The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

  “You don’t know anything about him.”

  “I’ll know more after I talk to him,” Mansur said, but he was wrong. He wouldn’t get anything out of Uncle Alva. I hoped he wouldn’t get anything out of Dirk, either. “So you went to Missouri with Gentry Frank? How did you end up driving Mr. Frank’s truck back to Wichita? Mr. Frank’s aunt, Bernice Betts, she identified you as the woman who returned his vehicle.”

  “Yes, I returned his truck. I didn’t know what else to do. Gentry left his phone with me, I didn’t know where they went, and he and Edrard never came back.”

  “By Edrard you mean Joshua Kline? Who was killed in Arkansas?” Mansur flipped over another page in his file folder, I think just to see me flinch, but there was no bloody picture.

  “He was introduced to me as Edrard,” I said.

  “According to you, they left you in southern Missouri, drove away, and you didn’t hear from them again, so you drove Mr. Frank’s truck back to Wichita.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Richard Bowers?”

  “I don’t know who that is.” I could guess. The girl at the motel had called him Rick.

  “Becky Eddiger identified him as a friend of Joshua Kline’s who might have gone to Missouri with him. She wasn’t sure. He says he didn’t go. What do you say?”

  “If he did, I never saw him. And I don’t know who Becky is,” I said.

  If Rhys claimed he never went to Missouri, it meant he was sticking to the lie. Mansur made an irritated little pout with his mouth, and flipped a few pages in his file folder.

  “Apparently all of these people are members of a . . . historical medieval combat group, and the . . . Society for Creative Anachronism. They all have pseudonyms. You may know Becky as Rosalinda?”

  “Yeah. Edrard’s wife. I met her a couple weeks ago at Gentry’s castle.”

  “His castle,” Mansur muttered. “Ms. Eddiger was under the impression that Frank, Kline, you, and possibly Bowers, were going to Missouri on some kind of crazy mission. That was how she described it.”

  “I went to Missouri to see my uncle. Edrard came later to see Gentry. They left. I never saw this other guy.”

  Mansur looked at his notes some more, while I waited for the other shoe to drop. For him to say, According to your sister you were there.

  Except LaReigne wasn’t just my sister. She was our father’s daughter. I was guessing she hadn’t spoken to the police at all.

  CHAPTER 50

  Charlene

  Gentry had always been a problem for the courts. When he was three, and bumped from foster home to foster home, because no one could handle him. When he was eleven, and had his knightly misadventure.

  I’d thought that was behind us, but after he was arrested, we lived it all over again. Every morning when I looked around the breakfast table at Bill, Trang, and Elana, I wondered what we would do as a family. Maybe the worst part was trying to maintain communication with Gentry, when he was in Arkansas, and we were trying to hold our lives together. Phone calls were impossible. He would answer questions, but only if I asked the right ones. He wrote letters, but they told me nothing about how he was coping. I didn’t want empty reassurances. I wanted to know the truth, and Gentry’s truth filtered through Middle English and bounced off Gawen told me nothing useful.

  According to our lawyer, Gentry was still a problem for the courts.

  “Obviously, they won’t want him to take the stand. The feds haven’t even subpoenaed him for Barnwell and Gill-Trego’s trials,” Ms. Howell said. She had come highly recommended by a church member, and I generally thought she was wonderful, but it soured my stomach every time she said Trego. As we learned more about the investigation, it was clear Zhorzha knew nothing about how those men escaped from prison. However innocent she was on that front, she was directly responsible for Gentry being a party to the deaths of three men, albeit none of them good men, and none of them innocent. Zhorzha was the reason Gentry was in jail, waiting to go to trial.

  “Wouldn’t it be risky for him to testify anyway?” Bill said. After years of my nagging him to lose weight, he finally had. Now I worried the stress was killing him.

  “Only for the prosecution,” Ms. Howell said.

  “How so?” I said.

  “Gentry? Gentry?” Ms. Howell leaned across the table and tapped her pen in front of him. He nodded. “Can you tell me about how you know LaReigne Trego-Gill?”

  “Certs. She be the elder sister of Lady Zhorzha Trego.”

  “And what’s your relationship with Zhorzha?”

  “I am her champion. I am sworn to protect her.”

  Ms. Howell smiled when she turned back to me. I never knew how to take those smiles, pitying but kind. I took hers in silence, because we needed her help.

  “If he testifies, there are a few possible outcomes. One: The jury doesn’t understand him or the jury finds him funny. Two—and this is the one the feds are worried about—the jury sees an earnest young man with a disability, who is being prosecuted for what is essentially a good deed.

  “Furthermore, because he was injured, it might be difficult for the prosecution to argue that what he did wasn’t self-defense. We may end up negotiating for an obstruction of justice charge or a mayhem charge. Worst-case scenario, manslaughter.”

  “Is there any way to get them to lower his bail?” I let Bill ask, even though we’d stayed up a ridiculous number of nights trying to figure out how to scrape together the bond money. We couldn’t.

  “Not while he’s charged with three counts of murder. They know they can’t convict on that, but it keeps him locked up until the trial.”

  Just hearing it said—murder—made me sick.

  I held out hope that we could reach a plea deal that would allow Gentry to serve his time in a mental health facility. Anything to keep him out of prison. While he was awaiting trial, he was housed at the county jail, but several times they took him to a diagnostic facility to assess whether he was competent to stand trial. Of course, he understood what he’d done was against the law, but according to Ms. Howell, the prosecutor worried there might be room for a diminished capacity plea, because of his voices.

  In the end, I wouldn’t have to hear murder again, because Ms. Howell negotiated a plea deal. One count of obstruction of justice and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, which meant Gentry wouldn’t have a felony on his record. As part of that deal, Gentry would go to the state hospital, rather than to prison.

  Bill and I went down to Arkansas together to meet with Ms. Howell and Gentry, who looked terrible in his orange jail scrubs. His hair was getting shaggier every week, and he clutched a manila folder of paperwork to his chest like a shield. I longed to hug him, but physical contact had become even more difficult for him while he was locked up. I made do with telling him how glad I was to see him. He bowed to me, then to Bill and Ms. Howell.

  She explained the plea agreement more remedially than was necessary, because Gentry’s silence was so often mistaken for a lack of intelligence. After she finished, he held out his hand for the papers. He read it through twice, before he passed it back to her. She flipped to the page he would need to sign and laid a pen on top of it.

  “Would ye have me sign it?” he said to his father and me.

  “Yes, Gentry. I think it’s the best thing. Don’t you, Bill?”

  “I suppose your mother’s right. Because your other option is a trial, and I don’t know about that.”

  Gentry nodded, but he stood up and walked to the other end of the room. He’d stimmed on and off while reading the plea, but now he was doing it in earnest. Squeezing his right hand into a fist, while frantically scratching his neck with his left hand, until I knew, from experience, he would end up drawing blood.

  “Is he okay?” Ms. Howell said.

  “He just needs a few minutes. Gentry—”


  “Nay,” he said, loudly enough that Ms. Howell jumped in her seat.

  I smiled to reassure her, but she was staring at Gentry, who was pacing and scratching, and having a rather heated discussion with Hildegard, if I were to guess.

  “Plague me not, harridan,” he said. “Thou hast no more wit than a stone. And a stone hath a use, more than thee.”

  “Should we call someone?” Ms. Howell said.

  “Son,” Bill said. “Calm down. You’re scaring Ms. Howell.”

  “Nay!” Gentry came back to the table and did something I hadn’t seen him do in years, something he’d been taught in ABA therapy. He put both his hands on the table and forced them flat with his fingers spread out. They’d been trying to stop him from stimming, even though that was actually useful to him. Flattening his hands like that had never helped him, and it made me uneasy to see him do it. He was breathing too fast when he picked up his folder and took out a few photocopies stapled together.

  “Read thou this?” he said to Bill, and then to both of us: “Read ye this and ye bidden me agree to such a thing?”

  “Do you know what he means, Bill?” I said, but before he could answer, Gentry slapped the pages down on the table between Ms. Howell and me.

  “It’s an article I sent him,” Bill said. “About diminished capacity plea deals.”

  “Is’t true?” Gentry said. “If I plead as ye would have me, they might give me physic I need not? They might keep me as long as they will? This tells of men held ten years and more, with no hope of freedom.”

  “It is one of the risks with this type of concession,” Ms. Howell said. I don’t think she had quite recovered from Gentry’s outburst, because she couldn’t look at him. “It requires him to show progress in his treatment. If he doesn’t, they would be able to incarcerate him for as long as they deemed necessary. For public safety.”

  “Of course, he’ll make progress,” I said. I waited for Bill to say something, but he’d picked up Gentry’s article and was flipping through it. “And if he goes to trial and gets convicted, what then? He’ll never get another aeronautics job. Not with a felony. What will he do?”

  “I got him the Bombardier job. He can get another job. No, he’ll never get security clearance for military work with a felony, but there are civilian jobs. Besides, maybe he’ll be acquitted,” Bill said, and then the thing he kept saying to all his friends: “Hell, he ought to get a medal for what he did.”

  At one point, I almost agreed with him, but in that moment, it made me angry. Unreasonably, irrationally angry at Bill. At Gentry. At myself.

  “Gentry, I want you to sign this. I think it’s the best option you have,” I said.

  “I will not.” I wanted to believe he was talking to Gawen or the Witch, but he was looking at my hands where I had them laced together on the table.

  “Do you understand what it would mean for you to go to prison? It’s not safe. It’s—”

  “My mother, I know it well, but I will not go to a mental hospital. Let those who suffer an illness of the mind do so and prosper of it, but I do not and I will not.”

  Gentry went to the door, and I knew from the set of his shoulders there was no way to convince him.

  That morning, as Bill and I had been driving the nearly eight hours from Wichita for the umpteenth time, I’d held on to the hope that we would go home with things decided. Instead I went home in tears, knowing we would come back for another meeting. As many meetings as it took to convince Gentry to take the plea deal, or to prepare him for trial. I was so upset when I left that I forgot to tell him I loved him.

  For the longest time, I’d worried that I was overprotective of Gentry. I’d sheltered him too much and kept him from finding his own way. Now I felt like I hadn’t sheltered him enough. I should have kept him on a shorter leash. I should have kept him under my wing, like the mother hen Bill always accused me of being.

  Instead, I’d let Bill teach him about guns like they were harmless toys. I’d let Gentry take boxing lessons. I’d let him go to all those tournaments, and learn to joust, and hang all those swords in his room, like it was a hobby. Like it was model trains instead of learning how to kill people.

  When we got home, Bill went to pick up Trang and Elana from Bernice’s, and I went around the house, doing a few chores and trying to calm myself before they got home. Trang had left his baseball cleats in the laundry room, so I carried them back to his room to put them away. There, I looked at the swords in a way I never had before.

  In the beginning, when Gentry was a teenager, it was all wooden swords and rubber axes, pretend weapons. The claymore hanging over his bed was the first real sword he’d bought with his summer lawn-mowing money. Hardened steel, double-edged blade. The handle was wrapped in leather and almost a foot long. It was a sword meant to be wielded with two hands, and it took me both hands to lift it down from the wall.

  Gentry had left his bed neatly made as always, and I stood in the middle of it in my shoes, trying to steady myself enough to get down while holding that ridiculous sword.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but it wasn’t staying in my house.

  CHAPTER 51

  Gentry

  The Witch spake not to me tho I cried out for a word. Let her curse me as readily as Hildegard, or mock me as Gawen did, if only she would speak. She left me to be torn between them like a bone twixt two dogs. In her silence, ’twas the black knight who counseled me.

  “Speak not what might harm Lady Zhorzha,” he said. “If thou art in truth her champion, hold thy tongue.”

  Tho my mind was confused, I heeded him, and spake only those things that had been wrought by mine own hand, and what I knew of Sir Edrard’s courage. For he could no more suffer the consequences, and I would have it known that he was true and valiant to the last. Of Lady Zhorzha, Master Dirk, and Sir Alva, I was silent. Many a time, I told the ilk tale of my journey to Arkansas, first to the sheriff’s men, then to Mansur, then to the lady Howell, my father, and my mother. I was heartsore to distress her and recalled my father’s words when I was a boy. If I would be noble, he said, I must strive to do her honor.

  Certs, to give her grief was dishonor, and I knew she grieved when I would not do as she asked. She bade me say I knew not what I did, that I was ill, for then the court would send me to some safe place. I might have done it, ere I read how I could be kept there and physicked beyond my wish. As ever, she desired to protect me, but I accorded not with her desire. My mother went from me in tears, and I could offer her no comfort.

  In truth, I was glad when they had gone, and I was returned to my cell, where there was what silence I could have. I made my prayers to appease Hildegard, and I told tales to soothe Gawen. Sleep would not come in that room where the window was no more than an archer’s loophole, but there weren hours enough to exercise myself. I passed many weeks thus, and each week the lady Howell came with my father, or my mother, for they could not often come together, and leave Elana and Trang with my aunt. It shamed me that I was such a burden unto them, and I bade them not surrender so much for me. ’Twas also that I wished to speak alone with the lady Howell, for she was mine advocate and not my mother’s. It liked her not, but she came as I asked, and soon I made her know my intent.

  I would not plead to be locked away safe for some unnumbered years, but to spare my father and mother, I would plead. For I did those deeds by mine own hand, and by pleading, I would free myself sooner. The lady Howell spake with the prosecutor, and returned to tell me what he offered. If I vouched my guilt for slaying Paul Scanlon, I should serve no more than five years.

  That week ’twas my mother that visited, and she was wroth with the lady Howell, and with me, and with God, methought, for she cursed us all.

  “Lord, don’t test me! I won’t allow you to do this!” she cried out with fierce feeling. I knew it well, for oft she had turned it upon me when I
was a stubborn boy.

  “Mrs. Frank, honestly, this is a good offer,” said the lady Howell. “He’ll probably only serve two to three years. At the rate things are going, he won’t even go to trial for another eighteen months.”

  “I don’t care. He cannot go to prison. Do you hear me, Gentry? You’re not taking this plea deal.”

  “My mother, I hear thee, but prison be not Battle of the Nations,” I said. “Thou canst not forbid me go, as thou didst then.”

  I readied myself for her wrath, but she wept, and still I could not give her what she longed for. After some while, she drew from her purse her kerchief and dried her eyes. When she laid her hand upon the table, I gave her mine.

  “Gentry, please, listen to me,” she said, and her voice in its hoarseness reminded me of the lady dragon. “I know you take what the Witch says very seriously, and I understand why, but you can’t trust her to help you make decisions like this. She doesn’t know any more than you do. She’s not psychic.”

  “Sooth, I know it. My mother, rememberest thou when first the voices spake to me?”

  “Of course, I remember.”

  “And I was frighted, for I knew them not. And thou said, Fear not. They aren part of thee. They aren thy voice. I say to thee, it is so. If I rely upon the Witch’s wisdom, ’tis myself I rely upon. This is my choosing.”

  I told her not that the Witch was silent. She spake not to me since I broke my vow to protect Lady Zhorzha. ’Twas I alone that chose this path, the sooner to be free.

  Tho til the last, my mother tried to sway me from it, I made my plea. I went before the judge, and there I swore a true confession of what crimes I committed. My lord asked, kenned I my plea and felt I remorse for what I had done? I assented I did, tho in truth I thought my crimes not very horrible.

  At last, I was delivered to the place of my servitude, where I was put into a barber’s chair still shackled. The first cold dread crept into my belly when the clippers with their gnashing metal teeth were put to my head. Tho I longed to be brave and stoic, I was not. I cried out like a small boy, like the small boy I had been when the therapist would do what she called desensitizing. I never could be made insensible, for ’twas not a battle to be fought, but a torment to be endured. My gaoler called for another to restrain me, and they scorned against me, as I was put to the blades.