Right Where We Belong (Silver Springs #4)(99)

“This will only last fifteen minutes,” she promised herself.

As she turned off her engine, she rehearsed, once again, everything Detective Sullivan had told her in their little coaching session last night. Just get him talking. Get him to commit to a sequence of events. Express some doubt. Provoke him into trying to reassure or convince you. With any luck, he’ll offer some kind of proof that he could not have been involved.

They were hoping he’d trip himself up, of course. That they would be able to disprove whatever he said and catch him in his own words. But if it went the other way, and he could prove he wasn’t responsible in the Emma Ventnor case, where would that leave Savanna? Sullivan hadn’t been able to find any new evidence on the three rapes. Barring a miracle, the DA would drop the charges, and soon. They’d been stalling, hoping her visit might make all the difference. If it didn’t, Gordon would go free.

She shuddered at the thought. God help me.

Her phone signaled an incoming text as she got out. You’ve got this.

Gavin. She’d spoken to him several times since she’d left. He always tried to reassure her.

There now. Going in. Wish me luck. She’d spent part of the time waiting in the motel room reading up on what to expect when visiting an inmate, but the Juab County Jail was such a small facility—capable of housing only fifty or so inmates—that she didn’t have to put her purse and other personal belongings in a locker, go through a metal detector or suffer an invasive pat-down. She merely waited in line behind ten other people, filled out a visitation form, provided her ID and allowed her purse to be searched. After that, she was admitted into a nonsecure area to wait her turn.

Problem was, the jail had only two visitation rooms, and each visitation could last as long as twenty minutes. Just what I need—another hour and forty minutes to wait...

She stared up at a television mounted on the wall. There was no sound, just subtitles, but it was all she had to help pass the time. She didn’t care to talk to the others who were waiting to get in. She was far too nervous for small talk.

Fortunately, some of those who went ahead of her didn’t take up all of their allotted time. It was only an hour before she was taken back to a small cubicle where she’d be allowed to speak with Gordon, when he arrived, via telephone while separated by a piece of Plexiglas.

Her heart began to pound as she sat down. She could feel each distinct thump in her throat. Not only was she frightened by what he’d done—what she now saw him to be—she was terrified of what he might do when he was released.

Savanna tried to even out her breathing, to settle down. She needed to be able to think straight. But the longer she waited, the more anxious she became. Where was he?

For a few seconds, she thought he might be refusing her visit. The way they’d gotten along, on the whole, over the past several months, even before he’d been arrested, she could understand why he might. But then she saw him, wearing the standard orange jumpsuit issued to all county inmates.

He looked like he’d lost some weight. He’d definitely lost a lot of color. Or maybe it was the lights that hummed overhead that made him look so washed-out. They seemed to cast everything in a bluish tint.

He didn’t smile when their eyes met. He stared at her for several seconds. Then he sat down and picked up the phone.

Savanna claimed the handset on her side of the glass. “You don’t seem happy to see me,” she said.

“You haven’t been supportive since I’ve been in here.”

“I put some money on your commissary account. That’s not supportive?”

“I’ve been in jail for two months, Savanna. What else have you done, except make everything worse?”

She gripped the phone tighter. After the letters she’d sent, she’d thought he might be more conciliatory, more hopeful of putting their marriage back together. Now she knew that was not the case, she had to prepare herself for a combative twenty minutes. That changed things, gave her even less leverage. “The past two months have been pretty crummy for me, too.”

“Until you fell into the sweet, loving arms of Gavin Turner, right?”

Savanna froze. “That was nothing,” she lied.

“You fucked him. I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

She loved Gavin, which was far more significant. But even if she were willing to divulge that, Gordon wouldn’t understand because he had no idea what true love meant, didn’t seem to possess the capacity for love.

She couldn’t let on, regardless. There was too much riding on this meeting. “A onetime thing.”

He leaned toward the glass. “Are you sure? My mother said you live on the same street. It’s just the two of you out in the middle of nowhere. That provides a hell of a lot of opportunity.”

When she’d mentioned Gavin, Savanna had been saying whatever she could to get a rise out of Gordon, as she’d been instructed to do. But it had been a mistake brought on by nerves and emotion to mention his name, and that mistake had been compounded when her mother-in-law wrecked into Gavin’s truck, thus becoming familiar not only with his first name but his last and where he lived. “Are we really going to do this?” she asked. “Make this about how I’ve wronged you?”

“What have I ever done?” he said, but then he smiled as if he found that to be quite the clever joke.