by R. J. Jacobs
“Now, I’m going to ask you again.” The detective steps closer. “I’m going to ask you one more time.” He raises his hand. I look up a little more, shaking my head, because I can see already what he means to do. His hand moves toward my shoulder.
I stand. “Don’t,” I say. “No, don’t.” Sometimes all I want is not to be touched—as simple as that. I try to warn people, I really do.
“How. Did. You. Get …”
The second his hand touches me, my hand goes around his wrist. His eyes widen when I stomp on his foot. He cries out, struggling toward the door, but I am already behind him, turning his arm. My left elbow connects with the back of his skull, a crack that echoes off the close walls. I shove him hard against the side of the metal table and hear his head crack again.
When the door flies open, I’m surrounded by voices and dark shirts. The sting of electricity surges through my body, so strong it becomes everything. All my fear and confusion is erased by the pain. Just before I pass out, I catch the detective’s angry eyes, his lip curled so that his teeth show.
Everything turns black again.
16
When I open my eyes, it’s dark again. Somehow, I hear music, as if the wind has carried it from some far-off place.
Maybe I’m awake. Maybe I’m still dreaming.
My thoughts wander, as they did in the dark before, to Shelly.
I see you, your heart beating so fast that your whole body trembles as you speed down the road. How long since your heart ached this way—so powerfully it hurt? People might say you’re being deceitful. Unfaithful. Sinful. But what do they know?
They don’t know.
Maybe being in front of twelve thousand fans, their lips synced with yours—maybe even that doesn’t compare to the feeling you’re running toward. This is what you wrote songs about. You think: if this isn’t love, there’s no such thing. You have to follow it.
Maybe you think that if you died tonight, you would die happy.
You pull in to a gravel lot that is empty except for some old car and skid to a stop. Will people at the party notice you’re gone? Maybe. Probably. Maybe you’ll make something up.
Or maybe you won’t.
Maybe you want to get caught. A laugh rises in your throat like a bubble in champagne.
The turn signals of your Mercedes strobe yellow as you lock the doors with a chirp. Then the trees fade into shadowy brushstrokes. It is the edge of dark just now, and you start up the trail, the song of cricket bows all around. By the top of the first hill, your forehead is already slick with sweat. When you pause to catch your breath, a twig snaps behind you. You turn, but dusk blurs the trail into the overgrowth on either side. Maybe the snap came from another trail. Or from an animal.
The air is so thick it stings your lungs. Something sweet blooms. Jasmine, most vivid at night, a flower that opens for moonlight.
Nashvillians have discussed this heat like they’ve been carrying on a rumor. Your makeup has run, and you wonder how you will look when you go back, but your heart feels like you’ve taken one of your pills. Seeing him somehow slows your pulse, but also makes you feel like you’re flying. Like a bird, or an angel.
You keep on, the sky’s edge pink with the last of the Tennessee sunset, far from the distant lights of Lower Broadway. A hundred people move here every day to try to make it the way you did. You wish them luck.
A gust rises at the top of the next hill, turning the backs of your arms to gooseflesh. Two rows of streetlights glow rose-gold in the new dark, running like an aisle leading to a stage. You hear a footfall behind you, a gentle cracking.
You say his name into the dark, but hear no response. You tell yourself you imagined the noise and come to the bench where you plan to meet. Your finger traces the splintery grooves of initials carved into the wood and the serpentine curvature of a heart. Maybe you want to cut your initials there too, but you wonder: Will this last? Despite everything? It has become the most wonderful, hazy dream, from which you never want to wake. Your fingertip circles the frayed wood until a splinter bites and you pull it away, stung.
Maybe you check your phone, then swing your feet like a child on a swing pretending to fly. But something makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You want to swallow but can’t. Your head swirls with thoughts, distracted, but your body knows the electricity of danger right away. Another gust of wind blurs the streetlights.
When movement comes, it is so sudden you stand up. It takes your breath away. Your heel catches on a root as you stagger sideways and fall—a shockwave as you land on your bottom, the brush gnawing your fingertips. Moisture from the soil rises through your jeans and you feel the warmth of blood on your palm.
You say, “Please wait.” You say, “Oh my God!” It comes out of you as a scream as your left shoe knocks loose, the ground tearing away your sock. You push yourself backward over the rocky soil. Dirt streaks your cheek when you wipe your hand over your face.
You say, “Please. Stop looking at me that way.”
Overhead, clouds like vermillion cotton pull apart, revealing the moon between soft shreds.
You don’t ask why.
You know why.
When the blows begin to fall, your head crackles with pain.
Such pain.
You turn your face to look one last time.
Your eyes widen, then close forever.
I’m talking to Shelly James.
She is beside me in my cell. Her perfume smells like orange blossoms, the same as it did outside her dressing room. Am I looking at a ghost? Am I dead? The cell seems exactly the same as it had earlier. If I’m dreaming, it is the most real dream I’ve ever had. Water drips from the leaky faucet, and voices echo faintly from somewhere unknowable. The air feels warm and still.
She’s close enough that I could touch her if I reached forward. She’s so familiar that I’m not afraid. The mattress shifts as she sits gently on the end of my bed. The faint light catches the sleeve of her cotton dress. It’s the color of a bluebird.
“Are you here?” I ask.
I can tell she’s smiling, even in the dark. “I am, but I’m not,” she says.
I start to sit up, but the ache in my head is a force pushing me back onto my elbows. I must have hit my head on the table or ground after the taser hit me, I realize. I must have been knocked out. “I didn’t kill you,” I tell her. I’ve been wanting to say this.
“Of course not.” Her voice is like honey, so gentle it seems to soften the concrete around me.
A year in the dark I spent with her voice.
I blink hard, searching for words. “You met someone … in the woods. I saw you. It was Sean?”
Shelly doesn’t answer.
“You were having an affair with him,” I say. I can’t hide the disappointment in my voice. My hands are fists atop the thin blanket.
She sighs. “It’s a story. Do you want to hear it?”
Yes.
“I grew up not far from here, our family was very poor. Not as bad off as you, but enough that kids teased us, pretty much all the time. My father ran off. My sisters, Mom, and I, we had to make do with very little. Mom was always away, and my oldest sister went to work at sixteen. You know what that’s like in a mill town?” Tears gleam in her eyes in the faint light. “We stole food. I stole food. I’m not proud of that, but what could I do? I listened to the sound of traffic from the highway at night, learning every note on the fret-board of a guitar my uncle stole from someone. Again and again until I knew how to play.”
I think of the way my neighbors practice night and day, repeating the melodies over and over like they’re searching for something. I picture Shelly practicing like that.
“Owen was already a celebrity, but when he met me I was nobody. I played state fairs, pool halls. I ate fast food in a van for two years. I slept on floors, using rolled up magazines for pillows. Early one morning when I was twenty-one, the van skidded off the road, everyone inside nearly died.”
She touches a tiny star-shaped scar on her cheek. “I looked in the mirror after I got stitches. I wanted to quit. But I couldn’t go back to what I’d come from.
“When Owen and I got married, I thought I’d never need to worry again, thought I’d never be lonely. But he worked. Constantly worked. More each year it seemed. I told him, we’ve made it, we don’t have to push so hard. But no success was ever enough, even though I knew we could live anywhere we wanted to, drive any kind of car, send Finch to the best schools.
“He never really got me. He was a millionaire, but drove a ’78 Ford truck that shot steam from the hood because he was used to it. Once, I went to go look at a property. Owen said I was acting different, full of myself. I told him, ‘I am different. I have three million dollars in my pocket now.’ ” She laughs shyly, teases her hair with her fingers, then inhales as if about to hold her breath. “I told him, ‘I can do whatever I want.’
“I guess eventually he lost interest in me. We’d been together for a decade. It happens. After we adopted Finch, we drifted even farther apart. That’s not an excuse, but nothing was ever the same. We had separate lives. And I needed to live. I needed to feel. I spent money. I traveled.” She looks at me and lowers her voice. “I did other things I shouldn’t have.”
“You saw … Detective Marion,” I say. “And Sean.”
She makes a motion with her chin that I think is a nod. “Just so you know, I took no pleasure in betraying anyone, or in sneaking around like we did.”
My stomach sinks, even if I’m only dreaming, or talking with a ghost. I picture Sean, standing so confidently in his backyard, waiting for Finch to arrive. Shelly didn’t want him because he was Finch’s boyfriend—she wanted him despite it.
I also try to picture her and Detective Marion as a couple. He got caught up in the fantasy part of her—that was clear. But maybe she allowed him to keep seeing her in that idealized way. Did she ever let her guard down with him, like she is with me now?
There are things I want to thank her for, so many things, despite everything. Phrases in her lyrics, bits of her songs, that maybe only I would have noticed. There are also so many things I need to ask.
There are things only Shelly and I will ever know.
“Did Sean …”
From the other end of the hall comes the creak of a door opening, then the echo of it slamming shut.
She sits up straight when she hears the sound, and sniffs like she’s just been woken up. I feel the mattress shift as she stands up, her motion bringing the orange blossom perfume back into the air. She smooths her hands over her dress. “Someone’s coming,” she tells me.
I’m saying the word “wait” when the overhead light pops on—so suddenly I close my eyes.
When I open them again, I’m alone in my cell.
When the cell door opens, it sounds like the roar of a metal lion. I force myself to sit on the bed and bring my knees up to my chest. The guard blocks most of the light from the hallway. He looks at me curiously, the way people do when they know what happened when I was young, but his mouth is pinched tight. He looks at whatever he is holding, then tosses it into my lap and steps back.
“This came,” he says.
I wave a little as the door creaks closed again. He could have thrown it away, I know.
The handwriting on the package is familiar, but I can’t place it. I slide my finger inside the rough paper and pull away the tape. The second I open it, I know exactly who it’s from. Four small packages fall into my lap—two of strawberry Pop-Tarts, two of orange peanut butter crackers. Neat, contained food. I smile for the first time in a week. Ms. Parsons. There may never be a way to show her how much her thoughtfulness means.
I lay three of the packages on the shelf beside my bed, then sit on the floor again and eat the first of the Pop-Tarts very slowly. Crumbs scatter everywhere—green and pink stars on the dark floor. For just a minute, I don’t even mind.
Later, the public defender returns. He looks neater, like he’s cut his hair, but he wears the same beige-cream-colored shirt as before. It feels like we’re alone even as voices echo all around us—sounds bouncing off concrete, off metal. The jail is so sturdy, it traps sound too.
The attorney winces when he comes close enough to see my eye, which is purple from being slammed into the desk after I was tasered. He makes a kind of inhaling sound—his lips tightening into an O.
The cool concrete feels good against the backs of my legs, so I stay seated on the floor.
“I heard about yesterday,” he says, as he lowers himself to sit on my bunk. “And I’m sorry that happened. That’s why I offered to represent you the day before. Sometimes a neutral party can keep things calm. I should have been there.”
I see his point.
He crosses his feet under him. His shoes are covered with white streaks and scuffs. The sole of the left one flaps where it comes apart from the rest of the shoe.
“I’m still willing to be your attorney,” he tells me, almost like he is joking. “I mean, the offer still stands.”
I straighten my back against the wall. I don’t want to talk to him, or anyone, but I also don’t want a repeat of yesterday either. I know I’m in deep trouble. And I need some answers.
“I have a question,” I say.
The lawyer looks up, hopefully.
“If it stays … between us.”
“Of course.” He looks at the bars, as if to make sure no one is coming. He rubs his hands together a little. “Absolutely, it does. Attorney-client privilege still stands, if this means that you’re agreeing for me to represent you.”
He pulls a yellow legal pad from the briefcase he brought with him and sets it on his lap. He opens a pen with a click that echoes through my cell.
“The detective said something that can’t be right,” I say. “He said there was an object used like a weapon. He said it came from the crime scene but that they found it in my apartment. That can’t be true.”
“You’re talking about the rock they recovered. It had Ms. James’s DNA on it. I saw the crime-lab report. Why do you say it’s impossible that you had it?”
I am not normal in a lot of ways, but I’m not the kind of crazy that makes up stuff or loses important memories. I have no memory of the trail where Shelly James was killed. And no one had handed me a bloody piece of limestone. That, I would have remembered. I’m innocent. I try not to glare as I answer him. “Because I didn’t go near Shelly James in the park, and I didn’t leave there with anything. And no one has been in my apartment between then and now …”
Find the right words.
The throbbing in my head from hitting the table doesn’t help any.
“… except for the detectives.”
I want to not say Detective Marion’s name, but I’m sure everyone knows who interrogated me the first time anyway.
He starts shaking his head before I can go on. He moves the pen around the pad as if he’s doodling a shape. “The rock wasn’t in your apartment, Ms. Duval. It was found under the passenger seat of your car.”
17
The attorney starts talking again but I just look back at him in a daze. I’m confirming his impression of me—that I’m too weird, too far gone, to defend. That I may not be able to help myself even though my life is at stake. He’s right. I am gone, in a way—my thoughts are stuck on what he said.
They found that rock that struck Shelly James inside my car.
I knew it wasn’t possible for it to be in my apartment. I knew I hadn’t brought it inside, and the only other people who came there were Detectives Marion and Williams. Neither of them would have carried it in, and they were both in my sight the whole time they questioned me. Maybe it would have been possible for someone to break in and hide it there, but that explanation started to stretch even what I could imagine.
Until this morning, I had wondered if I had been set up somehow. I wondered: Would Detective Williams have planted it to clear Marion? No cop wants to see another c
op found guilty. But no, I’d heard about the murder weapon being found just as Williams did.
The attorney repeats my name a few times again before he stands to leave, his voice swallowed up by the hallway voices, slamming doors, and laughter around the jail.
Where has my car been? And who has been inside it?
Then I realize something that turns my blood cold.
I clench my hands into fists as I sit on the jail floor, pounding the ground with each realization until the backs of my hands begin to ache.
My attorney’s almost to the door.
“Wait!” I run to the door to catch him.
He turns around, looking at me with a half-impatient, half-surprised expression. “Did you remember something else?”
“I want to talk to Owen James.”
He scratches the side of his head while giving me a we-don’t-have-time-for-this look. “You’re serious?”
I understand why he’s asking. After all, I have a history of having very bad boundaries with the James family. Why should any one of them want to meet with me, considering the evidence? But the answer has clicked in my head, and I need to tell someone. “Of course I’m serious. I understand what happened now.”
His head cocks slightly as he walks back toward where he was sitting. He grips the bunk rail and stays standing. “These are the first truly coherent words you’ve said since I offered to represent you. If you recall something about that night, I suggest you tell me. I’m the one trying to help you, and I can’t let my client just …”
But I cut him off by shaking my head, no. After being tricked by Robert Holloway into believing Owen and Shelly wanted to “set things right” with me, and Finch acting like she’d never met me before, I’ve had enough. “It’s only Owen I’ll tell,” I say. “He deserves an explanation too.”
“Ms. Duval,” he begins.
“My mind is made up.”
One advantage of being seen as unusual is that normal people don’t know how far to push.
He lets out a long, whistling sigh. “As your attorney, I advise you that you’re not in a position to dictate terms. Even if I did communicate to the court that you would prefer to talk with Owen James directly, the chances of the kind of meeting you’re talking about are very small.”
