Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Stephen shrugged. He had no idea what his lawyer was talking about. Why would they want to wave at a jury? Was that even proper? “It’s up to you,” he said.

  “Then let’s do it,” said Flynt Adams.

  Jim Hall understood the implications of Justice Wainwright’s ruling every bit as well as Flynt Adams did. Immediately after court, he gathered his staff around him in his office. And if any of them thought they’d been invited to celebrate the morning’s victory, he set them straight pretty quickly.

  “Okay,” he told them, “we won that battle, but we’re in danger of losing the war. You heard the judge. He all but came right out and told Adams to try the case nonjury in front of him. And unless we can come up with something else, he’s going to go ahead and acquit that pervert.”

  “How about the stuff from the search warrant?” suggested Hall’s investigator, Ed Sprague. “Like that ‘Love, Stephen’ card?”

  “That’s a nice touch,” said Hall. “But it doesn’t really zero in on the photo.”

  “What about the gynecologist’s report?” asked Hank Bournagan, pronouncing the word jynecologist. “You know, that his findings were ‘consistent with sexual abuse’? Couldn’t that help?”

  “Prob’ly not,” said Hall. “Knowing Wainwright, he wouldn’t even let that in. He’d consider it evidence of an uncharged crime. But you may be on the right track. How ‘bout that other doctor, the therapist?”

  “Silverman?”

  “Yeah. Maybe she can help us out. Give her a call, why don’t you? Find out if she’s still seeing the kid. See what she can come up with.”

  Cathy Silverman was most definitely still seeing the kid. Aside from her own heartfelt certainty that Penny Barrow had been sexually abused by her father and needed ongoing therapy to deal with the trauma she’d suffered as a result, Silverman was continuing to see the child for two additional reasons. First, referrals from judges and lawyers made up a significant portion of her practice, and she sensed (rightly or wrongly) that those who made the referrals to her wanted her to find abuse. After all, she almost always found it, and they kept referring her more cases. Beyond that, there was the practical aspect of it: The bottom line was that Cathy Silverman’s livelihood depended upon her finding abuse. She’d been seeing the Barrow child for six weeks now, twice a week, at the rate of $250 a visit. That added up to the tidy sum of $3,000. And the longer she saw the child, the more she’d make. Throw in some extra hours for preparing her reports, meeting with the lawyers, talking on the telephone, and testifying in court, and pretty soon Cathy would be able to buy that Subaru Forester she’d had her eye on. And the best part of it was that she didn’t even have to feel guilty about billing the county for her services. Her fee was being paid by Stephen Barrow - the very man who she believed was responsible for his daughter’s needing therapy in the first place.

  Now there was justice for you!

  She picked up her phone on the first ring and answered, “Cathy Silverman.”

  “Hi, Dr. Silverman,” said a young man. “This is Hank Bournagan, over at the DA’s office in Hudson. I’m calling you about Penny Barrow.”

  “Yes, that poor child.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “I think we’re making a little progress,” said Silverman. “But it takes time, you know. They’re slow to open up.”

  “Yes, I understand. The thing is, Mr. Hall was wondering if you’d come up with anything new yet.”

  “New. Like what?”

  “Oh, anything at all. Like if there’d been other photo sessions, videos, other kids involved, any props used. What her father had had to do in order to get her to pose like that. You know, that sort of stuff.”

  “Well,” said Silverman, “nothing along those lines yet. But I’ve got her scheduled for this afternoon. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good,” said Hank Bournagan. “In the meantime, why don’t you write down my phone number? Just so you have it handy.”

  It was Friday of that week when Stephen was called out of his cell. Though by that time, Stephen had lost all track of time. It had been almost seven weeks now that he’d been in jail, and he’d lost the ability to estimate the time of day, name the day or date, or even say with any degree of certainty what month it was. He knew Flynt Adams came to see him once a week at least, sometimes more, but only because Adams himself had told him so. He knew he was supposed to have a trial on April 17, and remembered signing a paper for Adams, saying he was giving up his right to a jury, and would instead be having something called a bench trial. Yet he had no real idea of how far off in the future that would be, at least not in any meaningful terms.

  So when they’d handed him his street clothes through the bars and told him to change into them, he’d guessed his trial was about to start. That was the only time they had him take off his orange jumpsuit, after all: for court appearances.

  “What day is today?” he asked the deputy, expecting to hear that it was indeed the 17th.

  “Friday.”

  “No, the number,” said Stephen. “The date.”

  “The seventh.”

  To Stephen, it sounded enough like “the seventeenth” to confirm his suspicion. Either he’d misheard the deputy, or he’d misheard the judge last time they’d been in court. Either way, it seemed the moment had finally come. He ran his hand over his face and wished he’d thought to shave. He did his best to smooth his hair into place. He didn’t want his lawyer to be angry with him.

  He followed the deputy down the corridor as instructed, only vaguely aware that they were taking a different route to the courtroom this time. They stopped at a small desk, where another deputy sat, just inside a large gate.

  “You got Barrow’s papers?” the first one asked.

  “Yeah, right here.”

  He was handed a pen and told to sign his name beneath a lot of fine print. Evidently it was different when you were on trial, more formal. When he went to sign his name, he found it difficult, not having written anything for so long a time, but he did his best.

  The deputy at the desk looked at Stephen’s signature for a long time, comparing it with something on another piece of paper, before nodding to the first deputy. Then he stood up and unlocked the gate, motioning Stephen to step through.

  “Hold it,” he said, and Stephen stopped, certain he’d done something wrong. But the deputy only wanted to hand him a slip of paper. Stephen looked at it. All it said was, “April 17, 9:30 a.m.”

  “What’s this?” Stephen asked.

  “A reminder,” said the deputy.

  “Of what?”

  “Your next court date.”

  “Isn’t it today?”

  “No.”

  Stephen frowned. He had no idea what was going on. It was as if the two deputies were speaking in some diaiect he didn’t quite understand.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” the first deputy asked him. And when Stephen just looked at him blankly, he said, “Follow me.”

  They walked down another corridor, a long one Stephen couldn’t remember having ever been in. At the end was another gate, where someone stood just on the other side of the bars. But because it was bright down at that end, behind the person, he couldn’t see who it was.

  It wasn’t until they were nearly at the very end of the corridor that the deputy turned to Stephen and said, almost matter-of-factly, “Your bond has been posted. You’re going home.” By that time, they’d drawn close enough to the person waiting on the other side of the gate for Stephen to see that she had red hair and very green eyes.

  It had taken Theresa Mulholland three full weeks to post the $50,000 bond required to get Stephen Barrow out of jail. She’d persuaded her brother to put up the deed of his home, which still left her almost $15,000 short. She’d emptied her own savings account, which had just under $8,000 in it. Then, over the next two weeks, she’d borrowed from anyone she could - other family members, friends, acquaintances - until she’d made up the diff
erence.

  Why had she done that?

  In trying to explain her actions much later, Theresa would put it this way: “Look, I know it didn’t make sense, like there was nothing rational about it. I mean, I barely knew this guy. But I did know a couple of things about him. I knew he loved his little girl, and could never have done anything to take advantage of her. That was plain to see. And I knew he wasn’t going to run away and abandon her. So as crazy as it was for me to do it, at least I was pretty sure the money would be safe.”

  At this point, Theresa would stop for a moment. “But there’s more to it than that,” she’d admit. “First I get myself stuck in the snow trying to sneak an exclusive out of this guy. He probably could have had me arrested for trespassing if he’d wanted to. Instead, what does he do? He ends up taking care of me, seeing to it that I don’t freeze to death. Next thing, I go and lose my job over it. Now I’ve suddenly got all this free time on my hands, and nothing to do with it but obsess about the guy and his problem. I got to the point where I convinced myself that it was meant to be, that it was my own personal destiny to help him.

  “Sure, there were times I knew I should back off, when I realized posting his bail wasn’t my responsibility. So I’d put things on hold for a day or two, tell myself to mind my own business. Then I’d see him in court - I kept going to court each time the case was on, I couldn’t help it - and each time he looked worse and worse. What finally drove me over the edge was that last time, when the judge said he wanted to dismiss the case but couldn’t. By that time, Stephen looked so thin, and - and beaten. He could barely hold his head up. The thought even occurred to me that he might not live through this, that he really might die in jail. Not from being killed by somebody else, or anything like that, but from just wasting away. You know, like you hear about some animal that gets put in a zoo, and it won’t eat, and after a while it just dies. At that point, I knew I had no choice, I had to get him out. There was simply no way I could have lived with myself if I hadn’t done it, and he’d died in there. And after all, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was only money I was talking about, right?”

  Wrong.

  Theresa had been operating under the assumption that she could post the bond, pick up Stephen at the jail, and give him a ride home. Sure, she’d seen how bad he’d looked in court at the beginning of the week, but she figured that the simple act of getting out would snap him out of his funk. A hot bath, some good food, a sound night’s sleep, and he’d be well on the road to recovery.

  What she hadn’t counted on was just how close to the bottom Stephen had sunk. When she’d finished making all the arrangements, signing all the papers, bringing the release order around to the entrance of the jail, and waiting there for an hour while they did whatever it was they had to do inside, there finally came a time when one of the guards had walked Stephen toward her. He’d looked up and had to have seen her standing there, just outside the front gate. Even once they’d opened the gate and let him walk through it, she wasn’t sure he’d recognized her, or grasped what was happening. On the way to her car, he’d walked - shuffled was more like it - all stooped over, like her grandfather used to. He smelled. He mumbled to himself. In the car, he took turns squinting and blinking, even though the day was overcast.

  “Your place or mine?” she asked, intending it as a joke, trying to pry a smile out of him.

  “Mine,” he said, straight-faced. “Penny . . .” But the thought drifted off, unfinished.

  So she took him home, to his place. But when they got there, and she helped him up the steps, it all seemed strange and frightening to him. He didn’t seem to know how to turn the lights on, or where the matches were to light the wood-burning stove. He kept looking around, as if he couldn’t quite place his surroundings, didn’t quite remember this place he was sitting in.

  His own home.

  By this time, Theresa knew there was no way she could leave him alone like that. Her earlier thought, that she could simply give him a ride home, now struck her as foolishly naive. He was simply in no shape to take care of himself. Left alone, it was only a question of whether he’d freeze to death, starve, or burn the house down first. So she looked at it this way: She’d already been his surety and his chauffeur; now, it seemed, she was about to become his nurse.

  But if taking that next step seemed even more bizarre than the earlier ones, Theresa’s later explanation would at least have the virtue of consistency.

  “I had no choice,” she would say.

  Word of Stephen Barrow’s release spread quickly. Flynt Adams found out that very afternoon, when he drove to the jail to check on his client, only to learn he was no longer there. Tom Grady wrote a follow-up piece for the Hudson Valley Herald, in which he questioned the wisdom of allowing bail for those accused of sexual crimes against children. Stephen’s ex-wife, Ada, phoned her lawyer, Jane Sparrow, demanding that an order of protection be issued, prohibiting Stephen from going anywhere within a ten-mile radius of their daughter. Sparrow told her there was already an order in force (though one slightly less restrictive in its terms), and if Stephen violated it, all she had to do was notify the sheriff’s office, and they’d arrest him on the spot for contempt.

  Both of the judges were surprised, but both were also pleased on one level - Everett Wainwright because he never really thought Stephen Barrow belonged in jail in the first place and had been surprised it took him so long to get out, and Priscilla McGee because Barrow’s release would give her additional leverage to force him to catch up on back alimony and child support he owed his ex-wife, and pay the bills from the physician and the therapist, which had begun to pile up. When a defendant was in jail, after all, there wasn’t all that much you could force him to do.

  But of all the parties touched by the case in one way or another, the one most heartened by the news was, surprisingly enough, the man whose job it would be to send Stephen Barrow back to jail. Reached by the sheriff only moments after Barrow had walked out the main gate, District Attorney Jim Hall turned to his assistant, Hank Bournagan, and smiled broadly.

  “Guess who just made bail?” he asked. And then, without waiting for an answer, he said, “Our friend Stephen Barrow.”

  “Bummer,” said Bournagan.

  “Au contrairy,” said Hall, whose French was pretty much on a par with his Spanish. “This is gonna turn out to be exactly the break we were looking for.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You just stay tuned,” said Hall, winking mischievously, “and you’ll see how the game is played.”

  When, sometime around noon on Sunday, Stephen Barrow turned to Theresa Mulholland and said, “I can’t believe I’m home,” it wasn’t just a figure of speech. In fact, it took Stephen the entire weekend to fully comprehend that he was indeed home -that his bedroom wasn’t his jail cell; that it was okay for him not to be wearing his orange jumpsuit; that no one had sneaked in while he wasn’t looking and added a fixture to the bare lightbulb in his ceiling, or forgotten to pass him his meals on a cardboard tray; and that this woman who kept taking care of him was not some deputy sheriff in civilian clothes, sent into his cell to spy on him.

  People react in different ways to being locked up. Some rail at their captors; some vent their anger on their fellow inmates. There are inmates who embrace religion, study law, or “turn snitch,” becoming informants in order to earn early release or receive some other form of leniency. Still others bide their time, obsessing over the possibility of escape, no matter how remote the odds.

  Stephen Barrow hadn’t followed any of those models. His particular method of adjustment had been to surrender, to give up, to accept his confinement as something he himself had not only brought on, but on some level had even deserved. And his surrender had been so complete and so effective that it had almost cost him his life. He’d reached the point, in those final days of his confinement, that he’d stopped eating altogether, and all but stopped drinking. He’d lost so much weight by the
time of his release that one wonders if he could have survived another week.

  Worse yet, he hadn’t seemed to care.

  As a result, Stephen’s post-incarceration recovery wasn’t simply a matter of restoring his body with food, fluids, and sleep, and then making it presentable with a shower, a shave, and a haircut. He needed much more than that. He needed, among other things, to find himself again, to locate that part of him that he’d abandoned at some point while he’d been in jail.

  And Terry (for now he remembered exactly who she was - the reporter who’d gotten her car stuck in the snowstorm and been forced to spend the night in Stephen’s living room), Terry seemed to understand this. So each time he’d eaten and drunk and slept and cleaned himself up, she’d talk to him. She’d tell him what had been going on while he was, well, away. She’d bring him up to date on his case - how close the judge had come to dismissing it before chickening out at the last minute; how Stephen had to go back to court on the seventeenth, and what was likely to happen when he did; and, even though he was no longer in jail, how much trouble he was still in. She’d tell him about his daughter, how Penny was still living with her mother, but was apparently not attending school; how several experts had suggested that not only had Stephen photographed her naked, but he’d done other things, sexual things, to her as well.

  And bit by bit, day by day, it all began to sink in - the things he’d never known, or had known but forgotten, or had simply chosen to ignore. And the more he learned or remembered, the more difficult it became for him not to care.

  They had his daughter. They were saying he’d done terrible things to her. They intended to keep her from him for as long as they possibly could, maybe even forever. They had no interest in helping her; their interest in her was limited to how they could use her to hurt him.

  It took the entire weekend and half the next week. Terry stayed with him the entire time, except toward the end, when she began to trust him enough to leave him for an hour or two while she went out to buy food, pick up the mail, or run some other errand. And as Stephen came to realize what her presence had done for him - that it had very possibly been lifesaving, in the most literal sense of the word - he took to thanking her over and over again, until she finally tired of it, and snapped at him.