willing to come out here and help with Rosita’s problem was a pretty good way to make an apology.
After talking to Orville, I was in a better mood, which I think Rosita noticed, since I caught her giving me a smug smile several times. She’d tried to counsel me to be patient and trust Orville but I’d allowed a lot of feelings about dad’s death to seep over into anger over the shooting and hadn’t been willing to listen to reason.
Tessa missed all of the by-play. She had spent a lot of the party talking to Al, and their body language certainly indicated an interest in each other. Al was a pretty closed book. Even when we’d talked in between shifts, it was hard to get anything significant out of him, so to see him spend a solid hour talking to one person was enough to be noticeable.
“Those two are cute,” Sarah said, coming up behind Rosita and me.
“He’s single, right?” Rosita said.
“Yep. Broke up with his last girlfriend about a month ago. Your friend could do a lot worse.”
“I’m surprised she’s even thinking about it. The whole thing with her and Lonnie was like a week ago.”
“I think that in her heart, she left him long ago,” Rosita said. “She’s said she’d been trying to leave him for a while, which is why he’d moved them out here in the first place. She’d had this whole plan to disappear on him with some help from friends, and he’d found out about it. He took the job with Dixon because he wanted to be somewhere far away from anyone she knew, so she couldn’t get out. She wasn’t kidding when she said she didn’t care if he was dead. I think she’s actually happy about it, really.”
“Well, I’m going to go meddle,” Sarah said, heading their direction.
“So you and Tessa are getting along, too?” I asked Rosita.
“She’s really sweet, and she knows her way around a kitchen. Julie was a big help, but Tessa’s a natural. I think if she had the money, she’d be able to open her own place and put me out of business. Not that she would, but she’s that good.”
“So does this mean you’ll be getting whole days off at some point?”
“Probably. Whatever will we do with our extra free time,” she said, giving me a smile.
Orville had made a good call with the BBQ. Everyone seemed to be feeling better afterward. Mom had spent most of the time talking to her best friend. She’d come by the house several times since Dad’s death, but Mom had been so shell-shocked she hadn’t really been very social. I think the change of scenery had helped, although I hadn’t realized how much until the ride back home.
“Did you know Francine is moving to Florida?” Mom said.
“What?” I asked.
We’d all been quiet for a few minutes, so the statement wasn’t kind of random.
“Her daughter moved there with her husband a little while after they got married, and they’ve been trying to convince her to move there, to be with them. She decided this week to do it.”
“Ohh, I’m sorry to hear that. Hopefully, you two can stay in touch.”
As long as I could remember, Mom and Francine were always talking. This last week was the longest I could ever remember Mom not talking to her, in fact.
“I was thinking of going with her,” Mom said.
“To Florida?”
“Yes. Her son-in-law owns a bunch of properties, and they were going to let her live in one of the apartments. It’s a two-bedroom place and it sounds really nice. She said she didn’t want to live alone, but she also didn’t want to live with a stranger, which is why she brought up the idea.”
“But Florida? You won’t know anyone.”
“I’ll know Francine and her daughter,” Mom pointed out. “But I think not knowing many people might be a good thing. Getting out of the house, I realized how hard it was, being there without your father. Everything I look at reminds me of him. Pretty much everything in the whole town reminds me of him. We both grew up here and everywhere I look there’s a memory of something we did. How we’d used to just drive around town, places we went on drives, places we took you when you were little. Getting out of the house, even for a few hours, made it hurt a little less, and I think getting out of town will make it hurt even less.”
“But Florida?” I asked again, still a little surprised.
“I think it might be a good idea,” Rosita said. “I never lived here with Tommy, so we didn’t build those kinds of memories, but I can see how they could make you sad. Sometimes, I stumble across something of his I’d forgotten about, and it still makes me a little sad. If everything around you does that, it would be really hard.”
“I guess. It’ll just be weird, you not being around.”
I was being selfish, but as mom said, her entire life was here in Buxton. It would be weird, her not being here anymore.
“Henry, until recently, you weren’t even planning on staying here. You’ve been trying to get out as soon as you could manage it, and you were gone for years. I don’t think I’ve become so vital to you over the last four months that you can’t live without me now.”
“I know. I guess I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around it. As long this makes you happy though, I guess who am I to get in your way?”
The conversation shifted to Mom, Tessa and Rosita talking about where she was going to in Florida and what it would be like while I silently tried to adjust to the news. It wouldn’t happen for a few weeks, and Mom was right. I hadn’t been here for years, so it shouldn’t have been that big of a shock.
I guess I’d just gotten used to things, and even with Dad gone, Mom and the house were still a bedrock for me.
