Free I Want Candy by Susan Donovan Page A

day at this point,” O’Connor said.
    “That’s a great idea,” said Trent Marshner, the special agent in charge for the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation. “Have the state EPA pay for the cleanup.”
    “So where do we stand with the Spivey kid? Any chance he’ll turn?”
    Turner knew that question from the assistant district attorney was directed to him. He’d known Gerrall Spivey since he was in Junie’s seventh grade class. Back then, he’d been a dirty, underfed wild child three years older than his classmates, uncomfortable making eye contact with adults. Junie had taken a liking to him, of course, since she always gravitated toward the most desperate cases. The kid had even been over to the house for dinner a few times and he’d shoveled in food with the manners of a stray dog. Turner had driven him home on those occasions, and that’s how he made his first acquaintance with Bobby Ray.
    A twenty-foot-high flagpole sat at the end of a long, steeply declining gravel lane, proudly displayed the stars and bars of the Confederacy, which provided yet another clue that Gerrall’s father might not be the most evolved of men.
    “Y’all shouldn’t be feeding my boy,” was how he greeted Turner and Gerrall. Turner tried to keep his disgust hidden—the Spivey place was nothing but a twenty-acre junkyard. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a dead cat lying in the grass.
    “We don’t mind, Mr. Spivey.”
    Gerrall kept his head down as he moved silently from the shiny county-issued SUV to the broken front door of the family trailer.
    “I can take care of my own. I don’t need no help from your kind, even if you are the sheriff.”
    Turner was fairly certain the “your kind” label did not refer to college-educated professionals who showered on a daily basis. “I hope you do make an effort to provide for your son, Mr. Spivey. My wife has noticed that Gerrall comes to class in the same clothes most every day, and that they haven’t been washed. She said he’s often hungry in the morning. A lot of people are struggling, and there’s no shame in that. If you’d like, I can have social services stop by and—”
    “You and your uppity badge can get off my land. I know my rights as a private citizen.”
    From then on, Turner dropped Gerrall at the end of the lane. He never again spoke to Bobby Ray until a few days after Junie died, when a fellow teacher mentioned to Turner that Junie had planned to stop by the Spivey place on her way out of town.
    The news crushed him. He’d told Junie to never go out there. He’d warned her. But she’d gone in secret. I would have gone with her! Why didn’t she tell me?
    “She didn’t want you worrying,” the teacher added. “She knew you were busy at work.”
    Before he could answer the DA, Turner steadied himself by taking a deep breath. “I don’t think Gerrall is going to help us. He’s doing great, considering his home environment—even got his GED last fall and obviously he’s working the night desk at Cherokee Pines—but he’s still living with his father. I spoke to him a few days ago when he stopped by my uncle’s convenience store.”
    “What did he say?” the FBI agent asked.
    Turner laughed a little. “Not much of a talker—not to me, anyway. But I don’t get the feeling he’d trust anyone to keep him safe from Bobby Ray. He certainly doesn’t trust me —not after what happened with child protective services.”
    Everyone in the task force knew of Turner’s past involvement with the Spiveys. Just before Junie died, he’d filed a report with the state’s child welfare agency, asking them to open an investigation into possible abuse and neglect. Six months after Junie’s death, the agency deemed the results “inconclusive.” Gerrall had turned sixteen by then, and had dropped out of school.
    “Dante says the kid is pretty beaten down—does whatever his daddy tells him to, and lately that’s been collecting from the