Skin Privilege

by Karin Slaughter

  Ahead of her, the gates of the Grant Institute of Technology stood open. Students walked down the main drive dressed as goblins and superheroes. Halloween had come and gone the night before, but the Grant Tech students tended to-stretch every holiday into a weeklong affair. Sara had not even bothered to buy candy this year. She knew that no parent would be sending their kid to knock on her door. Since the malpractice suit had been filed, the whole town had ostracized her. Even patients she had treated for years, people she had genuinely helped, avoided her gaze at the supermarket or the drugstore. Considering the atmosphere, Sara felt it would not have been wise to don her usual witch's costume and go to the church party as she had for the last sixteen years. Sara had been born and raised in Grant County. She knew that this was a town that burned witches.

  She had spent eight and a half hours in the deposition, every aspect of her life being raked over the coals. Over a hundred parents had signed releases so that their children's medical charts could be combed through by Sharon Connor, most of them hoping that at the end of the day there would be some money in it for them. Melinda Stiles, who had turned surprisingly helpful once the room had emptied of witnesses, explained that this was fairly common. A malpractice suit turned patients into vultures, she explained, and more would start circling as the Powell case proceeded. Global Medical Indemnity would run the numbers, weigh the losses against the strength of Sara's defense, and then decide whether or not they would settle.

  In which case, all of this – the humiliation, the degradation – would be for nothing.

  One of the college students in the street screamed and Sara startled, letting her foot slip off the brake. It was just a young man wearing a Chiquita Banana costume, including blue Capri pants and a yellow tie-top that showed a hairy, round belly. It was always the burly ones who dressed up as women the first chance they got. Would Jimmy Powell have been that sort of silly young man? If he had lived, would he have developed his father's stooped posture and thin frame or his mother's rounded face and cheery disposition? Sara knew he'd had Beckey's quick wit, her love of practical jokes and bad puns. Anything else would be forever unknown.

  Sara took a left into the clinic parking lot. Her clinic parking lot, the one she had bought from Dr. Barney all those years ago, working part-time as coroner so that she could afford the deal. The sign was faded, the steps needed a new coat of paint and the side door stuck on warm days, but it was hers. All hers.

  She got out of the car and used her key to open the front door. Last week, she had closed the clinic, furious at the parents who had signed releases in hopes of cashing in, furious at her town for betraying her. They saw Sara as nothing more than a cash machine, as if she was merely a conduit through which to access the millions of dollars sitting in the insurance company's coffers. No one saw the consequences of this smash-and-grab, the fact that malpractice premiums would go up, doctors would go out of business, and healthcare, which was already unaffordable for many, would soon be unobtainable for most. No one cared about the lives they destroyed on their way to becoming millionaires.

  Let them think about it while they drove an hour and a half over to Rollings, the closest town with a pediatrician.

  Sara left the lights off as she walked through the clinic's front lobby. Despite the chill October air, the building was warm, and she took off her suit jacket and laid it on the front counter as she walked to the bathroom.

  The water was freezing cold straight out of the faucet, and Sara leaned down to splash her face, to try to get rid of the grime that was clinging to her skin. She wanted a long bath, a glass of wine, but these were things that she would have to go home to find and right now, she didn't want to go home. She wanted to be alone, to regain her sense of self. At the same time, she wanted to be with her parents, who were at this moment somewhere in Kansas, exactly halfway in their long-planned quest to drive across America. Tessa, her sister, was in Atlanta, finally putting her college degree to use as she counseled homeless people. And Jeffrey… Jeffrey was at home, waiting for Sara to return from the deposition, to tell him everything that had happened. She wanted to be with him the most, and yet she didn't want to see him at all.

  She stared at her reflection in the mirror, realizing with a shock that she did not recognize herself. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that she was surprised she hadn't developed a stress fracture. Carefully, she reached up and loosened the band, wincing from the pain as roots were yanked out. Her starched white shirt showed water spots, but Sara did not care. She felt ridiculous in the suit, which was probably the most expensive outfit she'd ever owned. Buddy had insisted she have the black cloth sharply tailored to her body so that during the deposition, she looked like a rich doctor instead of a small-town plumber's daughter turned pediatrician. She could be herself in the courtroom, Buddy had told her. Sara could show Sharon Connor her real side when it would do the most damage.

  Sara hated this duplicity, hated having to transform herself into a masculine-looking, arrogant bitch as part of her defense strategy. Her entire career, she had resisted quashing her femininity in order to fit into the boys' club of medicine. And now one lawsuit had turned her into everything she despised.

  'You okay?'

  Jeffrey stood in the doorway. He was wearing a charcoal-colored suit with a dark blue shirt and tie. His cell phone was clipped to one side of his belt, his paddle holster to the other.

  'I thought you were at home.'

  'I dropped off my car at the shop. You mind giving me a ride home?'

  She nodded, resting her shoulder against the wall.

  'Here.' He held up a daisy he had probably picked from the overgrown yard. 'Brought you this.'

  Sara took the flower, which was little more than a weed, and put it on the edge of the sink.

  'Wanna talk about it?'

  She moved the daisy, lining it up perpendicular to the faucet. 'No.'

  'Do you want to be alone?'

  'Yes. No.' Quickly, she closed the distance between them, wrapping her arms around, his shoulders, burying her face in his neck. 'It was so horrible,' she whispered. 'My God, it was just so awful.'

  'It's going to be fine,' he soothed, rubbing her back with his hand. 'Don't let them get to you, Sara. Don't let them shake your confidence.'

  She pressed into him, needing the reassurance of his body against hers. He'd been at work all day, and he smelled like the squad room – that odd mixture of gun oil, burned coffee, and sweat. With her family scattered, Jeffrey was the only constant in her life, the one person who was there to help pick up the pieces. If she thought about it, this had been true for the last sixteen years. Even when Sara had divorced him, even when she had spent most of her days trying to think of anything but Jeffrey, in the back of her mind, he was always there.

  She brushed her lips against his neck, softly, slowly until his skin responded. She smoothed her hands down his back to his waist, pulled him closer in such a way that there was no mistaking her meaning.

  He looked surprised, but when she kissed him on the mouth, he responded in equal measure. At the moment, Sara didn't so much want sex as the intimacy that came with it. It was, at least, the one thing she knew she was capable of doing right.

  Jeffrey was the first to pull away. 'Let's go home, okay?' He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. 'I'll cook supper and we'll lay on the couch and…'

  She kissed him again, biting his lip, pressing closer. He had never needed much coaxing, but as his hand slid to the zipper on her skirt, Sara's mind wandered to thoughts of home: the pile of laundry that needed to be folded, the leaking faucet in the guest bathroom, the torn shelf liner in the kitchen.

  Just the thought of taking off her panty hose was overwhelming.

  He pulled away again, a half-smile on his lips. 'Come on,' he said, taking her by the hand and leading her out of the bathroom. 'I'll drive you home.'

  They were halfway across the lobby when his cell phone started to ring. He offered a shrug to Sara, as i
f he needed her permission to answer the phone.

  'Go ahead,' she relented, knowing whoever it was would just call back – or worse, come find him. 'Answer it.'

  He still seemed reluctant, but took the phone off its clip anyway. She saw him frown as he looked at the caller ID, then answered, Tolliver.'

  Sara leaned back against the front counter, hugging her arms to her waist as she tried to read his expression. She had been a cop's wife far too long to think that there was any such thing as a simple phone call.

  'Where is she now?' Jeffrey demanded. He nodded, his shoulders tensing as he listened to the caller. 'All right,' he said, looking at his watch. 'I can be there in three hours.'

  He ended the call, squeezing the phone so hard in his hand that Sara thought it might break. ' Lena,' he said brusquely, just as Sara was about to ask him what was going on. Lena Adams was a detective on his squad, a woman who made a habit of getting herself into bad situations and dragging Jeffrey along with her. Just the sound of her name brought a sense of dread.

  Sara said, 'I thought she was on vacation.'

  'There was an explosion,' Jeffrey answered. 'She's in the hospital.'

  'Is she okay?'

  'No,' he told her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. 'She's been arrested.'

  THREE DAYS EARLIER

  TWO

  Lena kept one hand on the steering wheel as she scrolled through radio stations with the other. She cringed at the vacuous girls screeching from the speakers; when had stupidity become a marketable talent? She gave up when she hit the country music channels. There was a six-disc changer in the trunk, but she was sick of each and every song on each and every disc. Desperate, she reached into the floor of the backseat, groping for a loose CD. She fished out three empty jewel cases in a row, cursing more loudly with each one. She was about to give up when the tips of her fingers brushed a cassette tape underneath her seat.

  Her Celica was around eight years old and still had a tape player, but Lena had no idea what this particular cassette contained, or how it had even ended up in her car. Still, she popped it into the dash and waited. No music came, and she turned up the knob, wondering if the tape was blank or had been damaged by last summer's scorching heat. She turned it up further and nearly had a heart attack when the opening drumbeats of Joan Jett's 'Bad Reputation' filled the car.

  Sibyl. Her twin sister had made this tape two weeks before she had died. Lena could remember listening to this exact song nearly six years ago as she sped down the highway, heading back to Grant County from a drop-off she'd made at the Georgia

  Bureau of Investigation's lab in Macon. The drive had been much like the one she was making today: a straight shot down a kudzu-lined interstate, the few cars on the road whizzing by eighteen-wheelers and mobile homes that were being transported to waiting families. Meanwhile, her sister was back in Grant County, being tortured and murdered by a sadist while Lena sang with Joan Jett at the top of her lungs.

  She popped out the tape and turned off the radio.

  Six years. It didn't seem like so much time had passed, but then again, it felt like an eternity. Lena i was just now getting to the point where her dead! twin was not the first thing she thought about when j she woke up in the morning. It usually wasn't until later in the day when she saw something funny or heard a crazy story at work that she thought about Sibyl, made a mental note to tell her sister, then i realized a split second later that Sibyl was no longer j there to hear it.

  Lena had always thought of Sibyl as her only j. family. Their mother had died thirteen days after giving birth. Their father, a cop, had been shot dead! by a man he'd pulled over on a speeding violation, i He'd never even known his young wife was pregnant. As there were no other relatives to speak j of, Hank Norton, their mother's brother, had j-raised the two girls. Lena had never thought of her l uncle as family. Hank had been a junkie during her j childhood and a sober, self-righteous asshole j during her teen years. Lena thought of him as more i like a warden, somebody who made the rules and | held all of the power. From the beginning, Lena had I only wanted to break out.

  She pushed in the cassette tape again, twisted the knob to lower the sound to a low, angry growl.

  I don't give a damn about my bad reputation …

  The sisters had sung this as teenagers, their anthem against Reece, the backwater town they lived in until they were old enough to get the hell out. With their dark complexions and exotic looks that came courtesy of their Mexican-American grandmother, neither one of them had been particularly popular. Other kids were cruel, and Lena 's strategy was to take them on one by one while Sibyl kept to her studies, working hard to get the scholarships she needed to continue her education. After high school, Lena had spun her wheels for a while then entered the police academy, where Jeffrey Tolliver plucked her from a group of recruits and offered her a job. Sibyl had already taken a professorship at the Grant Institute of Technology, which made the decision to accept the job that much easier.

  Lena found herself thinking about her first weeks in Grant County. After Reece, Heartsdale had seemed like a major metropolis. Even Avondale and Madison, the other cities that comprised Grant, were impressive to her small-town eyes. Most of the kids Lena had gone to school with had never traveled outside the state of Georgia. Their parents worked twelve-hour days at the tire plant or drew unemployment so they could sit around and drink. Vacations were for the wealthy – people who could afford to miss a couple of days of work and still pay the electric bill.

  Hank owned a bar on the outskirts of Reece, and once he had stopped injecting the profits into his veins, Sibyl and Lena had lived a fairly comfortable life compared to their neighbors. Sure, the roof on their house was bowed and a 1963 Chevy truck had been on blocks in the backyard for as long as she could remember, but they always had food on the table and each year when school came around, Hank drove the girls into Augusta and bought them new clothes.

  Lena should have been grateful, but she was not.

  Sibyl had been eight when Hank, on a drunken bender, had slammed his car into her. Lena had been using an old tennis ball to play catch with her sister. She overthrew, and when Sibyl ran into the driveway and leaned down to pick up the ball, the bumper of Hank's reversing car had caught her in the temple. There hadn't even been much blood -just a thin cut following the line of her skull – but the damage was done. Sibyl hadn't been able to see anything after that, and no matter how many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings Hank attended or how supportive he tried to be, in the back of her mind, Lena always saw his car hitting her sister, the surprised look on Sibyl's face as she crumpled to the ground.

  Yet, here Lena was, using up one of her valuable vacation days to go check on the old bastard. Hank hadn't telephoned in two weeks, which was strange. Even though she seldom returned his calls, he still left messages every other day. The last time she had seen her uncle was three months ago, when he'd driven to Grant County – uninvited – to help her move. She was renting Jeffrey's house after he'd found out his previous tenants, a couple of girls from the college, were using the place as their own personal bordello. Hank had said maybe a handful of words to her as he moved boxes, and Lena had been just as chatty. As he was leaving, guilt had forced her to suggest dinner at the new rib place up the street, but he was climbing into his beat-up old Mercedes, making his excuses, before she got the words out of her mouth.

  She should have known then something was wrong. Hank never passed up an opportunity to spend time with her, no matter how painful that time was. That he had driven straight back to Reece should have been a clue. She was a detective, for chrissakes. She should notice when things were out of the ordinary.

  She also shouldn't have let two whole weeks pass without calling to check on him.

  In the end, it was Charlotte, one of Hank's neighbors, who called to tell Lena that she needed to come down and see about her uncle.

  'He's in a bad way,' the woman had said. When Lena tri
ed to press her, Charlotte had mumbled something about one of her kids needing her and hung up the phone.

  Lena felt her spine straighten as she drove into the Reece city limits. God, she hated this town. At least in Grant, she fit in. Here, however, she would always be the orphan, the troublemaker, Hank Norton's niece – no, not Sibyl, Lena, the bad one.

  She passed three churches in rapid succession. There was a big billboard by the baseball field that read, 'Today's Forecast: Jesus Reigns!'

  'Christ,' she murmured, taking a left onto Kanuga Road, her body on autopilot as she coasted through the back streets that led to Hank's house.

  Classes weren't out for another hour, but there were enough cars leaving the high school to cause a traffic jam. Lena slowed, hearing the muffled strains of competing radio stations as souped-up muscle cars stripped their tires on the asphalt.

  A guy in a blue Mustang, the old kind that drove like a truck and had a metal dashboard that could decapitate you if you hit the right tree, pulled up in the lane beside her. Lena turned her head and saw a teenage kid openly staring at her. Gold chains around his neck sparkled in the afternoon sun and his ginger-red hair was spiked with so much gel that he looked more like something you'd find at the bottom of the ocean than in a small Southern town. Oblivious to how stupid he looked, his head bobbed with the rap music pounding out of his car stereo and he gave her a suggestive wink. Lena looked away, thinking she'd like to see his spoiled white ass dropped off in the middle of downtown Atlanta on a Friday night. He'd be too busy pissing his pants to appreciate the gangsta life.

  She turned off at the next street, taking the long way to Hank's, wanting to get away from the kids and traffic. Hank was probably fine. Lena knew one thing she shared with her uncle was a tendency toward moodiness. Hank was probably just in a dark place. He'd probably be angry to find her on his doorstep, invading his space. She wouldn't blame him.