Three weeks and five days from today. She ran her fingers over the embossed text. Drops splashed onto the cardstock. She leaned back against the wall and let the tears come. She hadn’t allowed herself to cry since the night she’d broken up with Jack. Jody’s problems had distracted her. But now she couldn’t help but compare where she was to where she thought she was going to be today. She loved this man. She loved his daughter. She thought she would spend the rest of her life with them—and this made her life finally make sense. She was going to be a wife, and a mother, and live in a beautiful yellow Victorian. The invitation in her hands led to a perfect life, surrounded by love and security. And it was nothing but scrap paper now.
She was adrift from everything that had tethered her for the last few years. And the one thing she’d always counted on in her life—Jody—seemed like a kite whose string had snapped and was flying away from her. Anna felt like she didn’t even know her sister anymore.
She tried to muffle the sound of her crying. How ridiculous to be crying about her wedding when her sister was being investigated for murder.
She tucked the wedding invitation into her purse. She took several deep breaths and wiped her eyes. She went back to cleaning the kitchen. The only way to get through grief was to keep moving forward, hour by hour, tackling one small job at a time until, one day, enough space and time would exist between her heart and the reason for its ache, and she wouldn’t feel it so much.
They worked all day putting things back into place. Jody ordered Chinese for lunch. The plumber came and installed the sink, toilets, and washing machine. By the time the sun was setting, most of the stuff was back in place. They still needed to wash off the black dust that had been left from the police fingerprinting, and the grime from all the police walking through, but at least it felt like a home again.
Jody sank down at the kitchen table, looking exhausted but more comfortable now that she was back in her own home. “God, I want a cigarette,” she said. Anna raised her eyebrows and glanced at her sister’s stomach. Jody sighed and stayed in her seat.
Anna went to the fridge and peered into the take-out containers, wondering whether there was enough lo mein left to provide dinner for two. For three, really. Jody had to eat for two. She scooped some noodles onto a plate and stuck it in the microwave. When it beeped, she put most of it on a plate for Jody, and a small portion on a plate for herself. If there was any left over from Jody, she’d eat it.
She set the plates down, and Jody dug in. “Thanks, Annie.”
While they were eating, the doorbell rang. Anna looked at Jody, who shrugged. Anna went to the door and peered out the peephole. On the porch stood a uniformed police officer and Detective Rob Gargaron, who wore a shirt and tie and a badge on a metal chain around his neck. This was not a social call. Anna opened the door and glared at him.
“I thought you were going to go easy on the house,” she said. “Like a virgin.”
She was surprised by how angry she was. She knew the police were just doing their job. She’d been part of it plenty of times herself.
“I’m sorry,” Rob said. He met her eyes and seemed, for a brief moment, actually sorry. “Is your sister home?”
Jody came to the foyer. “You could have at least left me a toilet.”
“I couldn’t, actually. I was required to search your house and seize anything described in the warrant. A warrant is a court order. So is this.” Rob reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper. He handed it to Anna. She opened it and saw the title across the top: ARREST WARRANT. The charge was first-degree homicide.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Rob said, as he pulled out a pair of handcuffs.
21
There were no streetlights on the dirt road, and the night was as dark as night can be. The Corvette’s headlights cut a small slice of visibility, only lighting up the brush directly in front of the car. My senses were so heightened, it seemed like I could feel every pebble the car went over. Coach put a hand on my thigh and squeezed gently. The world seemed to tilt.
“I love your legs,” he said. “You have the most beautiful, strong sprinter’s legs.”
My breathing came fast and shallow. He slowed the car and pulled onto a patch of grass that was blocked on three sides by trees. He looked at me, then turned off the headlights. The world went black.
After a minute, my eyes adjusted enough that I could see his face ever so faintly, just the vaguest impression of his features. He leaned in and kissed me. His lips were dry and insistent. I was dizzy—partly from everything I’d had to drink, but also because the situation felt so surreal.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. This was everything I’d ever dreamed of. And it was so wrong.
“Coach,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to do this.”
“Shh,” he whispered. He unzipped my winter jacket and squeezed my breast through my shirt. “Be a good girl, now.”
“Stop,” I said. “Please. Let me think.”
He murmured, “You want this too.”
I thought of his pregnant wife. I thought of Mrs. Weiscowicz bringing Mom a casserole. I thought of how I felt at the peak of the high jump. This felt like the opposite.
“It’s not right,” I said.
“No one will ever know.”
“I’ll know,” I said. “I don’t want to do this. Please, Coach. Please take me home.”
I scooched as far from him as I could, till my back was pressed against the passenger door. He was breathing hard as he looked at me. Then he grabbed my legs and pulled me down flat on the leather seat. He angled himself on top of me.
“You called me out of my house in the middle of the night. You made me drive halfway across the county. We’re not going anywhere till we finish what we came here to do.”
He pulled my jeans and panties down. Then he fumbled with his own zipper.
“No,” I said, panicking. “No!” I pushed his chest, trying to get him off. But he was so much bigger than me. It was like pushing a brick wall.
“Shut your mouth.” It was the same voice he used at sports camp when giving an order: Give me twenty push-ups or Take two laps around the track. It was the same voice he used with Devin back at the house. But now it didn’t make me think how much of a man he was; now it just made me fear him. “You know this is what you want,” he said. “You’ve been begging for it all year. It’s why you called me tonight. Now lie back and enjoy it.”
I started to cry. He freed himself from his pants and pressed into my thighs, fumbling to get it in. “No, no, no, no.” I pushed at his chest and hit him in the face. He grunted with pain and pinned my arms above my head. I couldn’t move.
“Please, Coach,” I sobbed. “Please. I don’t want to do this.”
“You trashy little dicktease.” His hands tightened around my wrists. “I’m not going to say this again. Shut up and take it.”
I couldn’t stop crying, so he kept my wrists pinned with one hand and covered my face with the other. He had big hands that covered my mouth, nose, and eyes. I couldn’t yell anymore. I couldn’t see, or breathe, or talk. And then he tore inside of me.
I was stunned by the pain. Before that night, I hadn’t gone past second base. I stilled from the shock of how much it hurt.
He liked that I stopped moving. “There’s a good girl,” he said. He took his hand off my face and went back to just pinning my wrists. I sucked in a rasp of air as he started to pump. He kept going for a long time. My head banged rhythmically against the car door. Tears streamed down my temples, soaking my hair and the leather seat beneath. I looked at the stars through the windshield. Then the glass fogged up, and all I could see was blurry black nothing. I closed my eyes and waited for it to end. Finally, he shuddered and collapsed on top of me. I don’t know how long he lay there. It seemed like forever.
When he sat up, I expect the world w
as pretty much the same for him as it had always been, only he’d just gotten laid. For me, I sat up into a whole different world, a world where I wasn’t in control of my own body, a world where a person I trusted had hurt and violated me. My whole body shook as I pulled up my pants and zipped up my winter coat. I sat there, looking at the fogged windshield and trying to get used to the dizzying feeling of existing on a different planet.
“I’m sorry it got a little rough there at the end,” Coach said, refastening his own pants. “Next time, don’t make it so hard. This can be a beautiful thing.”
Next time? Beautiful? These were words that had a real meaning in the English language, but in this context, I couldn’t process them in any logical way. He might as well have been speaking Chinese.
He started the car, three-pointed it around, and drove. I couldn’t stop shaking. We didn’t talk. When we got to my apartment building, he pulled to the curb.
He patted my leg, all friendly, like he hadn’t just raped me. “Have a good night,” he said. “Come to my office after school next week, and we’ll work on your high jump.”
I fled from the car and stumbled into the building. I could hear the Corvette zipping away. I ran up the two flights to our apartment, which was dark and empty. Mom was working the graveyard shift at the hospital. I turned on the TV, a rerun of The Simpsons, just so there’d be some noise to compete with the screams echoing through my head. I stripped off my clothes and left them in a pile on the bedroom floor. I looked at your empty bed and imagined telling you what had happened, and I started crying again.
I went to the shower and turned on the water as hot as I could stand. The mirror fogged up, like the windows at the house party, like the windshield of Coach’s car. I stepped under the steaming stream of water and stood there even though the water scalded my skin pink. I must have been in there for a while. The water turned lukewarm, and then cold, and even then, I still stood there, shivering.
22
The uniformed officer handcuffed Jody’s wrists behind her as Rob recited her rights. Jody looked terrified. Rob wore the steely expression of a man who believed in the righteousness of his actions.
Anna felt dizzy. She had seen this scene dozens of times before. It usually brought relief and the satisfaction that a bad guy was being taken off the street. Now it was all wrong. This was her sister. This was a good guy. She had to stop this.
“Wait,” Anna said. “It was Wendy. They were splitting up. She has to be the one who killed him.”
“Thanks for the info, but that’s not going to work for you,” Rob said. “Cell-phone records and hotel receipts show that Wendy Fowler was a hundred miles away, with family in Ohio, when the coach was killed.”
The officers led Jody out of the house. Anna ran after them. “Rob, does she really need to be handcuffed?”
“Procedure, sorry.” He opened the squad car door and put his hand on Jody’s head to guide her to sitting in the backseat.
“Jody, don’t say anything, to anyone!” Anna’s voice was an octave higher than usual. She recognized the tone as panic. “Not to the police, not to your cellmates, nobody. Do you understand?”
Jody nodded. Her eyes were wide with fear.
“As her lawyer, I am invoking her right to remain silent and to be represented by an attorney,” Anna told Rob. “No one is to ask her questions without me present.”
“You know you’re not her lawyer.” He got into the car. “She can talk to us if she wants to.”
She opened her mouth to tell him that Jody was pregnant. They might treat her better in lockup if they knew her medical condition. Then she paused. She didn’t know who the father of the baby was. What if it was the coach? Someone might wonder if Jody fought with the coach because she was pregnant. Anna had wondered it herself. She closed her mouth.
The cruiser backed out of the driveway. Her sister looked out the window at her. Anna held up her hand, not so much to wave, but as if she had some magical powers she could conjure to stop this from happening.
Anna watched the car drive off. She’d known this might be coming, but actually seeing her sister behind the cage of a police car was shocking. Whatever Jody had done, she was the only family Anna had.
She shook herself, strode back into the house, and grabbed her cell phone. She had to punch in the passcode three times before she got it right. She forced herself to stop and take a deep breath. She was no good to Jody if she was a shaky mess. She had to organize her thoughts.
First, if she was actually going to represent her sister in open court, she needed to get permission from the Department of Justice. She hadn’t filed anything with DOJ so far, because she didn’t want her bosses to know about this unless it was absolutely necessary. There was no avoiding it now. She pulled up an e-mail from her Drafts folder and hit Send.
This wasn’t the sort of request where she could wait for a return e-mail. It was 6:35 P.M. so there was a chance that some supervisors would still be in the office. She dialed her phone. Carla didn’t answer, and neither did the ethics adviser. But the U.S. Attorney himself picked up. “Marty Zinn,” he answered. Anna was surprised to have gotten straight through.
Marty was the head of the entire office of 350 prosecutors. He was a mild-mannered guy, whom she didn’t know well. The office was so big that the boss had very little contact on anything but the most high-profile cases. Plus, Marty came from the civil side of the office, and mostly deferred to Jack Bailey, his Homicide chief, on criminal issues.
After a minute of small talk, she told Marty why she was calling. “I have to ask a big favor. My sister has been charged with a violent crime in Michigan—by the State of Michigan, so the prosecutor is a separate sovereign, not our office. It’s a terrible mistake, and I’d like to represent her. The Code of Federal Regulations says this is doable, but I understand I need your permission first. I’m calling to ask for your permission.”
“I see. Well, in situations like this, there’s a memo for you to fill out . . .”
“I sent it to you a couple minutes ago.”
“Ah.” She heard his keyboard clicking. “Indeed you did. First-degree homicide. That is a violent crime.”
“She didn’t do it.” Anna’s voice sounded so certain, she almost convinced herself. “And she needs a good lawyer.”
“But how will you continue to do your own work at the office, while representing your sister in Michigan?”
“I was hoping to transfer to the Appellate section for the duration of my sister’s case. You’ll still have my full dedication and effort, but I could research and write the briefs from here in Michigan. I understand that a few prosecutors have telecommuted this way before, for example, while their spouse took a job in Europe or on a military base out of state.”
Marty paused. She could feel his discomfort radiating through the cell phone. The spouses she spoke of hadn’t been accused of murder.
“Anna, I don’t know. It could be very awkward to have one of my prosecutors arguing to keep someone out of jail. And it would be a burden on both the Sex Offense section, to lose you, and the Appellate section, to take on a long-distance employee.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m very sorry to put you in this position. But my sister needs me. After this detail, I’d be willing to go anywhere the office needs me, however I can help out.”
“And if I say no?”
“I can’t abandon her. I’d have to quit.” As she said it, she felt like her lungs were being squeezed inside a vise. She didn’t want to quit. She loved her job. And she had no financial cushion. But she would do what she had to do.
The U.S. Attorney sighed. She could picture him at his desk, staring out the window and running a hand over his bald head. He said, “I’ll look at your memo and make my decision in due course. But I have to warn you: I’m leaning toward no.”
“I understand. Please let me kno
w as soon as possible. My sister will probably be arraigned tomorrow.”
“In the meantime, you may want to look at the information on our website about separating from the government. I don’t want to sound dire, but you’ll want to have some health-care coverage lined up before you resign.”
“I see. Okay.”
They hung up. Health-care coverage. Oh God. She was not in any way prepared for what resigning entailed.
Anna looked around the house, which was eerily quiet. It felt spooky to be here alone. But it wasn’t spookier than where Jody was: in the central cell block being fingerprinted and having her mug shot taken. Then she would spend the night in a holding cell with a bunch of women who’d been arrested for street crimes over the last twenty-four hours. They would not be easygoing women. A current of fear buzzed steadily through Anna’s body. Her stomach hurt more than ever.
As the sky grew black, she walked through the house turning on all the lights and TVs. Soon every room was filled with canned laughter and bright light. But the darkness she was trying to chase away wasn’t amenable to electricity.
23
The Lawrence P. Upperthwaite Courthouse was one of the few living buildings in Holly Grove’s old downtown. It was a stately old structure, with marble pillars, a gold dome, and big arched windows. Across the street was a square park, planted with grass and trees. That’s where the pretty part ended. Around the square, the old storefronts ranged between shabby and vacant. They’d been built when many more people worked in the nearby auto plants. As the car companies left town, so did the rest of the commerce.
Anna arrived at the courthouse promptly at 8:00 A.M., the time the website said the doors opened. She wore her standard black pantsuit. Her purse was overstuffed with legal pads, a Local Rules Book for Holly Grove County, and Clif bars. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be here today.
The courthouse was as beautiful inside as out, built in an age when the county had money for public projects. The walls alternated between peach marble veined with ivory and a green marble veined with gold. Gold trim laced every door, window, and painting. Oil portraits of old men covered the hallways.
A Good Killing Page 11
