by Joy Fielding
“We wouldn’t show you the picture if there was,” he said.
“How did the girl die?” Donna Lokash asked from her chair. She was staring at the door to the back room, although her eyes were blank, and it was unlikely she saw anything at all.
“Multiple stab wounds,” Officer Gatlin answered, his voice low, as if trying to minimize the impact of his words.
“Oh God,” Donna moaned.
“When?” I asked.
“Probably several days ago. A group of kids found her body this morning in a park in Stuart.”
“But Amy disappeared almost a year ago,” I said. “What makes you think it’s her?”
“She fits the general description,” he said.
“What happens if I’m not able to make a definite identification?”
“We can check the dental records, if there are any,” Officer Gatlin said. “Or we might ask Mrs. Lokash to bring in Amy’s hairbrush, something with her fingerprints on it, lift the prints from that, compare the two.”
The door at the back of the room suddenly opened. A tall, good-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back off his face crossed into the waiting area, a photograph in his hand.
“Oh God, oh God,” wailed Donna, rocking back and forth in her seat, arms clasped around her stomach.
“This is Fred Sheridan, one of the medical examiner’s assistants,” Officer Gatlin said, as I rose to my feet. “Are you ready, Mrs. Sinclair?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied honestly.
“Take your time,” Fred Sheridan said, his voice husky, full of gravel.
Several slow steps brought me to his side. I swallowed, closed my eyes, said a silent prayer. Please let me know one way or the other, I prayed, conjuring up a quick image of the last time I’d seen Amy, enlarging it, focusing in on each facet of her face, dissecting it piece by piece: the dimples on either side of her round mouth, the freckles dotting the sides of her upturned nose, bright eyes brown and wide apart. She was a pretty girl, of average height and weight, which meant she probably thought she was too short, too fat. I shook my head, opened my eyes. If only they knew how beautiful they really are, I thought, thinking again of my daughter Sara, as I glanced down at the photograph in Fred Sheridan’s outstretched hand.
“She was wearing a red barrette,” Donna Lokash suddenly announced.
“What?” I turned away before the picture had a chance to register on my brain.
“When she went out that night, she was wearing a red barrette. It was just a silly plastic thing, a cupid sitting on a bunch of hearts, but she loved it. One of the kids she used to babysit for gave it to her, and she misplaced it, and was very upset, until I found it one morning when I was straightening up her room. It had fallen behind her dresser, and she was so excited when I showed it to her. She was wearing it in her hair, just above her right ear, the night she went out. She said it was her good-luck charm.” Donna’s voice broke off abruptly. She lapsed into silence, stared at the floor.
“Is this Amy?” Fred Sheridan asked gently, his words pulling me back toward the photograph.
The face I found myself staring at was young and round and surprisingly untroubled. No laugh lines interrupted the flat surface of her mouth; no worry lines tugged at the edges of her eyes. A blank slate, I found myself thinking. She hadn’t even had a chance to live. Tears welled up in my eyes. I turned away.
“It isn’t her,” I whispered.
Donna emitted a strangled cry. Immediately, I returned to her side. She grabbed my hand, sobbed against it, her tears lying warm and wet on my skin.
“You’re sure?” Officer Gatlin asked.
“Yes.”
The girl in the photograph may have fit Amy’s general description, but her nose pointed down instead of up and her lower lip was thinner, less prominent. There were no freckles on her ashen skin.
There was no red barrette.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“We keep trying to find out who she is,” Officer Gatlin said, as Fred Sheridan retreated into the back room. “We keep our eyes out for Amy.”
“My daughter didn’t run away,” Donna told him decisively.
“I’ll give you a ride home, Mrs. Lokash,” the officer said.
“I’ll take her home,” I told him.
Donna smiled gratefully. “I’m not sure I can stand up,” she said.
“Take your time,” I told her, as the coroner’s assistant had earlier told me.
“What about you?” she asked as I helped her to her feet. “How are you doing?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
Officer Gatlin held the door open for us, and we stepped out into the sunlight. Into the land of the living, I thought. “Oh, look,” Donna said, pointing to the spot where less than half an hour earlier the mother duck had been sitting with her newborn ducklings. All that remained now were a dozen empty and abandoned shells. Mother and children had vanished. “What happened to them?”
“The mother probably took them over to the pond,” Officer Gatlin said. “There’s another bunch getting ready to hatch around back, if you want to have a look.”
“Can we?” Donna asked me, as if she were a small child.
“If you’d like.”
We said goodbye to Officer Gatlin, and walked around to the back of the building. There, in a shaded corner, sat another large Muscovy duck, eggs fanned out around her.
“Look,” Donna said, pointing. “There’s a crack in that one. It must be getting ready to hatch.”
“Pretty amazing.”
“Can we watch for a few minutes? Would you mind?”
“We can watch.” I sat down on the grass, tucking my legs underneath me, the skirt of my blue dress falling in folds around me. We sat this way for several minutes, as still as the eggs we were watching, neither of us speaking, each lost in her own private world. I thought of Sara and Michelle, how grateful I was for their well-being. I ached to hold them in my arms, to tell them how much I loved them. Had they any idea? Did I tell them often enough? “How are you feeling?” I asked finally.
“I don’t know,” Donna said, her voice as lifeless as the girl in the photograph. “On the one hand, I’m so relieved, relieved beyond words, that it wasn’t Amy.” She sighed deeply. “But on the other hand, it would have been almost a relief if it had been, because at least that way I would have known once and for all what happened to her. There would have been some sense of closure. Not this waiting, all the time waiting,” she said, her voice picking up urgency. “Waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for Amy to come walking through the door, waiting for her killer to come forward. I’m not sure how much more of this waiting I can stand.”
“It must be so hard,” I said, wishing I could say more, say something, anything, that might lessen her pain.
“The trial makes it harder,” she said, and I knew immediately she was referring to the trial of Colin Friendly. “Every day I read about that animal in the newspaper, what he did to those women, and I wonder: Did he do the same thing to my little girl? And it’s more than I can bear.”
I moved to her side, cradled her in my arms.
“Do you know that he breaks their noses?” she said.
“What?”
“He breaks their noses. It’s his trademark. Apparently, he doesn’t always kill them the same way, but he always breaks their noses. I read that in the paper.”
I recalled Colin Friendly’s photograph in the Palm Beach Post. (“What do you see when you look at him?” I’d asked my sister. “I see a little boy who’s been hurt,” she’d said.)
“There are times when I want to burst into that courtroom and confront that monster myself,” Donna was saying. “Demand that he tell me if he killed Amy. ‘Tell me,’ I want to scream. ‘Just tell me so I know one way or the other, so I can get on with my life.’ And then I think: No, I couldn’t bear to hear him say he’d killed her, because if I know for sure that she’s dead, what life do I have
?”
I said nothing. Donna and I watched the mother duck as she stood up and checked beneath her feathers, then repositioned herself slightly to the right.
“I keep thinking back to the night she disappeared,” Donna said. “We had an argument before she went out. Did you know that? Did I tell you that?”
“No, I don’t think you did.”
“I didn’t think so. I haven’t told anybody. I’m too ashamed.”
“Ashamed about what?”
“It was such a stupid argument. It was raining. I wanted her to take an umbrella; she said she didn’t need one. I told her she was acting like a child; she said to stop treating her like one.”
“Donna,” I interrupted, “don’t do this to yourself.”
“But it was the last thing I said to her. Why did I have to make such an issue over a stupid umbrella?”
“Because you cared about her well-being. Because you loved her. And she knew that.”
“Sometimes, when we’d argue, and it was always about little things, never about anything important, but everything always seemed so damned important at the time, I don’t know, maybe because I was a single parent, and I always felt I had to make up for Roger’s not being around, I don’t know, I don’t know what I thought anymore, but I remember … Oh God, do you want to hear something really awful? I remember that sometimes I thought it was just too much for me, that maybe she should go live with Roger, that it would be easier if she weren’t around. Oh God, oh God, how could I think such a thing?”
“Every parent has thoughts like that from time to time,” I tried to assure her, thinking of my mother and Jo Lynn, myself and Sara. “It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t make you a bad mother.”
As if on cue, the egg we’d been watching cracked apart, and a scrawny creature, wet feathers plastered to its tiny, shaking skull, beak spread wide, eyes tightly shut, pushed itself into the open air, impatiently shucking off its protective shell, then collapsing onto its side with the effort, lying prone on the ground without moving.
“Is he dead?” Donna squealed.
“No, he’s just too weak to move around yet.”
Donna stared at the fallen duckling. “I have to know what happened to Amy,” she said.
I said nothing. My mind was on Sara. Children drive you crazy, I was thinking, sometimes even make your life an absolute hell. But once they were part of your life, there was no life without them.
It was this thought more than anything else that persuaded me to accompany Jo Lynn to the courthouse on Wednesday.
Chapter 5
I arrived at the courthouse at just after eight o’clock Wednesday morning. Jo Lynn was already in line, near the front of the long queue that snaked its way through the lobby of the magnificent new peach-colored marble building in the downtown core of West Palm Beach. Jo Lynn had warned me to be at the courthouse at least two hours ahead of time in order to get a seat, but I’d refused to arrive before eight, and she’d agreed to hold a place for me. Cutting into the line, I got more than my share of dirty looks.
“Next week, you’ll have to come early,” Jo Lynn said, “or I won’t save you a place.”
I scoffed. “This is it for me.”
Jo Lynn only smiled, lazily lacing a bright fuchsia scarf through her blond curls, then securing it with a saucy little bow at the side. The scarf matched her lipstick and sling-back, high-heeled shoes. In between, she sported a clinging, low-cut white jersey dress with a thigh-high slit up the side. Standing next to her in my conservative, albeit fashionable, beige Calvin Klein suit, I felt like an old frump, the still-virginal maiden aunt who stands in judgment, showering her disapproval on everything the younger folks do. People walked by, smiled and nodded at Jo Lynn, scarcely aware of my presence.
It was the same whenever I went anywhere with Sara. Men craned their necks to get a better view of my daughter, visually pushing me out of the way. Why was I wasting my money on expensive designer fashion when it obviously didn’t matter what I looked like? No one saw me anyway.
I pictured Sara, still flopped across her bed when I left the house, which meant she’d be late for school again today. Of course, her lateness yesterday had been my fault, she claimed. I was the one who started the fight, who had to butt my nose into her business. I reminded her that her business became mine when I got phone calls from the school. She told me to get a life. Despite the insights I’d received at the coroner’s office, despite my best intentions and newfound resolve, the discussion went downhill from there. It ended with the front door slamming, Sara’s final words reverberating down the otherwise quiet street: “Thanks for making me late for school, Ms. Therapist!”
A man approached, medium height, slightly scruffy in jeans and a lightweight navy sweater. He told Jo Lynn he was going across the street for a cup of coffee and asked if he could get her anything.
“Coffee would be great, Eric,” she told him. “How about you, Kate?”
“Coffee,” I agreed, smiling my appreciation. He didn’t notice.
“Cream and two sugars, right?” he asked Jo Lynn.
“You got it.”
“Just black for me,” I said, but he was already on his way. “And who is Eric?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “Just a guy I met in line the other day. He’s been coming since the beginning of the trial.”
The trial was in its second week. According to news reports, it was expected to last until Christmas. I looked around, casually perusing the faces of the others waiting behind me. Just a bunch of ordinary people, I realized, awaiting their opportunity to glimpse into the heart of extraordinary evil. The young outnumbered the old; the women outnumbered the men; the young women outnumbered everybody, undoubtedly drawn here by the powerful twin magnets of revulsion and attraction. Did being here make them feel safer, I wondered, more in control? Were they confronting their own worst fears, staring down their demons? Or were they here, as was my sister, to ask for the demon’s hand in marriage?
It was the first time I’d been inside the new courthouse, which had been completed in May 1995. My eyes swept the foyer, trying to see it as Larry might, with a builder’s appreciation for detail, but all I saw was a lot of glass and granite. Maybe I was too nervous. Maybe I already regretted my decision to be there.
Eric returned with our coffee. Mine, like Jo Lynn’s, contained cream and enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma. I smiled my thanks and held the undrinkable thing between my palms until it grew cold. At least Eric had remembered I was here.
About an hour later, a large contingent of men and women appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, and swept past us through a set of glass doors. “Press,” Jo Lynn whispered knowingly as my eyes trailed after them, my attention focusing on the profile of one man in particular, thinking he looked vaguely familiar. He was about fifty, slim, maybe five feet ten inches tall, with autumn-brown hair that matched his expensively tailored suit. My gaze accompanied him through the metal detectors and around the corner until he disappeared. “Too bad the judge won’t allow TV cameras into the courtroom,” Jo Lynn was saying, sounding very knowledgeable about the whole proceedings. “Of course, if there were cameras, I’d have to buy a whole new wardrobe. White doesn’t photograph very good on TV. Did you know that?”
“White doesn’t photograph very well,” I corrected, trying to decide whether or not she was serious.
She looked stricken. “Well, who died and appointed you Mrs. Grundy?” We didn’t speak again until we’d passed through the metal detectors ourselves and were in the crowded elevator on the way to the courtroom on the top floor.
I didn’t know what to expect, and I was astonished when I stepped out of the elevator and found myself staring out an expansive wall of windows at a truly spectacular view of the city, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the ocean beyond. A dreamscape, I remember thinking, as I proceeded down the long corridor, knowing I was walking into a nightmare.
The spectacular view continued
inside the courtroom itself, where the entire east wall was made up of windows. The trial was taking place in Courtroom 11A, the so-called ceremonial courtroom, and the largest courtroom in the building. I’d never been inside a courtroom before and was amazed to discover how familiar it all felt. Years of watching fictional trials in the movies and on TV, plus the relatively new experience of Court TV, had rendered the arena more accessible, if not downright cozy. There was the judge’s podium, flags to either side, the witness stand, the jury box, the spectator’s gallery with room for about seventy-five people, everything exactly where I’d known it would be.
“Colin sits there.” Jo Lynn indicated the long, dark oak table and three black leather chairs of the defense team with a nod of her head. “In the middle.” She was already sitting on the edge of her seat, straining her body forward to get a better look, although there was nothing yet to see. We were in the third row of the middle section, just behind the prosecutor’s table and the two rows reserved for the families of the victims. “We get a better view of Colin from this side,” she explained.
I watched the courtroom fill, wishing that she would stop referring to the accused serial killer as if he were a close personal friend. “Wait till you see how handsome he is,” Jo Lynn said. The shoulders of the woman sitting directly in front of us stiffened, her back arching, like a cat’s. I turned toward the back of the room, stared absently at the cloudless blue sky, my face flush with embarrassment and shame.
It was several seconds before I realized that someone was staring back. It was the man I’d noticed outside, the man with the autumn-colored hair and expensively tailored suit. In profile, he’d appeared lean and angular, intense and inaccessible; full-face, he appeared kinder, softer, less formidable. Too many years of Florida sunshine had rendered his handsome face somewhat leathery, and there were crease lines around his full mouth and hazel eyes.
How could I know his eyes were hazel? I wondered, looking away, then immediately back again, staring at him outright, watching in awe as the years fell away from his features, like layers of paint being stripped from the side of a house. The grown man vanished; a boy of eighteen took his place. He was wearing a white track suit, a bright red number 12 stamped across his chest, the sweat of victory from his final race trickling down his cheeks and into his smiling mouth, as he accepted the congratulations of the adoring crowd around him. Way to go, Bobby! Hey, guy, great race. “Robert?” I whispered.
