by Gregg Olsen
MLI never recovered their glory days, though they still did enough business to employ twenty-two of the prisoners, whose names were drawn by lottery. Janet was one of the lucky few to get one of the coveted positions.
"Janet is afraid she will lose her job doing zippers," Jett told me. “She needs the cash.”
Jett was already working two jobs and sending whatever money she didn't absolutely need for her own food and shelter to the prison for her mother and sister's canteen expenses. The girl simply couldn't work harder.
"How long will it take for her to recover?" I asked.
"Doctors don't know. Hell, the doctors in there aren't worth a crap. They do as little as they can. Mom and Jan tell me that if you are going to prison, you better stay healthy. There is no such thing as medical care for the girls on the inside."
"So I've heard," I said as I switched on the speakerphone so I could neaten up the little piles of murdered lives that deluged my desktop.
"I'm getting ready to write the first chapter and if you're up for it, I have a couple of questions for you."
We talked another twenty minutes or so and I wondered why it was that the nicest people are trapped in families in which there is no hope. No chance even. Why is it that once the ball is rolling, it can never be stopped? Everyone wants to believe that they are in charge of their own destiny, but what of the baby born to a woman like Connie? Jett had barely escaped and the sad truth was that at any time she could be pulled back into the whirlpool like her sister. If the worst that could happen ever did, and Jett committed some airhead crime and was sent to prison, every day could be a family reunion for mother and daughters.
"Your name is unusual," I said, winding down the conversation.
There was a short silence. Then a gusher.
"My mother named me after her favorite singer, Joan Jett. Obviously, 'Joan' wouldn't work. For the longest time I wished she had named me Mariah or something else. Even Madonna would have been better. But she thought Jett was a strong, unique name. She had heard somewhere that strong names make for strong women. She already had a Janet and figured Jett would be better."
I told her I liked her name.
"I think it's kind of stupid," she said flatly.
I tried to convince her otherwise, but she would have none of it. She didn't take compliments well and she didn't know how to give them. She had been isolated from the good that people had to offer. Yet, she was so trusting of me. I liked her right away.
♦
I SPREAD OUT MY NOTES AND TURNED ON my iPod. It was a ritual that had sustained me through my other books. I always typed to the sound of music. I tried to pick a performer whose music fit the milieu of the story I was telling. For Twisted Sisters: Deception, Death, Dough in Dixie, I typed to a Dolly Parton disc that I picked up at Silver Saucers by exchanging my girls' Raffi CDs. I felt country tunes would help me write the story of two sisters from Knoxville who murdered the husband of one because he was lazy, mean and wouldn't buy her a new car. I guess it worked. Twisted Sisters was optioned for a television movie to star post-Clarissa, pre-Sabrina Melissa Joan Hart. The movie, like all the others optioned by some hotshot producer with little money and a gigantic line, was never made.
For Murder Cruise, I typed to Jimmy Buffett, realizing that the Florida Keys was nothing like the Hawaiian Islands, save for the fact the islands—like any—were surrounded by water.
When I wised up and figured out that my books needed more intellectual appeal, I wrote to Musical Jewels: A Golden CD Collection of Classical Composers' All-Time Favorites. I played it on repeat for days on end, hoping the flow of the compositions would rub off on my phrasing.
My editor considered my work-in-progress Fatal Killer my masterpiece at the time.
"The rhythm of the murder scene is outstanding," he said, while I watched Hedda awkwardly dig into her back after a flea. "The way in which you have the girl find her mother with the blood still spurting out of her head was magical."
"Thanks," I said. "I'm trying to reach a different crowd. Don't you think we could do better than 'Fatal Killer' for a title?"
"Marketing says Fatal works. Look at Fatal Vision."
I rolled my eyes at the never-ending list of Fatal titles. Fatal Voyage, Fatal Mother, Fatal Wedding, Fatal blah, blah, blah.
"I'm just trying to lift up the genre," I finally said. "I want it to be better than it has been."
"Better doesn't work," he said. "Better doesn't sell books!"
"I see."
"Besides, wait until you see the cover for Fatal Killer. I think you'll like what the art department is trying to do with it."
"Red and black?"
"No, a dark ebony and mahogany. Very different. Incredibly classy."
When I saw a jpeg rendition of the cover a few days later, it looked red and black to me. I dialed my editor right away.
"It's just your monitor," he said, somewhat impatiently. "It's more cherry than red and more of a warm black than anything. You'll see."
In the end, I counted my blessings. It was not the worst cover I had ever seen. I doubted For the Love of a Baby could ever be topped. It was, of course, red and black. But the art department at Death Penalty Books touted a unique die-cut, pop-up cover that they believed would set a new standard for the publishing world. They were right. It set a new low-water mark.
The cover depicted a tombstone with a child's date of birth and death cut into the cold gray of a granite slab. When the reader opened the book, a die-cut flap popped up like a gruesome jack-in-the-box. It was a little baby, eyes closed, wearing a pink sleeper.
Baby in the grave. Baby out of the grave. Open and close. Open and close.
Whenever I thought of it, I cringed and felt a sense of relief at the same time. It could always be worse.
I settled down and went to work, each day fading into the next as I soaked up the story and planned how I'd make this the best story ever.
♦
Thursday, August 8
THE SUN CAME OUT ON THURSDAY. The girls begged me to take them to the lake and I begrudgingly agreed. I didn't mind going to the beach, as it gave me time to do a little reading and it kept Taylor from killing Hayley and vice versa. We put Hedda on a leash and secured her in the back of the truck. Cecile, from up the hill, had been invited to go along because I knew that with three there would be one unhappy child. With two, there would be an unhappy adult and two unhappy children. Cecile was a good sport and I was glad for the diversion.
We had to be home by late afternoon because Jett was coming for dinner after her prison visit with her mother and sister. I wasn't about to try anything to impress company. I just wanted something good and easy to serve.
"No meat," Taylor advised while I dug through the refrigerator. "I can't have any meat even touching my food."
"Me neither," Hayley chimed in.
With the notable exception of McDonald's hamburgers and cheeseburgers, our girls had emphatically insisted that they were vegetarians. I failed to see how they could justify a burger when its starting place was an Argentine cow.
"Fine," I said, somewhat annoyed. "I'll put the shredded chicken on a separate plate. No meat will touch anything you don't want it to."
"Better not," snapped Hayley, the one who could make my blood boil faster than anyone. She was the daughter everyone said was most like me, though I didn't see it.
"Mom cooks us tofu for our tacos now, you know," Hayley added.
"No, I didn't," I said. "And no, before you ask, I'm not going to do that."
Valerie came home at seven, in time to share a glass of wine and witness a mess in the making. She was hot and miserable from her long commute from the city. The instant I saw her I felt the unmistakable pang of guilt. It had been my idea to pass on air conditioning for the new Honda.
"Who needs it in Seattle? It's an extra nine hundred that we don't really have to spend," I had told her, uttering the famous last words that I had to live with.
Val
was dubious at the time, but she finally consented. The first day she drove it in eighty-degree weather she knew she had given in too soon. She'd have paid nine grand extra for the comfort of an air conditioner.
"It is like a little silver coffee can," she said of her car. "If I were a lizard you'd take a nail and hammer out a row of holes on the top so I could breathe. " Pinkness slowly faded from her face.
Jett arrived five minutes after Val. She wore jeans and a cropped T-shirt. She was cool and refreshed. Her car, it seemed, had air conditioning. “This isn't what I had on in prison,” she said. “No skin can be exposed—except arms, of course. I wore a sweatshirt for my visit with mom and sis.”
Jett brought what she called her "Kids Kit," though she was quick to point out that she was not babysitting that night.
"I thought the girls and I could make some barrettes or charms before dinner."
I called Taylor and Hayley to pry themselves from the TV.
"Do you girls want to make hair bows?" I asked.
“Barrettes,” Jett corrected.
The girls gathered around while Jett cut colorful strips of plastic and melted them with a hair dryer. When it was heated, the plastic could be bent, stretched and twisted. She made two fast friends that night. Taylor made a rainbow clip and Hayley made a cat pin. Val and I even played with the stuff before we all sat down to dinner. Taylor and Hayley gobbled their food, pretended to be bored by the adult conversation.
Val excused them and suggested they watch a movie.
"I brought home two new releases from the RedBox," she said.
I could tell Val liked our dinner guest. She was listening intently and even reached across the table to pat Jett's hand when I returned from getting the girls settled. It was a touching gesture. She had never done that for Wanda-Lou.
"Kevin never told me," Valerie said.
"Told you what?" I resumed my seat and pulled out my little tape recorder.
"About her father's suicide," Val said quietly, never moving her sympathetic eyes from the young woman seated at our table.
I was pleased Jett had opened up to my wife. Pleased and surprised. I thought I was the good listener, I thought I was the one who could draw out the most intimate of details.
"We've never really talked about it in detail. Could we now?" I asked.
Jett looked at Val and slowly nodded.
"I don't like talking about it, but if you need me to, I will," she said.
Chapter Eleven
Friday, August 9
CONNIE CARTER WAS WORKING NIGHTS at the Rusty Anchor serving drinks and "hostessing. " She wore a short black skirt and a white sailor top trimmed in blue. Jett was seven and in her eyes her mother was a vision, as pretty and elegant as Vanna White in one of those gowns by Climax of Rodeo Drive. Her dad was a short man with hands like oven mitts and a belly that made the waistband on his Wranglers roll over. Two times. He was a hardworking and sometimes hard-drinking man who never hit the kids. Connie, however, was known to slap them around if she thought they needed it.
"One time," Jett recalled that night in our kitchen, "my mom came after my sister with the electric cord of her curling iron. She held the iron in her hand like a mini-baseball bat and beat Janet on the back of the legs until the welts erupted like tree roots under the asphalt."
Val put her hands to her lips and shook her head. I gently urged Jett to go on. I wanted to know more about life with Connie Carter.
She pushed a dark lock of hair behind her ear, though it was too short to stay in place. She poured milk into her coffee and told Val and me what we knew had to be the understatement of the year.
"We had no money," she said, “and we were fresh out of hope.”
It was true, she explained, the Carter family lived paycheck to paycheck. Light bills were paid just moments before the power company turned off the electricity. A mattress and box spring set was divided into two sleeping platforms—"the softy" and "the hardy," as she and her sister dubbed them. Janet took the softy, leaving little sister Jett with the rigid box springs.
When she was about ten, Jett said her mother left her logger father, Buzz Carter, and took up residence in a second-floor room with a kitchenette at the Seahorse Motor Inn. Connie told her daughters things weren't working out with their father and they needed time apart. The distance would allow them the time and space to see if they still loved each other.
Connie left her girls in the room when she worked at the bar. When the motel manager complained that the Child Welfare people wouldn't take the idea of leaving little ones unattended all night, she took them to the Rusty Anchor and had them sleep in the car until after her shift ended. The girls liked the motel-room arrangement better. It had a television set and two real beds. The fact that it had moth-eaten bedspreads and a toilet that was ringed in a bloom of rust was lost on the girls. Anyone older would have called the Seahorse what it was—a flop house, a fleabag, a crash pad.
For four months, the Carter girls called it home.
According to Jett, her mom had a boyfriend by then and they saw less and less of Buzz. One afternoon Connie sat her girls down and announced that they would never see their daddy again.
"Mom told us he left a note saying he wasn't coming back," she recalled.
Jett remembered how Janet cried and blamed both her mother and sister, making Buzz mad at the whole family. They had been bad. Connie shouldn't have moved away and Jett shouldn't have been born.
"It was two years before I figured out what they were talking about," she said softly, her words growing fainter as she struggled to fight the emotions that she had kept locked away so well. So long.
Painful as it obviously was, I prodded her to continue. I didn't want to force her to reveal more than she was ready to tell. And yet I didn't want to be left hanging.
"What happened?" I asked once more. Val glared at me. Her eyes told me not to push. It was too late.
Tears came quickly, in such a rush that it startled me. Jett got up and took her plate to the sink, turning her back on us.
"Daddy didn't move away," she said. "He jumped off the River Bridge into the Ocean River. His note was a suicide note. This was no, 'I love you', no 'goodbye.' But I didn't know that. I thought he had moved to another town because he didn't love us. I didn't know that he jumped into the river because he knew Mom had a boyfriend. For two years my mom and sister let me think he was still out there."
Val moved closer. "Why on earth did they do that?" she asked, tears now filling her dark brown eyes.
Jett looked out the window, far off into the soft green boughs of the Douglas firs that fringed our property, as though the words she was seeking could somehow be found out there.
Finally, she spoke. "It was to spare me, I guess. That's what they told me. To spare me."
"How did they tell you?" I cut in, jumping back into the conversation.
"They didn't. My foster parents did. My fourth set of foster parents, to be exact. Written out on my junior high enrollment papers after my father's name was 'deceased'."
She studied our reactions before continuing.
"I asked the snippy woman, who told my caseworker she loved children—of course, what she really loved was the money from the state—what gives, and she looked at me and said, 'Didn't your mommy tell you?'"
Jett Carter had never thought of her mother as the mommy type, but she resisted the temptation to say so.
"'Honey,'" Jett recalled, mimicking the singsong voice of her foster mother, "'your father's dead. He jumped off the bridge.' God, I can still see him drunk, stumbling against that railing, throwing out his arms to stop himself—I mean, uh, that's how I always pictured it, you know, in my nightmares. " She looked up at us, as if suddenly breaking out of a trance, or coming to the surface after swimming deep under water, and for just a second she looked so hateful that I took two steps back.
Val and I were breathless. The words shocked. This girl had been through a nightmare that was inconceivable.
She was telling her story so calmly, so serenely, I knew she had told it before. She had talked it out; she had worked it out.
"I started to cry and the woman told me to let it all out. Instead I gave her the finger and ran up to the room I shared with another foster kid. In fifteen minutes, I was out of there. Mom and Janet had their own apartment then and by the time I got to their place, the foster mother had already called."
"I didn't think there was supposed to be any contact between parents and foster parents," I said.
"There isn't, but Timberlake is such a small place... that particular foster mother knew Mom from the Rusty Anchor. She and her husband used to come in to play pull tabs and drink beer. Anyway, Mom met me at the door and gave me the line about wanting to spare me. It took me years to forgive her for that."
♦
VALERIE AND I TALKED FOR ALMOST AN HOUR after Jett went home. We both hugged the petite little wisp of a girl. Val and I both knew that by doing so, we had crossed the line from book source to friend. It didn't matter. In the case of Jett Carter, it was the right thing to do. To be unmoved by her lot in life was to have a granite heart. Jett, who we now knew was a surprising twenty-one years old, was a fighter. She might have been on the wrong side of the tracks most of her life, but she still had the desire to better herself. She wasn't going to throw in the towel. Val and I wanted to help her, if we could.
"Think how strange, how tragic it is," Val said as we turned off the living room and kitchen lights and told the girls to go to sleep. "Jett is an outsider in her own family, and has been since she was a kid. Now her mother and her sister are together in prison of all places and she's still on the outside."
It was an astute observation. For Jett, it was just as it had been after Buzz Carter took the plunge off the bridge so many years ago in Timberlake. Valerie was so right. In a family of sour milk, Jett Carter was the sweetest cream. Against all odds, she had risen to the top.
Chapter Twelve
Friday, August 13
