The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  She stepped around her table and leaned back on it, her legs outstretched, but crossed at the ankles in a delicate way.

  “We’re here because of one man’s fantasy.” She shrugged. “It sounds bad, believe me, I know. But it’s true. We’re here because one man made up his mind about this case a long time ago, and he refused to admit he was wrong when the evidence clearly indicated that he was. He couldn’t admit that he had made a mistake, and as a result of that, this young woman”—she touched Heather’s hand—“has spent the last five months in prison, separated from her baby, whom she loves deeply. She’s spent those months waiting for this court case. Dreading this court case, which terrifies her. And I’ll tell you something else. Heather Pratt has no idea what the case of a murdered baby found in a river has to do with her. But she has a very good idea of what it can do to her.”

  Judith sighed. “Let me be clear about something. I’m not saying that the district attorney went out of his way to make a mistake, or that he set out to railroad my client, a young woman he’d never laid eyes on before last fall. Mr. Charter is a decent man, and I’m sure he embarked on his investigation with every intention of getting to the bottom of a terrible crime. He made some mistakes, but I don’t fault him for them. But he refused to acknowledge those mistakes, and I certainly do fault him for that.

  “Now, let me see,” she said, cocking her head, “let me see if I can find a way to explain to you what I mean.” She sighed, and appeared to think, but Naomi knew Judith far too well to imagine she was just working this out now. “Let’s say,” she said, “you wanted to glue something on your living-room wall. Like … let’s say you went down to New Orleans on vacation and you brought back one of those masks they have down there in the souvenir shops. They’re made of ceramic, and they’re painted black and white and decorated with paint and feathers, and sometimes glitter. You know the ones I mean?” She eyed her audience and waited for nods: tentative rapport. “So you bring it home and you decide to glue it onto your living-room wall. But unfortunately the glue doesn’t stick very well. Maybe it holds for a day or two, but the mask is heavy. It needs strong support, like a nail or a shelf to keep it up. The glue’s just not up to the job. So the mask falls off onto the floor. But you try again, because you want that mask on your wall, and it looks great where you put it, and you’re not going to be defeated by a little bit of glue. But you know, this time, when you put the mask onto the wall, it doesn’t really look quite as nice as it did the first time. You’ve got some of that old glue underneath the new glue, and it shows around the edges, and what’s more, the mask doesn’t really sit flat against the wall anymore. But hey, at least it’s sticking.”

  She pushed off the table and walked toward them.

  “Then it stops sticking. It falls off again. By this time, maybe that mask is trying to tell you something, right? Like it just isn’t meant to be hung up on walls with only a little glue, right? But you are really determined by now. Damn it, that mask is going right back on the wall! So you throw on a little more glue, and by now the whole thing is a real mess. It looks like an amateur job, with the old glue and the new glue, and it’s kind of crooked. Well, how long is it going to last this time?”

  She leaned forward, touching the railing.

  “That’s what you’re going to have to tell us.” She eyed them, letting her gaze drift from face to face. “Now usually a defendant will be brought to trial for a crime when there is evidence linking him or her to that crime. That is not the case in this trial. We’re not here,” she said, her voice heating up, “because a trail of evidence pointed to Heather Pratt. Mr. Charter did not lay a foundation for his accusation on this most serious of charges, I’m sorry to say. He just hung his mask in the first place that felt right to him. But when it fell off the wall, when it became clear that he’d accused the wrong person, did Mr. Charter get to work finding a better place? A more appropriate person to stick it on? He did not. He just threw on a little more glue and tried again. And when it happened the second time, he tried again, and every time he redid his original bad job, it got worse. Because no matter how nice that mask looked where he put it, there were other forces at work here, and they were much stronger than the little bit of glue, of conjecture, and of suspicion. And of dislike, ladies and gentlemen.” She stopped and shook her head briskly.

  “What was stronger? Well, gravity, for one thing. Reality. The truth.”

  Naomi looked at Charter. His cheeks were flushed, as if two blazes of livid red had been applied by some unsubtle cosmetician. He sat rigid, the fingers of his left hand splayed and stiff.

  “We are all here today for only one reason. My opponent in this case, a decent man and a well-meaning man, made a rush to judgment based on his own moral prejudice, and in so doing, he has destroyed lives.” She paused. She wanted them to see that she would not take this back. “This is a terrible accusation, I know, but I have to make it. Mr. Charter was driven to find the perpetrator of a crime we all abhor, and so he turned to a woman whose morality he abhorred, and he made her into a murderess. He accused Heather Pratt of murdering the infant girl found in the Sabbathday River on September 22. When she denied that she had done this, he didn’t believe her. Well”—Judith shrugged, a half smile—“I guess I wouldn’t say that’s uncommon, to deny a crime.” Then her face hardened. “But then Heather told her interrogators that she had had a stillborn child a few weeks before, and she begged them for the chance to show them the body of that child. They ridiculed her. They would not allow her to take them to the place where her own child’s stillborn body had been put. And when that body was discovered—and it was easily discovered! There was no criminal attempt to hide the body. It was found simply by looking where Heather said to look—when it was found, Mr. Charter did not even pause to consider that he had been wrong about Heather, that there was in fact a real murderer, still unidentified, still out there. No. He simply affixed a new charge to his accusation. Heather Pratt had murdered not one baby but two! She had, we were asked to believe, given birth to twin daughters, murdered them in different ways, and disposed of their bodies in two separate places. He was that determined not to be proved in error! Being right, ladies and gentlemen, was more important to him than preventing the absolute destruction of this woman’s life.” She paused for effect, but to Naomi’s eye, the jurors still looked dubious. They didn’t trust Judith, she saw. And they didn’t like her accusatory tone. Naomi’s stomach clenched. She wished she could speak to Judith, but it was too late.

  “Still,” Judith went on, almost jauntily, “that was nothing compared to what happened next. Next”—she shook her head in exasperated disbelief—“some genuine evidence entered this investigation. Forensic evidence that had nothing to do with what kind of person Heather Pratt is, or what Mr. Charter thought of her. And this impartial forensic evidence, which Mr. Charter himself will be telling you about, proved to him that Heather Pratt’s lover—the father of her daughter Polly and of the stillborn daughter born last September—could not have been the father of the infant found first, in the Sabbathday River, if, by some chance, Heather was its mother. Did this indicate to Mr. Charter that he might have made a mistake? After all, hadn’t he believed, prior to this report, that Heather had had twins in the normal way?”

  She regarded Heather, then turned back to the jury and shook her head with an isn’t this crazy? expression on her face.

  “Well, that was before he had this actual evidence. Do you know what he wants us to believe now? He wants us to believe that Heather—who claims that she gave birth to one child, a child who died tragically at birth, a child whose blood type is consistent with that of Heather’s lover—actually had twin children fathered by two different men.” She let the sound of her incredulity linger.

  “Anywhere else,” Judith sighed, “this might be a comedy. But here”—she gestured with her hand—“it’s a tragedy. Because this young woman, who has already suffered the hardship of being abandoned by her l
over while pregnant with his second child, who has already struggled alone, without any emotional or financial support, to raise the child she already had, and who has already experienced the devastation of a stillborn child—this young mother has now been declared a murderess. She has been deprived of her livelihood, thrown in jail for nearly six months. She has had her daughter—whom she adores and to whom she is an excellent mother—taken away from her.” She stopped, letting them see her disbelief, and her compassion. “And why? Why Heather Pratt, out of all the women he might have accused? What made Heather Pratt such a perfect candidate for a murderess? Well, it’s very simple. Heather was a bad woman. She did bad things. She had an affair with a married man—terrible! She had a child without being married. Also terrible! And she refused to apologize for it, or be shamed by it. She showed her first pregnancy in public. Later, she showed off her daughter Polly. She refused to take the hint when people let her know she ought to go off and hide.” Judith shook her head. “They never forgave her for that.

  “Now,” she went on, stepping back a bit, “it may well be that you don’t approve of everything Heather Pratt has ever done. I’m not sure I approve myself. Heather made a lot of mistakes, I’m the last one to deny that. For starters, she fell in love with a heartless jerk instead of a decent guy. She wasn’t responsible about birth control and she got pregnant. She continued the affair against all the evidence that her lover would never leave his wife and live with her, and she continued to be irresponsible about birth control, even though she must have understood, by this time, what the result of such behavior might be. So when Ashley Deacon finally broke off their relationship, and when Heather discovered that she was pregnant again, you can understand how unhappy and depressed she must have felt. That’s no excuse for what happened next. Heather had an obligation to make some kind of preparation for the birth of her second child, and she didn’t do it, with fatal results.” Judith turned and looked at Heather squarely, but Heather did not look back. She was examining her hands, cupped open before her on the table, as if she were trying to read her own fate in the lines. She was also crying, but silently. “And those, ladies and gentlemen, are the crimes of Heather Pratt. They are serious crimes, but they are not the crimes with which this court has charged her. And I know you know that there’s a world between Heather’s actual failings and the murder of two children.”

  She paused for a moment. She looked pointedly at Charter, then back at the jury, intimate but firm. “Now, from all this conjecture, you must think there’s very little actual evidence in this case. You’d be wrong to think that, ladies and gentlemen, because there is evidence. You won’t hear it from the prosecution, because it interferes with their myth of Heather the murderous mother, but I can assure you that you’re going to hear it from the defense. The evidence will show that there was no second man in her life, no phantom father of her phantom twin. The evidence will show that Heather was pregnant with one fetus only. The evidence will show that it is entirely possible that Heather’s baby died naturally, if tragically, at birth, precisely as she told the police it had. The evidence will show that we can never even know whether Heather’s infant achieved life.” She shook her head, grave. “It might never even have lived. No life, no death. Certainly no murder. No crime, ladies and gentlemen. Heather’s child was stillborn, and she buried the body herself, with her own hands. Was that proper? Probably not. But it hardly warrants the treatment Heather has received, and it certainly isn’t a double murder.”

  Judith went back to her place, and there she stood, her hand at Heather’s shoulder again. Naomi was close enough now to see that shoulder twitch at the touch.

  “Mr. Charter chose to affix the mask of a murderer to Heather Pratt. But he chose the wrong person. The mask doesn’t fit. It’s wrong. It’s held in place only by the condemnation of people like himself, people who don’t approve of Heather Pratt, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is far too weak a glue to make a multiple murder stick where it doesn’t belong. I know you won’t let that happen. I know you’ll see truth where you’re asked to see a fairy tale. I know you’ll understand that we cannot avenge the deaths of two innocent babies with the life of one innocent woman. I know you’ll be the voice of reason in this terrible case, where there has been so little reason until now. On Heather’s behalf, I thank you for that.”

  She sat down. Naomi stared at Judith in blank awe. For a moment it had seemed to her that the jurors must stand in unison and walk out of the courtroom in protest, but instead they regained their individual composures and looked to the judge for guidance. And Judge Hayes, despite the burden of reason, did not rap his gavel and release them all from this realm of the absurd and the unjust. He called for the prosecution’s first witness, and the trial began in earnest.

  Chapter 30

  So Help Her God

  SHE COULD NOT IMAGINE WHY THEY CALLED IT the witness stand—Naomi would actually have preferred to stand, or to have the option of standing at least. But the seat she was directed to take was utterly ordinary, a plastic bucket on splayed metal spikes, even cracked in places and grubby everywhere else. It was not at all elevated but sat on the courtroom floor to one side of the judge’s bench, diagonally across from the jury. Naomi looked at them and smiled nervously, but they were nervous, too, she saw, and did not smile back.

  At the bailiff’s request, she said her name. Then somebody held out a Bible.

  Naomi gaped at it. Vaguely she understood what they wanted her to do, but she couldn’t do that. Could she put her hand on her heart, maybe? Or pledge by something else, if she could think of something fast? Would they let her do that? The moment lengthened interminably.

  “Ms. Roth?” somebody said.

  Naomi looked up. Judge Hayes was frowning over at her.

  “You need to swear.”

  “I swear,” Naomi said. “I do. But …”

  The bailiff was frowning at her. “You need to say it with your hand on the book.”

  “But I don’t—” She looked over at Judith, who was glaring at her, frantic.

  Instantly Naomi placed her palm on the cheap leather binding of the Bible and swore to tell the truth, so help her God. For about five different things at once, she was ashamed of herself. She looked at the jury, embarrassed, and hoped they would forgive her for Heather’s sake.

  Charter, still in his seat, milked the moment a bit, shaking his head in wonder. She tried to pull herself together, but her thoughts raced on, heated and bitter. It took all her strength to make her heels stop drumming the floor.

  “You did not want to testify today, did you, Ms. Roth?”

  “That’s true,” Naomi said, grateful at least that they’d begun, though a little perplexed by this opening volley.

  “Am I right in thinking that you are not particularly in sympathy with the prosecution?”

  “Yes,” she said, growing more confused by the moment.

  “And yet I have decided to begin my case against Heather Pratt with the testimony of a person who thinks I’m wrong about her. Why do you think I’m doing that, Ms. Roth?”

  It occurred to her that she should laugh, but she couldn’t muster the humor. “I really don’t have any idea.”

  He sighed, as if she had disappointed him. “Well”—he got painfully to his feet—“why don’t we talk about some things we are in agreement about. Would you please tell the jury about the morning of September 22 of last year.”

  “Oh,” she said stupidly. “Of course. I was at the river. I mean the Sabbathday River. Just south of Goddard.”

  “And what were you doing at the river?” Charter said.

  “Running. Well”—she blushed—“jogging, really. I don’t run very fast.”

  “You’re a regular jogger?”

  “No. I should do it more.” The truth was, she hadn’t been jogging at all since that day last fall.

  “And where were you, precisely?”

  Naomi closed her eyes, then opened them quickly. She did n
ot like what she saw when her eyes were closed.

  “Near Nate’s Landing. I’d say half a mile upstream.”

  “And did something make you stop in your jogging?”

  Naomi paused. Powerfully, irrationally, she wanted to say no. No, she had seen nothing. No, she had found no dead baby. There was no Nelson Erroll, no medical examiner, no Robert Charter, no Heather Pratt. They could all rise and go home and laugh at their shared delusion of sin. She looked at him. He was waiting.

  “I saw something,” Naomi said.

  “What did you see?”

  She remembered, and shook her head slightly. “I thought it was a doll. It made me think of a doll I’d had when I was little.”

  “A doll in the river.” He seemed to consider. He was leaning over his desk, his weight on his braced arms. “And what did this doll look like?”

  She knew what he wanted, but she wouldn’t give it to him. “I couldn’t see very well.”

  “And yet you were intrigued enough to go closer.”

  “I was, yes. I thought someone must be missing the doll. I could get it back for them.”

  “You thought someone had left a doll in the river and you were going to get it back for them?”

  It sounded much stupider in his voice. She frowned. Naomi nodded. “Yes.”

  “Was the … object close to the shore? So that you could reach out and grab hold of it?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It was in the middle of the river. I had to pick my way over the stones.”

  “And the water would have been cold in late September, too, I imagine. »

  “Yes,” said Naomi.

  “And yet you say you thought this was only a doll some careless child had lost? And you were willing to slip on the rocks and get wet in the cold water? Just to retrieve a doll?”