She shook her head. It came to her that she might just do nothing, but she couldn’t seem to hold the thought. She got her coat and keys, and went outside.
Nelson Erroll lived on the far side of Goddard from Naomi, south of the town center itself and en route to Haverhill, in a yellow farmhouse that had been his father’s. The house had a barn with three huge but withering silos that shot up like a colossal trident. It sat just off the main road, pretty but a little lost, as if no longer sure why it was precisely there; its many acres—once given over to sheep—were long gone, sold to a Boston academic who feared development around his summer retreat farther up the mountain. Nelson lived alone, though he had once had a wife and twin sons. These, too, were long gone, since Carol Erroll had moved down to Keene with her second husband, and only a succession of school pictures, framed in a line on the piano top, gave immediate evidence of the sheriff’s earlier life.
Naomi drove her car around the back of Erroll’s house and parked out of sight of the road, alongside the silos. By the time she reached the kitchen door he was waiting for her, peering out into the dark and looking, if not concerned, then mildly curious. He made her out on the second step and nodded, without exactly smiling. Naomi didn’t feel like smiling either.
“Sorry I didn’t call,” she said when he opened the door.
“Doesn’t matter,” Erroll said. “I wouldn’t have heard the phone. I’ve been sleeping.”
She looked reflexively at her watch. “It’s only ten.”
“I was up all night.” He shrugged. “Slept most of the day today.”
“Up all night,” Naomi said viciously. “And doing such hard work, I’ll bet.”
He frowned at her. They stood in the kitchen. The air, suddenly cold, wafted in the open door.
“This is such shit,” Naomi said.
Erroll sighed. He shut the door. “I was going to make some dinner,” he said, his voice tired. “Want something?”
“I’ve eaten. Nelson, this is completely insane. Don’t tell me there’s anything to this.”
“Sit down,” he said, and Naomi did. He went to the refrigerator and rummaged, eventually extracting a single steak in its Styrofoam Stop & Shop tray. He dug the plastic away with his fingers. “Sure you don’t want one?”
“No,” she said. “Thanks.”
He took down a skillet from over the stove and put it on the electric coil. He filled the kettle and it hissed when he turned the heat on beneath it. Then he came to the kitchen table and sat down opposite her.
“Tell me,” Naomi said. “Explain this to me. You can’t, I bet.”
“I can’t,” Erroll admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I was there, Naomi. I was in the room. She did it.” He shook his head. The top of his head shone in the fluorescent kitchen light. “I didn’t want to believe it either, but it’s true.”
“It can’t be. Now look, I’m not being naive. But Heather loves her daughter so much. She would never hurt a baby like …” She closed her eyes, the better not to see that single, perfect hole over the infant’s heart. “She couldn’t.”
Erroll shrugged. He got up and put his steak into the skillet, then poked it once or twice with a fork.
“This fucking town. They just decided it was her. Because she’s a single mother and they can’t deal with that. Because she doesn’t go around beating her breast with shame all the time!”
“Because she was pregnant, Naomi. Because people knew she was pregnant and then suddenly she wasn’t pregnant anymore and there was no baby. Because we had a baby without a mother and a mother without a baby! That’s all.”
“She wasn’t pregnant,” Naomi insisted. “She just put on some weight over the summer.” She paused. Nelson was looking at her. “She was just depressed and she gained weight! It isn’t a crime. I mean, her grandmother died and she didn’t have anybody. Wouldn’t that make you depressed?”
“Sure,” he agreed. “But that isn’t the point.” He frowned. “You’ve got to understand, Naomi. After you brought the baby’s body in, and word about it got out, the phone started to ring. Within forty-eight hours we had fourteen calls about Heather. Especially from women who insisted she must be pregnant. We were looking at all kinds of possibilities—”
“I heard,” Naomi snapped. “Like through-hikers. Women on welfare. Women living in sin.”
He shrugged and flipped his steak. It spat grease into the air. “We had to. We wanted to be thorough.”
“Lesbians. Single mothers. Women who live alone.” I’m surprised you didn’t accuse me, she almost said. But then she remembered: they had accused her. They had accused her first.
“Naomi, we had to bring her in. After all those calls. And we talked to Ashley. We found out the dates and everything. She could have been pregnant. And the fact that she didn’t tell him about it, or anyone else.” He looked at her. “You have to see that was, at least, suspicious.”
“It wasn’t her. Jesus, Nelson, we’re talking about a stab wound!”
“She showed us the weapon, Naomi.”
Naomi, stunned, looked at him.
“She showed us the weapon she used. It’s her, Naomi. I’m sorry.” He speared his steak and dropped it on a plate. “I know you like her, but it’s her.”
She watched him eat, his head down, the skin of his scalp alive with reflected light. He seemed famished. She didn’t begrudge him his meat.
“Just like that,” she said, more to herself than to him.
Erroll looked up. “Sorry?”
“Just like that? You sat her down, she said, ‘Yes, I killed my baby with a knife’?”
“No, not just like that.” He shook his head. “I can’t really discuss the specifics of what was said, Naomi, and I’m going to count on you not to let this go any further. But I will tell you that at first Heather did deny being pregnant. She later admitted she was pregnant and said she’d had a miscarriage, but it seemed pretty clear to me that ‘miscarriage’ was a term she’d taken on to make it a little easier for her to live with herself.”
“What are you, a psychologist now?” She regretted it as soon as the words were out, but she couldn’t take it back.
“No, Naomi. I’m not a psychologist. It’s only my opinion. A layman’s opinion, all right?”
“Sure,” she said.
“It just seemed to me that she was sad. She was sorry for what she’d done. At one point she even told us she’d had this miscarriage, and put the baby’s body in a little pond in back of her house. So the baby you found couldn’t have been hers.” He shook his head. “I think it made her feel better to think that.” He sighed. The skin under his eyes was barely there, so thin, like tissue bared to bright light. It pulsed, tightening and opening, as he looked at her, and she unexpectedly found herself listening to her own breath. “I feel awful about this, you know.”
“I know,” Naomi said. “I can see that.”
They looked at each other.
“I’m glad you came over,” he said. “I mean, I know you didn’t—”
“I was furious,” she cut him off. “I’m still furious. God.” She looked out the kitchen window. The moon glinted off the silo-trident. “What’re they going to do to her now?”
“I hope she’ll get some help,” Erroll said, pushing his plate away.
“Help,” Naomi said with disdain. “You know the kind of help they’ll want to give her. The stake at dawn.”
He smiled a little. “Hey, we’ve moved on a little bit since that kind of thing, no matter what you city types might think.”
She nodded. She hoped it was true.
“Where have they got her?” she asked suddenly.
“In Peytonville,” Erroll said.
“Can I see her?”
“In a few days, I’m sure it’s possible. And I think that would be nice. I think that would mean a lot to her.”
“Good.” Naomi nodded, instantly regretting the offer. The truth was that she didn’t want to see H
eather. In fact, she desperately didn’t want to see Heather. The hand that had raised a weapon over that baby—she didn’t want to see that hand. But nobody else would go, Naomi knew that much. And maybe Heather needed to see that Naomi, who had after all taken the baby from the river, could be forgiving of what she’d done.
“There’s something else,” said Erroll. He was pouring water out of the kettle and spooning in instant coffee, two cups. “I was going to call you in the morning, anyway.”
Naomi took a cup and asked for milk to cover the taste.
“It’s Polly. Heather wants you to have her.”
She sat there, overwhelmed. The brownish bubbles of the instant coffee gathered on the surface.
“She wants me?”
“She asked for you. I think she knows that you sort of believe in her. I mean, believe she’s a good person, whatever she’s done. Anyway, I didn’t ask her why, but she was very clear about it. Of course,” he looked at Naomi, “you don’t have to agree. You can say no. They can find a foster arrangement for Polly. It’s not like you have kids of your own and it’s just one more.” Naomi’s throat caught. She took a scalding gulp and coughed. “And, you know, we don’t know how long we’re talking about here. That’s another thing.”
He paused. He ran one hand through the ridge of his pale hair. It came to rest on his thigh.
“You think about it,” he said kindly. “Nobody expects you just—”
“I’ll take it,” Naomi said. “I mean Polly. I’ll take Polly. Of course I will.” And she got up and left before he could see her face.
Chapter 22
Somebody in Her Corner
FOR THE FIRST WEEK, THEY WOULDN’T LET HER visit Heather. She was “under evaluation,” they said, in some kind of medical wing adjacent to the jail outside Peytonville, and Naomi couldn’t seem to find a single person who had authority to explain the situation. The jail itself, when she called, referred her to the press office, where she was told that the accused murderess could not be permitted to speak with non-family members without the permission of Heather’s lawyer. Heather’s lawyer was, officially, the Public Defender’s Office in Peytonville. So Naomi called Judith.
“I just started,” Judith said, laughing. “I’m barely up on the coffeemaker instructions. I don’t know anything about what’s going on with this!”
“I want to see her,” Naomi said. “I feel awful that I haven’t been to see her. You know I’m going to take care of her little girl.”
“I didn’t know,” Judith said, and Naomi explained that Polly was still with a foster family in Peytonville, until the paperwork got sorted through. “Are you really up to this?” she asked.
Naomi couldn’t say that she was. At night, when she was alone and looked around her little house, trying to imagine having Polly with her, she didn’t know how she might be able to do this, how she could possibly meet the unimaginable needs of a fourteen-month-old child. It would be like bringing an exotic animal under her aegis, she thought. What would it eat? And how would she keep it alive? She only had to believe that she would learn. She remembered something her mother had told her when Naomi, native New Yorker that she was, had finally, in her early twenties, taken on the task of learning to drive. She’d been terrified of the power of driving, the responsibility of guiding a lethal weapon through crowds of other people in other cars, and sure she wouldn’t be able to understand road signs or respond to the mutable and constant requirements of the highway. “Listen,” her mother had said, the night before Naomi’s first lesson at Ithaca Triple A, “people much stupider than you can do this. You can do it, too.”
Now she was a good driver. And like most other late converts, she liked to drive.
“I’ll be okay,” she told Judith. “Polly’s sweet, and it’s what Heather wants. So how could I say no?”
“All right,” Judith said. “Look, I’m a little harassed right now. Can I look into this for you? I’ll find out who’s got the case and see if I can’t get you on an approved list. Is that okay?”
“Okay,” Naomi said. She hung up the phone and called Erroll.
“I’m glad you called,” he said. “I was going to call you.”
“You always say that,” she observed. “But you never do.”
He paused. She could imagine him frowning into the phone, completely incapable of response.
“Nelson, I’m going to have to get out to Heather’s house. I need to pick up things for Polly. Like a crib, you know?”
“I see,” he said. “Well, I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Work on it, will you?” she said, a little irritated. “I mean, this poor kid doesn’t know what’s hit her. And we’re going to move her again. The least we can do is get some of her own things, you know? Like her toys, Nelson.” She waited, listening to the silence. “I’m not going to go around collecting evidence, okay?”
“You’d need an escort.” He sounded wary but relenting.
“Fine.”
“You couldn’t go out on your own. It’s a crime scene, Naomi.”
“Fine. Whatever. Will you please work it out?”
He said he’d try, and Naomi, aware that she wouldn’t get any more out of him, let it go at that.
Judith called her at home that evening.
“You’re on,” she said. “You can visit any weekday afternoon, from two to four-thirty. Just call in the morning and say you’re coming.” She gave Naomi the number. “No tape recorders, no cameras. Any gifts have to be checked by the guards. She’s on a suicide watch.”
“How surprising,” Naomi said dryly. “What she’s been through, I can’t imagine why.”
“Yeah,” Judith said vaguely.
“So … who’s in charge, then?”
“What?” said Judith.
“You know, who’s going to defend her?”
“Well, nobody yet. No one in particular.” Naomi heard her sigh. “I don’t think anyone wants it, to tell you the truth. Most people in the office are just generally freaked out by the whole thing. There are only two other women, and as far as I can tell, they can’t handle the material at all. They both have kids,” she said in explanation.
“And the men?” Naomi asked, her heart sinking.
“Well, one or two seem pretty excited about getting a high-profile case like this one’s bound to be. I mean, already the calls from reporters—they’ve never had anything like it. They’ll probably give Heather to one of those guys.”
It sounded primitive. Naomi winced.
“Hey, Judith?”
“Hmm?” She sounded distracted. “Sorry, I’m rinsing. They’re not hooking up the dishwasher till next week.”
“Well, I was just wondering. What about you?”
“What about me what?” She sounded wary. “Oh no, you mean Heather? Oh, Naomi, no. There’s no way.”
“But why?” she asked.
“Because I’m the new kid,” Judith said, amiably enough. “I can’t just waltz in and ask for the biggest case in years!”
“You can if nobody else wants it,” suggested Naomi. “Or if you’re better qualified to handle it. I mean, maybe you had something like this before. In the city. You said—”
“I said it was happening,” she spoke tautly. “I never said I’d had a case like that myself.”
“But you could say you were aware of cases like that, in your office. Maybe you assisted on them or something, even if they weren’t yours specifically. Couldn’t you?”
“May I ask why you’re saying all this?” Judith said. Naomi heard the water shut off in the background. “Why are you asking me to do this? And are you in a position to ask me to do this?”
“No,” Naomi said. “Of course, officially, I’m not in a position to ask anybody to do anything. I just want to see somebody in her corner, you know? Not somebody who has to defend her but somebody who really wants to see her get what she deserves, and not somebody who doesn’t care about her but just wants their own picture in
the paper. She needs a friend.”
“A lawyer isn’t a friend,” Judith said carefully. “A lawyer shouldn’t be a friend. Sometimes a friend is the worst kind of advocate.”
“Even so,” said Naomi, who couldn’t quite parry that, “she needs help.”
“She’ll get it. In the hospital.”
“Oh, right!”
The silence built between them.
“Listen,” Judith said finally, “I hear what you’re saying. And I promise to think about it. That’s not the same as saying I’m going to ask for the case. But I’ll think about it. Basta?”
“Basta. And thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s unlikely they’d even consider giving it to somebody so new, no matter how many big-city murderesses I’ve defended in the past. And also, I’ve got family stuff I’ve told them about. They know I’m going to be running up and down to Providence a lot over the next couple of months.”
Naomi considered. “Providence?”
“My sister. She lives there. Her son is ill.”
In the way she spoke it, there was finality. A door shut between them.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi said.
“So it’s unlikely. That’s all I’m saying,” Judith said. Naomi heard Joel around her, faintly. They were speaking.
“I understand,” Naomi said. “But thanks.” She said goodbye.
The Sabbathday River Page 24
