CHAPTER 24
SHE FLEW FROM RALEIGH TO HARTSFIELD-JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL Airport.
Her return to New York had been open-ended, not knowing exactly what Dr. Cutty would reveal during her experiments.
The conclusions, however, were a damning condemnation of the boat oar theory that had been used to convict Grace Sebold.
Sidney sent Derrick home to New York to compile the footage they had recorded in Raleigh.
Leslie would take the amassed recordings and trim the fat.
By Monday, when Sidney planned to return, the hours of footage recorded during her time with Dr. Cutty and the ballistics team at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina would be condensed to four hours of useable material.
Sidney would then edit those hours down to the most important forty minutes, work with the writers to create her voice-over material, and cut episode four with the tech team in time to screen it to the network executives for their approval to air next Friday.
If she were able to present Dr. Cutty’s experiments with enough intrigue, it would be the most explosive installment of the season.
She touched down in Atlanta and rented a car, careful to use her personal card.
Today’s travel could not be expensed to the network.
In fact, she wanted no one at work to know about her trips to Baldwin State Prison.
Least of all Luke Barrington, who would hold her in contempt for the fact that her birth father, with whom Sidney had never had a meaningful relationship—besides during a brief window of her childhood—was serving a life sentence for murder.
She came to the now-familiar setting of low buildings strung out across the open land, contained by a tight perimeter of barbed wire and latticed chain link, a common theme no matter which jail Sidney visited.
She spoke with the gate guard and waited while the fencing slowly parted and allowed her to pull into the complex.
Prison visits were never fast, but Baldwin was longer than most. The screening was worse than any airport, and the waiting was on par with a bad layover.
Eventually, an hour after she arrived, the guard called her name and led her past the thick door and into the visitation booths.
There she took a seat and waited another fifteen minutes until her father appeared on the other side of the glass.
She did not know the man sitting across from her.
Not well, at any rate. Memories of him came from when she was ten years old and her family life was still somewhat normal.
Those still images and short clips of her family, just the three of them, were created before her father killed a man.
Before her mother uprooted her from the Atlanta suburb, where every friend Sidney had ever made lived, and replanted her haphazardly in Sarasota, Florida.
Sidney never created the same friendships in Sarasota that she had enjoyed her whole life in Atlanta, and the new life her mother attempted to forge in Florida was less new and mostly just different.
Can life really be started over? Can you simply turn the page in the notebook of life that has recorded your history and start writing a fresh story?
If so, Sidney and her mother did it incorrectly.
They either wrote the wrong story, or an unoriginal new story, or one that didn’t properly allow them to forget the pages that had come before.
The failure was evidenced by the fact that Sidney sat waiting at a penitentiary to see her father more than two decades after he’d scribbled all over their original notebook—deep, crevice-producing gouges that ruined so much.
It wasn’t until college that Sidney steered her life back on track.
Even then, though, the identity of her murderous father, who was locked away in an Atlanta penitentiary, was a well-kept secret.
None of her college friends knew about her father; and the further her life progressed from his conviction when she was ten years old and in fifth grade, the less she thought about him.
Thirty-six now, Sidney had spent more than two-thirds of her life without her father being part of it.
Only the arrival of an unexpected letter had sparked the idea of a reunion.
In it, Neil Ryan made a simple request to his daughter: Can I see you?
She still struggled, even after three years of clandestine meetings, to view her father through anything other than the prism of a ten-year-old girl.
It was how she remembered him. Ingrained in her mind was the image of her dad taking her to the deli after Sunday church service, and riding on his shoulders as they walked through the amusement park.
With just the three of them, roller coasters always left an odd man out.
Although Sidney dutifully divided her riding time between her parents, secretly she loved riding the coasters with her dad.
She always felt safer with him. Now, as she stared through the glass at the man in an orange jumpsuit, no feelings of safety or comfort came from his presence.
No feelings at all, really. Not anger or resentment.
To Sidney, Neil Donald Ryan was a stranger much more than he was a father.
He picked up the phone and his voice rang in her head as Sidney pressed the receiver to her ear.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“I watched last week. I’ve got most of the guys in here hooked on it. I’m real proud of you.”
Sidney smiled. “Thanks.”
She wondered if she should mention to the network suits that the inmates at Baldwin were fans of The Girl of Sugar Beach. She could use the ratings.
“I know you’re real busy,” he said. “But did you get the chance to look into the DNA?”
Sidney shook her head. “Not yet.”
She gave her father credit. His original letter had requested to see her with no ulterior motive besides a reunion after more than twenty years.
She had reluctantly visited, expecting him to ask if she could manage to free him the way she had freed so many others.
It was a common plea in the letters she received from inmates.
That she had, actually, only gotten three convictions overturned was immaterial to most felons she spoke with.
The fact that she’d freed a single man was enough to draw the attention of convicts around the country.
So, when Sidney visited Baldwin for the first time, she expected a similar reception.
She didn’t get it. Her father simply stared at her for most of the visit.
He laughed a lot, too, shaking his head at the sight of his ten-year-old daughter who had blossomed into a beautiful woman with long brown hair, highlighted by faint streaks of auburn.
Hazel eyes brightened with radial traces of ice blue.
He couldn’t, in fact, stop shaking his head during that first visit.
It was two years, and nine visits later, before he breached the subject of his innocence.
“There are new techniques now,” he had said. “That weren’t available back when I was convicted. DNA analysis is much more specific and advanced these days. If I get you a sample of my DNA, then you could use it to show that it doesn’t match any collected at the crime scene.”
Sidney had changed the subject then, veering the conversation back to her mother.
It was a common topic between them, and had been enough to distract him from pursuing things further.
Then the letter arrived containing her father’s fingernail clippings.
Until Sidney had opened that small square of tissue that spilled ten perfect crescent moon fingernails onto her desk, she had been able to explain away her inaction.
But since the potential source of DNA had arrived, it gnawed at her and prevented her from dismissing her father’s pleas.
“Nail clippings are a viable source for DNA,” her father said now. “I looked it up. And I put the tissue paper on my tongue, so a good lab should be able to draw a saliva sample as well.”
The tissue and nail clippings sat in Sidney’s desk drawer at home. They had spent the night next to her kitchen trash can, but Sidney had never gotten up the nerve to toss them in. Instead, she stowed the tissue and clippings in her desk and tried not to think about them.
She looked at her father through the glass now. “I haven’t had them tested yet.”
He shrugged. To most, Sidney figured, this would be discouraging.
But she had found over the years that inmates, deprived of just about every luxury in life, possessed a great deal of patience.
They never expected anything to happen quickly, and took news of delays in much the same fashion as finding the bathroom stall occupied. They simply took a breath and waited.
Too young at the time of the crime to understand fully what had happened, she had briefly researched her father’s conviction in college. Accused of killing a man in the victim’s home, he was sentenced to first-degree murder and was slated to spend his life in prison.