Don't Believe It

by Charlie Donlea

  Today, Sidney would tell the viewers in a dramatic voice-over, Grace Sebold was ten years older, free at last, and with a life unrecognizable from when she last stood and watched a sunset at Sugar Beach. The only thing that remained unchanged was that she still very much loved Julian Crist.

  CHAPTER 40

  Thursday, July 13, 2017

  NEWLY MOTIVATED, GUS MADE FAST WORK OF THE PARALLEL BARS over the past week. The ten steps required to conquer them from end to end were now accomplished with almost no pauses. His grunting and swearing came from choice rather than reaction. The walker was like a strange friend he came to rely on, even if he still detested it. He was able to shuffle down the hallways, and although he couldn’t make the full loop around the floor—which required four turns and nearly two hundred steps—Gus made it his goal to complete the trek by the end of the week. If someone had told him a year before that sitting on a toilet and walking without assistance would be considered gifts from God, he’d have thought they were certifiable.

  He sat in his bedside chair with the breakfast cart pulled in front of him and a steaming cup of coffee resting next to badly poached eggs and burnt toast. He ignored the food and indulged in the aroma of hazelnut. Drinking coffee and reading the paper had been one of the joys of life, and for the first time in many weeks, he was beginning to notice such subtle benefits of being alive. He scanned the front-page stories and then lifted the paper to see the stories below the fold. He stopped when his gaze fell to the headline:

  WOMAN CONVICTED OF MURDER EXONERATED

  Grace Sebold freed after ten years in a Caribbean jail

  He quickly unfolded the paper and read the article. Grace Sebold, made famous once more by the current documentary The Girl of Sugar Beach, was exonerated after new evidence surfaced that put into question the forensics used to convict her.

  Jason strolled into his room as Gus finished the article.

  “Hello, there. Ready for therapy?”

  “No,” Gus said. “I need a favor.”

  “What’s up?”

  He scribbled onto a yellow notepad and ripped off the page, handing it to Jason. “I need you to make a run for me. Pick something up.”

  Jason held the sticky note in his hand.

  “What is it?”

  “An address. I was hoping to get there myself, but I can’t walk out of here yet, and I’m short on time.”

  “Where is this? Your house?”

  “Not my house. Listen, kid, I haven’t asked for much while I’ve been in this place. I’ve pretty much followed the rules. Your rules, anyway. The goddam nurses are another story. I’ve got no one else to turn to for this, and, frankly, I wouldn’t trust anyone but you. It’s important—otherwise I wouldn’t put you out. Will you help me?”

  Jason looked down at the newspaper and saw the headline about Grace Sebold’s exoneration. He held up the sticky note and slowly nodded.

  “Tell me what you need.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Monday, July 17, 2017

  THE PRESS, WITH NEWS VANS AND CAMERA CREWS, HAD BEEN CAMPED outside the Sebold residence since news broke of Grace’s exoneration. They gathered the morning Grace made her appearance at the courthouse in St. Lucia and shouted questions at Gretchen and Glenn Sebold as they left for the airport. The crowd of reporters grew throughout the day and into the next as they anxiously awaited Grace’s return, hoping to capture images of the girl from Sugar Beach. They were hoping, despite such things seldom happening, that Grace would return home and stand proudly on the front lawn and field questions while cameras popped and live feeds streamed.

  Instead, a neighbor tipped off Gretchen Sebold about the mob of reporters that had grown out of control, and suggested they avoid bringing Grace home just yet. The neighbor then phoned the police to tell them about the public nuisance of vans and trucks parked illegally in the quiet neighborhood, and the group of reporters that was loitering in the streets and stomping down the grass of the common areas. Soon the police arrived and set up barriers to keep the journalists sequestered in one corner of the neighborhood, their news trucks forced to park on the main road thirty yards away.

  Despite their vigilance, which lasted through the weekend, Grace Sebold never showed.

  * * *

  Ellie Reiser’s apartment was located at Windsor Tower in Tudor City, a short walk from the hospital. Many beat reporters, Sidney knew, were waiting lazily at the Sebold residence in Fayetteville, hoping for a sound bite. Most had no ambition to perform real journalism, and certainly not of the investigative manner. So when Sidney recommended that Grace ask her old friend Ellie for a place to stay until the media attention died down, the Sebolds thought it was a grand idea. Grace would stay anonymous at Ellie Reiser’s Manhattan high-rise, at least until an ambitious reporter decided to get to work and do some digging. Of course, their work had been done for them. One of the first episodes of The Girl of Sugar Beach featured Ellie Reiser and her close relationship with Grace Sebold. Had any of the beat reporters been paying attention, they’d know Ellie was a practicing physician at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan; and with Grace a no-show in Fayetteville for the past few days, Dr. Reiser’s apartment would be a good place to look. But Sidney was betting none knew even this much. Grace was safe for a while.

  On Monday evening after work, Sidney and Derrick rode the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor and found the corner apartment. She knocked and Ellie Reiser opened the door with a smile a moment later.

  “Hi, Sidney. Come on in.”

  Derrick stayed anonymous behind his camera. Ellie Reiser barely noticed his presence.

  As soon as Sidney passed the entrance threshold, she heard the boisterous conversation of a family giddy to be reunited after so many years apart. Sidney followed Ellie through the entrance foyer and into the sleek, modern living room, with tall windows that offered a beautiful view of the New York skyline, which Derrick captured as he settled into the corner. The small group turned when she entered. Grace came over and wrapped her arms around Sidney. They hadn’t seen each other since Sidney dropped Grace at the small St. Lucian hotel near the airport a few days before.

  Sidney had been in this position before—three other times, in fact—on the receiving end of praise and gratitude when the wrongly accused was finally reunited with his or her family. Scores of people participated in and were responsible for exonerations—and in Grace’s case, elite officials inside the United States government did more for Grace than Sidney could ever have managed on her own—but still, Sidney was the one who received the recognition.

  Grace took Sidney’s hand and led her into the room. “You all know Sidney Ryan.”

  Despite having interviewed nearly everyone present, Grace made formal introductions. The only ones Sidney had not met were the couple that stood in the back of the group.

  “Sidney,” Grace said, pulling the man forward by his hand. The woman with him carried a stoic look as she followed him. “This is Daniel and Charlotte Greaves, old and dear friends.”

  Sidney recognized the names. Daniel and Charlotte’s wedding had brought the group to Sugar Beach so many years before. Sidney also knew that Daniel, along with Ellie, were the only friends registered in the Bordelais Correctional Facility books as having visited Grace during her incarceration.

  Sidney shook Daniel’s hand. “Nice to meet you. It always inspires me to meet the people who stick by their friends in tough times.”

  She reached for Charlotte’s hand. The woman offered a limp shake and curt smile.

  “Through tough times, and for many years,” Grace said, putting her head on Daniel’s shoulder and patting his chest. “He’s my Superman.” Grace stared at Daniel for a moment before turning her attention to Charlotte.

  Sensing the awkwardness, Grace pulled Charlotte forward.

  “Sidney,” Grace said, “check out Charlotte’s shoes. She’s always had the best taste in shoes. Ungodly, hideously expensive shoes. But always beautiful. And nothing has
changed in all these years.”

  Sidney looked down at Charlotte’s Giuseppe Zanotti shoes. She nodded. “Beautiful shoes,” she said to fill the silence.

  Mercifully, Grace pointed toward another person in the room. “And this,” Grace said, “is my brother, Marshall.”

  Grace walked next to the wheelchair and placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “Marshall, this is Sidney.”

  “Good to see you again, Marshall,” Sidney said.

  “Thank you,” he said, offering a hand twisted by atrophy, “for bringing her home.”

  Sidney took his hand and smiled. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you’ll have time together now.”

  “I’ll teach her how to play chess again,” Marshall said.

  Grace smiled. “Ellie has a summer home in Lake Placid. She’s offered it to us for as long as we need it. We’re thinking of heading there if the media doesn’t die down in a few days.” She glanced at Marshall. “I bought him a new chessboard as a bribe to get him to come with me.”

  “Sounds like a nice vacation,” Sidney said. “And one that’s much needed.”

  Ellie came over and draped her arm over Grace’s shoulder.

  “It’s nice of you to offer your home,” Sidney said.

  “Of course,” Ellie said. “They know they can stay here as long as they want. Or the lake house. I don’t get to use the house in Lake Placid as much as I’d like. It’s terrible that it sits empty. My apartment here is secluded, but no one will find them out at the lake.”

  Grace smiled and looked at her friend. “Thank you.”

  Sidney watched the two friends embrace and sensed something strange from their body language. Maybe it was that Ellie stood so tall over Grace, who looked up into her friend’s eyes like a helpless child staring at a parent. Maybe it was the aura of regret that Sidney felt between them. An unspoken acknowledgment that suggested Grace, too, should be a successful surgeon. To look at the two friends now, once brought together by their similarities, it was impossible to notice much now besides the things that separated them, which today, Sidney knew, was much more than inches.

  Dr. Ellie Reiser, in her designer blouse and perfect-fitting jeans, standing in her chic Manhattan apartment and offering the use of her summer home, was the picture of success. Grace, in her too-large clothing that sagged from her shoulders, skin and hair neglected for a decade, looking up at her old friend and without a dollar to her name, was the polar opposite.

  “What am I missing?” Daniel came over to where Grace and Ellie were hugging.

  Grace pulled Daniel in to create a three-person hug. After a moment, Grace’s parents joined the group that huddled around Marshall’s wheelchair. Sidney noticed Charlotte, standing off to the side. The stoic look of indifference never left her face as she slowly approached the group and leaned in with a light hand on her husband’s shoulder.

  Grace broke out of the group and wiped her eyes.

  “Gone for ten years, and there’s not much left when you get back.”

  Ellie put her arm around Grace again. “Stop talking like that. You are loved by many people.”

  Grace wiped her cheeks again with the backs of her hands, a quick swipe meant to erase the vulnerability she had known to suppress for the past ten years of incarceration. But here, with people who loved her, she allowed it for just a moment.

  “Maybe that was true one day,” Grace said. “But today, these are the people left in my life. And I’m so happy to have you.”

  Ten years of bottled-up emotions—fear and regret and anger—suddenly flooded from Grace Sebold as she sobbed. After an initial attempt at stifling it, she eventually gave in with no effort to disguise it. Ellie and Daniel hugged her again, and her parents rushed to comfort her. Charlotte patted her on the back. Marshall seemed lost to the circumstances, still studying the new chessboard in his lap.

  Sidney took a quick glance to the corner of the room, where Derrick stood with his camera on his shoulder. She knew Grace’s homecoming would play well in one of the concluding episodes, and secure the audience’s sympathy for the girl America had once hated.

  CHAPTER 42

  Monday, July 17, 2017

  JASON PULLED HIS CAR OFF THE HIGHWAY AND ONTO THE EXIT RAMP. He’d plugged the address Gus had given him into the GPS, which told him that his destination was on the left in one-point-three miles. A light drizzle fell and the lights of New York collected in a matrix of yellow and red starbursts on his windshield until his wipers swept them away and allowed the halos to begin forming anew. He squinted through the mist until the billboard sign, illuminated by two bright spotlights that also highlighted the falling rain, told him he had arrived at Red’s Self-Storage.

  He pulled his compact Toyota Corolla onto the gravel lane, which led into the facility. There were endless rows of single-story storage sheds, with garage door openings in the front and large numbers on top of each unit. He wound down three lanes, avoiding potholes, until he found number 67. A yellow incandescent light glowed above every third unit. Gus’s number 67 was not one of the lucky ones. Jason angled his car so the headlights fell onto the closed garage door.

  He climbed from the driver’s seat with an eerie feeling of isolation and bemusement as to what the hell he was doing in the Bronx during a rainstorm about to open the storage unit of one of his patients. He walked to the shed and held the paper so the headlights allowed him to read the code, which he punched into the keypad on the side of the building. He pressed enter and the garage door rattled open. The headlights tunneled through the rain and brightened the small ten-by-ten space. It was filled with storage boxes—the sort with hand slots on each side for easy carrying—and which were capped with cardboard tops. They looked to be meticulously organized; and, indeed, once Jason started searching, he realized the boxes were organized by year.

  He checked the note Gus had given him again, and glanced from stack to stack until he saw boxes marked 1999. There were four of them. Jason pulled the top off the first. File folders lined the inside of the box, packed tight with no room to spare. He pulled one loose and opened it. The top of the first page was stamped with a Wilmington Police Department seal. Jason riffled through the report, some portions typed neatly and others written in all-caps block letters of a man trying hard to make his thoughts legible. Jason leafed through a few pages and then glanced at the bottom of the report and saw the scribbled signature. The hurried scratch of the name was indecipherable, but typed underneath was Detective Gustavo Morelli.

  Jason stood bathed in the glow of the headlights as the rain came down harder now, pelting the metal roof of the storage facility.

  “Damn, Gus,” he said aloud. “I thought you were retired.”

  A few minutes later, he backed his car to the opening of the storage unit, opened the trunk, and loaded all four boxes from 1999.

  CHAPTER 43

  Tuesday, July 18, 2017

  TRAVERSING THE HALLWAYS WAS AN ACCOMPLISHMENT, BUT STILL CARRIED the weight of embarrassment. The corridors were tackled only after a nurse set him up with his walker and got him started like a child bicycling for the first time without training wheels. Look at him go! Gus could almost hear the nurse yell that when she let go of the tennis-ball coated walker as he took off shuffling the linoleum runways. But he swallowed his pride and kept his ass moving.

  Navigating the room, too, was becoming something he could handle. Thanks to Jason’s drill-sergeant-style physical-therapy sessions, Gus could manage his way into and out of bed all on his own. He had become proficient at attaching his prosthesis and was able to hobble around his room on crutches, no longer at the staff’s mercy when he needed to take a leak. It was a healthy milestone both for him and for the nurses he was driving to the brink of insanity.

  Tonight he waited until the rehab prison was dark and quiet. Until the hallways outside his room were soft with night lighting. He knew he had two or three unfettered hours now that the overnight nurse had left his room. He no longer neede
d the hourly medicine checks, the repositioning, or the drainage of his tubes and catheters. His hard work had earned him three hours of freedom each night, and he planned to take advantage of them.

  Slowly he shifted on the bed until his leg hung from the side and his stump floated in the air. He attached the prosthesis. He hadn’t quite conquered the proper technique, and the pain of the maneuver was shocking. When it passed, he eased off the bed, took hold of his walker, and hobbled to the closet. Inside were the four boxes Jason had brought from the storage unit the night before. It had taken all the patience he had left in him to wait until now, 3:00 a.m., to retrieve them.

  It took twenty minutes to drag the boxes to the bedside chair but, finally, retired Detective Gustavo Morelli sat with his files stacked around him. For a moment, he felt like his old self. He opened the first box, plucked a folder from within, and spread the contents across the overbed table. The pain in his hip, from the last thirty minutes of effort, faded. He hadn’t felt this alive in years.

  The files were marked 1999. It had been so long, he hadn’t been sure of the name. But over the Fourth of July weekend when he binge watched the Grace Sebold documentary on Jason’s iPad, it had come to him. Now the file of Henry Anderson was in front of him. He ran his index finger under the name: Henry Anderson.

  The boy was eighteen years old when he died. Gus, who finished his career with the New York Police Department’s Detective Bureau, had been a senior detective out in the sticks of Wilmington, New York, back in 1999 and was called to investigate the boy’s death, which occurred on Whiteface Mountain. A few minutes of paging through the reports was all it took to transport Gus across the years. The memories flooded back to him. Two hours into reviewing the file, the rising sun brought dawn through his hospital window and slanted a bright streak across his table. By then, Gus remembered vividly the boy named Henry Anderson, as if Gus were still working the case. As if it hadn’t been put to rest nearly twenty years before, but instead were alive and active and exhaling hot breaths of air that fogged the prism of his mind the way all his homicides used to do.