Guilty

by Karen Robards

  Which killed her.

  “I suck at basketball.”

  The small voice from the backseat was truculent and pathetic at the same time. Kate sighed again, inwardly this time. After one of the most horrific events of her life, after the terror and trauma that had struck out of nowhere, this was only a small pain. But it was nonetheless sharp.

  “You do not,” she protested loyally, glancing at him in the mirror. He was looking at her in the mirror, too, and their gazes met.

  “I do too.” His voice grew even smaller, and with all the other sounds in the car, she had to strain to hear it. Then, after the briefest of pauses, he added, “Nobody wants me on their team.”

  Kate’s heart broke. He didn’t usually tell her when things went wrong for him—You’ve got enough to worry about, Mom, as he had said on one memorable occasion when she’d asked him why he hadn’t told her that some bigger kids at his previous school were stealing the lunch she packed for him every day—so, since he was telling her this, it must be bothering him a lot. She almost said, Sure they do, because her instinct was to deny the pain in his face, to buck him up, to do what she could to persuade him that he was mistaken. But the thing about Ben was, he was good at spotting bullshit. Especially hers.

  The other thing was, he really wasn’t very good at basketball, or any other sport. He took after her in more than looks: Jocks they were not. He was good at school, especially language arts and math. He was a whiz with computers. He watched the Discovery Channel with the same fanatical devotion some people lavished on sports teams. He loved to read, and one of the reasons his backpack was always so heavy was that he always had a couple of books—the one he was reading at the moment and the one he meant to read next, in case he should finish the first one unexpectedly and be caught unprepared—stashed in there along with his school-work. When he got the chance—before class started, when he completed an assignment early, even at lunch or recess, unless an adult objected—he would pull out his book and bury his nose in it. This tended to endear him to teachers, but to classmates, not so much. Add that to the fact that he was small for his age, shy around strangers, and just getting started in a new school, and it shouldn’t be surprising that he was having trouble making friends.

  Which didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt. A lot.

  How do I handle this? Oh, God, I don’t have a clue.

  “They choose teams?” Kate asked carefully, trying to get a feel for what was actually happening. “In gym?”

  She glanced up in time to see him nod.

  “So who chooses?”

  “Some of the guys.” He shrugged. It was such a masculine-sounding appellation—“the guys”—and the shrug was such a masculine gesture that Kate got a quick, poignant vision of the man he was struggling to become.

  One day. Right now, he’s just a little boy. Desperation squeezed her insides at the thought. A little boy who thinks his mother can make things all better. Only sometimes I can’t.

  Panic tried to rear its ugly head again, but she forced it back. Taking a deep breath, she braked at another intersection, then turned right onto Beech Court.

  “Well, who picks the guys who choose?”

  “Nobody.”

  Of course not. That would be too easy. One quick phone call . . .

  “We have to run laps at the beginning of gym. The first four guys to finish—they’re the captains, and they get to pick who they want on their teams. We play half-court, with two teams on each end of the court.” He paused. “I usually finish the laps last. Then I get picked last. Shawn Pascal has a broken arm, and he even gets picked before me.”

  Another quick glance in the rearview mirror told her that he was drawing aimless designs in the condensation on the inside of his window.

  “That sucks,” Kate said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “They pick their own teams. They play in the little gym.”

  “We should practice. You and me, kid.”

  “Mom, you suck at basketball. You know you do.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t practice. We could both get better.”

  Ben snorted. “Like that would help. Anyway, I hate basketball.”

  Kate eyed her son in the mirror.

  “I bet you’re one of the best readers in your class.”

  “Like anybody cares about that.”

  “I do. And I bet your teacher does, too.”

  Ben snorted again.

  “We have a basketball net over the garage. You could practice in the driveway.”

  “I don’t want to practice. I told you, I hate basketball.

  Look, just drop it, okay?”

  Kate pressed her lips together, swallowing her tendency—which Ben frequently pointed out—to worry subjects to death, as their house came into view on the left. This was, for Philly, one of the newer suburbs, a grid of carefully laid-out streets punctuated by strip malls not too far from I-95 and the Delaware River. It was convenient to her job, with good schools and very little crime. Most of the houses dated from the fifties and sixties. They were either small Cape Cods or modest split-levels, tucked in side by side with postage stamp-sized front yards. Lights were on in a few windows up and down the street—this was a family neighborhood, and several of the mothers stayed home with their kids—but their own house was quiet and dark. It was a pretty little Cape Cod with gray-painted brick and black shutters and two picturesque gables. Right now, rain pelted the tall pin oak by the sidewalk that was just starting to turn red and the smaller, glossily green holly by the front porch and rolled off the black shingle roof to cascade like a waterfall onto the neat line of round bushes that hugged the front of the house.

  Kate looked at the overflow in dismay. Clearly the gutters needed to be cleaned. She had never leased a house before; was that a job for her, or for the landlord?

  File that under one more problem to worry about later.

  As they drove up the driveway, Kate pressed the garage-door opener and the sound of water spilling over the gutters was drowned by the growl of the garage door rolling up. Of all the things she liked about this house, and there were many, the attached garage had to be right up there at the top of the list. For years she’d had to park on the street, and she and Ben, along with whatever packages, groceries, backpacks, or anything else they needed to transport, had had to struggle through everything the weather cared to throw at them to get inside. Driving into a garage, even a small, cluttered, one-car garage without an overhead light, felt like a real luxury.

  If I don’t do what Mario wants, we’ll lose the house. I’ll lose my job and my freedom. Maybe even my life. And Ben. I would lose Ben.

  Her heart clutched at the thought.

  She parked in the garage and pressed the button so that the garage door would go down. As it did, her gaze slid sideways to the lone basketball and kickball in a plastic crate near the trash cans. Maybe she could . . .

  “Mom?” Ben’s voice sounded a little louder now that she had turned off the car. “Who would take care of me if something happened to you?”

  The garage door met the concrete floor with a metallic clank. Kate sat in the gloomy, musty-smelling darkness for a second with her hands still curled around the wheel.

  The question struck icy terror into her soul.

  Because today it was just too close to home.

  She knew why he asked, of course. He had seen parts of what had happened at the Criminal Justice Center on TV. No doubt they had talked about the dead judge, the dead deputies, the dead, period. She only hoped he hadn’t seen much of it. She was going to have to talk to him about it, to explore what he knew and thought and feared, to tell him an edited version of how she had been caught up in the horror, sometime within the next few hours, because if she didn’t, someone at school almost certainly would. But not yet. She just could not face it yet.

  She was still too shattered.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me,”
she said firmly, and got out. Ben followed suit, and they went into the house. The garage opened into the kitchen, with its cheerful yellow cabinets and white Formica countertops. The appliances were white, too. They had come with the house, so they weren’t new, but they worked, and that was all Kate asked of them. On the far side of the refrigerator, a door led out into the small, fenced backyard. The middle of the room was dominated by a round maple table with four chairs. It was, like most of the rest of her furniture, secondhand.

  She flipped on the light. There were dishes in the sink from breakfast—she’d been too rushed that morning to load the dishwasher—and a few Cheerios were scattered across the scuffed hardwood floor. Upstairs, the beds weren’t made. A couple of loads of laundry waited to be done in the basement.

  So Supermom she wasn’t. She was trying.

  “You hungry?” she asked, as Ben dropped his backpack on the table.

  “No.” Then he flashed her a cheeky grin. “I just threw up, remember?”

  “I remember.” Her tone was dry, and she aimed a not-entirely-playful swat at his backside. He dodged, grinned at her, then vanished into the living room. She called after him: “No more faking sick, understand?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  I should probably ground him or something, just so he knows I really mean it.

  But she was so relieved to see him looking more cheerful that she dismissed the thought almost as soon as she had it. Then she found herself worrying that a more experienced mom would probably be stricter about discipline, and gave it up.

  Like the overflowing gutters, Ben faking sick was the least of her problems at the moment.

  Fear twisted inside her.

  What am I going to do?

  But she was hideously, horribly afraid she already knew the answer. Ben’s question about who would take care of him if something happened to her had crystallized the situation for her.

  To hell with ethics and morals and personal integrity and criminal liability. Unless she had some kind of brainstorm within the next few hours and saw some way out that hadn’t yet occurred to her, she was going to do just exactly what Mario had told her to do. Dance with the devil, just this once, and get him off her back and out of her life.

  There simply wasn’t any choice.

  For Ben’s sake.

  And never mind that her heart pounded and her pulse raced and she got all light-headed at the thought.

  While Ben headed upstairs to his favorite sanctuary, his bedroom, Kate called the office. Her administrative assistant, Mona Morrison, a forty-one-year-old recently divorced mother of a college-age daughter, answered.

  “Oh my God, Kate, where are you? Bryan—the police—a couple of reporters—everybody’s been calling, looking for you. Are you all right? What happened?” It was clear from Mona’s tone that she was desperate to know all.

  “I’m fine. Ben got sick at school, so I had to go pick him up. I’m at home now.”

  “What do you mean, you’re fine?” Mona screeched.

  “There’s no way. You were taken hostage. You got hold of a gun and killed the guy to get free. The story’s all over TV. How can you be fine?”

  I can’t handle this now. Then came the corollary thought: I have to handle it.

  “I really am,” Kate insisted, even as her heart sank at the idea that her lie was already being broadcast all over the city. “And Ben really is home sick. I just need some time to decompress, so I’m taking the rest of the day off. Tell everybody I’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  Kate didn’t give Mona time to protest any further.

  She hung up and walked into the living room. The curtains were open, and through the wide front window she saw that the waterfall thing was still happening.

  I’m looking at the back side of water here, she thought with what even she recognized was a sad attempt at mood-lightening humor, and moved to close the draperies, which were a heavy faux silk in a rich tan color (another eBay special, of which she was particularly proud; curtains cost a fortune). A large brown-and-tan plaid couch (courtesy of Goodwill), a gold, plush rocking recliner (consignment store), matching oak coffee and end tables (yard sale), an earth-toned braided rug (another yard sale), and a TV on a cart beside the fireplace made up the furnishings. The walls, like all the walls in the house, were white, except for those in Ben’s bedroom, which at his request she had painted a deep blue. For art she had framed some black-and-white sketches of the city, which she had picked up at a street fair early in the summer. The result was attractive, she thought, and not too feminine, which, as the single mother of an only son, she tried to guard against. Along with a separate dining room, which she had turned into an office so she could work at home, a tiny half-bath squeezed in under the stairs, the entry hall, and the kitchen, that was the entire ground floor of the house.

  With the draperies closed, the room was dark. Kate switched on one of the brass lamps that graced the tables on either side of the couch, then looked at the TV. For a moment she simply stood there, undecided, then shook her head: Right now she didn’t want to know.

  Instead, she went upstairs to take a shower.

  When she came down again some half an hour later, a little warmer and a whole lot drier but still as sick inside as before, fixing lunch for Ben, who was happily reading in his room, was next on her agenda. Halfway down the stairs she stopped dead. She had finished her shower just in time to watch through the small glass window in her front door as a police cruiser pulled into her driveway.

  Followed a scant moment later by a white TV van.

  Her stomach did a nosedive for the floor.

  Chapter 10

  THE FEDERAL DETENTION CENTER was just around the corner from Kate’s office. She waited after lunch the next day, until after the in-office brouhaha about her and Bryan’s survival and her supposed heroism in killing her abductor had died down a little and everybody was once again hard at work, to walk the few blocks to the tall stone building located right in the crowded, tourist-friendly heart of Center City.

  Stay calm. It’s only your imagination that everyone’s looking at you.

  Or not. Yesterday, stories on the massacre at the Criminal Justice Center had aired on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CourtTV, and all the local channels, and was featured on shows like Nancy Grace and Hannity & Colmes, just to name a few. This morning Today, Good Morning America, and The Early Show had kept America in the loop. The story took up the entire front page in all the local dailies, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tribune. Walking past a sidewalk newspaper stand, she was appalled to see a picture of the post-massacre interior of courtroom 207 splashed across the front page of USA Today. She had little doubt that her own picture would be featured in there somewhere. Luckily, her third-year law-school yearbook photo, the one that seemed to be getting the most play, featured her smiling and with her hair loose around her shoulders. Today her hair was pinned in a severe up-sweep, and she definitely wasn’t smiling.

  The way she felt, she might never smile again.

  Just thinking about Mario sent cold chills running down her spine. She had put him and all the old gang out of her mind years ago—she had never thought to see any of them again. She had never wanted to see any of them again. But like the proverbial bad penny, Mario had turned up, and if she did not meet with him—today, as he had instructed before hoisting himself up into the ventilation shaft and disappearing—he might start making good on his threat to start talking about their shared past.

  The thought made her shiver.

  It was a beautiful crisp fall day, sunny, with a cerulean sky dotted with soft white clouds that soared high above the jagged edge of the city’s skyscrapers. Yesterday’s rain had left behind only a few isolated puddles and some squishy grass. She was walking fast in the black flats she was reduced to because she had abandoned her only black heels in the Justice Center, hugging the charcoal pinstriped blazer she wore with black slacks and a white Hanes T-shirt close bec
ause she was freezing, cold to the bone, which was, she knew, more the result of emotional distress than of the weather. The smell of car exhaust and melted asphalt from some construction work up the street and hot dogs from the stand on the corner hung heavy in the air. She breathed deeply anyway, trying to calm her jagged nerves.

  It was a waste of bad air.

  I feel like a criminal.

  A jackhammer’s sharp rat-a-tat mixed with the whoosh of passing cars and the jumble of voices from the people around her on the narrow sidewalk to create a deafening background noise. It was all but drowned out by the too-fast pounding of her own pulse in her ears.

  Guess what? You are a criminal.

  Kate felt sick at the thought. Catching a glimpse of her own reflection in the window of Ye Olde Candy Shoppe, which was located in one of the dozens of brick-fronted Colonial-era row houses that crowded Juniper, she saw that she was way too pale, with dark shadows beneath her eyes and a grim set to her mouth. She looked like someone who had just received a boat-load of really bad news.

  Wonder why?

  Turning the corner onto Arch Street, she glanced up at the plain stone rectangle of the detention center. The narrow slits in the stone that served in place of windows were the only outside indication that some of the most dangerous criminals in the city were housed inside. When the complex had been built, there had been much controversy about locating a prison right in the tourist-hungry heart of the City of Brotherly Love. What visitors didn’t seem to realize was that Philly was one of the most dangerous metropolitan areas in the nation. The police chief, throwing in the towel over the rising crime rate, had recently called for the formation of a vigilante force of ten thousand civilians to patrol the streets, hoping to stem the rising tide of murders, rapes, armed robberies, aggravated assaults, and various other assorted crimes.