by L. N. Cronk
“You said ‘if we get desperate’,” I reminded her. “What do you think our chances are right now?”
“I never try to predict how a case is going to turn out.”
“I could lose him,” I said, flatly.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay?”
I nodded.
“What about the hearing date?” I asked. “He ruled closer to the time that we asked for . . . that’s good, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Everything that’s happened so far bodes very well for us. I think we’re off to a good start.”
“So, what do we do now?” I asked.
“Go home and enjoy your family,” she said. “I’ll see you in eight weeks.”
That afternoon, when I got home, Laci spoke to me for the first time since Friday night.
“What happened?” she asked.
“If you wanted to know so badly,” I said shortly, “maybe you should have been there with me.”
She stared at me icily for a moment and then turned on her heel and left the room.
And except for obligatory conversations that we had to have with one another about the house or the kids or the dog, we didn’t try to talk to each other again for eight weeks.
~ ~ ~
ONE MONTH BEFORE the hearing, Reanna flew into town again. She wanted to meet with me in Madison’s office the next morning. Tanner offered to take another day off of work to come along.
“I got the distinct impression that she wanted you to not be there.”
“Are you sure?” Tanner asked, a smug look on his face.
“Pretty sure,” I nodded. Normally I would have welcomed Tanner and his attempts to keep my mind off of my troubles, but Reanna wanted to go over my testimony with me and I needed to concentrate on what we were doing. I really didn’t want to screw up in the courtroom.
When I arrived at Madison’s office, Reanna was already there in a conference room, clicking away on her laptop.
“Hi,” she said, barely looking up.
“Hi,” I said back.
“Give me one second,” she said. I sat down and waited for her to finish. She tapped away at her keyboard for a few more minutes and then closed her computer up and looked at me.
“The DNA results are in,” she told me.
“He’s hers,” I said. “Isn’t he?”
She nodded.
“And your P.I. sent me his report,” she added. “You got a copy, right?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “So, I guess you saw that there really wasn’t a lot in there that’s going to help our case either. It looks like she’s pretty much been telling the truth, as far as I can tell.”
I sighed.
“But, on a more positive note, all the paperwork and everything that was done on your end looks great. It’s really good that you pursued a state adoption after you brought him home. She’s gonna have to overturn that adoption first, then any appeals we file, and then even if she gets through all that she’ll still have to go through the same thing with the adoption in Mexico. Even if she keeps winning, we can keep this thing tied up in the courts for years.”
“I don’t-”
“I know you don’t want this thing hanging over your head for years,” she said. “I’m just saying.”
I nodded and sighed.
“They’re apparently only planning on calling two witnesses,” Reanna told me.
“Who?”
“One of them is a psychologist – Zoe Walker. I’ve heard of her before. No doubt she’s going to testify that Savanna was so abused by her husband that she didn’t believe she had any options available to her once he took Doroteo away.”
“Who else is going to testify?” I asked. “Savanna?”
“No,” Reanna said, shaking her head. I don’t think they’ll want her to take the stand.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I’ll be able to bring up questions like how did Doroteo get rickets? Weren’t they feeding him properly? Obviously they weren’t taking good care of him . . . stuff like that.”
“Oh,” I said. “Who’s it going to be then?”
“Her oldest son. Claudio.”
Her oldest son. Dorito’s brother.
“Why do they want him to testify?” I asked.
“I suspect that he’s going to corroborate Savanna’s story that her husband was abusive. They’re going to try to prove that the father not only took Doroteo without Savanna’s knowledge, but that he prevented her from looking for him.”
She looked at me for a moment.
“Once an abducted child has been found,” she went on, “they’re naturally returned to their parent. Beckham is going to contend that this is really no different than any other kidnapping situation.”
“Do you think I could lose him?” I asked in a small voice.
“It’s possible that the judge may rule to set aside the adoption if they can convince him that Savanna never had a chance to contest the original rulings.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked anxiously
“We’re going to prove that she had a chance.”
Reanna wasn’t going to be asking me a lot of questions herself and I felt completely ready for that part of my testimony, but Beckham was going to get to question me as well. There was no telling what he might throw at me and Reanna wanted me to be prepared for anything. We spent the next few hours practicing what I should say when Beckham examined me.
“Police records show that you placed a 911 call last year because you could not find Doroteo?” she asked, pretending to be Beckham. “Apparently he ran away from home?”
“No,” I said. “He put a magnet on the TV and it messed the screen all up. He didn’t know that it would be alright once you turned the TV off and on again. He thought he’d ruined it and he got scared . . . so he hid in his closet. We couldn’t find him – we looked everywhere for him. We went up and down the neighborhood, calling for him. We called all of the houses of his friends that lived nearby. We couldn’t find him anywhere so we called the police. When they arrived and Dorito heard-”
“Don’t call him Dorito!” Reanna admonished.
“When Doroteo heard us talking to the police he figured he better come out.”
“Why did he hide? What was he so afraid of?”
“I guess he was afraid he was going to get into trouble.”
“Was he afraid you were going to beat him?”
“No. I don’t know,” I said. “He was just . . . afraid.”
“Have you ever beat Doroteo?”
“No!”
“You’ve never hit him?”
“I’ve spanked him.”
“Really?” she asked. “You hit him?”
“I’ve spanked him.”
“I’m not playing semantics with you, Mr. Holland. How many times have you hit Doroteo?”
“I’ve spanked him twice.”
“Exactly twice?” she asked, skeptically. “You remember exactly how many times you’ve hit him?”
“I remember exactly how many times I’ve spanked him, yes.”
“Why did you hit him the first time?” she asked.
“The first time I spanked him was when we were on a camping trip. He was about five years old. We had a campfire going and he tried to poke a stick into the fire to push the logs around like he’d seen me doing. I told him not to do it. When he did it again I gave him a spanking.”
“Made you angry, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t want him to get hurt.”
“You didn’t want him to get hurt, so you hit him?” she asked. “That makes a lot of sense.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What about the second time?”
“The second time I spanked him was last winter. I’d broken my leg and I was in a cast and it was really hard for me to get around and do stuff. We have a hot tub and Dorito wanted to get in it, but I told him ‘No’.”
“
Doroteo,” Reanna said through gritted teeth.
“Oh. Right. Doroteo wanted to get in, but I told him ‘No’, that he’d have to wait until Laci got home-”
“Say, ‘His mother’.”
“What?”
“Instead of calling her ‘Laci’, call her ‘his mother’. We want to take every opportunity we have to remind this judge that Doroteo views you and your wife as his only parents.”
“Oh. Okay. So I told my son, Doroteo, that he would have to wait until his mother got home.” Reanna smiled at me and I went on. “I couldn’t get into the hot tub with him because of my cast and it was too cold for me to just sit around outside and watch him. Plus, I knew I’d have a hard time getting the cover off by myself.”
“And what happened?”
“He went into his room. I thought he was playing, but after a little bit I heard the back door. I hobbled into the kitchen and looked out the window. He was in his bathing suit and he was tugging away at the cover of the hot tub, trying to get it off. I told him it wasn’t safe for him to get in the hot tub without an adult there and I gave him a spanking.”
“Good,” Reanna said in her own voice, nodding approvingly. Then she put her Beckham voice back on and continued. “You’re a hunter?”
“How’d you know that?” I asked.
“It’s my job to know that, David,” she said. “Answer the question. Are you a hunter?”
“Yes.”
“Have guns in the house?”
“Yes,” I said, “but they-”
“Asked and answered,” she interrupted. Then, in her own voice she said, “Don’t worry – on cross I’ll make sure we get it in there that they’re locked in a gun safe and they’re unloaded and the ammo’s locked in a different location and all that . . .”
How did she know all this stuff?
“You and your wife were foster parents for a while, is that true?” Reanna asked.
“Yes.” My breath caught in my throat like it always did whenever I thought about Amber.
“Why did you decide to take in a foster child?”
“I . . . I don’t know, exactly,” I said.
“I want you to answer here, ‘Because we found out about a little girl in our son’s class that needed a foster family and we wanted to help her out’,” Reanna instructed in her own voice.
“Right,” I nodded. “Because my wife and I found out about a little girl who was in Dorito’s class that-”
“DOROTEO!”
“Sorry,” I said. “Because my wife – I mean – because his mother and I found out about a little girl in Doroteo’s class who needed a foster family and we wanted to help her out.”
“But it eventually became necessary to remove that child from your home, correct?”
“Well . . .”
“Yes or no, please.”
“Her mother regained custody of her.”
“Was she removed from your home or not?” Reanna asked sharply. Then, in a softer voice, she said, “Just say ‘Yes’ and I’ll fix it later.”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly.
“And in the spring, before she was removed from your home, did you take this little girl with you to California?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did your wife go with you?”
“No.”
“Did anyone else go with you?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“A friend?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Tanner Clemmons.”
“Tanner,” she said, appearing to think. “Is that a male or a female?”
“Male.”
She paused.
“Is it true that this little girl came to you from an abusive situation?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“She’d been sexually abused, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, somehow you thought it was a good idea for her to travel all the way to California with two grown men and no female to accompany her?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Answer it,” she said, gently. “You’ve gotta answer it.”
“Yes.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
“That hardly seems appropriate,” she went on in her Beckham voice. “Where did you stay?”
“In a hotel.”
“All three of you stayed in the same hotel room?” she asked, incredulous.
“No,” I said. “We had two rooms.”
“So this little girl was left in a hotel room in a strange city all by herself?”
“No,” I said, hesitatingly. “I had a room with two beds in it and she slept in one of them and I slept in the other.”
“Uh-huh.”
She pretended to shuffle through some papers.
“How soon after you and this male friend returned from California with her did Social Services decide to remove her from your home?”
“That’s not what happened!” I cried.
“How long, Mr. Holland?” Reanna asked firmly.
“It’s not what you think!” I said. “I don’t even understand how you know about any of this!”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, David,” Reanna said gently, putting her hands on the table in front of me and leaning forward. “If I found out about it, I guarantee they can find out about it. No matter what they know or what they say or how they twist it, you can’t let them see you get angry. Just answer the question honestly and trust that I’m going to come in and clean it up on cross. Okay?”
“Okay,” I nodded, “But, seriously. How did you find out about all this stuff?”
“I may have had dinner last night,” she said, carefully avoiding my eyes for the first time since I’d met her, “with your male friend – Tanner.”
After she’d accused me of being a negligent, gun-toting, child-beating, pedophile, Reanna moved on to some topics that were even more fun, like Greg, Mr. White, and even Gabby. When we were finished, Reanna looked at me approvingly and said that I’d come through with flying colors. I mumbled my thanks to her, went home and took a double dose of ibuprofen. I was lying in my office on my couch/bed, when Tanner called.
“I hate you,” I said, answering the phone.
“Tough day?”
“I hate you,” I said again, sighing. “What did you tell her about Charlotte?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just that she’s like a little sister to you.”
“And that she got pregnant last year?”
“Well, yeah . . .”
“Uh-huh. Well, apparently I might be the father of the baby.”
“I never said that.”
“No, I think Reanna’s pretty good at inventing stuff like that all by herself,” I agreed. “She also wondered if someone helped me dispose of your father’s body or if I did it all by myself.”
“She wanted to know everything,” Tanner explained. “She said she needed to get you ready in case they started twisting things around when you were on the stand. . .”
“I know,” I admitted. “If this Beckham guy had started asking me some of that stuff out of the blue next month I probably would’ve lost it in front of the judge. I’m ready for anything now, though.”
“Good,” Tanner said. “I’m glad.”
“Me too,” I agreed, “but Tanner?”
“What?”
“She’d better not try and bill me for the dinner you ate last night.”
~ ~ ~
LACI AND I continued along in our pattern of doing whatever needed to be done while at the same time ignoring each other as much as possible. Laci still cooked the dinner every night and did all the laundry (which was fortunate for me because I didn’t really want to start). I guess she figured that since I was paying all the bills, fair was fair. She didn’t wash the sheets on my couch/bed though . . . I did that by myself.
At the beginning of December, I t
ook Lily and Dorito out to choose a Christmas tree. After I’d carted it home, put it in the stand, and dragged it into the house, I lugged all of our decorations up from the basement and set them in the living room by the tree. I didn’t say one word about it to Laci, but she took over from there, helping the kids string the lights and hang up ornaments.
At least I wasn’t obsessing about Amber anymore. As each day passed the hope that I might ever see her again had faded more and more. I no longer fantasized that one day I’d suddenly get a call from her mother, telling me that she’d finally decided to let me see Amber. I knew that was never going to happen and I had given up wishing otherwise. Now I had other things to worry about anyway. Dorito made out his Christmas list and wanted me to help him mail it to Santa. As I let him open the door to the mail slot at the post office, I couldn’t help but blink back tears, wondering if this was going to be the last Christmas that I would ever spend with him.
The hearing was scheduled for two weeks before Christmas. Reanna anticipated that the whole thing would take – at the most – two days. Tanner took off three days, just in case (for which I was exceptionally grateful), saying that we could go on a celebratory hunting trip on the third day if the judge had already ruled in our favor by then.
~ ~ ~
OPENING STATEMENTS BEGAN on a Wednesday morning. After Beckham and Reanna had each given the judge a brief rundown of what he could expect, Beckham started things off.
First he presented the results of the DNA tests that showed that Savanna was indeed Dorito’s biological mother. Then he submitted marriage, birth, and death certificates to show that Savanna had married her husband, that he was named as Dorito’s father, and that he had died over the past summer.
Next Beckham called an expert witness, the psychologist, Zoe Walker. She testified that she had met with Savanna and spoken with her at great lengths. It was Zoe’s expert opinion that Savanna had suffered greatly at the hands of her husband, been terrified of him, and had submitted to his wishes and desires in an attempt to not only survive, but to protect her children as best she could. When she began relaying information that Savanna had shared with her, Reanna tried to object, saying it was hearsay, but the judge decided to allow it.