The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: On Air

"What book?" I said.

Grandma Verna straightened up.

She patted my arm, twice, the way she patted pie dough.

"Go back to school, Laney Jean," she said. "You've done enough."

She walked back across the yard to the porch, and the sheriff opened the screen door for her.

It banged shut behind them.

The detective came over to me with his notebook.

"What did she say to you?"

I told him. Every word.

He wrote it down. All of it, this time.

"A book," he said.

"She's kept something. A record. She wouldn't have said it if she hadn't."

"Then I need it." He shut the notebook. "Right now I've got remains, a father who just took the whole thing on himself in front of thirty witnesses, and a confession tape he'll say was the whiskey talking. Her lawyer will eat it alive."

"So she just stays on her porch."

"Until I've got something I can hold."

Ben drove Frances and me back down the hill.

Nobody turned on the radio.

Two days later, Annie left the hill in a van with the county seal on the door.

She went to a building in the city where they'd keep her until they were sure.

Frances drove behind it the whole way.

I went back to campus because there was nowhere else to go.

By Wednesday everybody knew my name.

The bridge stream had been picked up by a city news site. Then by two more.

A still of me in the blue dress, lit red and blue, was the top image on all of them.

Under it, people wrote things.

Some of it was kind.

A lot of it wasn't.

Trafficker's granddaughter.

She grew up in that house and never noticed? Sure.

Bet she's writing a book.

On Thursday the church put out a statement.

It was on the county paper's website, with a photo of the white steeple against a blue sky.

The congregation is grieving a private family tragedy.

We ask for prayers for a troubled young woman who has struggled since childhood with a vivid imagination.

She has been influenced by people outside our community. We forgive her.

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