Accused sf-2

by Mark Gimenez

  Accused

  ( Scott Fenney - 2 )

  Mark Gimenez

  Mark Gimenez

  Accused

  PROLOGUE

  When she opened her eyes, she did not know that her life would never be the same.

  All she knew was that her body was shivering violently. She wrapped her arms but felt even colder, almost wet from the sea breeze. The French doors leading to the deck outside stood propped open, and the breeze billowed the sheer curtains. In the vague light, they looked like whitecaps of waves rolling ashore. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand: 3:45 A.M.

  She got out of bed-the tile floor felt damp beneath her feet, as if it had rained in-and went over to shut the doors, but the scent of the sea lured her outside. She parted the curtains and stepped out onto the deck. The house stood on tall stilts like an eight-legged white flamingo perched among the sand dunes; the second-story deck overlooked the secluded stretch of Galveston beach and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. She walked to the far railing where she could see the last ripples of high tide dying out just feet from the house. She inhaled the sea and tasted the salt in the air. She often woke and came out here in these quiet hours when the moon offered the only light, when all color was washed out by the night, when her world was painted only in shades of gray.

  She lived her life in shades of gray.

  She gazed out at the twinkling lights of the offshore drilling platforms dotting the distant horizon; she liked to think they were the lights of Cancun. She had often imagined taking the yacht straight across the Gulf the seven hundred fifty miles to Cancun-and never returning. Maybe one day she would.

  Maybe. One day.

  The breeze blew her short nightgown tight against her lean body; the silk seemed to stick to her skin. She clutched herself again. It was early June, and the night temperature had not dipped below eighty, but she had still caught a chill. A big wave splashed ashore, and the sea spray hit her. She licked the wet from her lips then reached up and wiped her face; she could not see the dark streaks down her cheeks that her hands had left in their wake, but her face now felt even wetter. She touched her cheeks again then looked down at her hands. Her palms were shiny with a wetness that was dark in the moonlight, dark and wet like…

  She turned and ran back inside. She fought her way through the curtains then slapped her hands against the wall until she found the light switch-the stark white bedroom was suddenly ablaze with incandescent light. The shades of gray were gone. Her world was now painted bright red: red on the white bed sheets… red footprints on the white tile floor leading from the bed out to the deck where she had stepped… red handprints on the white wall where she had searched for the light switch… red on the white curtains where she had fought through them… red on her white nightgown… and red on her. Bright red. Blood red. His blood. She stood drenched in his blood. And he lay on the bed with a knife in his chest.

  Rebecca Fenney screamed.

  ONE

  Three hours later and three hundred miles to the north, Scott Fenney stood drenched in sweat. The sun had just risen that Friday morning, only the fifth day of June, but the temperature was already pushing ninety. It was going to be a hot summer.

  The traffic light changed, and he jogged across Mockingbird Lane. He was running the streets of Highland Park. He ran five miles every morning, before the town came alive, when the roads were still free of foreign automobiles and the air still free of exhaust fumes, when the only sounds were birds chirping in the tall oak trees that shaded the broad avenues and the only sights were other white men waging war against middle age in running shoes. Scott was only thirty-eight, so he could still avoid such a daily confrontation with his future. But he could not avoid a daily confrontation with his past.

  He ran past the lot where the small rent house he had grown up in had once stood, home to mother and son, the poor kid on the block. He ran past the Highland Park football stadium where he had been a high school hero under the bright Friday night lights and the SMU stadium where he had become a college legend on a glorious Saturday afternoon in the fall of his twenty-first year. He ran past the law school where he had graduated first in his class then had struck out for downtown Dallas to find his fortune in the law. He ran past the country club where lush green fairways bathed in a soft shower from low sprinklers, an exclusive golf course that would soon welcome the wealthiest white men in Dallas just as it had once welcomed him. He ran past the mansion he had once called home.

  He was now the poor lawyer on the block.

  It had been two years since that life had become his past. He had not mourned the loss of his partnership at the Ford Stevens law firm or the money that had come with being a successful lawyer or the things that money had bought-the home, the club, the car… okay, he did miss the car; it was a red Ferrari 360 Modena that could do zero to sixty in 4.5 seconds. But he had what money could not buy and what no one could foreclose, repossess, or otherwise take from him by legal process. He had his daughters. So while his morning run reminded him of the past, he did not long for the past. He had gotten over his past.

  Except Rebecca.

  She had not screamed or cursed or said goodbye. She had just left. She wanted nothing from him and took nothing-not her community property or her clothes or her child. After eleven years of marriage, she had just wanted out. So twenty-two months and eight days ago, she had walked out of their house and marriage and left town with the twenty-six-year-old assistant golf pro at the club. Scott blamed himself. If only he had been more attentive to her needs, more thoughtful toward her, more caring toward her, more… something. Whatever it was that a woman needed from a man. What she had needed from him. He had not given her what she had needed, so she had found it with another man. In another man's bed.

  He now slept alone. When he slept. The other hours he lay awake and alone, thinking of her and wondering if he would ever again feel the love of a woman lying next to him, holding him, touching him, wanting him. He wanted to love again, to feel the heat of passion again, to experience that special connection-physical and mental-between a man and a woman, when he and she were one. Those moments were the best moments of a man's life. Those were the moments with Rebecca he recalled now.

  He longed to share his life with another woman. But he couldn't, not until he understood why his wife had left him. Until he knew what she had needed and how he had failed her. So if he got a second chance at love, he wouldn't fail again. But for now Scott Fenney had no reason to stay in bed each morning.

  So he ran.

  TWO

  Scott entered the small cottage through the back door that led into the kitchen and was greeted by the smell of eggs, chorizo, and coffee. Consuela had already arrived and was cooking breakfast.

  "Morning, Consuela."

  " Buenos dias, Senor Fenney."

  Consuela was thirty, round, and Catholic. She wore three crucifixes and kept prayer candles lit on the windowsill. Her husband, Esteban Garcia, dropped her and the baby off each morning on the way to his construction job in Dallas. Little Maria sat in a high chair and smeared mushy food on her face. Scott leaned down to her.

  "And how are you this morning, Senorita Maria de la Rosa-Garcia?"

  She spit up something green.

  "She no like brecol," Consuela said.

  "Don't believe I'd like broccoli for breakfast either."

  The fifteen-month-old child smiled at Scott as if she understood what he had said. He scrunched up his face and rubbed noses with her-she liked that-and said, "You don't want that yucky broccoli, do you? Tell your madre you want huevos rancheros and chorizo so you can grow big and strong and get a futbol scholarship."

  Her parents were Mexican nationals but she was an American citizen-born in the USA. She
raised her arms to him.

  "Oh, Uncle Scotty can't play now, honey. I've got to go to work."

  He gave the child a kiss on her forehead and a little hug and came away with slimy green broccoli on his cheek. It smelled awful-or maybe it was him. He swiped a sweaty sleeve across his cheek then grabbed a bottled water out of the refrigerator and walked down the hall to his daughters' bedroom. He knocked on the door.

  "Come on, girls, I can't be late today. Closing arguments."

  The door opened, and his eleven-year-old daughters emerged from a small bedroom cluttered with posters of the Jonas Brothers and a smiling Michael Jordan on the walls, books stacked on shelves and scattered about the floor, clothes hanging over chairs as if one of them-guess who? — could not decide what to wear that day, and a small television with rabbit ears. They had pushed their twin beds together in one corner so they could read together at night. They shared clothes, they brushed each other's hair, they were like sisters-and now the law said they were.

  Barbara Boo Fenney was wearing jean shorts, a black T-shirt with white print that read "Obama Ba-Rocks My World," green retro sneakers without socks, and her red hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked more like her mother every day, albeit less expensively dressed. Pajamae Jones-Fenney wore a color-coordinated short outfit, matching socks folded down neatly, and black-and-white saddle Oxfords. Her skin was tan and flawless, her hair brown and fluffy and cut in a bob. She too looked more like her mother every day. One girl was the product of his failed marriage, the other of his law practice. Two years before, he had defended Pajamae's mother against a murder charge and won, only to see her die of a heroin overdose two months later. Pajamae had no one except Boo and her mother's lawyer, so he had adopted her.

  "Morning, girls."

  "Whereas, Mr. Fenney," Pajamae said.

  "What's your pulse?" Boo said.

  "I didn't check my pulse."

  "Do you feel faint or dizzy? Are you experiencing chest pain?"

  "No, Boo. I feel fine."

  "A. Scott, I still think you should be on a statin."

  "I think you should change that T-shirt. The school won't like it."

  "I told her, Mr. Fenney. I said, 'Girl, you can't be wearing a T-shirt reminding these rich white folks there's a black man in the White House.' "

  The conservative Republicans in town-which is to say, the entire Town of Highland Park-had not gone for Obama. They had hoped that George W. would salve their electoral wounds by coming home to Highland Park, but he had retired to his old stomping grounds in North Dallas instead. Even Dick Cheney had forsaken his former home town for Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But Bush did give the Parkies a consolation prize: the $300 million George W. Bush Presidential Library would be located on the Southern Methodist University campus in Highland Park.

  Boo shrugged. "What are they gonna do, suspend me again, on the last day of school?"

  She had been suspended earlier in the year for fighting. With a boy. He had called Pajamae "Aunt Jemima" on the playground, so Boo had punched him in the nose and made him cry. She had a heck of a right cross for a girl. Scott had threatened to take the school district to court-and more effectively, the story of a white boy bullying the only black student in school to the newspaper and local television-so the school had dropped the suspension after one day. Now, whenever the principal threatened Boo with disciplinary action for defending her sister against bullies, her standard response was, "Call my lawyer."

  "Consuela has breakfast ready."

  The girls went one way down the hall and Scott the other. He entered the "master suite" of the two-bedroom, fifteen-hundred-square-foot cottage. The master closet in his former residence dwarfed the small bedroom and adjoining bath. Scott undressed in the bathroom, stepped into the cramped shower, and stood under the hot water. The mansion and material possessions that had once given his life value were gone. His ambitious years, that period in a man's life when human nature and testosterone drive him to prove his net worth to the world-when the score is kept in dollars and cents-were over. For most men, the ambitious years extend well into their fifties, even their sixties, and come to an end only with a heart attack or a positive prostate exam, when a man confronts his mortality. But it wasn't the prospect of his own death that had brought his ambitious years to a premature end for A. Scott Fenney, at age thirty-six; it was the death of a U.S. senator's son.

  He got out of the shower, shaved, and dressed in a $2,000 custom-made suit; the suits and Consuela were all that remained of his past life. She was part of the family, and the suits still fit. And he was still a lawyer.

  Scott returned to the kitchen where the girls were eating breakfast tacos and playing with Maria.

  "Last day of school, girls." Scott sat and ate his taco and studied his adopted daughter's face. "Pajamae, are you wearing makeup?"

  "Blush, Mr. Fenney, like Beyonce. You like it?"

  "What's a Beyonce? And please call me 'Dad.' It's been a year and a half."

  "Don't seem right, Mr. Fenney."

  "Why not?"

  " 'Cause you're Boo's daddy."

  "I'm your daddy, too, and don't you ever forget it." He drank coffee and said, "So what do you girls want to do this summer?"

  "The other kids are going to Colorado, Hawaii, the south of France …"

  "We can't afford that, Boo."

  "What can we afford?"

  "Well, we could camp out in a state park."

  "That'd be fun. We could never go camping with Mother. She hated to sweat."

  "Boo, she's still your mother."

  "I don't have a mother."

  Her anger seeped out from time to time. Or was it a sense of shame? Everyone in Highland Park knew her mother had run off with the golf pro.

  Scott turned back to Pajamae. She seemed glum, too.

  "Pajamae, smile-you're about to graduate from fifth grade."

  "She doesn't smile because the other kids make fun of her," Boo said.

  "Because of her color?"

  "Because of her teeth."

  "Her teeth? "

  "My teeth are all crooked, Mr. Fenney. It's embarrassing."

  She needed braces. Ten thousand dollars worth of dental work. Scott paid $30,000 in annual health insurance premiums for the three of them plus Consuela and Maria, but the plan did not include dental.

  "Mr. Fenney, when I'm playing pro basketball, how am I gonna do endorsements with crooked teeth? You see Michael Jordan's teeth? Look like a string of pearls."

  "Honey, I'll find a way to pay for braces, okay? Before next school year."

  "You promise, Mr. Fenney?"

  He nodded. "I promise."

  She started to smile but caught herself.

  Braces for Pajamae. Another financial promise he wasn't sure he could keep, like the mortgage and office overhead-unless he won the case that day and the city didn't appeal the verdict and…

  Boo stood and tossed her napkin on the table.

  "Let's get this fifth grade over with."

  Ten minutes later, Scott was driving the Volkswagen Jetta to the elementary school past the mansions of the most important people in Dallas-or at least the richest. The streets of Highland Park were no longer vacant. Mothers were taking their offspring to school, and fathers were taking themselves downtown. From the back seat, he heard Pajamae's voice, sounding spooky.

  "Boo… I see white people."

  They fell over each other laughing hysterically. They had seen The Sixth Sense — the edited version on network TV-and were always coming up with new variations on the "I see dead people" line.

  Of course, Pajamae did see white people. Only white people. Exactly one black family lived in Highland Park… and one black girl named Pajamae Jones-Fenney. The Town of Highland Park was a two-square-mile enclave entirely surrounded by the City of Dallas-the bright white hole in the middle of the multicolored Dallas donut. Few people of color could afford to live in Highland Park-the median home price was $1 million-and those who co
uld, like the pro athletes who played football for the Cowboys, basketball for the Mavericks, and baseball for the Rangers, weren't so keen on being protected by a police force whose standard operating procedure for traffic stops was "If they're black or brown, they'd better have tools in the back."

  "A. Scott," Boo said from the back seat, "since we can't go to the south of France this summer, can we at least get cable?"

  "No."

  "Can we have a cell phone? We can get a family plan."

  "No."

  "Can we have a Facebook account?"

  "No."

  "Can we get our ears pierced?"

  "No-and why would you want holes in your ears anyway?"

  "I don't, Mr. Fenney," Pajamae said.

  "A. Scott, we're the only kids we know without cable, iPhones, pierced ears, a Facebook, or who haven't seen Juno."

  "Because it's rated PG-thirteen and you're not thirteen."

  "It's PG-thirteen for mature thematic material and sexual content and language, but they only say the F-word once. We hear it more than that at recess."

  "Kids say the F-word?"

  "Hel- lo. Come on, A. Scott, we're practically teenagers."

  "Two years, Boo. It'll come soon enough. Enjoy being eleven. When you're older, you'll miss it."

  "Do you miss being eleven?"

  "I miss being nine."

  "Why nine?"

  "I lost my dad when I was ten."

  "We lost our mothers when we were nine."

  So they had. The girls were quiet for a few blocks then Boo said, "So can we at least have cable? Just for the summer. Please. "

  "Boo-"

  "A. Scott, it's hard on us-at school, living in Highland Park…"

  "Because you don't have cable?"

  "Because we don't fit in."

  "Why not?"

  Pajamae joined the fray. "Because I'm the only black kid in town."

  "And we're the only kids without a mother. We're different, A. Scott. Walking around the Village, everyone looks funny at us."