What I Remember Most

by Cathy Lamb

  I went to pick her up the next afternoon for a new placement with Callie and Joseph Niemeyer, but she had run off again.

  I spent several hours looking for her, phoning people, and I went downtown, but I could not find Grenadine. I am extremely worried about her—especially because that head wound and the burns on her hands could become infected.

  Children’s Services Division

  Child’s Name: Grenadine Scotch Wild

  Age: 15

  Parents’ Names: Freedom and Bear Wild (Location unknown)

  Date: December 8, 1991

  Goal: Adoption

  Employee: Aleta Cohlo

  Grenadine went back to school in the middle of November. The school neglected to tell me that. I believe it is because she has a close friendship with the principal, Damon Greene, who has had many arguments with this office about Grenadine’s care.

  I went to the restaurant where Grenadine was waitressing, to talk with her, but the manager said she’d quit. I don’t believe him, and I will swing by tomorrow and look for her. The manager said that as case workers we all “suck the big one.” He told me that Grenadine had been living in a car and we obviously didn’t “know shit” about how to treat a child.

  I told him I worked for the state and it was my job to protect Grenadine, so she would need to contact me, and he said that I obviously should be fired as I hadn’t protected her at all and he told me he would call the police if I didn’t get off his property. His wife told me to stay away from Grenadine because I was a threat to her safety and health. She pulled the spray thing out of the sink and sprayed me.

  In another issue, I need to talk to you about my case load. I have 37 kids. My health is shot. This is impossible. I am requesting a medical leave due to stress and exhaustion.

  44

  “Mrs. Hamilton, thank you for coming.”

  “Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.”

  Dale Kotchik, an assistant U.S. attorney, looked slightly surprised. Perhaps he was thinking I would walk in combative? Swinging a sword around? Juggling knives?

  I had nothing to fight out. I was completely at his mercy and the mercy of all the other serious and anal and formidable-looking people at that long table in an intimidating building in an expensive office in downtown Portland. Ironically, the furniture, I was told by Millie, had been made by prisoners. I thought of Kade.

  The list of people from various organizations was frightening. Dale Kotchik was from the U.S. attorney’s office, as were his assistants. There was a woman from the IRS; two special agents from the FBI; a man and a woman, one of whom was a computer specialist, the other a financial fraud specialist; a man from the postal service; a woman from a finance and corporate securities division; and other suits whose titles I forgot.

  I tried not to be scared down to my gut, but it didn’t work. I knew they were here to beat the heck out of me, legally speaking. I exchanged a glance with Millie. She nodded at me, as in, you can do this.

  “Let’s start from the beginning, Mrs. Hamilton,” Dale said. I guessed him to be about fifty. He reminded me of an overbearing owl. “You and Mr. Hamilton were married for about a year. Correct?”

  “Yes. Covey and I are separated and will be getting a divorce as soon as he stops being an asshole and cooperates. Which could be a long time. Also, please don’t call me Mrs. Hamilton. The name makes me nauseated. You can call me Dina, or Ms. Wild.” But not Grenady. That name is for my new life, not this one.

  “All right, Ms. Wild.” Dale had a calm and cool demeanor. “When did you leave Mr. Hamilton?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but I planned on leaving Covey the day I was arrested. I’m an artist, and I had one client coming in that morning to pick up a collage, then I was going to pack up and leave. I was arrested before I could get out of there.”

  “Why were you leaving him?”

  “Let me count a few of the most creepy reasons.” I put my hands up and started pointing at my fingers, ignoring the scars. “He was obsessive and possessive. He called and texted me all day to see what I was doing and who I was with. He accused me of seeing other men. He had anger and jealousy issues. He liked money and his toys too much. He did not support my career as an artist. In fact, he did what he could to sabotage it. Without telling me, he put a tracking device on my car. He put a tracking device on my phone. Finally, I found cameras set up in our house, including our bedroom, so he could watch me. I didn’t know they were there. That’s some of why I left.”

  There was a loud silence for long seconds.

  Dale studied me through his glasses. “Tell me about your investment business.”

  “It was not my client’s investment business,” Millie said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “It wasn’t mine. Covey founded it, he worked at it. I knew next to nothing about it. I did not work with Covey.”

  “But you were an officer. It’s on the letterhead.”

  “I was a figurehead only. He said he needed another person, someone he trusted”—I put my fingers up in the air to make quote marks—“to be an officer in his investment business. He said that he wanted his business to be our business, that as a married couple we should share it. I thought that was romantic and sweet at first, but now I know it was like signing a warrant for my arrest and committing myself to time with Boob-Swinging Bertha in a jail cell.”

  Dale coughed.

  “When he wanted me to become an officer, I told him no several times. I know little about investments or real estate or playing the stock market. To me, the stock market sounds like gambling—buy and sell, buy and sell, hope the dice rolls your way.” I leaned on my elbows. “But Mr. Kotchik, hell, I’ll admit it. You are looking at one of the most naive wives in the country.”

  Dale blinked. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I am.” I could feel myself flush. “It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassing to myself.”

  “Your signature allowed him to move money, open accounts for two shell companies, and make withdrawals that eventually lost a massive amount of money for your clients, among other things.”

  “Covey’s clients, not mine. Covey always had a reason for needing my signature, and it sounded plausible. For example, the account in New York. He said he needed it for tax purposes because of his clients there and he said we both needed to sign. He always had the same excuse—we were a company, and as a couple, the bank had to have two signatures, the government had a bunch of rules we had to follow, there was investment protocol, tax reasons. I didn’t know what he meant. It sounded complicated, but he sounded confident. I’d sign, and out he’d go.”

  “Did he put pressure on you?”

  “He was always in a rush. He’d come in when I was at work in my studio or a client was there. I’d tell him I’d look things over, but I couldn’t at that point because I was busy and he’d get angry, be pushy, tell me that I wasn’t trusting him. If a client was there it was especially demeaning for me, so I’d sign it to get him out of there. Now I know it was all part of his plan. I had no reason not to believe him. I didn’t know he was cheating anyone. It never occurred to me that he was.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I loved him. I thought he was an honest man. I thought he was an honest businessman. I had never heard otherwise.” I took a quick look around the table. They were all staring right at me, judging me. “Now I hate him and wish he would be kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel and buried in a desert.”

  They asked questions I couldn’t answer about Covey’s business, his accounts, and shell companies called, ironically, Scotch Electric, GrenWald, and Wild Construction.

  “Ms. Wild, Mr. Hamilton is adamant that this is a company run by both of you. If you’re innocent, why would he implicate you? Why wouldn’t he say, ‘Hey, I’m innocent, and so is my wife, but she wasn’t involved in my business at all’?”

  “My leaving has enraged him. He threatened me and said if I didn’t move back in with him,
if I testified against him, if I divorced him, he would bring me down with him. He told me he would fry my ‘tight little ass in jail,’ and that’s a direct quote.

  “He also told me that he would tell you that I was the mastermind behind it all. I don’t know how to mastermind any of this. I can’t even balance my own books for my art, so I had to hire a bookkeeper and an accountant.”

  “And if you moved back in with him?”

  “If I moved back in, Covey said he would get us out of this, that he and his attorneys would fix it, get the case thrown out on technicalities, they would shred your evidence, say it was false arrest, something, and that neither one of us would go to jail.”

  “Ms. Wild, this is your life. In all likelihood, you will go to jail. If Mr. Hamilton said that all you had to do was move back in with him and then he wouldn’t bring you down, too, why risk the situation you’re in now?”

  “Because I am not going to let him control me anymore. I won’t. I didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing. And I cannot stand—” I paused and tried to get myself together. “I cannot stand . . .” I rolled my lips in, trying not to let a single cry out. “I cannot stand to live with him. I don’t want to be around him. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him to . . . to . . . touch me. I am hoping you all will believe me, that I didn’t know about any of this, and that I won’t go to jail, but . . .” My voice cracked.

  “But?”

  “Even if I do go to jail for this, I would rather be there than live with Covey. I will not let him tell me what to do or force me to do what he wants.” I’d had enough of that when I was younger. I would not put myself under someone else’s power again, ever.

  Mille patted me. I stared down at the scars on my hands for a few seconds. It was easy to do. This meeting was taking me back to a time years ago when it was hard for me to look anyone in the eye at all.

  “Ms. Wild, do you remember signing this paper?” the woman from the FBI asked. She had brown hair, brown suit, brown heels. My eyes flicked down to the signature. I studied it, caught my breath. Oh, that was bad. I wiped the tears off my cheeks. Damning bad. That was not my signature. The room tilted, as if we were on a sinking ship. “No, I don’t remember signing it because that’s not my signature.”

  “What do you mean that’s not your signature?”

  I had signed my legal name to the documents Covey had given me: Grenadine Scotch Wild. “I didn’t write it. See? The way the G is for Grenadine? I don’t write my G’s like that. And that W, it looks pretty close to mine, but it isn’t. I don’t do a loopy doop there . . .” I pointed to the W and moved the paper back to her.

  “What about this one?”

  She handed me another paper. Fine print. Legalese. Grenadine Scotch Wild, written at the bottom. Getting worse. So worse. “That’s not my signature, either.”

  Again and again. Forged signatures.

  “What about this one?”

  “That’s my signature.” I flipped through the paperwork. I remembered that Millie had shown me the back page. It was my nightmare. On closer inspection of the six previous pages with all the fine print, I had signed to transfer money from our company to another company with a name I didn’t recognize. “Shit.”

  “Not shit. It’s fraud.”

  I met Dale Kotchik’s owl gaze. “I didn’t know I was doing anything fraudulent. See, this back page? That’s what Covey handed me. It has the name of the bank, his signature, and mine. I don’t remember these other pages attached to it at all. He gave me this one sheet and said he was opening up an account for us for retirement. We were investing in minerals, or something like that. I think he even said gold, that prick.”

  Dale studied me for a minute, as did the other serious, uptight people in there.

  “What about this?” Dale pushed another paper across the table toward me.

  Millie had shown me this one, too. I leafed through the pages before it. I felt as if the floor beneath me had cracked and I was teetering on the crack. “That’s my signature. Same thing. I don’t remember all these attached papers . . .” The words and letters were moving on the page, but I understood the main points. Covey invested money for this company. I thought I would pass out. “Williams and Sons went out of business.”

  “Yes, they did. The investment losses they suffered with Hamilton Investments sank them. A hundred-year-old company. Gone. Al Semore’s went out of business, too. Liberty Trucking. Red Tail Plumbing. Hundreds of people lost their life savings.”

  “I never saw all these pages when I signed. You can even tell here.” I pointed to the left hand corner. “See? It’s been stapled twice. Do you see that? Covey took them off before he gave them to me.”

  “I do. So you’re innocent, Ms. Wild?”

  “I’m guilty because I signed those papers, but I believed Covey when he told me what they were for. I never wanted to steal money from anyone. I have never done that. I would never do that.” I knew why I hadn’t read the papers more carefully, but that was a poor excuse. On the other hand, should I not have questioned Covey’s money? The easy flow of it, all the cash? The house and cars and vacation homes? Yes. I should have. I thought he was a successful investor. Period.

  Dumb.

  “There is one thing that is not fitting here at all with me.” The financial man from the FBI tapped his pen. He was a human calculator, I could tell. “You’re a smart woman. Articulate. Quick. I understand that Covey may not have included all the paperwork when he asked for your signature, but on a couple he did. Why did you not read any of the papers you signed? They are somewhat complicated, but the gist of them is quite clear. Why didn’t you ask questions?”

  My deepest, deepest shame. I stared down at my hands. You are stupid. Stupido Grenado. She’s retarded. She can’t read. Dirty Grenadine.

  “Ms. Wild?”

  I felt myself go red. I was suddenly hot. I felt like I was in grade school again. Everyone staring at me. Everyone thinking I’m stupid. Ready to leap and make fun of me.

  “Because . . .” I ran a hand through my hair. I thought about saying something like, “It was too boring” or “too complicated” or “It was written in legalese.” But that would sound flip. It would make me sound shallow and silly. It would make me appear guilty, like I was being evasive and vague.

  “I didn’t read all of it because . . .” I about choked. All these smart people. So smart. Brilliant. Lots of degrees. I barely got out of high school.

  “Because you didn’t want to know,” Dale said, quite calmly. He thought I was trying to get out of being prosecuted. “Because you wanted Mr. Hamilton to continue to bring home the money he did for your expensive cars, the boats, the clothes, the jewelry, the vacations.”

  “Don’t attack my client,” Millie said.

  “I didn’t care about any of that,” I said.

  “You liked the wealth and all that went with it. You didn’t really care where he got the money, as long as he got it.”

  “No.” The word wobbled out, as a rush of ragged emotions hit.

  “Don’t be obnoxious, Dale,” Millie said.

  “You signed the papers. You aided and abetted him with his criminal activity. You were a part of it. A willing participant. You brought in clients, Mr. Hamilton told us. You smiled and gave dinner parties. Lavish parties on his boat. A Christmas party. Hundreds of people.”

  “I did not try to help Covey cheat people. I didn’t even know he was cheating people. I didn’t read the five papers I signed. . . .”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” I wanted to disappear.

  “Yes?” Dale prodded.

  “I didn’t read the papers Covey gave me because . . .” I wanted to dive into the ground and stay there.

  “No lies, Ms. Wild. We don’t have time.”

  “I can’t read . . . well.”

  “What?”

  “I have . . .” I felt tears spring to my eyes. A lifetime of shame and humiliation came flowing up.
r />   “Yes?”

  “I have dyslexia.”

  “You do?” Millie said, semi outraged. “Why didn’t you tell me that? I’m your attorney. Hello? I should have known that.”

  “I’m ashamed of it. I shouldn’t be. It’s not my fault, but I can’t read quickly, or well, sometimes.”

  No one said anything for a long minute.

  “I found out in high school.” I heard my own ragged breath. “I thought I was stupid. Unbelievably dumb. That’s why I couldn’t read in school. I was in special classes, sometimes, and other times I wasn’t. The teachers let it slide.”

  “I don’t understand,” one of Dale’s assistants said. “You’re saying that your teachers let it slide, they didn’t notice you couldn’t read, that this problem wasn’t addressed until high school?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s not believable.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Sure, it is,” Millie said. “Kids slip through the cracks all the time.”

  “I moved around . . . frequently.”

  “What about your parents?” She leaned forward. “They usually notice when their kids can’t read.”

  I felt like I’d been slugged in the stomach. The air rushed out of me, though I’m sure I didn’t make a sound. “My parents didn’t notice it—”

  Millie interrupted. “Why the drilling about her parents? We’re off topic. You’re bullying her.”

  “It’s okay, Millie,” I said. “My parents didn’t notice it because they weren’t around.”

  “What do you mean they weren’t around?” the human calculator asked.

  I put my hand over my lily bracelet. I remembered a woman with long red hair and a daisy chain crown and a red, crocheted shawl she let me wear and a flowered skirt. I remembered a father with a tickly beard and a tie-dyed T-shirt in the same colors as mine. I remembered an orange tent and a yellow VW bus. “I was in the foster care system starting when I was six.”