“I thought I’d try the ‘Small and sophisticated’ dinner from Bon Appétit,” he added. “Celery bisque, turkey breast roulade, and pumpkin mousse.” He looked at me hopefully, as if he’d been afraid I might turn him down but would change my mind once I heard the menu.
Warren had taken up cooking after Maxine’s death. He routinely invited people from the neighborhood to eat with him, and sometimes he brought meals to other people’s houses. The sight of the rumpled man in the rumpled clothes carrying a casserole dish was a familiar one on our street. Joe and I had joined him a few times, and after I came home from rehab, Warren had more than once suggested our sharing a meal. I knew he figured it was only natural that two widowed people should do so, but I usually found some excuse to say no.
It had been almost a year since he’d asked, and because I’d been trying to forget how soon Thanksgiving was, his invitation took me aback. I coughed, stalling, trying to figure out how to respond. “I’m not sure,” I managed to stammer, as Abby started to whine on the sidewalk between us. I recognized that my answer was what the kids would call “lame,” but I couldn’t think how to improve it. Just the word Thanksgiving was enough to speed up my breath. That and the fact that I’d wondered, over the past couple of years, whether the conversations Warren always initiated—when we were both outside getting mail from our boxes, or unloading groceries—were an effort to, as the kids would say, “hit on me.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe this was the case, because, well, why would he? I’d never been pretty to begin with, and since the attack, I was even less so. I wasn’t particularly smart or accomplished, and I didn’t have an impressive or lucrative job. Not to mention what had happened in our house three years earlier. Unless Warren was one of those people who got turned on by catastrophe, what could he possibly see in me?
And even if he could see something, did I want him to?
“I’ll let you guys go,” he said, nodding at Abby, who was straining against the leash. “Will you think about it, Hanna? You don’t have to give me any notice—we’ll be here either way.” He put his hand out to touch my arm in good-bye, but I pretended I didn’t feel it and turned away.
After our usual loop of the brook at Two Rivers, Abby trotted me back toward home. But halfway down the street she paused, making the low growl in her throat that meant she was scared of something. “It’s okay, girl,” I told her, trying to sound convincing even though I had no way of knowing if it was really okay or not. Then we heard the familiar sound of Emmett Furth’s motorcycle revving up in his driveway, and he sped past the dog and me, coming so close we could feel the wind and hear him whoop as he rushed by us.
“Goddammit,” I breathed as he moved down the street, but it must have come out louder than I thought, because Pam, his mother, heard me from the curb where she had dragged out her trash barrel.
“You know he can’t help it, Hanna,” she chided me.
She’d been saying this for years, that Emmett couldn’t help it. When he was an eight-year-old getting into trouble for kinking people’s sprinkler hoses and chasing cats up trees, all of us on the block tried to buy Pam’s explanation that Emmett had an “auditory processing problem,” which was the source of all his troublemaking.
But as he grew older, we became more and more aware that he just chose not to listen to people, including his mother, when they were telling him what not to do. And he couldn’t have cared less whether he ruined your yard or terrorized your pet or caused water to back up into your basement. In fact, he always seemed happier leaving destruction in his wake. This was why some people seemed to believe that Emmett, and not Rud Petty, had been responsible for the attack on Joe and me.
I used to talk back to Pam, and let her know when I was angry about her son tormenting Dawn or charging on his bicycle through my garden. But after he set fire to our tree house when he was in tenth grade, I became afraid of him.
During the trial, when Rud’s lawyer proposed Emmett as a possible alternative perpetrator, he cited the fact that Joe had refused to provide a reference for Emmett after he graduated from high school the same year as Dawn and, instead of going on to college, applied for a job at Home Depot. I remember telling Joe he should just go ahead and do it, for the sake of peace with the neighbors. He didn’t have to make Emmett sound like a saint, but couldn’t he just say the kid would probably show up on time and not make any trouble? It had been three years since the tree house, I reminded him. Didn’t he deserve a second chance?
When I suggested this, Joe said, “He burned down our property, Hanna. Do you realize how easily that fire could have spread to our house? If I’d had my way, we would have pressed charges. What possible reason would I have to recommend him for a job?” I quit trying to persuade him, because he was right.
The jury didn’t buy the notion of Emmett as a possible culprit, probably because the defense also suggested that Joe might have been targeted by someone associated with Marc Sedgwick, the former superintendent of schools over in Shelby Falls, whom Joe had helped expose for embezzlement and whose case was scheduled to go to trial a few months after Joe got killed. The defense had no evidence of this, and everyone could tell it was just a Hail Mary pass attempting to put doubt in the minds of the jurors. According to Gail Nazarian, Rud Petty’s legal team “royally fucked up” by floating both scenarios as possible motives for Joe’s murder. She said, “Emmett Furth probably tipped the scales. Without him, we might have ended up with a hung jury.”
Though I knew it was silly, I almost felt I owed Emmett a favor for contributing in this dubious way to the fact that there had been a conviction in my husband’s death. So when Pam told me now that her son couldn’t help it, I only waved at her, and gave her a nod excusing Emmett again, as she turned away from her trash cans and I followed Abby back to our door. I’d fed her but not myself yet, so I settled down in front of the TV to eat a dinner I hadn’t had the patience to heat properly in the microwave.
I wasn’t nearly as particular about what I ate, after Joe died, as I was when he was alive. After certain things have happened to you, you start to feel as if it doesn’t make any difference. No matter how much you want to believe what they tell you, you realize you can’t really keep yourself safe.
The news was about to come on—pirates, suicide bombs, drunk drivers, and stocks going down the drain. Before I could hit the Mute button, I heard the teaser to the top local story: “New trial on tap for so-called Croquet Killer.” Even though I warned myself not to, I found myself peering at the screen, squinting to distort the image a little, when Rud Petty’s photograph came on.
How was it possible that after all he’d done to destroy me and my family, my instinct at seeing his picture was to think That’s a good-looking man?
And could I really blame my daughter, who was so much younger than I, who considered herself ugly and who’d had no romantic experience before him, for wanting to believe that he was in love with her?
After finishing the tepid mess its package called a stroganoff, I picked up the phone to listen to my messages, already knowing, because of what Thornburgh had told me, that at least one of them would be from Gail Nazarian. And there it was, along with requests from still more reporters. I ignored those, and was jotting myself a note to call the prosecutor back (maybe the following week, after I’d figured out how to say, once again, that I couldn’t help her), when I heard a rap at the back door and saw her standing there, peering at me through the pane. It was too late to hide and pretend I wasn’t home. I had no choice but to go over and let her in.
“Ow, shit!” she said, reacting as the door I held open gave off a static spark. She shook her hand a little and added, “I know you don’t want to see me.” In her other arm she clutched a leather briefcase to her side so tightly it might have been a tourniquet preventing her from bleeding all over my floor. “I came by because I thought you might hang up on me if I just called.” She tried to say it in a joking way, but humor was not one of her stre
ngths.
I resisted the temptation to tell her she was right. Once she’d failed in her effort to persuade the grand jury to indict Dawn in the attack against Joe and me, I tried to warm up to her because she was working to send Rud Petty away. But I couldn’t, mainly because I knew Gail believed Dawn was guilty. She did everything she could to get her bound over for trial, but there wasn’t any physical evidence against Dawn, and she had an alibi.
I tried to make my voice light, so she could take what I said as a joke, too, if she wanted. “Don’t you have anything better to do on a Friday night than harass crime victims?”
“Sorry,” she said, sweeping past me into the kitchen, but of course she was not sorry at all. “You really should give me your cell phone number. I might need to get in touch with you immediately sometime, like I did today.”
“I don’t have a cell phone,” I told her. I knew she’d think I was lying, but I didn’t care.
Most of my friends just thought I was a technophobe. The truth was that I didn’t have a cell phone because I grew up with a father who flinched every time the phone rang in our house. Later, after he was convicted of fraud and a few other “legal infelicities” (his lawyer’s words), I understood that this behavior was related to the fact that he lived in constant fear of being found out. Though all of that was a long time ago, I never got over the impulse to cringe at the sound of a ringing phone. So I stuck to my old-fashioned landline at home and used caller ID to screen any calls that came in.
But I wasn’t about to explain any of this to Gail Nazarian. “I know why you’re here,” I continued. “Ken Thornburgh just came by to tell me about the appeal.”
“I was surprised you weren’t there in the courtroom to hear it yourself.” Though Abby was sniffing at the hem of her brown skirt, the prosecutor didn’t reach down to pet her. Gail Nazarian had always looked like my idea of a female lieutenant, with her severe style of dress—always the same cut of dark-colored suit—and the way she didn’t let her hair, which I noticed had grayed somewhat since the end of Rud Petty’s trial, wave around her face as it wanted to. She was short and plump, with stubby limbs and a lean in her walk that made me think one leg might be longer than the other. Her eyes appeared black, and they moved in her face the way a bird’s eyes move, darting sharply to both sides above a beak poised to sense the slightest threat at any distance.
“I didn’t have any reason to be there,” I said to Gail.
“You don’t care that he got a new trial?”
“Of course I care. It’s just that I knew I’d find out sooner or later which way it went. The last thing I wanted was to be in the same room with him again.” I scooped some more food into the dish for Abby and felt happy, as I always did, to see her eat with such appetite. For months after the attack, while I was recuperating in the hospital and she went to a foster home, she ate too little and lost too much weight. Now she was almost her old self again, give or take a few creaks that were part old age, part leftover trauma.
“Well, I came in person,” Gail told me, drawing out her enunciation as if she were speaking to a child, “and on a Friday night, to let you know that I have every intention of putting Rud Petty away again, this time for good.” She would have kept talking, but I held a hand up to interrupt.
“Just a minute. Can you tell me what happened in court?”
She sighed in the weary manner I became used to during the trial. If you had been there yourself, the sigh said, I wouldn’t have to explain it to you. “It was a little complex, in terms of the legalities. But basically, the judge ruled that because of the medical witnesses the defense put up, the nods shouldn’t have been let in.”
The Nods. It was a phrase coined by Cecilia Baugh, in that national crime tabloid she freelanced for, to describe in a kind of shorthand what happened when the police found me beaten in my bed that November morning. I had appeared to implicate both Rud Petty and my daughter when Ken Thornburgh questioned me, before the medics sped me away. My testimony about The Nods hadn’t been heard by Dawn’s grand jury, but the judge at Rud Petty’s trial allowed it under the “dying declaration” rule, which basically says that when you think you’re about to die, you have no reason to lie about who tried to kill you.
But now the appeals court said The Nods had to be thrown out and the trial started over, apparently because—since by the time the trial started, I couldn’t access my memory of that night—Rud’s lawyer hadn’t been able to question me about them.
My chest knew what the prosecutor was asking of me before she even spoke the question, and the knowledge squeezed my lungs to the point that my next few breaths came out in a pant. For three years, there had been no reason for me to try to remember the attack. Not that I had tried; to be honest, I didn’t want to remember. Who in her right mind would?
“I still can’t testify,” I told Gail. “I don’t have anything for you to use.”
She was silent for a moment, and I remembered the way she had, in the courtroom, often allowed herself to pause when she was questioning defense witnesses, not because she needed the extra time, but because it made them nervous; you could see it in their eyes. Even with her own witnesses—including the state police investigator who took the stand to confirm that our alarm system had been disabled by someone who knew the code and then smashed the keypad to make it look like a random break-in—she came off as somewhat hostile. When Warren Goldman testified for the prosecution that he’d gotten out of bed at two o’clock on the morning of the attack and thought he’d seen Dawn’s Nova parked in our driveway, he went on to explain that he’d had insomnia since his wife, Maxine, died. But Gail cut him off. “We’re only interested in what’s relevant,” she said.
In my kitchen she shifted from one foot to the other, and for some reason this simple movement triggered a feeling of dread. “I know you want to protect your daughter, Mrs. Schutt,” she murmured. “I get that. If I were a mother, I’m sure I’d do the same thing.”
“But I’m not ‘doing’ anything,” I told her.
She looked at me long and hard. I could tell she didn’t believe me. “There’s something else you should know.”
There it was, that chill to my neck again. I filed this in my mind as another thing to mention to the neurologist, although I guessed it wasn’t actually a physical symptom.
“They found a cell phone on Rud Petty,” she said. “He hadn’t made any calls yet, so they couldn’t track any numbers. But—well, like I said. I thought you should know.”
She wasn’t telling me this because she thought I cared what Rud Petty did with his time at the correctional facility in the northern part of the state. She wanted me to think that it was possible it had been Dawn he was trying to contact. “How did he get a phone?” I asked, to distract myself from the panic I felt gathering in my belly and threatening to break out. “I thought that wasn’t allowed.”
“It isn’t. But lots of things happen in jail that aren’t supposed to.”
“Well. It’s a good thing they found the phone, then.”
She sighed again, this time so quietly I assumed she hadn’t meant for me to hear it. Then I watched her decide to take the plunge and come right out with what she was thinking. “You aren’t worried he might try to get in touch with your daughter?”
“He won’t,” I said, loud enough that I hoped I might persuade both of us. “She doesn’t want to hear from him. Anyway, even if he tried to, what difference would it make? He’s in jail.”
“You’re a fool if you think he can’t get you from there.”
I swallowed the urge to ask what she meant by “get” me. I didn’t say anything as I watched her face and tried to figure out how much she was thinking about her own reasons for wanting another conviction, and how much she was thinking about me and my safety. She asked, “Where is she, anyway?”
“I’m not sure.” This was true only in the sense that at that very moment, my daughter might have been inside her apartment in Santa Fe or out of
it. But I didn’t have to tell Gail Nazarian that.
“If I find out you’re holding something back, I won’t be happy,” she said, this time making a point of pushing Abby’s snout away. “Look, I don’t actually need you to tell me where she is. My staff can find her. My staff could find the tooth fairy if they wanted to. But it would be better for everyone if you cooperated with us.”
“I am cooperating.” My hope was that if I spoke as calmly as possible, it would infuriate her into leaving. But no such luck.
“We need one of you on that stand,” she said. Then, after a dramatic pause for effect, she added, “Just keep in mind that we always have the option of trying again to indict Dawn.” She took a step back to watch my reaction.
I tried not to let out the gasp I felt. “You can’t do that.”
“Of course I can. It’s not a question of double jeopardy—she never stood trial.”
“So,” I said, wondering even as I spoke whether I should continue, “you’re threatening me?”
She shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it that. Just passing on information. Letting you know what our options are.”
When I didn’t say anything further because my brain had gone on the blink, she thanked me in a tone that said the opposite of what her words did, and told me to call her, please, if something changed—if I remembered anything, anything, that might be of use. “The case might depend on it,” she said. Pointedly, she propped her business card against the salt shaker on the table. I had a half dozen identical cards scattered in my junk drawer.
Lacy Eye Page 2
