Chapter 20 The Target #2
Everything he said left me a little more gutted.
Because he was right, and almost everything he said was true.
(The one thing that was not true was the teeny-tiny detail that I had not, in fact, torn off the target.) Had the district attorney gone so far as to say that I had, in essence, murdered the help, I might have nodded along in agreement.
Occasionally, I would punish myself and glance over at Nick and Sharon Foster.
When I saw them in the opening moments of the trial, it was the first time I had seen them together since the funeral.
They both looked older to me, but in Sharon’s eyes I saw the indelible mark of sorrow, the way loss had given the sclera a rosacea-like cast and transformed the lines around them into runnels no age-defying cream could spackle.
She would sometimes lean into Nick, and I took comfort in that: they still had each other.
Sharon would never hold eye contact with me, but Nick would, and it was not precisely forgiveness I saw in them, but pity: he knew both the guilt I was shouldering and, I am confident, that my relationship with Theo Catton had been going on for years before he saw the two of us at the hotel and made a decision as a father to say something.
As a father of two daughters, Olivia and Jane.
Those two girls were not there in the courtroom those first days, and I wondered if they would appear at any point in the trial.
They had school. And, I supposed, all the discussion of their brother’s death might be traumatizing, especially for Jane, who was only in the sixth grade.
Olivia might have been able to handle it, but I hadn’t seen her since August, when she had given me a tour of her brother’s bedroom, and people change.
She’d seemed pretty damn plucky to me then, but six months in high school, even one as mannered as Tallmadge, can change a person.
Still, I was surprised by how empty the courtroom felt.
There were a few local newspaper reporters there, but no TV crews outside the courthouse hoping to get a sound bite from my lawyer or the Fosters.
And the reporters rarely hung around all day long.
That meant they were spared the endless testimony of the experts and engineers—but when they weren’t there on what would turn out to be the last day, they would also miss the real pyrotechnics.
I was Miss Winston, a woman, when introduced to the jury by the prosecution.
But I was Mira, a girl, when presented to them by Cleon Barker.
In his opening argument, my lawyer strolled between his seat beside me at the defense table and the jury box, his voice moving between a fiery defense of “that young girl” and elegiac wistfulness when he brought up Kenny Foster.
At one point, Barker used the word target almost as if it were the core of a call-and-response dialogue with a crowd at a campaign rally or church.
“We will all be talking about targets this week and next,” he said a few minutes later, “and one specific target. But when you think of a target, think also of the target people have been plastering onto the back or the heart of that young girl. That child. A child as innocent as the victim in this tragedy. A child so traumatized by the hatred directed at her by some people that—and we will not hide this or be ashamed by this—she tried to take her own life.”
My mother hadn’t wanted my suicide attempt to become part of the narrative.
Even Mr. Barker had suggested it could possibly be viewed as an admission of guilt.
(It was, of course, but not in the literal way he was seeing it.) But he and his team decided, in the end, it would more likely elicit a jury’s sympathy when they saw me seated day after day at the defense table.
So, my mother agreed, though still with some reluctance.
When we had been discussing this part of the defense, I reminded her, “I don’t think gossip can make my reputation any worse than it already is, do you?
I mean, really, what’s an X-Acto in a bathtub compared to being a home-wrecker? ”
“The home-wrecker thing won’t come up,” Barker reminded us and raised his eyebrows at me, signaling that these pretrial conversations were not the time to be glib. My jokes had been growing darker as the days got longer: they’d become a part of how I braced myself for what was coming.
At another point in his opening statement, he said, standing still within a foot or two of the jurors, “The state has literally no evidence that my client removed that target.
Absolutely none. A wonderful young man is gone, this is true, and all of our hearts break for the family.
But he died because a country club put a driving range net meant for home use in a spot that was reckless; because the country club pro did nothing for three days after noticing the target had gone missing; because someone—and we do not know who, but it was most assuredly not Mira Winston—removed the target with all the care we reserve for the weeds we rip from our gardens.
“And let’s be totally honest: anyone could have planted the target in this girl’s golf bag.
Anyone. It sat in the bag room every night from Monday evening, July thirty-first, through Thursday, August third, and then again for two long weeks after that, until Mira’s mother retrieved it, hoping her daughter would bring it to college…
but, as you will learn, Mira did not go to college that fall.
She was devastated by the death of Kenny Foster.
And, you will see, she hasn’t played golf or been to a putting green or driving range since that awful day.
“Moreover, did Mira ever tell anyone in the three days between that Caddy Day and the day when Kenny died that she had taken off the target? No, she did not. Did she throw the target away when, two weeks after his death, her mother brought home the golf bag? No, she did not. Did she throw the target away when it became clear that its removal had factored into Kenny’s death?
Again, she did not. It defies logic to argue that she would not destroy the one piece of evidence that suggests anyone other than the country club, its employees, or the net manufacturer was responsible for Kenny Foster’s death.
My gosh, rivers are filled with the guns that criminals have used in crimes, because that’s what guilty people do: they get rid of the evidence, they chuck the handgun or the knife or the tire iron with all haste into the East River or the Charles or the Hudson.
Whatever, wherever. Well, Mira never did that.
Because she didn’t take the target down in the first place, and she never even knew it was in her golf bag.
“And let us not forget, and not forget this for one single moment: her fingerprints were not on the target. Just not there.
“The state has suggested that Mira had motive, opportunity, and evidence. We will show that other club members and club employees had motive and opportunity, as well. Mira wasn’t the only one who hated that target.
It’s untrue to say she was. Much will be made of the idea that she was one of the only people who used that little driving range net.
Well, why was that? Answer? Because plenty of members loathed it.
They loathed the target. And any one of them could have removed it in a fit of pique—or, perhaps, because someone thought they were doing a club member a favor,” he said cryptically, laying the groundwork to suggest that club pro Harry Fallows was the real culprit.
I had learned by then that the defense has no burden of proof, but Mr. Barker felt that the jury needed to have an alternate explanation as to why the target was in my bag.
Part of that story was to throw as much shade as he could on Fallows.
“And given how long Mira’s golf bag sat in the bag room, anyone could have stuffed the target into one of its pockets.
Anyone,” he said, a remark that was a powerful tease.
I could sense that the jury was already interested in whom he was going to accuse, knowing that eventually we all would get there.