Southern Lights: A Novel

They left the DA’s office after a few minutes, and he wished them luck. Charlie followed them out of the office, and Jack sent him back to work to check with the forensic lab for progress, and said he’d come back to him later on. Charlie nodded and disappeared.

“He’s a quiet one,” Alexa commented.

“He’s good at what he does,” Jack reassured her, and then decided to share some private information with her. “This is a tough case for him.”

“How so?”

“If this is the guy, he killed Charlie’s sister in Iowa a year ago. It was pretty ugly, and Charlie got himself on the task force after that. He had to do a lot of talking to get them to allow it, even though it’s a personal vendetta for him. But he’s a great cop, so they let him do it.”

“Sometimes that’s not a good thing,” Alexa said, looking worried, as they walked back to her office. “If he’s going to help us, he needs to be clear-headed. I don’t want him misinterpreting information or being overzealous because he wants to nail him. It could blow our case.” She didn’t like what she had just heard at all. She wanted everything about this case to be picture perfect, so the guilty verdict she got couldn’t be overturned. And she knew she would get one. She was relentless in her prosecution and meticulous in her work. She had learned it from her mother, who was a lawyer too, and a good one. Alexa hadn’t gone to law school until after the divorce. She had been married right out of college to the first and only man she had ever loved. And she had been madly in love with him. Tom Beaumont was a handsome southerner who had gone to UVA and was working, more or less, at his father’s bank in Charleston, where the spirit of the Confederacy had been kept alive, in part by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of which Tom’s mother was the head of the local branch, and a very grande dame. Tom was divorced and had two adorable little boys who were seven and eight at the time. She had fallen in love with them immediately, and Tom, and everything about the South. He was the most charming man she had ever known. Tom was six years older than she was, and much to their delight she had gotten pregnant on their wedding night, or maybe the day before. Everything had been idyllic for them for seven years, she had been the happiest woman alive and the perfect wife, and then Luisa, his ex-wife, came back, when the man she had left him for died in a car crash in Dallas. And the Civil War was fought again, and this time the North lost, and Luisa won. Tom’s mother turned out to be Luisa’s strongest ally, and Alexa never had a chance. To clinch the deal, Luisa got pregnant, while Tom sneaked off to see her, dazzled by her once again, as he had been when they met in college. Tom’s mother showed him where his duty lay, not just to the Confederacy, but to the woman who was carrying his child, the mother of his “boys.” Tom was torn between the two women and drank far too much while he tried to sort it out. In the end, Luisa was the mother of three of his children, Alexa only one. His mother kept reminding him of that and convinced him that Alexa had never really fit into their way of life.

It all happened like a very bad movie—a real-life nightmare. Everyone in town was talking about it, and his affair with his first wife. Tom explained to Alexa that he had to divorce her and marry Luisa. He couldn’t let this child be illegitimate, after all, could he? He promised to work it out as soon as Luisa had the baby, but by then she was running his life again, and it seemed as though everyone had forgotten, including Tom, that there had ever been another wife—and child. Alexa had done everything she could to reason with him and talk him out of the insanity he was committing, but she couldn’t stem the tides. Tom was too determined, and insisted that marrying Luisa for the baby’s sake was the only option. It was the only one he saw.

Alexa felt as though her heart was being torn out of her body when she left Charleston. Luisa was actually moving her things in while Alexa packed. She took Savannah and her broken heart, went back to New York, and stayed with her mother for a year. The divorce had come and gone by then, and Tom didn’t know how to explain it to her, but he said it just seemed better to leave things as they were. Better for him, Luisa, and his mother, and the little girl Luisa gave birth to. Alexa and Savannah had been banished, and went back to the North from whence they came, Yankees.