“You have yourself a wonderful time tonight,” her granddaughter said, hugging the tiny woman in lilac lace.
“I’m going to do my best to remember every detail, so I can tell you all about it when I get home.” Rose whispered as she swept out the door on the arm of the chauffeur.
The inside of the limousine was every bit as elegant as the outside, with plush gray upholstery, polished wood paneling, a full bar with cut crystal decanters, and even a television set.
“If you want to turn on the TV, just push the button on the left,” the chauffeur told her, as he guided the big automobile away from the curb, and slipped expertly into traffic.
Giggling just a bit, Rose leaned forward and pushed the button. Immediately, the set lit up, and the Reverend Jonathan Heal came onscreen by way of a prerecorded tape, dressed in his familiar white tuxedo, ruffled shirt, and bow tie.
“Hello, Rose,” he said in his liquid golden voice. “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to know that you’ll be joining us tonight. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, in person, for a long time now. It will be the highlight of my evening.”
“Oh my,” Rose said to the television image. “I’m so happy you invited me.” She lowered her voice. “You know, I could never have afforded to come on my own.”
“Leroy is bringing you directly to us,” Heal continued over her confession, “so you just sit back and relax, and enjoy the ride.”
The trip to the Seattle Convention Center didn’t last nearly long enough for Rose. She had to go all the way back to her courtship days to recall being treated like such royalty.
As the limousine came to a halt, the door flew open and a young man with a broad smile and an enormous bouquet of red roses offered her his hand.
“On behalf of the Reverend Heal, welcome, Rose,” he said, helping her out of the car, and escorting her right through the crowd and into the building.
“Oh my,” Rose murmured.
“You are one of our very special guests tonight,” the young man told her, “and I’m instructed to take you right to the Reverend.”
It was a small room, set apart from the area where the banquet was to be held, and the first thing Rose noticed was that it was filled with white flowers.
“To be honest, it reminded me of a funeral,” she told her granddaughter later.
“Just make yourself at home, Rose,” the young man said, taking her coat and disappearing. “Help yourself to anything you like.”
A large table set up in the middle of the room sagged with platter after platter of elegant hors d’oeuvres. Rose wondered who was going to eat it all.
“That food would have fed us for a whole month,” she told her granddaughter afterward.
Five minutes later, Jonathan Heal swept in, his aide in tow, looking exactly as he had on the television set in the limousine.
“My dear Rose,” he said, grasping her hand, and she watched as it disappeared into his. “You don’t mind that I call you Rose, do you?”
“Certainly not,” Rose replied breathlessly, thinking it was a little late for her to object now.
“I am so happy you could be with us tonight,” he went on. “One of the best parts of taking my ministry across the country like this is that I get to meet so many of the wonderful people who fill my life with light, and make the journey worthwhile. People like you, Rose. Your support and your generosity over the years have kept me going, like a beacon, through good times and bad. Knowing you were there has made all the difference.”
“My goodness, Reverend,” Rose said, overwhelmed. “I do what I can, but I’m sure I’m just one of the little people.”
“There are no little people, Rose,” he told her. “Not in the Kingdom of God.”
“He made me feel like I was the most important person in the whole world,” Rose reported to her granddaughter.
“Would you like some champagne?” Heal invited.
“Well, maybe just a little would be all right,” Rose said shyly.
An aide immediately popped the cork on a bottle of Dom Perignon that was cooling in an ice bucket judiciously placed off to the side. “Let’s toast to our finally meeting, and to the wonderful future I know is ahead of us when it includes someone as devoted to the cause as you.”
Rose was not much of a drinker, and the champagne tickled her nose on the way down. “Oh my,” she said with a little giggle. “This is such fun.”
Heal gestured to his aide and a platter of caviar was suddenly at Rose’s elbow. She carefully spread some on a small cracker, and swallowed it in one bite.
“Now I do feel special,” she said.
“You have no idea how special you are, dear lady,” Heal told her, signaling his aide to refill her glass. “You alone have the opportunity to do something great for humankind.”
“I do?” she responded.
“Oh yes,” he assured her. “You alone are in a position to give voice to the millions of voiceless ones who perish every year. You alone can champion the sanctity of life.”
“My word, how can I do that?” she cried. After his effusive compliments, and two glasses of champagne, she was floating.
“By telling the world that everyone has the right to be born,” he replied. “By using your good heart to persuade others that a plea for the preborn is a plea to be cheered, not jeered. And that an act for the preborn is an act to be commended, not condemned.”
“What are you saying, Reverend?”
“I’m saying it’s up to you, Rose. There’s no one else. You must speak for all those who have no voice.”
“But I’ve always supported the fight against abortion. You know I have.”
“So you have. But now, our Lord has given you a unique moment, the chance for a perfect union with Him. When that moment comes, Rose, grab it. Face your peers with righteousness as your sword. You are one of His precious children, and He waits on you. He has spoken to me, and through me, He speaks to you. Here, Rose, take my hand. Feel Him, feel His love, His courage, His strength, His commitment to holy life, as He says to you that you must not convict Corey Latham for acting in His name.”
Sunday, Allison Ackerman slept in, not awakening until a shaft of autumn sunlight slanted across her pillow.
It was a long weekend, due to Columbus Day, and it was such a relief to have three days away from the courtroom to clear the dreadful proceeding from her consciousness. Like a series of doors shutting behind her down the long hallway of her mind, she moved further and further away from the agony of what she was being forced to witness. That distance, she knew, was the only thing that would enable her to return to the courthouse on Tuesday morning.
But today was still Sunday, and Allison stretched lazily. Two of the dogs were curled up at the foot of her bed, snoring softly, encouraging her to linger on a lazy morning. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Ten minutes past ten, practically the middle of the day. She rolled over to look out the window. The horses seemed content to nibble at the ground, and would probably not mind waiting a bit longer for their morning ration of hay and oats and attention.
She fell back against the pillows, and almost immediately an unbidden image of an eighteen-month-old corpse blinded her. The little girl had been squashed like a bug by a falling beam. According to the medical examiner’s testimony, there wasn’t an intact bone left in her body. Of all the images of the past week, that one had stayed with Allison.
It was ironic, really, for a woman who earned her living writing about the goriest details of murder her imagination could conjure, that she would be having so much difficulty dealing with the real thing. True, the Hill House bombing was infinitely more horrendous than any scenario she had so far invented. But more than that, there was a significant difference between the portrayal of murder for the purposes of entertainment and enjoyment, and the actual murder of an eighteen-month-old infant for the furtherance of some twisted ideological belief.
For the first time, Allison found herself w
ondering whether her portrayals of frivolous murder were an insult to victims of the real thing. To a woman with a signed contract for two more books in place, it was not a welcome thought.
In the middle of a deep sigh, the doorbell rang. By the time Allison had scrambled into a robe and hurried down the stairs, a tan sedan was disappearing up the drive. She opened the front door for a better look, and a large manila envelope that had apparently been propped against the door fell into the hallway.
Allison picked it up. Her name was written on it, but nothing else. She closed the door, took the envelope with her into the kitchen, and dropped it on the table. Only after she had started the coffeemaker, poured a glass of orange juice, and popped an English muffin into the toaster did she turn to it, slitting the top open with a bread knife.
Inside was a sheaf of some three dozen flagrantly inflammatory photographs, eight-by-ten glossy prints of butchered fetuses that Allison was apparently supposed to assume had been sucked and scraped out of uteruses during abortion procedures.
A note accompanying the photographs begged the author to consider the alternative. “Are one hundred and seventy-six lives, albeit innocent, really too high a price to pay for the chance to save the million and a half lives each year that without a second thought are cut short of taking that first breath?”
The images were truly horrible to look at, and the note had a point. But they meant little if anything to Allison. Her personal definition of life began and ended with the viability of a fetus’s survival outside the mother’s womb. Even carrying her own daughter for nine months, feeling her kicking and turning and growing inside her, had not changed that.
The doorbell at Stuart Dunn’s Renton home rang shortly after noon.
“I’ll get it,” his eleven-year-old son shouted, bounding down the stairs. A moment later, the youngster skidded into the kitchen, carrying a thick manila envelope.
“Who was it?” Stuart asked, his eyes teary from chopping onions as he helped his wife prepare lunch.
“Nobody,” the boy replied. “Just this.”
He handed the envelope to his father, and dashed out.
“What’s that?” Stuart’s wife asked.
“Haven’t a clue,” the teacher said, wiping away the tears.
The envelope had his name scrawled across the front, no address, no return. He ripped it open, and pulled a stack of photographs from inside. They were identical to the ones Allison Ackerman had received. Affixed to the stack was a note that read: “What you saw in court was indeed hideous, but was it more hideous than what happened to these poor souls, and the millions like them? Please, remember the voiceless. They have only you to speak for them now.”
“Oh my God,” Stuart murmured.
“What?” his wife asked, alarmed because his face had suddenly gone white.
Stuart shook his head slowly, and pushed the photos across the counter for her to see.
“But why would anyone send these to us?” she said, perplexed and angry by the intrusion of such wretchedness into her kitchen. “We don’t endorse abortion. We’ve never endorsed abortion.”
“What I want to know is how they found out.”
“Who? What?”
“No one was supposed to know who was on the jury,” Stuart told her. “It was supposed to be kept confidential. But someone knows. Whoever sent me these knows.”
The light of understanding came into his wife’s eyes. “Of course,” she breathed, oddly relieved. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I think I have to tell the judge,” the history teacher said.
“Will they take you off the jury, if you do?”
Stuart thought about that for a moment. “It’s possible, I guess. Maybe even probable. But it doesn’t matter. I still have to tell.”
“But is it right that someone can manipulate the system like this?”
“No, it isn’t right.”
“Then why should you pay? You’re an honest man, and you would have rendered a fair and impartial verdict.”
“I know,” Stuart said with a sigh. “But sometimes, that doesn’t matter.” There was no way to hide his disappointment from his wife; she knew him far too well for that. He shrugged. “Either way,” he reasoned, “I guess my students are going to learn an important lesson about how our legal system really works.”
At two o’clock, barely minutes after the dinner dishes had been cleared away, a similar envelope was delivered to John Quinn’s Ballard home.
“What the hell?” he demanded, when he saw the contents.
“What’s the matter, dad?” his thirteen-year-old daughter asked. “What’s in there?”
“Nothing,” the contractor replied, quickly shoving the photographs under the bulk of the Sunday newspaper. “Just junk mail.”
“What is it?” his wife asked, as soon as the girl left the room.
Quinn pulled the photographs out and handed them to her. “They’re pretty awful,” he warned.
“Good gracious,” she said, wincing as she glanced through them. “These are sick. Why would anyone send them to you?”
“It must be about the trial,” he told her.
She took a second, longer look at the gruesome images. “You mean, those antiabortion people found out you’re on the Hill House jury? But how could they? Information about jurors is supposed to be kept confidential, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s all I can think of.”
Fear crept into her eyes. “These people are really crazy, you know,” she said. “I’ve heard about some of the things they do to get their point across. If they went to all the trouble of finding out who you are, and where you live—who knows what they’d try to do to us? And who’s going to protect us?”
Quinn nodded. The same thought had occurred to him. Trial or no trial, his first responsibility was to take care of his family.
Karleen McKay was showing property. The client was a fresh-faced young couple from South Carolina. In the first five minutes of meeting, Karleen learned that he was being transferred, and that she was pregnant, and that their marriage had almost ended six months after it began.
“We just didn’t know each other very well,” the woman confided. “And we probably got married for all the wrong reasons. It was just through the blessings of Jesus that we made it through the bad time.”
“How was that?” Karleen asked politely.
“I got pregnant,” the woman said. “As unbelievable as it seems, it was the answer to my prayers. But I must say, it’s an awesome responsibility. Just thinking about bringing another life into this world scares me.”
“Yes, it can be a life-altering experience,” Karleen said.
“I didn’t know whether I was ready for children, but the minute I found out I was pregnant, well, everything changed. Do you have children?”
“No, I don’t,” Karleen told her.
“Well, when you do, you’ll know what I mean. It’s like finding out what your real purpose is on earth.”
“I’m sure,” Karleen murmured.
“No, it’s true,” the woman insisted. “To tell you the truth, when my husband came home and told me we were being transferred to Seattle, well, I didn’t want to come. I’d heard about that terrible bombing, and about how that nice naval lieutenant who’s accused of doing it is probably going to be executed for it. And I told my husband, those must be godless people in Seattle. We can’t take our unborn child there.”
“Oh, I don’t think people here are much different than people anywhere,” Karleen suggested.
“Well, that’s just what my minister back home told me,” the woman said. “That there were good people everywhere. It just takes some of them longer to realize it. He said not to judge too harshly. He said God works in mysterious ways, and that before everything was said and done, the jury on that trial would do the right thing. Wasn’t that wonderful of him to say that? Just to cheer me up?”
“Oh yes,” Karleen assured her.
“I mean, everyone has a right to be born, don’t they?” she continued. “Life is God’s gift, and I think I know that as well as anyone. I mean, how would you have felt if you had never been born?”
“I rather think I would never have known the difference,” Karleen replied.
“Oh no, I don’t believe that,” the woman exclaimed. “I believe our souls precede us into this world. I believe we would know if someone sucked us out of our mother’s nurturing womb before we had a chance to know full life.”
“I think the next house on the list is going to be perfect for you,” Karleen said.
“Yes, of course,” the woman responded. “But I’m not giving up on you.”
“On me?” Karleen asked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m going to be praying,” the woman said fervently, “just as hard as I can, that you and the rest of your jury will celebrate that young man’s bravery, not profane it.”
Tom Kirby had taken to stopping by Judith Purcell’s Beacon Hill home on Friday evening, and staying until Monday morning. He came in grimy work clothes, purported to have become grimy from crawling around other people’s houses, and occasionally from odd jobs he did for her neighbors. Judith happily laundered his clothes for him.
She cooked dinners for him on Fridays, nothing fancy, casseroles mostly. She was relieved to learn that he actually liked macaroni and cheese. The rest of the time, they went out to restaurants, the three of them, and he paid. It was a small thing, but it helped.
After the first weekend that Kirby had come and stayed, she had a long conversation with Alex. The twelve-year-old had been surprisingly adult.
“Hey, mom, if this guy is someone you want to hang around with, I’m okay with it,” the boy said. “I know how much you like it when he’s here. I like him okay, too. He’s pretty neat.” Alex kicked his shoe at the floor. “Anyway, it’s kinda nice, having another guy around the house, you know, someone to do guy things with. But if you just want me to get lost sometimes, I can go hang with friends.”
She hugged him hard. “This is your home,” she said firmly. “You’re never in the way here, and no one wants you to get lost, not for anything, ever. It’s just that I wouldn’t like it if you felt, you know, uncomfortable. And I’d want you to tell me about it.”
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