Silence on Cold River

by Casey Dunn

  To Katelyn

  The last chapter is for you, because of you. I hope you like it.

  MICHAEL Chapter 1 | October 10, 1989 | Tarson, Georgia

  THE FOREMAN LISTS THE CHARGES for which I stand accused. The air in the courtroom is cold and thick. It reminds me of a lightning storm in the dead of winter, the kind that makes people look out their windows, smiling and shivering, watching for the next forked strike, counting until the next big boom.

  No one is smiling now.

  My attorney, Ama Shoemaker, shifts her weight off her toes for half a second and resettles. The tap of her heels against the sealed concrete floor travels the length of the courtroom. I imagine the vibrations climbing the khaki-colored walls, racing across the ceiling, weaving between fluorescent lights, and fading into oblivion.

  I turn my head to stare full-faced at Ama. The side of her cheek slides between her teeth. Her eyes remain fixed on the jury. I’m not sure which aspect makes her more nervous: the fact that my trial is her first big case as a court-appointed defense attorney, or me.

  Because I’m guilty as sin, and she knows it.

  The foreman finishes the list of charges, and the courtroom falls silent, a string pulled taut to the point of snapping.

  “Have you reached a verdict?” the judge asks. Ama doesn’t glance in my direction.

  The foreman clears his throat. “We have, Your Honor. In the case of the State of Georgia versus Michael Jeffery Walton, we find the defendant not guilty on all charges.”

  Beside me, Ama continues to hold her breath, drawing her torso unnaturally straight. I imagine her weight collecting near the front of her shoes, because by nature, humans are still prey animals, still subliminally answering when a shot of adrenaline chases a prick of fear down a spine.

  The room is dismissed, clearing in haste. Ama investigates me from her peripheral vision first, shuffling needlessly through her papers before securing them in her double-buckle briefcase. She drums four fingernails on the strip of metal running across the top. Her thumb ends the run with a thump against the leather underside.

  “This is when a client typically says ‘thank you,’ Michael,” she says.

  “Thank you, Michael,” I reply, yet my attention is drawn to the far corner of the courtroom, next to the rows reserved for the jury, where piece after piece of evidence was offered as proof. The pictures didn’t do it for me. The visual memory is hazy and far-off, a rumble of distant thunder uncommitted in its future trajectory. But the sounds. Oh, the sounds.

  I close my eyes and recount the struggle note for splendid note, the shift into a ragged, exhausted tenor. There’s an optimal volume for the human ear to detect a sound at perfect clarity, and most people don’t realize it’s quite low. At high volume, all one hears is noise. But in that perfect range, the tone comes through on a razor’s edge, straight and unwavering. If only those items of proof had been captured. I would’ve begged for them to be admitted, to play them in this room with an audience, again and again. They’d be spellbound and breathless. Father would be proven right, dead in his grave—all things for a reason, son—and Mother would think there was a sliver of hope for me yet.

  “Do me one courtesy,” Ama says. She turns to face me, guarding her squishy, pulsing organs with her briefcase. “Make sure I never see you again.”

  We hold eye contact for a full second. Her pupils constrict, doubling the size of her pale gray irises.

  Ama rakes her teeth across her lip and glances at her wristwatch. I follow her gaze: 3:33 PM Her mouth opens, an excuse for why she’s about to leave without escorting me out probably floating somewhere in her throat. She won’t need to shield my exit. Tarson is a rural town in the foothills of north Georgia and well over an hour from anywhere that matters. My work didn’t even make for a sentence in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This isn’t the kind of place where people picket on the courthouse steps. They’ll turn over opinions in church pews and on front porches, in line at the feed store. And I’m a minor. Ama had said she’d move to have the records of this case sealed should I be found not guilty, but that was when she never thought I’d get off.

  Ama reaches into the front pocket of her briefcase and extracts a handful of cash.

  “I don’t guess your mom is picking you up,” she states.

  I flinch at the mention of Mother, and my eyes travel the scale of music notes she branded into my forearm with the end of her cigarette.

  CDEFGAB Can you feel it now, Michael?

  “I would guess not,” I answer.

  Ama sets the money down on the black tabletop. “This should be enough for a cab,” she says. “I meant what I said. This is your second chance. Take it. I never want to have to cross paths again.”

  Ama steps out of our row and moves down the center aisle. I turn but don’t follow, keeping my stare where the brown fabric meets in a seam on Ama’s back as she walks to the open doors at the back of the room. Her parting words echo in my skull.

  I never want to have to cross paths again.

  What if we did? Not orchestrated in any way, but naturally, in a way that would almost suggest fate itself had intervened. Something random. Somewhere new. All things for a reason.

  She steps through the doorway without once looking back. I imagine her steps on the polished floor, clicking and clacking down the main corridor, faster and faster as her internal chemistry demands the safety of open space and distance from threat.

  If we saw each other again, it could be a coincidence, an accident. An almost. But if our paths crossed a third time… now that would be interesting. Three weeks, three days—the length of the trial. 3:33 PM Mother’s favorite number. Her most important rule: the Rule of Three.

  One time is an accident. Two times is a coincidence. Three times is mastery.

  If I didn’t know better, I would think Lady Fate is flirting with me.

  In my mind, Ama reaches the parking lot and breaks into a run.

  You run, Ama.

  I can wait.

  AMA Chapter 2 | 4:00 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  AMA CHAPLIN STEPPED OUT OF her sedan, zipped up her jacket, and slid her sunglasses onto the top of her head. Nearly twenty years and Tarson hadn’t changed a bit. At least the crisp mountain air was clean. She couldn’t say the same for anything else in the town. Ama dropped her sunglasses in place, recalling every reason she shouldn’t be here and wondering how the hell she’d made the nearly two-hour drive north of the city without talking herself into turning around.

  Deep down, she knew why: that case, that impossible case, and the wall of evidence she’d somehow managed to topple. The disemboweled cat pinned to a board like a science project found in the crawl space beneath her client’s house, the other small animals in varying stages of decomposition slit into pieces and found heaped in a pile inside a hollow tree just beyond the edge of his yard. The neighbor who watched her client lure a cat with a piece of ham and tuck it inside his jacket.

  Still, somehow she’d won. The rookie, the underdog, the outsider, the felon’s daughter, the woman. She’d won.

  Maybe she thought that if she came back here, breathed the air, ran the same trail she’d run every morning before heading to the courthouse, she’d rediscover that woman again—the one with barely enough cash in her bank account to fill the tank of her car and an equally empty conscience. Back then she’d had no idea how she’d won, and even now she still didn’t have an answer. But maybe she would be able to unearth the reason she’d lost her case today.

  She plucked a Walkman and a small can of pepper spray from under the driver’s seat before slamming her door shut. The echo went far and wide. The guilty verdict had been announced with similar effect: Ama Chaplin just lo
st.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so unlucky in the courtroom. Denied motions, barred evidence, a star witness who never showed, and the heel on her black patent Louboutin that broke in the middle of her closing argument. She didn’t want to think that had something to do with the guilty verdict, but it was impossible to be sure what affected a jury more: proof or presentation.

  She knelt to thread a shoelace through the lid of the pepper spray as the memory of the foreman’s voice announcing her client’s guilt replayed in her mind. Of course, this latest client had been guilty. Most of them were. Ama could count on her fingers the number of innocent defendants she’d represented. Determining guilt or innocence wasn’t her job. Her job was to provide the most thorough defense money could buy so if the defendant was found guilty, there would be no room or cause for an appeal. In reality, she was doing a public service. If a guilty person walked, it was on the prosecution’s hands, not hers.

  Failure washed over her in a wave of heat. She yanked the knot secure, then stood and brought the heels of her hands down on the hood of her car, light-headed and furious. She hadn’t been sleeping as of late. The night before, she’d tried to drown her insomnia in a bottle of top-shelf gin. All she got for her efforts was a splitting headache and a forgettable night with the young executive who lived in the penthouse opposite hers. They’d exchanged casual banter in the elevator, and instead of returning to her apartment, she’d followed him to his. In hindsight, she should’ve opted to finish the bottle of gin. At least it would’ve brought some satisfaction.

  Or you could always give it a go with a man your own age, Ama’s assistant, Lindsey Harold, had advised whenever she recounted another lackluster evening. At least they know their way around the bases. And they’ve usually learned the value of a good, long warm-up.

  Well, that would make one of us, Ama usually responded, which was followed up with Lindsey accusing her of being detached and emotionally unavailable, and naming her job the cause.

  Although she wouldn’t admit it, Ama had to agree with her. She welcomed the shadow of every soul with open arms, shielded it, and sent it back into the world. She’d seen some deep, dark, horrible shit in the twenty years since she’d become a defense attorney. Of course it made her reluctant to form connections. Some of the worst minds she’d ever encountered turned their wheels behind very ordinary, clean-cut faces. Preachers, teachers, Little League coaches, presidents of the PTA. Evil wore any face. So she didn’t like the idea of second dates or sleeping over. Gin was her favorite company. At least she got to set the pace of how fast gin would kill her. If those were the costs of being the priciest defense attorney in the city of Atlanta, she’d take it.

  She felt for her phone inside her jacket pocket. She should call Lindsey now to tell her where she was, but there was something freeing in knowing she was completely off everyone’s radar. This latest loss was a big one. She knew the phone on her receptionist’s desk probably wouldn’t ring quite so often with calls from potential clients seeking representation in the next few days. Maybe not even until the next big win, which was months away at a minimum. The case should’ve been a slam dunk. What the hell had gone wrong?

  Other attorneys might consider the loss the beginning of a losing streak. Most lawyers she knew practiced some kind of habit or ritual before going into a trial or carried a lucky totem with them into the courtroom. Ama wasn’t one for superstition. As she clipped her Walkman to the hip of her running shorts and adjusted it to its perfect spot, it occurred to her that she had more ritualistic preparations for going on a run than she did for walking into a courtroom ahead of a closing argument. She believed in coincidence; many of her cases had been won on it. She knew she couldn’t second-guess coincidence just because it wasn’t stacking in her favor this time.

  A decent martini and a little release usually did the trick to snap her out of a funk, but she was zero for two. Surely to God, a long drive and a hard run would do something for her mood, or, at the very least, would chase away the remnants of her hangover.

  The rumble of a struggling engine approached from behind. She looked over her shoulder. An old white van pulled into the small parking lot, which was empty but for the two of them. Its rear windows were blacked out, and a pair of red bandanas served as curtains for the rear windshield.

  A beat-up American-model van in the middle of nowhere.

  Isn’t this how most serial killer stories begin?

  She stretched her arms one at a time across her chest, keeping a sidelong focus on the car. It sputtered as the engine shifted into park and then idled in a corner spot. The driver’s-side window was transparent. The driver was a middle-aged black man. His cheeks were flushed like he’d either been drinking or was very upset. He gripped the top of the steering wheel with gloved hands.

  Ama hesitated, eyeing her car, the keys in her hand, the tube of pepper spray tied to the front of her shoe. This trail wasn’t popular. It definitely wasn’t listed in any guidebooks or tourist pamphlets for north Georgia hiking. Either you knew about it or you didn’t, which had once made it one of Ama’s favorite places to escape. When she was here, she was small and inconsequential. She didn’t impact lives here. She wasn’t responsible for the grief of the victims’ loved ones being made doubly worse with a not-guilty verdict.

  This solitude now made her heart rate accelerate. She propped her foot on the rear bumper of her car and pretended to stretch her leg as she read the van’s license tag, committing it to memory.

  She switched legs, considering her options. She could get in her car right now and drive to a different, more popular trail. She could have her office run the guy’s plate. If there was so much as an unpaid parking ticket, she could have them phone in a tip to the local police department. The station wasn’t too far from here. He’d be picked up in thirty minutes tops. She could see the headline now: DEFENSE ATTORNEY HELPS BUST REPEAT OFFENDER. Surely that would send good karma her way. Not that she believed in that, either, unlike the guy last night. He’d asked her, Aren’t you worried helping guilty people go free is going to come back to haunt you?

  That’s just not the way the universe works, she’d answered.

  And she believed it.

  She did.

  The universe eventually took care of the guilty—like Michael Jeffery Walton drowning in Cold River a couple of years after his trial. Some say he fell. Others say he jumped. If Ama was a betting girl, she’d put her money down on someone pushing him in, vigilante justice–style. If she’d stayed in town long enough after his trial, she might’ve hired someone to do just that. Would she be back here, even just for a run, if he hadn’t been swallowed up by that river? She wanted to believe she wasn’t afraid; she’d gotten him off against impossible odds. Surely he would’ve wanted to keep her around in case he needed another miracle. Chances were, had he lived much longer, he would’ve ended up in front of a judge and jury again.

  Ama opened her phone and dialed her office. The screen flashed and went blank. No signal. She’d try again once she made it to the top of the first peak. Ama cast one last glance at the van, locked her car, pocketed her keys and her phone, and jogged to the mouth of the trail.

  EDDIE Chapter 3 | 4:05 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  EDDIE STEVENS SQUEEZED THE STEERING wheel until his knuckles hurt. He released his grip and sank back against the chair. The drive had been harder than he thought. Now here he was: the last place his daughter, Hazel Rae Stevens, was ever seen alive. She walked into these woods, on this trail. He watched her do it, just like the tall blonde did now, and she never came back out.

  The thought of it lit the backs of his eyes. Waiting an hour in the van had seemed like a waste of time then. He’d lucked into a string of extra work, and he was determined to save up enough money to be able to send Hazel to college without her having to take out student loans. He’d told her he had to get some work done in town and would meet her back right here.

 
Right here, Hazel Rae. Five PM, and not a second late, you hear? You like runnin’ by yourself better anyhow.

  The memory brought the burn in his eyes from back to front. They smoldered, still dry, tear ducts squeezing the way a throat does after a hot day without water. He pressed his fingers against them, trying to dull the pain and the sound of her voice in his head. She’d asked him to wait for an hour.

  If only I’d waited.

  He’d logged over 1,200 hours in these woods since then. He’d memorized every inch of the five-square-mile search zone. He knew where the trails were most likely to wash out during a hard rain, where the river bottom dropped after a tight bend, which rocks shifted with a person’s weight. But he didn’t know where Hazel was.

  “Come with me,” she’d pled that day. “We can just walk. It’ll do you some good.”

  “My knee is acting up again, Hazy. I don’t want to slow you down.”

  “You can set the pace,” she’d offered.

  “Not today. I got a wiring job in town. Should be quick. You and I will finish up about the same time.”

  “Meant to be, then,” she’d said, and retracted her petite frame from the open passenger door.

  “Hey, Hazel,” Eddie had called through her open window.

  She’d popped her head and shoulders through the opening, resting her elbows on the frame. “Yeah, Daddy?”

  “I know you’re eighteen and grown and all, but just be careful. Don’t talk to anybody you don’t know.”

  Hazel’s expression had softened into something playful. “Daddy, I barely talk to people I do know.” Then she’d walked away, her purple-streaked, frizzy hair flashing through the early scattering of trees before the woods swallowed her up.

  Most people had read Hazel wrong her whole life, even more so once she hit fourteen and traded every shade of color in her closet for black. One night, he found her in the bathroom they shared, hair bleach burning her scalp. He’d steered her under the showerhead and held her there while he rinsed it clean. The bleach had been on long enough to turn her soft brown curls brittle and orange. Eddie had damn near cried.