Trial Run

by Anne Metikosh

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sonja Reid fiddled with the thin silver bracelets encircling her wrist. The faint jangle of metal was her standard preface to small talk and it required no great psychic powers to divine what her topic of the day was likely to be. Everyone in Kingsport was debating the same question.

  “I wonder how much it will cost the Outrays to bail Randy out of this one.”

  A heavy varnish of cosmetics restricted her facial expression but Sonja’s tone carried clearly across the room. We were in the library at Reidmore, a pun not intended by the owner of the house, whose sole interest in books lay in color-coordinating their dyed leather spines. Sonja Reid was a twice-anointed pillar of Kingsport society, having been born into one preeminent family and married into another. She was highly regarded by the disenfranchised for her charitable works, though I suspected that for Sonja, doing good had long ago taken the place of feeling good. Her latest pet project was the Youth Development Project and Sonja had gone to considerable effort, and no small expense, to remodel herself in an image suitable to the director of such an enterprise.

  I finished tallying the numbers on a bank statement against the ones in Sonja’s ledger. Once again, she had neglected to record the checks she had written to cash. She seemed to believe that “pin money” didn’t count. Unfortunately, her pins tended to be gold-plated.

  Ignoring the slightly malicious bent to her comment on the Outrays, I said, “According to the news, it was two million.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it literally, dear.” Sonja fingered the bronze chrysanthemums that graced a highly polished drum table. “I meant I wonder just how the family will buy their son’s way out of trouble this time. His escapade last year cost them a new library for the college.” She put a finger to her lips, so that I would understand the confidential nature of her remark.

  I took perverse pleasure in attracting Sonja Reid’s condescension because it also attracted her garrulity. In a social circle where gossip could easily transmute to a knife in the back, I made an innocuous sounding board for all the hearsay, rumor, and speculation that Sonja thrives on.

  My fortunes derived from members of the monied set with an aversion not only to the hands-on evils of day-to-day life, but also to the underpinnings of lifestyle. Budgets and business correspondence bored them. My peripheral involvement in their lives fed their sense of position. They made me privy to their opinions, but not party to them. Listening, even with half an ear, provided me with a comprehensive mental map of Kingsport, a pin dot reference that plotted the patterns of social commerce that shaped the community.

  Sonja prattled on. “ … Zoe, poor lamb, had to take a month’s rest at Bretton Woods. Her doctor insisted. That Randy would try the patience of a saint. And the Lord knows Zoe is hardly a saint. But this! This has to be the absolute worst for the Outrays.”

  “For the Forresters, too,” I said, shutting the ledger and sliding it back into the desk drawer.

  “Who, dear?”

  “The Forresters. The family of the woman and the little girl who were killed.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, of course. Dreadful for them.”

  Despite the family’s request that funeral services for Susan and Tracey Forrester remain private, Saturday’s News at Six had run extensive film of grim-faced pallbearers shouldering their double load. The camera had lingered over-long on the second, pathetically small coffin. Close behind the caskets followed a haggard Ian Forrester and three grief-stricken people who must have been grandparents. Their pain was palpable.

  I had flicked off the television and left the papers unread. Studiously ignoring any psychological implications, I spent Sunday afternoon dressed in my father’s ancient khakis and tweed jacket, carefully mounding winter mulch around my roses and planting tulip bulbs in the border.

  Sonja was still talking. “Of course, the boy has always been unstable. I suppose that’s the tack they’ll take.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The approach they’ll use in court, dear. Mel Deloitte will have to say Randy’s out of his mind or something and they’ll send him for a cure somewhere.”

  I stared at her blankly.

  She made a small “tch” of impatience. “The case is going to trial, dear, didn’t you know?” A heavily lacquered nail tapped the newspaper I hadn’t read. “Mel Deloitte — such a charming man, do you know him? — made a statement to the press last night. Randy Outray’s going to exercise his democratic right to a fair trial.” She lowered her voice for effect. “Max told me the DA offered him a deal, but he wouldn’t go for it.”

  Max was Sonja’s husband, chairman of the board at Kingsport Pulp and Paper and, unless I missed my guess, another member of The Clubbe. If I were married to Silicone Sonja, I thought uncharitably, I’d join, too.

  “Apparently the case against him is pretty much iron-clad — but if he accepts the plea bargain, it means a life sentence. Whereas if he goes to trial, who knows, Mel might actually be able to make a jury think he’s innocent or something.”

  My stomach clenched at the idea of a trial, not because of any fellow feeling I harbored for the Outrays, but because of Kerrin. Mel Deloitte was sure to call on her expertise for a high profile case like this one, because, guilty or not, as long as Randy Outray wanted a trial, his lawyer would need to find some way to defend what he had done.

  • • •

  At one o’clock, I stopped by Phil’s Diner for a quick sandwich before going on to my afternoon job. Several of my clients were half-days and I liked to offset the desk work with a little exercise. Most days, I walked the Sanderson’s dogs, two handsome labs, one black, one yellow, both trained as guides for the blind. Guiding was a tough job; a dog’s useful life was usually over by age eight. When the dogs retired, they needed to find new homes; canine hierarchy won’t allow for a younger dog to take over the responsibilities of the senior one.

  Colonel and Mrs. Hugo Sanderson were retired, too. A bullet in Iraq had ended the colonel’s part in a diplomatic mission several years ago and confined him to a wheel chair. His wife was still ambulatory, but frail. They could manage staid walks around the neighborhood. They paid me to run Caleb and Kelsey in the ravine. Mrs. Sanderson called it their “little adventure.” The amount she was willing to pay to finance the fun had shocked me at first, but according to a segment I watched on Enterprise, the Sandersons were not alone in their devotion to their pets. The piece spotlighted a young entrepreneur currently raking in the bucks by offering day care for dogs that costs more than most people spend on their kids. “Coddled Canines” had a six-month waiting list and was about to expand to New York and L.A.

  I set off with pooper scoop in hand, Caleb on my left and Kelsey on my right. Both walked slightly in front of me as they had been trained to do, stopping automatically at corners, vying a little with each other over the right to be the leader.

  Thanks to a farsighted city planner, Kingsport was blessed with an extensive ravine system that successive mayors have carefully preserved as a screen against the ugliness of the pulp mill. If you entered and left the city by Route 2, and the breeze was stiff enough, you might never know the mill existed.

  Maple Key Trail came up out of the ravine a quarter of a mile from the Sanderson house. Usually I followed it around in a five-mile loop, letting the dogs off their leads to snuffle in the underbrush and chase a few squirrels.

  The sun felt warm on my back, a fading vestige of summer. Nights were cold enough to leave a faint pattern of frost on scarlet leaves. The fallen ones made a satisfying scrunch underfoot and I couldn’t resist kicking up the piles, looking for hibernating bears the way I used to when I was six.

  “Bears don’t sleep in the leaves,” my father had told me. “And besides, it’s too early for them to be hibernating.”

  I kicked the leaves up anyway.

  Half-way around the lo
op, three trails merge and it was at their junction that I spotted the yellow tape. It stretched around a copse of young white birch, the bright color complementing the still-hanging leaves, the words “Crime Scene-Do Not Enter” plainly visible in black. Someone had ignored the warning and crossed the line to place a spray of lilies in the center of the circle. A similar bouquet had graced Susan Forrester’s coffin.

  Normally the path was deserted, apart from the odd hiker or birder to nod at in passing. Today, half a dozen people had congregated for what I thought at first might be a private pilgrimage. Then I recognized Cindy Maravich from Talk TV, complete with cameraman, sound, and lights. I whistled the dogs to me and steered them abruptly onto Woodchuck Way.

  Our new path dipped into a hollow and crossed the creek before rising again on the other side, where a scattering of houses backed onto the ravine. I wondered if Susan and Tracey Forrester had lived in one of them. The newspapers said they often walked in the ravine. Perhaps they, too, had kicked through the leaves in a whimsical search for bears. Had there been time for memories of past happiness or regret, or had their terror been all-encompassing? Could the mother think of anything beyond the pain of watching her daughter die? My throat began to ache, an all-too-familiar presage of tears. What possible purpose could be served by such a death? The sense of it was beyond my imagining. Only the flesh and blood of it was real.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  With one eye on the clock, I grated old cheddar cheese into some macaroni and debated about a drink to go with it. The radio blatted in the background.

  “They oughta fry the son of a … right now! Save the taxpayer a … pot full of money.”

  Red Reilly’s censor button was working overtime. His talk show Open Line was a daily feature on Radio Kingsport. It was the vehicle from which he harangued the listening audience, exhorting them to his particular brand of venom. To me he was fascinating, like a deadly snake, and just as frightening. He was a man who made hate easy by making it funny.

  “Everyone needs a voice; Open Line is yours.” Sometimes Red oversaw a general bitch session, but that day the fact that the Outray case was going to trial provided a focus for on-air debate. The first few callers sounded sane enough, upholding everyone’s right to a fair trial and approval of the jury system. It was all rather tame until Red stirred it up with his response to a woman I suspected was a shill. She spoke in the long-suffering voice of the professional martyr.

  “I have four boys, Red, two of them about the same age as young Randy Outray, and I can understand, as I’m sure other mothers can, how in these fast times, what with all the peer pressure and the drugs, how boys sometimes can act without thinking.”

  Red barked in astonishment. “Did I hear you right, ma’am? That’s your heartfelt reaction to this … this heinous crime? A man brutally attacks and callously murders a woman and her four-year old daughter — four years old ma’am, that’s how old that little girl was — and then rapes their dead bodies, and you have the nerve to call in here and say to the people of this city that boys sometimes act without thinking? Let me ask you something, ma’am. Are you under medical supervision of any kind?”

  The number of deleted expletives rose exponentially after that. It was interesting to note that none of the subsequent callers was anyone the Outrays might consider a peer on any level. Despite an outward show of being “just folks,” there was a strict demarcation between the haves and have-nots of Dahgue County, and it seemed implausible that an Outray would accept the judgment of a jury comprised of any of Red Reilly’s disciples.

  While I dined on macaroni and red wine, I reviewed notes for my lecture. Once a week I taught a class at Metcalf, the local business college.

  New Hampshire was overrun with institutes of learning. During the Revolutionary War, our little state spearheaded a movement to produce an intelligentsia more attuned to the philosophies of an emerging nation than an old, established one. Doubts about the success of the venture may have arisen in 1850 when Ralph Metcalf, for whom the business school was named, was elected governor under the auspices of the Know-Nothing Party.

  Initially, the trustees at Metcalf were reluctant to hire me. Despite the fact that I hold an advanced degree in business administration, they felt that a household manager was under-qualified to teach at their school. My references finally persuaded them. I ran a very successful small business, with low overhead, high income, and none of the jockeying for position I would have to endure in a large corporation. It was a career I fell into more or less at random. Years of caring for my mother had taught me the finer points of dealing with health professionals, social services, legal consultants and financial advisors, and in all of those areas, I had encountered scores of people, unafflicted by any dementia, who were nonetheless bewildered by the mazes of bureaucracy. Sheer detail overwhelmed them. It occurred to me then that there were bound to be people ready and willing to pay for someone else to shoulder that burden. I mentioned it to Kerrin once and she surprised me not long after Mom died by referring me to the Sandersons. Business quickly snowballed until I was as busy as I wanted to be, and with as varied and autonomous a working life as I could contrive.

  Based on the adage that you don’t get rich working for someone else, I designed a course called “Alternatives,” in which I explored atypical business opportunities with my students, encouraging them to target needs in the community that their particular skills and interests could fill. I taught them how to draw up a business plan, how to assess the viability of their ideas and determine the practicalities of putting them into effect. Some used my class as a filler, their hearts and minds already dedicated to big business. I’ve had a few who thought it was a joke and walked out after the first session, but several have been keyed in to new possibilities and one or two have already made successful starts. Lately, I’ve been toying with my own plans for a permanent “Ideas Center” that would provide assistance to inventors who lacked the know-how to bring their novelties to market. So far, it’s just a thought.

  I steered my little Subaru into a parking space under one of the floodlights near the main walkway to the college. The lot might be full now, but come ten o’clock it would be nearly empty and the sculptured shrubbery that is so eye-catching by day casts too many shadows for comfort at night.

  As usual, there was a line-up at the coffee counter inside Grosvenor Hall. What used to be self-service, pay at the cash register, had upscaled into a three-person operation offering at least a dozen blends of coffee and the now-mandatory cappuccino and caffé latte. I ordered a decaf, black, no sugar and then got a withering look from the well-scrubbed girl behind the counter for selecting a huge, gooey brownie to go with it. It seemed I was crossing some invisible food boundary. Pastry was okay with cappuccino; decaf, no sugar, apparently demanded high-fiber wheat germ.

  “Hey, Debbie!” someone called.

  I grinned and nodded at the sweatered arm waving me over to join her at a small table. One of my students had laughingly dubbed me Debbie Domestic in honor of my day job. As I stuffed change back into my purse, I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes should see me through the brownie and safely into the classroom.

  I slung my knapsack over my shoulder and picked my way around an overturned chair and someone’s discarded notes. Newspaper littered the seat I was heading for. I would have dumped it into the recycling box, but my tablemate stopped me.

  “I’ll take it. I haven’t finished reading it yet.”

  Corey Wayne was completing a degree in interior design. She’s was about my age, which means she’s on the wrong side of thirty, but where my hair was liberally streaked with premature gray, hers was still glossy black. She figured her adolescent twins will even us up pretty soon. She had married her high school sweetheart right after the prom, driven, I suspected, by impending motherhood. Either luck or love had overcome the odds of failure. Now she and Geoff, a carpenter, were hoping t
o start up their own decorating business. Given Corey’s hectic schedule, I wasn’t surprised she didn’t have time to get through a newspaper, though the Barker really doesn’t demand much more than a skim.

  DID RANDY REALLY DO IT? was its question of the day.

  Predictably, the Outray’s paper cast doubt on the guilt of the Outray’s son. When interviewed, teachers lauded Randy’s scholastic abilities and teammates applauded his athletic ones. They recited a litany of achievement, which, though conspicuously lacking in public service, demonstrated no overtly antisocial behavior. The minutiae of his life were recorded in the Barker as though for a Memorable Moments album of the kind doting mothers maintained. One enterprising journalist even noted Randy’s medical history, including a broken arm when he was eight, a head injury from a fall when he was twelve, and a cracked ankle skiing in Aspen last year. What bearing any of it had on the murder charge was not explained.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I picked up the phone, my caller responded to “hello” with the bald statement, “I need your help” which identified her as readily as a name.

  Conversations with Kerrin often began without preamble. I laid on the couch nestled in an ancient yellow afghan, bolstered by a glass of chardonnay. Stacked on the floor beside me were a dozen dog-eared travel magazines. Each one chronicled a journey not taken. When the phone rang, I had to tear myself away from a Montana dude ranch to answer it.

  I knew from past experience what my sister wanted and it wasn’t personal help, but professional.

  “Kerrin, I’m working. I can’t … ”