by Jodi Picoult
What I want to write—what I need to write—is not what the New Hampshire Gazette is paying me for. Sitting down at my laptop, I erase what I’ve written. I start fresh.
VI
Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven’t any memory—have you?—
Of ever coming to the place again.
—Robert Frost, “The Exposed Nest”
Eric
Chris Hamilton’s paralegal spends three days trying to trace the current whereabouts of the neighbors who used to live next door to Elise and Andrew twenty-eight years ago. She sticks her head in the door of the conference room shortly after lunchtime. “Want the good news or bad news?”
I look up over the stack of papers I’m wading through. “There’s actually good news?”
“Well, no. But I thought I’d make you feel better.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“Alice Young,” she says. “I found her.”
Alice Young was a teenager who lived with her parents next door to Elise and Andrew; at one point she had babysat for Delia. “And?”
“She’s in Vienna.”
“Good,” I say. “Subpoena her.”
“Might want to rethink that. She lives with the sisters of the Order of the Bloody Cross.”
“She’s a nun?”
“She’s a nun who took a vow of silence ten years ago,” the paralegal says.
“For Christ’s sake . . .”
“Exactly. However, I did manage to find the other neighbor, Elizabeth Peshman. She’s at some place called Sunset Acres; I assume it’s a retirement community.”
I take the information. “Did you call?”
“No one answers,” she says.
It’s a Sun City, Arizona, address; it can’t be that far away. “I’ll go find her.”
It takes me two hours to reach the town, and there are so many retirement communities I wonder how I’ll ever find the right one. However, the clerk who sells me gas and a Snickers bar knows the name right away. “Two lights, and then a left. You’ll see the sign,” she says, as she rings me up.
From the looks of things, Sunset Acres is not a bad place to finish up one’s life. It is a turn off the main drag, a long drive lined with saguaros and desert rock gardens. I have to stop at a stucco guard booth—apparently these seniors value their privacy. The man inside is stooped and age-spotted, and looks like he could be a resident himself. “Hi,” I say. “I’m trying to find Elizabeth Peshman. I tried to call—”
“Line’s down,” the guard says. He points to a small parking lot. “No cars allowed. I’ll take you up.”
As I walk beside the guard, I wonder what sort of facility wouldn’t allow cars up to the main building. It seems like quite an inconvenience, given the fact that some of the residents have to be arthritic or even disabled. As soon as we crest the hill, the guard points. “Third from the left,” he says.
There are acres of crosses and stars and rose quartz obelisks. OUR DEAR MOTHER, reads one tombstone. NEVER FORGOTTEN. DOTING HUSBAND.
Elizabeth Peshman is dead. I have no witness to corroborate the fact that thirty years ago, Elise Matthews was the drunk that Andrew says she was. “Guess you’re not talking either,” I say out loud.
Although it is beastly hot, there are fresh flowers wilting in pots beside Elizabeth’s tombstone. “She’s real popular,” the guard says. “There are some folks here who never get visitors. But this one, she gets calls from a bunch of old students.”
“She was a teacher?” I ask, and my mind catches on the word. A teacher.
“You get what you need?” the guard asks.
“I think so,” I say, and I hurry back to my car.
* * *
Abigail Nguyen is mixing paste when I arrive. A slight woman with two knots of hair at the top of her head, like the ears of a bear, she looks up and gives me a smile. “You must be Mr. Talcott,” she says. “Come on in.”
When the preschool where Delia went closed down in the mid-eighties, Abigail started her own Montessori classes in the basement of a church. She was the third school listed in the Yellow Pages, and she had answered the phone herself.
We sit down, giants on miniature chairs. “Mrs. Nguyen, I’m an attorney, and I’m working on behalf of a girl you taught in the late 1970s . . . Bethany Matthews.”
“The one who was kidnapped.”
I shift a little. “Well, that hasn’t been determined yet. I’m representing her father.”
“I’ve been following it all in the papers, and on the local news.”
As has the rest of Phoenix. “I wonder, Mrs. Nguyen, if you might be able to tell me about Bethany back then.”
“She was a good child. Quiet. Tended to work by herself, instead of with her peers.”
“Did you get a chance to know her parents?”
The teacher glances away for a moment. “Sometimes Bethany came to school disheveled, or wearing dirty clothes . . . it raised a red flag for us. I think I even called the mother . . . what was her name again?”
“Elise Matthews.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What did Elise say when you called?”
“I can’t remember,” Mrs. Nguyen says.
“Do you recall anything else about Elise Matthews?”
The teacher nods. “I assume you mean the fact that she smelled like a distillery.”
I feel my blood flow faster. “Did you report her to child protective services?”
The teacher stiffens. “There weren’t any signs of abuse.”
“You said she came to school disheveled.”
“There’s a big difference between a child not being bathed every night, and parental neglect, Mr. Talcott. It’s not our job to police what happens at home. Take it from me—I’ve seen children burned on the soles of their feet by their parents’ cigarettes, and I’ve seen children come to school with broken bones and welts on their backs. I’ve seen children who hide in the supply closet at pickup time because they don’t want to go home. Mrs. Matthews might have liked her afternoon cocktail, but she deeply loved her little girl, and Bethany clearly knew that.”
You’d be surprised, I think.
“Mrs. Nguyen, thank you for your time.” I hand her my card, with Chris Hamilton’s office number penciled in. “If you think of anything else, please call me.”
I have just started my car in the parking lot when there is a knock on the window. Mrs. Nguyen stands with her arms folded. “There was one incident,” she says, when I roll down the window. “Mrs. Matthews was late to pick up. We called the house, and kept calling, and there was no answer. I let Bethany stay for the afternoon session of school, and then I drove her home. The mother was passed out on the couch when we got there . . . so I took her home with me and let her stay the night. The next day, Mrs. Matthews apologized profusely.”
“Why didn’t you call Bethany’s father?”
A breeze blows a strand of Mrs. Nguyen’s hair from her bun. “The parents were going through a divorce. A week before, the mother had specifically asked us not to allow her husband to have any contact with the child.”
“How come?”
“Some threat he’d made, if I remember right,” Mrs. Nguyen says. “She had reason to believe that he might take Bethany and run.”
* * *
Andrew looks thinner; although that might just be the baggy prison uniform. “How’s Delia?” he asks, like always. But this time, I don’t answer. My patience is wound too tight.
I stand with my hands in my pockets. “You told me that the kidnapping of your child was a spur of the moment thing, a knee-jerk reaction to a bad situation. You told me that when you went home to get Delia’s blanket, you saw your ex-wife passed out and knew it was time to take matters into your own hands. Did I get that right?”
Andrew nods.
“Then how do you explain the fact that you threatened to take your daughter away fro
m your wife before you actually did it?” Frustrated, I kick a chair so that it spins across the tiny conference room. “What else aren’t you telling me, Andrew?”
Muscles tighten along the column of Andrew’s throat, but he doesn’t answer.
“I can’t do this alone,” I say, and I walk out of the room without looking back.
* * *
Thirty days before Andrew’s trial, the State notices up its witnesses. I respond like I always do—by requesting the criminal records of everyone the prosecutor plans to call to the stand. This is basic defense law, for those who have no defense: Do what you can to shoot holes in anything and everything the State throws your way.
I get the records in the mail as I am running out the door to the courthouse for a 404B hearing that Emma Wasserstein’s scheduled. Waiting for the judge to receive me in chambers, I open the envelope. Delia doesn’t have a record, of course, so there are only two criminal record printouts. It’s not much of a surprise to find a clean report for Detective LeGrande, the retired policeman who had once been in charge of the kidnapping case. It’s the second report that interests me, anyway—the one for Elise Vasquez. Delia’s mother was busted on a DWI charge after a car accident in 1972.
It’s a felony. It happened when she was pregnant with Dee. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m sure as hell going to try to impeach Elise with that conviction on the witness stand. It’s a credibility argument: If someone’s been drinking chronically, his or her memory recall is even more suspect.
I ought to know.
Emma Wasserstein turns the corner and comes to a halt when she sees me outside the judge’s chambers. “He’s not ready yet?”
I glance at her prodigious belly. “Unlike you,” I say, “apparently not.”
She rolls her eyes. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but we aren’t in seventh grade anymore.”
The door opens, and Judge Noble’s assistant lets us into chambers. “Very cranky,” she warns under her breath. “Someone hasn’t had his protein today.”
We retreat to our seats and wait for Judge Noble to let us know it’s all right to speak. “Ms. Wasserstein,” he sighs, “what is it this time?”
“Your Honor, I’d like to have a prior bad act admitted as evidence. Namely, the assault conviction of Charles Matthews in December of 1976. It goes to motive.”
“Judge, that’s completely prejudicial,” I say. “We’re talking about a scuffle years ago, one which is completely irrelevant to the charge at hand.”
“Irrelevant?” Emma stares at me. “Did you happen to notice whom your client was beating up at the time?” She hands me a copy of the old assault charge—the same one I skimmed when I got it during discovery, figuring it had nothing to do with this case. My eyes hone in on the victim’s name: Victor Vasquez.
Six months before Andrew absconded with his daughter, and three months before his divorce, he beat up the man who would later marry his ex-wife.
Which, actually, does go toward motive . . . namely revenge, if your wife is screwing around with a guy before you’re even out the door.
The judge gathers the papers on his desk into their file. “I’m going to allow it,” he says. “Is there anything else, Counselor?”
Emma nods. “Your Honor, I think it’s clear to all of us that Mr. Talcott hasn’t noticed up a formal necessity defense. That leads me to believe that he’s going to run this trial as an all-out slander of Elise Vasquez.”
It’s exactly what I’m planning to do.
“I’d like to say on the record that I truly hope this doesn’t turn into a smear campaign of the victim, just because counsel doesn’t have anything redeeming to say about his own client.”
The judge fixes his gaze on me. “Mr. Talcott, I don’t know if they allow character assassination in the courtrooms of New Hampshire, but you can be assured that we certainly don’t allow it here in Arizona.”
“Regular assassination, though, would be a different story,” I murmur under my breath.
“What was that?” the judge asks.
“Nothing, Your Honor.” Andrew is guilty as hell of kidnapping, but there must be ways around that. It’s the way defense law works: You always plead not guilty, when what you really mean is guilty, but with good reason. Then you talk to your client and he gives you details from his sorry life that will win the sympathy of the jury.
Assuming, that is, that those details from your client’s sorry life don’t thwart you at every turn. I think back to what the nursery school teacher said about Andrew threatening to take his daughter; to Emma’s smug expression when she handed me Andrew’s old assault charge. What else hasn’t he told me that might screw this case up even more?
“You’ve got thirty days to pull a rabbit out of a hat, Counselor,” Judge Noble says. “Why are you still standing here?”
* * *
When Andrew walks into our private conference room at the jail, I glance up. “Let’s add this to the list of things you ought to mention to your attorney, who is trying his best to get you acquitted: that your prior conviction for a bar fight just happened to involve your wife’s future husband.”
He glances up, surprised. “I thought you knew. It was right there on the record at the arraignment.”
“You feel like enlightening me any further?”
He stares at me for a long moment. “I saw him,” he confesses, his voice cracking. “I watched him touching her.”
“Elise?”
Slowly, Andrew nods.
“How did you find out there was something going on?”
“Delia had drawn a crayon picture for me on a piece of scrap paper. I was hanging it up in my office at the pharmacy when I happened to notice there was writing on the back. I thought it might be something important, so I turned it over . . . it was a letter Elise had been writing to someone named Victor. I was still married to her. I loved her.” He swallows. “When I asked Dee where she got the paper from, she said the drawer next to Mommy’s bed. And when I asked her if she knew anyone named Victor, she said he was the man who came over to take a nap with Mommy.”
Andrew gets up and walks toward the door, with its tiny streaked window. “She was in the house. She was only a baby.” He stands with his hands on his hips. “I came home early from work one day, on purpose, and caught them together.”
“And you messed him up so bad he needed sixty-five stitches,” I say. “Emma Wasserstein is going to use that whole episode to explain why you turned around and kidnapped your daughter six months later. She’s going to say it was a premeditated act of payback.”
“Maybe it was,” Andrew murmurs.
“Do not say that on the stand, for God’s sake.”
He rounds on me. “Then you make up the story, Eric. Give me a goddamned script and I’ll say whatever you want.”
It would be enough, I realize, for any defense attorney: a client willing to do whatever I say. But it’s different this time, because no matter what facade I build over the truth, we’ll both know there’s something hiding underneath. Andrew doesn’t want to tell me more, and, suddenly, I don’t want to hear it. So I pick three words from the quicksand between us. “Andrew,” I say heavily, “I quit.”
* * *
Fitz is trying to make fire. He’s put his glasses down on the dusty ground, and has positioned them in direct line with the sun, to see if they’ll ignite the crumpled ball of paper underneath the rims. “What are you doing?” I ask, unraveling my tie as I approach the trailer.
“Exploring pyromania,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because I can.” He squints up at the sun, then moves the glasses a fraction to the left.
“I told Andrew I quit,” I announce.
Fitz rocks back on his heels. “Why’d you do that?”
Glancing down at his combustion experiment, I say, “Because I can.”
“No you can’t,” he argues. “You can’t do that to Delia.”
“I don’t think it’s he
althy to have a spouse who looks at you and thinks, ‘Oh, right, he’s the guy who got my father locked away for ten years.’ ”
“Don’t you think it’s going to hurt her more when she finds this out?”
“I don’t know, Fitz,” I say pointedly, thinking that this is the pot calling the kettle black. “Maybe she’ll find out what you’re doing first.”
“Find out what?” Delia says, coming out of the trailer. She looks from me to Fitz. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to talk your fiancé out of being an asshole.”
I scowl at him. “Just mind your own business, Fitz.”
“Aren’t you going to tell her?” he challenges.
“Sure,” I say. “Fitz is writing about the trial for his paper.” Immediately I feel like a jerk.
Delia steps back. “Really?” she says, wounded.
Fitz is red-faced, furious. “Why don’t you ask Eric what he did today?”
I’ve had it. First the hearing in chambers, then the argument with Andrew, and now this. I tackle Fitz to the ground, knocking his glasses to the side as we scuffle on the dirt. Fitz has gotten stronger since the last time we’ve done this, which must have been ages ago. He grinds my face into the pebbles, his hand locked on the back of my neck. With a jab of my elbow in his gut, I manage to get the upper hand, and then my cell phone begins to ring.
It reminds me that, in spite of how I’m acting, I’m not some stupid adolescent anymore.
I frown at the unfamiliar number. “Talcott,” I answer.
“This is Emma Wasserstein. I wanted to let you know that I’ll be adding a witness to my list. The man’s name is Rubio Greengate. He’s the guy who sold your client two identities back in 1977.”
I walk around to the back of the trailer, so that Delia won’t hear. “You can’t spring this on me now,” I say, incredulous. “I’ll object when you file the motion.”
“I’m not springing anything on you. You’ve got two weeks. I’ll have the police reports of the interview we’ve done with him on your desk by tomorrow morning.”
