2
He doesn’t understand them, either as a breed or individually.
Quentin opens the refrigerator, which gives off a dubious odor, and then sinks onto the spongy mattress. Well, it could be the Ritz-Carlton and he’d hate it. Biddeford, in general, makes him edgy.
Sighing, he picks up his car keys and leaves the hotel. Might as well get this over with. He drives without really thinking about where he’s going. He knows she’s there, of course. The address for the checks has stayed the same all this time.
There is a basketball hoop in the driveway; this surprises him. Somehow, he hasn’t thought past last year’s debacle to consider that Gideon might have a hobby less embarrassing to a prosecutor. A beat-up Isuzu Trooper with too many rust holes in the running board is parked in the garage. Quentin takes a deep breath, draws himself up to his full height, and knocks on the door.
When Tanya answers, it still hits him like a blow to the chest—her cognac skin; her chocolate eyes, as if this woman is a treat to be savored. But, Quentin reminds himself, even the most exquisite truffles can be bitter on the inside. He takes small comfort in the fact that she steps back when she sees him, too. “Quentin Brown,” Tanya murmurs, shaking her head. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“I’m here on a case,” he says. “Indefinitely.” He’s trying to peer behind her, to see what her home looks like inside. Without him in it. “Thought I’d stop by, since you’d probably be hearing my name around town.”
“Along with other, four letter words,” Tanya mutters.
“Didn’t catch that.”
She smiles at him, and he forgets what they were discussing. “Gideon around?”
“No,” she says, too quickly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“And I don’t like you, so why don’t you take your sorry self back to your little car and—”
“Ma?” The loping voice precedes Gideon, who suddenly appears behind his mother. He is nearly Quentin’s height, although he’s just turned sixteen. His dark face draws even more closed as he sees who’s standing at the doorway. “Gideon,” Quentin says. “Hello again.”
“You come to haul my ass back to rehab?” He snorts. “Don’t do me any favors.”
Quentin feels his hands balling into fists. “I did do you a favor. I pulled enough strings with a judge to keep you out of a juvenile detention facility, even though I took heat for it in my own department.”
“Am I supposed to thank you for that?” Gideon laughs. “Just like I get down on my knees every night and thank you for being my daddy?”
“Gideon,” Tanya warns, but he shoves past her.
“Later.” He pushes Quentin hard, a threat, as he passes down the steps and gets into the Isuzu. Moments later, the car peels down the street.
“Is he still clean?” Quentin asks.
“Are you asking because you care, or because you don’t want that stain on your career again?”
“That’s not fair, Tanya—”
“Life never is, Quentin.” For the slightest moment, there is a sadness caught in the corners of her eyes, like the seeds of a dream. “Go figure.”
She closes the door before he can respond. Moments later Quentin backs carefully out of the driveway. He drives for a full five minutes before he realizes that he has no idea where he is headed.
Lying on his side, Caleb can see the night sky. The moon is so slender it might not even be there the next time he blinks, but those stars, they’re flung wide. One bright beacon catches his eye. It’s fifty, maybe a hundred light-years away from here. Looking at it, Caleb is staring right into the past. An explosion that happened ages ago, but took this long to affect him.
He rolls onto his back. If only they were all like that.
All that day he’s been thinking that Nina is sick; that she needs help, the way someone with a virus or a broken leg needs help. If something in her mind has snapped, Caleb will be the first to understand—he has come close to that himself, when thinking of what has been done to Nathaniel. But when Nina called, she was rational, calm, insistent. She meant to kill Father Szyszynski.
That, in and of itself, doesn’t shock Caleb. People are able to hold the greatest scope of emotions inside them—love, joy, determination. It only stands to reason that negative feelings just as staggering can elbow their way in and take over. No, what surprises him is the way she did it. And the fact that she actually thinks this is something she did for Nathaniel.
This is about Nina, through and through.
Caleb closes his eyes to that star, but he still sees it etched on the backs of his eyelids. He tries to remember the moment that Nina told him she was pregnant. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said to him. “So we can’t ever forget that it has.”
There is a rustle of blankets and sheets, and then Caleb feels heat pressed along the length of his body. He turns, hopeful, praying that this has all been a bad dream and that he can wake up to find Nina safe and sleeping. But on her pillow lies Nathaniel, his eyes shining with tears. “I want Mommy back,” he whispers.
Caleb thinks of Nina’s face when she was carrying Nathaniel, how it was as bright as any star. Maybe that glory faded long ago, maybe it has taken all these light-years to only reach him now. He turns to his son and says, “I want that too.”
Fisher Carrington stands with his back to the door of the conference room, looking out onto the exercise courtyard. When the correctional officer closes the door behind himself, leaving me there, he turns slowly. He looks just the way he did the last time I saw him, during Rachel’s competency hearing: Armani suit, Bruno Magli shoes, thick head of white hair combed away from his sympathetic blue eyes. Those eyes take in my oversize jail scrubs, then immediately return to my face. “Well,” he says gravely. “I never imagined I’d talk to you here.”
I walk to one of the chairs in the room and throw myself into it. “You know what, Fisher? Stranger things have happened.”
We stare at each other, trying to adjust to this role reversal. He is not the enemy anymore; he is my only hope. He is calling the shots; I am just along for the ride. And over this is a veneer of professional understanding: that he will not ask me what I’ve done, and that I will not have to tell him.
“You need to get me home, Fisher. I want to be back by the time my son sits down for lunch.”
Fisher just nods. He’s heard this before. And it doesn’t really matter what I want, when all is said and done. “You know they’re going to ask for a Harnish hearing,” he says.
Of course I know this; it is what I would do if I were prosecuting. In Maine, if the state can show probable cause that a capital crime was committed, then the defendant can be held without bail. In jail until the trial.
For months.
“Nina,” Fisher says, the first time he has called me anything other than counselor. “Listen to me.”
But I don’t want to listen to him. I want him to listen to me. With great self-control I raise a blank face to his. “What’s next, Fisher?”
He can see right through me, but Fisher Carrington is a gentleman. And so he pretends, just the way I am pretending. He smiles, as if we are old friends. “Next,” he replies, “we go to court.”
Patrick stands in the back, behind the throngs of reporters that have come to film the arraignment of the prosecutor who shot a priest in cold blood. This is the stuff of TV movies, of fiction. It is a story to debate at the water cooler with colleagues. In fact, Patrick has been listening to the commentary on more than one channel. Words like retribution and reprisal slide like snakes from these journalists’ mouths. Sometimes, they don’t even mention Nina’s name.
They talk about the angle of the bullet, the number of paces it took to cross from her seat to the priest’s. They give a history of child molestation convictions involving a priest. They do not say that Nina learned the difference between a front-end loader and a grader to satisfy the curiosity of her son. They do not mention that the contents of her pocketbook, catalogued at the jail, included a Matchbox car and a plastic glow-in-the-dark spider ring.
They don’t know her, Patrick thinks. And therefore, they don’t know why .
A reporter in front of him with a helmet of blond hair nods vigorously as her cameraman films her impromptu interview of a physiologist. “The amygdala influences aggression via a pathway of neurons that leads to the hypothalamus,” he says. “It sends bursts of electrical excitation down the stria terminals, and that’s the trigger of rage. Certainly, there are environmental factors, but without the preexisting pattern …”
Patrick tunes them out. A tangible awareness sweeps the gallery, and people begin to take their seats. Cyclopsian cameras blink. Hanging behind, Patrick tucks himself against the wall of the courtroom. He does not want to be recognized, and he isn’t quite sure why. Is he ashamed of bearing witness at Nina’s shame? Or is he afraid of what she might see in his face?
He should not have come. Patrick tells himself this as the door to the holding cell opens and two bailiffs appear, flanking Nina. She looks tiny and frightened, and he remembers how she shivered against him, her back to his front, as he pushed her from the fray yesterday afternoon.
Nina closes her eyes and then moves forward. On her face is the exact expression she wore at age eleven, a few feet up from the base on a ski lift, the moment before Patrick convinced the operator to let Nina off lest she pass out.
He should not have come, but Patrick also knows he could not have stayed away.
I am to be arraigned in the same courtroom where, yesterday, I murdered a man. The bailiff puts his hand on my shoulder and escorts me through the door. Hands cuffed behind my back, I walk where the priest walked. If I look hard enough, I can see his footsteps glowing.
We march past the prosecutor’s table. Five times as many reporters are present today; there are even faces I recognize from Dateline and CNN. Did you know that television cameras running in unison sound like the song of cicadas? I turn to the gallery to find Caleb, but behind Fisher Carrington’s table there is only a row of empty seats.
I am wearing my prison scrubs and low-heeled pumps. They cannot give you shoes in jail, so you wear whatever you were arrested in. And just yesterday, a lifetime ago, I was a professional woman. But as the heel of my shoe catches on the natty nap of a mat, I stumble and glance down.
We are at the spot where the priest lay dead, yesterday. Where, presumably, the cleaning people who scoured this courtroom could not completely remove the stain of blood from the floor, and covered it with an industrial carpet remnant.
Suddenly I cannot take a single step.
The bailiff grabs my arm more firmly and drags me across the mat to Fisher Carrington’s side. There, I remember myself. I sit down in the same seat the priest was sitting in yesterday when I walked up and shot him. It’s warm beneath my thighs—lights beating down on the wood from the courtroom ceiling, or maybe just an old soul that hasn’t had the time to move on. The moment the bailiff steps away, I feel a rush of air at the nape of my neck, and I whip around, certain there will be someone waiting with a bullet for me.
But there is no bullet, no sudden death. There are only the eyes of everyone in that courtroom, burning like acid. For their viewing pleasure, I start to bite my nails, twitch in my seat. Nervousness can pass for crazy.
“Where is Caleb?” I whisper to Fisher.
“I have no idea, but he came to my office this morning with the retainer. Keep your head straight.” Before I can answer, the judge raps his gavel.
I do not know this judge. Presumably, they’ve brought him in from Lewiston. I do not know the AG either, sitting in my usual spot at the prosecution desk. He is enormous, bald, fearsome. He glances at me only once, and then his eyes move on—he has already dismissed me for crossing over to the dark side.
What I want to do at that moment is walk over to this prosecutor and tug on his sleeve. Don’t judge me, I’d say, until you’ve seen the view from here. You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed—the length of a sleeping baby’s eyelash, the span of a child’s hand. Life turns on a dime, and—it turns out—so does one’s conscience.
“Is the state ready to proceed?” the judge asks.
The assistant attorney general nods. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Is the defense attorney ready to proceed?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Fisher says.
“Will the defendant please come forward?”
I don’t stand, at first. It is not a conscious rebuff; I’m just not used to being the one who rises at this point in the arraignment. The bailiff hauls me out of my seat, wrenching my arm in the process.
Fisher Carrington remains in his chair, and my whole body grows cold. This is his chance to insult me. When a defendant stands and the attorney stays seated, it is a clear sign to insiders that he doesn’t give a damn about the client. As I lift my chin and turn away, resolved, Fisher slowly unfolds from his chair. He is a solid presence along my right side, a fortifying wall. He turns to me and raises an eyebrow, questioning my faith.
“Please state your name?”
I take a deep breath. “Nina Maurier Frost.”
“Will the clerk please read the charge?” the judge asks.
“The State of Maine hereby charges that on or about the thirtieth day of October, 2001, the defendant, Nina Maurier Frost, did slay and murder Glen Szyszynski in Biddeford, in the County of York, Maine. How do you plead?”
Fisher smooths a hand down his tie. “We’re going to enter a plea of not guilty, Your Honor. And I’m putting the court and state on notice that we may be entering a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity at a later date.”
None of this surprises the judge. It does not surprise me either, although Fisher and I have not discussed an insanity defense. “Mr. Brown,” the judge says, “when would you like to schedule a Harnish hearing?”
This is expected, too. In the past I have seen State v. Harnish as a godsend, keeping felons temporarily off the street while I’m working to permanently lock them up. After all, do you really want someone who’s committed a capital crime walking free?
Then again, in the past, I have not been the criminal in question.
Quentin Brown looks at me, then turns to the judge. His eyes, obsidian, do not give anything away. “Your Honor, at this time, due to the severity of the crime and the open nature in which it was committed in this very courtroom, the state is asking for bail in the amount of $500,000 with surety.”
The judge blinks at him. Stunned, Fisher turns to Brown. I want to stare at him, too, but I can’t, because then he will know that I’m sane enough to understand this unexpected gift. “Am I understanding, Mr. Brown, that the state is waiving its right for a Harnish hearing?” the judge clarifies. “That you wish to set bail in this case, as opposed to denying it?”
Brown nods tightly. “May we approach, please?”
He takes a step forward, and so does Fisher. Out of long habit, I take a step forward too, but the bailiffs standing behind me grab my arms.
The judge puts his hand over the microphone so that the cameras cannot hear the conversation, but I can, even from a few feet away. “Mr. Brown, I understood that your evidence in this case was rather good.”