The One-Eyed Judge

by Ponsor, Michael;

  David started fumbling for the button to lower his window. Someone was behind him. The man—like him, wearing a tie—was getting impatient and tooted his horn, but David was trying to get his window down. It was taking forever.

  He managed to shout, “Jordan!,” while the window was half open, but she was picking up speed, and she didn’t hear him. He could see the black Camry, oblivious, still coming, way too late to brake, and Jordan skipping from the wet grass onto the blacktop. He shouted again, louder, “Jordan, watch out!,” and began struggling to unhook his seat belt.

  He had just managed to get one leg out of the car, shouting for a third time, very loud now, “Jordan!,” when the Camry, going at least twenty miles an hour, hit Jordan hard, knocking her down and sending her book bag in a flutter of paper onto the blacktop. The front end of the Camry bumped up over her, leaving one twisted, very skinny child’s leg sticking out at an angle from behind the front left tire. The tire itself and part of the fender had blood on it. He could see the dark spatter of it clearly. Barely able to breathe, he began running.

  Except, it didn’t happen. It only happened like that in his imagination and not, this time, in real life. In fact, at the last moment, Jordan saw the Camry, squealed, and jumped back. The Camry came to an abrupt halt, rocking forward on its suspension but not skidding. It might not have been going as fast as David had feared.

  The driver leaned out the window and called, “Sorry, Jordan!”

  Jordan waved. “It’s okay, Ms. Anderson!” Ms. Anderson waited as Jordan crossed the curving drive and dashed into the school. The doors closed behind her. David stepped back into his car, waved apologetically to the man behind him, and slowly drove off.

  A short distance from the school, David pulled off onto a wide shoulder on the edge of one of Amherst’s conservation areas. He sat for several minutes, catching his breath. The rain began to let up, just misting the windows. The car engine purred, and the wipers plodded back and forth.

  Something had happened while David wasn’t looking. He’d accepted early on, after Lindsay and Jordan came to live with him, that, if the situation required it, he would be obligated to give his life for them, the way poor Professor Cranmer had given his for Ethan and Claire. He wouldn’t enjoy doing it, and he would be very frightened, but if the occasion arose where it was necessary, he would have the duty to do it. What he hadn’t known was that this would be the least of the demands on him.

  Getting killed for Lindsay or Jordan had the virtue of being unlikely and, if it happened, potentially noble. When he imagined, for example, throwing his body in front of a train to save Jordan, it made him feel sort of exalted, as though he would still be around afterward to congratulate himself and join in the general applause. Dying to save a small child like Jordan would, of course, probably make him feel better than dying to save an adolescent like Lindsay. Thinking of this, David smiled and rubbed the area under his eye. If he sacrificed his life for Lindsay, she’d probably just be annoyed.

  Anyway, the problem with children was not an unlikely tragic gesture like this, but the inevitable, ignoble daily challenges—situations that regularly left him feeling helpless and stupid, dinners that nobody liked, wise observations or jokes of his, or attempts to introduce interesting topics of conversation that only provoked embarrassed side glances and silence. Mysteries he’d never plumb. He hadn’t foreseen how skepticism about, and even scorn for, elders could be part of a child’s process of maturation. Worst of all, the dirty little secret, which nobody told him, was that it was not possible to construct shields around children without unpeeling many of his own protective coverings—camouflage he’d been stitching together to protect himself since before he hit puberty. Now there were big holes in it.

  Some days, he didn’t even want to come home after work. He wanted to detour to a nice restaurant, maybe call Claire, have a couple glasses of wine, eat seafood, and let the girls fend for themselves for once. But when these fantasies arose, he immediately pictured Lindsay saying something unkind to Jordan and making her cry, or someone leaving a burner on, or forgetting to feed Marlene, or some darn thing, and he would end up hurrying home.

  His old life was gone, and he was trapped. Even when the girls went back to Washington, it would not be over. If Ray mistreated or neglected them, he would hear it in their voices when he called on the phone—or he would feel it immediately when he visited—and his urge to bring them back to Amherst would be unbearable. Even if Ray managed with the girls somehow, part of David would be worrying about them until the day he died.

  Soon, he could see, he and Claire would be starting their own endless journey down this path. Something dangerous had happened. David no longer worried about being a dad. He already was one.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For more than thirty years, my position as a federal judge has placed me within a small cohort of people permitted to view child pornography legally—provided, of course, that the viewing occurs only in the context of a criminal prosecution. I wish I had never had this dubious privilege. The heartbreaking images one is required to examine linger in the mind, offering evidence of our species at its worst.

  Defendants charged with these offenses vary greatly. They include vicious, unrepentant predators; outwardly upstanding citizens, otherwise law-abiding, drawn to a repulsive late-night obsession; pathetic loners, sometimes victims of abuse themselves; and teenagers or students trolling the Internet out of morbid curiosity. This novel, including the chat-room material, draws from my experience with these cases in federal court, but it does not track any specific case or defendant I handled. None of the characters in the story is modeled on any particular person.

  It is important to underline as well that, though the story refers to the “Town of Amherst” and “Amherst College,” and draws certain details of setting from both, the two are highly fictionalized. I could have concocted others names—Elm City or Norwottuck College or something—but the transparency of the ruse might have suggested that the book had some real-life events it had to obscure. It doesn’t. My fondness for my hometown and, in particular, for Amherst College, a dynamic and courageously innovative institution, is enormous. Crimes like the ones described in this novel occur often, but not, up to now, in the town or at the college, so far as I know.

  Finally, I must beg pardon if this story leads readers down some of the darker passages that judges routinely travel. It is not easy to write or to read about child sexual abuse. It is not easy to talk or even to think about it. On the other hand, we are learning that silence is false consolation and does little to help.

  Michael A. Ponsor, U.S.D.J.

  Springfield, Massachusetts

  January 21, 2017

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It might be said, as with so many things, that it takes a village to write a novel. I am so thankful for the support of friends during this journey, including Ted and Esther Scott, Peter Shaw, Phyllis Joachim, Randall Paulsen, Sally Bowie, Brian Fay, Julie Perkins, Jennifer Kaplan, and Elizabeth Collins.

  I am particularly grateful to my dear, lifelong friend, the superb poet Ellen Bass, whose line editing and insights took the early draft to another and finer level. The excellent writer, friend, and neighbor John Katzenbach also looked over the manuscript; his firmly grounded observations were very helpful and much appreciated.

  My children, Anne and Joseph Ponsor, also offered helpful, very practical advice on points that their generational niche gave them special purchase on. From a loftier vantage, my parents, Ward and Yvonne Ponsor—still amazingly alive and kicking at ninety-six and ninety-three—and my sister, Valerie Pritchard, patiently listened to me, offered helpful perspective, and provided continuous encouragement.

  Special thanks go to my fellow judges who read the draft, including my former boss and now dear friend, Senior Judge Joseph L. Tauro; Chief Judge Patti B. Saris; Senior Judge Rya Zobel; and Judge William G. Yo
ung. My friend and colleague Judge Denise Casper, in particular, made several very insightful suggestions that I have adopted and that significantly improved the narrative. The warmth of this collegial spirit in our court has been a strong and positive force in my life for more than thirty years, including in my writing. No one, in all of history or on any known planet, has had better men and women to work with.

  I have a deep feelings of appreciation for the attorneys who have appeared before me. Because I sit in a rather small community, in an essentially one-judge court, many of these lawyers have appeared before me numerous times over many years. For virtually all of them, I have not only great respect, but also real fondness. They are good people. My respect for the handful of assistant U.S. attorneys who have tried cases in front of me over the years is especially profound. Their work is morally challenging, and a conscientious AUSA can do as much to improve the quality of justice as any defense attorney or judge, often more. Prosecutors who handle child pornography cases carry an especially heavy emotional burden. I must emphasize than none of them would have made the mistakes that the inexperienced AUSA Campanella made in this book.

  All the people at Open Road Integrated Media have been extraordinarily good at what they do and terrific to work with. From this group, I am most especially grateful to David Adams and Colleen Lindsay, for their energy, kindness, and competence, and to founder Jane Friedman, whose wisdom and experience still provide the soul of the Open Road operation.

  My literary agent, Robin Straus, has been, as always, fantastic. Her guidance, both on the book and on the complex professional world she navigates so adroitly, has been invaluable. Without her, I would be nowhere. It doesn’t hurt that she is a delightful friend and great fun to be around as well.

  A wealth of material exists on the lonely, whimsical Oxford mathematics professor Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, exploring his paradoxically very conventional and very odd life, his literary efforts, and his obsession, for some years, with very young girls. This is not intended to be an academic work, so I won’t list all the books and articles I reviewed. The most prominent and helpful were Morton N. Cohen’s Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (New York, 1995); Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, St. Martin’s Griffin (New York, 2011); and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass., 2015). I also took great delight in rereading The Annotated Alice, with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, W. W. Norton & Company (New York and London, 2000). Whatever may have been Prof. Dodgson’s demons, he was an amazingly creative storyteller.

  Next to my wife, my closest, best, most essential ally in writing this book has been Maggie Crawford, my editor. Helping anyone write is tricky; helping me requires something well above average. Maggie has been brilliant. She has been gracious. She has been meticulous through years of hard work and the exchange of, by now, an extremely plump file of drafts and emails. Whatever the virtues of this book may be, they have been immensely enhanced by her careful assistance. No words can convey the extent of my gratitude to her.

  Finally, there is my adored wife, Nancy. The fundamentals of the book, its blocks of granite, emerged from conversations with her. Every tap on the chisel from then on has had the benefit of her perceptive mind and sharp ears. Nancy’s generous, passionate spirit dazzles me every day. Whenever I see her, or even think of her, a green light turns on inside me, I smile, and life makes sense.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Ponsor graduated from Harvard, received a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied for two years at Pembroke College, Oxford. As an undergraduate, he spent a year teaching in Kabete, Kenya, just outside Nairobi. After taking his law degree from Yale and clerking in federal court in Boston, he began his legal career, specializing in criminal defense. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1978, where he practiced as a trial attorney in his own firm until his appointment in 1984 as a US magistrate judge in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed him a life-tenured US district judge. From 2000 to 2001, he presided over a five-month death penalty trial, the first in Massachusetts in over fifty years. Judge Ponsor continues to serve as a senior US district judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Western Division, with responsibility for federal criminal and civil cases in the four counties of western Massachusetts. The One-Eyed Judge is his second novel featuring Judge Norcross.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Ponsor

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  978-1-5040-3513-2

  Published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  THE JUDGE NORCROSS NOVELS

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Find a full list of our authors and

  titles at www.openroadmedia.com

  FOLLOW US: