After she’d rung twice, Temple cautiously tried the knob. The front door was unlocked. She turned to wave at Jessica and moved inside. Her heart was still beating too hard, so she stood inside the doorway for a minute, picturing a decision tree: where she would look for Ruth and Karin, what she would do, each decision with its “yes” and “no” forks visible in her mind.
She’d only been in the house a few times and didn’t know the layout, but she moved quickly through the ground floor without seeing anyone. Stairs to the basement led from both the kitchen and the front hall. Since she was right by the kitchen stairs, she went down those, but the house was so quiet she was beginning to worry that Ruth might have persuaded her mother to drive off with her somewhere.
She turned on her phone flashlight. She was in a small laundry area, with doors leading out of it to other parts of the basement. She swept them with her light. An instant later, she heard her mother call for help.
“It’s me, Mom, it’s Temple, I’ll be right there.”
The voice had come from her left. In her haste, she tripped over a basket of towels, but when she got back to her feet she managed to find a light switch. At first she saw only the furnace and other mechanicals, but when her mother called to her again, she found her in the back of the room, by the water heater, bound hand and foot. Next to her was Ruth Meecham, also tied, but unconscious.
Temple knelt next to her mother and started to undo her hands; her own were shaking so badly she could barely use them. “Karin! What happened? I thought Ruth—”
“Temple, look out!” Karin shouted.
She turned and saw Jessica standing over her, a piece of firewood held like a club. She tried to roll out of the way, but shock slowed her reflexes, and the wood hit the side of her head as she rolled.
6
She blacked out for only a minute, but when she came back to a nauseated consciousness, she found herself lying bound on the floor next to Karin. Jessica was placing a wrinkled copy of the Wall Street Journal on the floor next to the water heater, her motions as precise as a temple goddess laying out a sacrifice.
“Jessica, what are you doing?” Temple knew she was slurring the words: everything was blurry, the lights, her voice, the giant standing over her clutching the Wall Street Journal.
“I’m solving the Spadona bombing,” Jessica said. “Poor Ruth—her hatred for your mother had grown to such outsize proportions she brought the two of you here for a funeral pyre.”
“But, Jessica, why? Why do you need to kill all of us? We don’t wish you any harm, or at least, if it was you who blew up the Spadona building, why do you want to harm us on top of killing Mr. Epstein and Mr. Brooke?”
“Because you were meddling!” Jessica spat. “You had to go taking my supplies to your stupid lab. This way, it won’t matter what they find, because all the evidence will point here! To the jealousy between Ruth and Karin.”
“My God, you’re foul!” Ruth had regained consciousness and now tried to sit up. She fell over again but said vehemently, “You thought no one would pay attention to your harassment of Clarence, but I saw it for what it was. I tried to warn Karin, but she’s too holy for warnings and doubts.”
“Let it go, Ruth, let it go, it doesn’t matter.”
“Let it go?” her neighbor said. “For five cents I would leave you to blow up here if I could, you and your unending chanting. Jessica worked for Clarence in Washington. Titus was his baby. She came here to Chicago to taunt him with it, and you let her use you as a dupe! If you ever asked the questions I’m prepared to ask, you’d never have given her house room!”
Temple felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her, like a bubble floating on a fountain in a child’s water experiment. She still felt dizzy, dizzy and ditsy. She thought, what a way to go, and she laughed helplessly.
“So you think it’s funny?” Jessica snapped. “You’re little Miss Perfect, aren’t you, living your life according to so many rules you’re like a walking computer, so I don’t suppose you’ve ever even thought of having sex with a married man. Professor Conservative, the economic saint of the neocons, tried to force me to have an abortion. He didn’t want a child on his résumé—at least, not one belonging to one of his interns, not when he has a perfectly respectable wife in their Potomac mansion. When he was here last week, he threatened me, threatened to take Titus away from me. He said he could prove I was an unfit mother and get me put in prison.”
“But, Jessica, I would have helped you,” Karin said. “You didn’t need to kill him. You can stay calm, I know you have it in you, we can work this out together.”
“Oh, fuck you and your calm!” Jessica screamed. “Read the newspaper—it’ll forecast the end of the world for you.”
She ran from the basement. Karin began chanting softly, “Eka leya, eka leya.” Harmony.
Ruth told her to shut up, she didn’t want her last minutes on earth to be filled with Karin’s hippie crap. Overhead, Temple heard water running in the pipes.
“Is someone in the house? Who’s running water?” she demanded, opening her mouth to scream.
“No one, I’m not like your idiot mother, running a commune in my parents’ beautiful—”
The newspaper. That was it, Jessica had made explosive paper, soaked it in acetone, left it to dry, made a perfect torch. She was running hot water somewhere upstairs, and when the water heater pilot flicked on—it would at any second—the paper would go up like a napalm bomb. Temple rolled over painfully and flung herself at the heater. The drain tap, she needed to open it, she couldn’t get her hands in front of her, damn it, seconds not minutes. She clenched her teeth around the tap and jerked hard, again, a tooth cracked, jerked again, and a stream of hot water flooded her, the paper, and Ruth Meecham, lying in its path.
7
“You’re going to be okay, darling.” Karin stroked Temple’s bandaged head. “You got burned on the side of your face, but not too badly, and the surgeon says there will only be a faint scar, once they operate. You were so brave, my darling, so clever. How did you know what to do?”
“I’m an engineer,” Temple said. “They teach us that stuff.”
“But what was on the paper?” Karin asked.
“Acetone, with mineral oil and something called PETN, that’s kind of a detonator,” Alvin said.
Lettice and Alvin had come to the hospital to see Temple. They had brought a video game that they assured her was impossible to solve so she’d have something to do while she waited for her surgery. “Now the Feds are agreeing it’s what Jessica used in the Spadona building—anyone can get the details from the Anarchist Handbook—you don’t have to be an explosives engineer. It was smart of you to guess how the fire went up the mechanicals—Sanford says you did well for a beginner, even if you stuck your head in where you shouldn’t have.”
“I didn’t know,” Temple said. “She made me think Ruth was behind it all.”
“Oh, Ruth, she’s just a confused and angry person,” Karin said. “She got us out of there—once she saw you use your teeth to open that valve or tap or whatever it was, she used her teeth to pull the knots apart on my wrists. Even though she was still woozy from the blow to her head, she got upstairs to phone for help.”
“Jessica must have been totally insane,” Lettice said. “How could she imagine she’d get away with it all?”
“Poor Jessica: she’s going to have a hard time in prison. I didn’t do well my one night in jail, despite all my years of training, but unless she starts wanting to find a place of balance, she’s going to have an angry hard time of it.”
“Poor Jessica!” Temple said. “Can’t it ever be ‘Poor Temple,’ or even ‘Poor Karin’? Don’t you care as much about me as you do about her? She was a murdering bully, and I saved your life!”
Karin knelt next to the bed and put her arms around her daughter. “Darling, I love you. You’re the moon and the sun goddess in my life, but you’re never ‘Poor Temple.’ You’d never be so
weak and so scared you’d have to kill someone to make yourself feel better. How could I insult you by feeling sorry for you?”
“See?” Lettice said. “My mom would never say something like that to me. It’d be, ‘Lettice, get out of your hospital bed and bring me a glass of water.’ Your mom is the coolest, Temple, get used to it!”
Note
When Christine Matthews asked me to write a story for Deadly Housewives (Avon, 2006) I’d been thinking about my generation of Second-Wave feminists and wondering what kind of children we might raise. I was never given the gift of children of my own, but I began thinking of someone who went to India, spent time—years, in Karin’s case—at an ashram, and the effect this would have had on her child. Temple doesn’t reject her mother’s outlook on the world, but she does grow up revolted by the chaos in her mother’s house.
In the V.I. novels, whenever the detective needs forensic advice she turns to the Cheviot Engineering company, which does forensic engineering. Temple works there. V.I. Warshawski’s account manager, Sanford Rieff, is Temple’s boss.
The homemade bomb is something I got out of The Anarchist Handbook. I have been told that this is a completely unreliable guide to homemade explosives. I myself have never been interested in chemistry experiments, so I can’t tell you whether this works or not. If you know that it doesn’t—please don’t tell me. I like the story too much to want to have to change it.
Safety First
She guessed cameras, or at least microphones, were hidden in the cell. Possibly in the showers, the cafeteria, even the attorneys’ meeting rooms. From the moment of her arrest until the day of the trial, she said nothing inside the prison, except immediately after her arrest, and that was only to repeat a demand for a phone call. Finally, when she’d been kept sleepless and could no longer be sure of time, a guard handed her a cell phone and told her she had thirty seconds, and if she didn’t know the number, they weren’t a phone directory, so tough luck.
Once she’d made the call, she became mute. She didn’t speak to the assistant attorneys for the Northern District of Illinois sent to interrogate her, nor to the guards who summoned her for roll call four times a day, or tried to chat with her during the exercise period. Because she was a high-risk prisoner, she was kept segregated from the general population. A guard was always with her, and always tried to get her to speak.
The other women yelled at her across the wire fence that separated her from them during recreation, not rude, just curious: “Why are you here, Grandma? You kill your old man? You hold up a bank?”
One day the guards brought a woman into her cell, a prisoner with an advanced pregnancy. “You’re a baby doctor, right? This woman is bleeding, she says she’s in pain, says she needs to go to the hospital. You can examine her, see if she’s telling the truth or casting shade.”
A pregnant woman, bleeding, that wasn’t so rare, could mean anything, but brought to her cell, not to the infirmary? That could mean an invitation to a charge of abuse, malpractice. She stared at the pregnant woman, saw fear in her face and something less appetizing, greed, or maybe unwholesome anticipation. She sat cross-legged on her bunk, closed her eyes, hands clasped in her lap.
The guard smacked her face, hard enough to knock her backward. “You think you’re better than her, you’re too good to touch her? Didn’t you swear an oath to take care of sick people when they gave you your telescope?”
In the beginning, she had corrected such ludicrous mistakes in her head. Now she carefully withdrew herself from even a mental engagement: arguing a point in your head meant you were tempted to argue it out loud.
She sat back up, eyes still shut, took a deep breath in, a slow breath out. Chose a poem from her interior library. German rhymes from her early childhood: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh. English poems from her years in London schools: Does the road wind uphill all the way?
When her lawyer finally arrived, three weeks after her arrest, she still didn’t speak inside the small room set aside for attorney-client meetings. The lawyer explained that it had taken them that long to discover where the doctor was being held. “They’re fighting very dirty,” the lawyer said.
The doctor nodded. Come back with an erasable board, she wrote on an edge of the lawyer’s legal pad. When the lawyer had read the message, the doctor tore off the handwritten scrap and swallowed it.
She was being held without bond because she was considered a flight risk, the lawyer explained. “We tried to fight for bail, but these new Homeland Security Courts have more power than ordinary federal courts. We are challenging the Constitutionality of both your arrest and your postarrest treatment. We have our own investigators tracking down information and witnesses in your support. Keep heart: there are hundreds of thousands of people in America and across the world who are aware of your arrest and are protesting it.”
After the lawyer left, the guards took the doctor to a new cell, one with three other inmates. Those women were noisy. One had a small radio she played at top volume at all hours. Another heard voices telling her to pray or scream or, on their third day together, to attack the doctor. The radio player was shocked into calling for a guard. When no one came, the radio player grabbed the woman hearing voices; the fourth cellmate joined her. Together they subdued the voice-hearer.
“You gotta file a complaint,” the radio player said. “You can’t let people try to kill you. That’s what they want, you know: they told us they’re hoping you’ll die, or that we’d annoy you so much, you’d attack one of us. They didn’t say you was an old lady who wouldn’t hurt a flea. So you gotta file a complaint.”
The doctor almost touched the radio player’s shoulder, remembered in time that a touch could be turned into a sexual caress by clever camera editing and clasped her hands in front of her. The following day, she was back in her old cell, one bed, just her, alone.
After that, she was sent to exercise with the general population. The woman who’d attacked her tried to do so again, joined by several others who liked to prey on the old or friendless—including the woman who’d been brought to her with a problem pregnancy. “She’s a doctor but she only treat people with money!”
The radio player intervened. She had plenty of friends or at least followers within the prison, and she summoned enough help that the attackers withdrew.
“You a doctor?” the radio player demanded. “Why you in here?”
The doctor shook her head. Because they were outside, presumably far from microphones—although these days you probably were never far from a camera or a mike—she risked a few words.
“I don’t know.” Her voice was hoarse from disuse.
“How come you don’t know? You know if you killed a patient, right? You know if you stole money from Medicare. So what you do?”
The doctor couldn’t help laughing. “True, I’d know if I did either of those things. I didn’t do them. I don’t know why the United States government arrested me.”
“You got some big fish pissed off.” The radio player nodded sagely.
After that, people approached the doctor during exercise in the yard. The radio player served as an informal triage nurse. Swollen nodes in necks or armpits, varicose veins, heavy periods, no periods, bruises, knife wounds.
The doctor had limited ability to treat, no way to conduct a proper exam, but she would recommend the infirmary or a demand for hospital care or in most cases, wait it out—which is what the inmates would have to do in any event, even the women whose swollen abdomens didn’t indicate pregnancy but ovarian tumors.
Finally, seven months and twenty-three days after her arrest and arraignment, the trial began.
The clerk of the court: “Docket number 137035, People v. Charlotte R. Herschel, MD, Homeland Security Court, Justice Montgomery Sessions presiding.
“Dr. Charlotte Herschel is accused of violating United States Act 312698, an Act to Guarantee the Security of the Borders of the United States, known as “The Keep America Safe Act,” ¶¶ 7.18
3 through 7.97 inclusive, relating to the medical treatment of undocumented aliens and to the willful concealment of undocumented aliens from the federal government. She is charged further with violating ¶¶16.313 through 16.654, relating to the sanctity of the life of all United States–born citizens, from the moment of conception.”
Justice Sessions: “Today’s hearing is held in camera. Because the Security of the Borders Act addresses Homeland Security, neither journalists nor civilian observers can be present. I must ask the bailiff to clear the courtroom of everyone but the lawyers and their assistants.”
Some forty people from the Ex-Left were in the courtroom. Predictably, they raised outraged howls at being ordered to leave. In fact, many of them lay limp on the floor. The bailiff and federal marshals didn’t suppress their grins as they banged the protestors into the benches or against the doorjamb on their way out of court.
About the only legislation the 115th Congress had passed was the Keep America Safe Act, and its follow-on, the law funding the Homeland Security courts. Dr. Herschel’s case was one of the first to be heard in a Homeland court.
The law was sketchy on what defendants could do to support themselves. They could not have a trial by jury—a tribunal of five federal judges was empaneled for each trial. Defendants could call witnesses, but it wasn’t clear on the presence of citizens in the courtroom. Justice Sessions had decided that matter, at least for Dr. Herschel’s trial.
From the moment of her arrest, Dr. Herschel’s case had been drawing attention from the Extreme Left and their fake news machines. The New York Times huffed and puffed so often that a Real News cartoon, showing the paper as the Big Bad Wolf unable to blow over the government’s case, went viral. Of course, in response, the Ex-Left tried to paint the government as a trough full of pigs, but everyone agreed that the Times response was a lame knockoff of the Real News original.
Love & Other Crimes Page 14