“Friends,” Naomi said. “I’m Stefan’s lawyer.”
“Sydney Fox,” she said, shaking Naomi’s hand. “Neighbor and landlord.”
I introduced myself and explained the family connection to Stefan.
“Jesus, isn’t it awful,” Sydney said softly, her face saddening. “I love that guy. I really do. Stefan’s got soul and passion, you know? I just pray what they’re saying isn’t true. Break my heart if it was, and I don’t want to think what it would do to Patty. But I’d best be going to take my run. I like it when it’s cool like this. Nice meeting you, and anything I can do to help, you just call Sydney. Patty’s got the number.”
The blinking porch light went dead, casting her side in shadows.
“Shit,” Sydney said, and she had to fumble to get her key in the lock before going inside. “I guess my run will have to wait a couple of minutes.”
My niece rang the other bell. The curtain drew back a few moments later.
“It’s me and my uncle, Patty,” Naomi said.
The door opened. We slipped inside into a simple, tidy living area with a futon for a couch, a trunk for a coffee table, and a flat-screen on the wall. The door shut, revealing a fit, attractive blond white woman in her late twenties. She looked exhausted.
She studied me a beat before sticking out her hand. “Patty Converse. I’ve heard a lot about you, Dr. Cross.”
Eyeing the small diamond engagement ring, I said, “And I’ve heard very little about you other than what Stefan has told me.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and her voice turned yearning. “You saw Stefan? They haven’t let me see him in days. How is he?”
“Puffy and bruised but okay,” Naomi said. “He was attacked—unprovoked—first by inmates and then by guards.”
Her concern turned to anger. “There should be security cameras, tapes.”
“I’ll be going after those,” Naomi promised.
I made a note to myself to find out if the fact that Patty and Stefan were a mixed-race couple had anything to do with the case. Patty offered us coffee, which Naomi declined and I accepted. We followed her into a galley kitchen, and she made the coffee in a French press while answering a few of my questions.
“Stefan says you met the first day of school,” I said. “New teacher just like him.”
“That’s right,” she said, scooping coffee from a tin.
“Love at first sight?”
Patty blushed. “Well, it was for me. You’d have to ask Stefan.”
“It was for him too,” Naomi said.
Patty got teary, and her hand trembled as she covered her lips. “He didn’t do this. He loved Rashawn. We both did.”
“I know,” my niece said.
I asked, “How’d you come to take a job in Starksville?”
Patty said she’d been raised in a small town in Kansas and played softball on scholarship at Oklahoma State. She’d majored in exercise science and minored in education. When she graduated, she decided to move to the Raleigh area, where her older sister had settled, and look for a job.
“Closest openings were here,” she said. “They needed two gym teachers to cover high school and middle school.”
I said, “Seems fated that you and Stefan would take the jobs.”
Patty’s eyes welled up again, and she whimpered, “I love to think so.”
Chapter
17