Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  “That’s why she was so calm.”

  “Come on, Mom. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can you just tell me what happened?” He gripped the steering wheel tighter, expecting to hear something bad. Something very bad.

  “You mean what didn’t happen.”

  “What didn’t happen?”

  “The execution, Fin. The execution.”

  His heart lurched, then sped off without him.

  “What?”

  “The governor called it off.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “How dare you!”

  He felt for her. A lot. But he still couldn’t help but give silent thanks to whatever force in the universe had answered his prayers.

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “Why did the governor stop it?” He tried to keep his voice calm, to sound neutral, but he was so beside himself he could barely sit still.

  “She was in on it.”

  “Who? In on what?”

  “Raelynn Blackwell, that’s who. She worked the system, that’s what. She had it all planned. She knew she wasn’t going to die.” With each angry spurt, his mom smacked the top of her leg like a drum, her voice growing louder with each beat.

  “Come on. That just doesn’t sound right.” He reached for her hand, hoping to calm her down so he could reason with her. But she snatched her hand away and stared stone-faced at him.

  He looked out the window at the passing rural landscape, at what he could see in the dark of the tin-roofed houses with ramshackle porches sagging under the weight of old refrigerators and trailer parts, red barns with hand-painted roofs advertising Brahman bulls and Suzie’s Bar-B-Q, ubiquitous Don’t Mess with Texas signs. This part of Texas had always been scary to him, but right now it wasn’t anywhere near as scary as what he was about to say. Still, he had to say to it.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but I’m glad.”

  There, he’d been honest. At least there was that. They’d always been honest with each other. Mom would have it no other way. She could at least appreciate that, couldn’t she? But she shook her head and waved him away. Her face, twisted into an angry coil, looked disfigured in the dark. This was not his mother. What was happening to her?

  “If I could get my hands on her right now, I would …”

  “What? Kill her?”

  She slapped the seat between them. His hand flew up to his cheek as he realized, for the first time in his life, that not every slap is physical. His face went numb, and he felt sick to his stomach. Tears stung his eyes. Whatever had happened tonight had been too much for her. He saw that now. He reached over and touched her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  She didn’t speak for the rest of the way, just sat rigid and stared out the window. When they got home, Fin walked her to the front door and told her he loved her. She stormed into the house and slammed the door behind her without even saying good night.

  NINE

  Marty poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, propped his head up with his hands, and sighed. Most of the night, Bernie had kept him awake, saying over and over that Raelynn Blackwell had known what was going to happen all along, that everyone else knew, too, that she’d been a fool. And yet, after all that, he still didn’t know what had happened, only that Raelynn Blackwell was still alive this morning. But how could a murderer orchestrate the timing of her own execution? Down to the last minute, no less. Nothing Bernie said made any sense, and he didn’t know what to make of it. His wife was a lot of things—headstrong, passionate, bold, practical, courageous—but never crazy, never delusional. This wasn’t like her. Not like her at all.

  “Hi, Dad. I brought Mom’s car back.” Fin dropped the Volvo keys on the table, then ran his fingers through his disheveled hair and stretched his neck up and down, side to side.

  “You look like hell,” Marty said.

  “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror this morning? How’s Mom?”

  “She’s asleep. Finally.”

  Fin reached for the Austin American-Statesman lying untouched in the middle of the table. “It’s the lead story,” he said as he unfolded the newspaper.

  A picture of Raelynn Blackwell taken the night she was arrested was on the front page next to a photograph of now-retired judge Vera Jean Groundtree and former district attorney Frank O’Grady at some glitzy fundraising event.

  “Here, I’ll read it to you,” Fin said.

  That crooked grin of his, plus an almost-twinkle in his eyes, made Marty sit up and take notice.

  GOVERNOR HALTS EXECUTION

  Huntsville—Convicted murderer Raelynn Blackwell, who brutally stabbed 16-year-old Veronica Baker to death at an Austin bus stop 10 years ago, got lucky last night. Blackwell was already strapped to a gurney with intravenous needles in her arms when a call from Gov. Libby Kopecky halted the execution.

  The governor’s action was apparently a surprise to Blackwell’s attorney, Jimmy Pearl, who had written a letter to the governor claiming that retired Judge Vera Jean Groundtree, who sentenced Blackwell to death, and former district attorney Frank O’Grady, who prosecuted Blackwell, had an intimate relationship for several years.

  In the letter, Pearl claimed that “the intimate sexual relationship between the judge and the district attorney began several years prior to Miss Blackwell’s trial. While Mr. O’Grady and Judge Groundtree have different recollections as to when the affair ceased containing a sexual component, there is no doubt that the relationship was sexual in the years immediately leading up to the time that the Judge had jurisdiction over Miss Blackwell’s case.”

  Pearl said the pair kept the relationship secret. “The judge never disclosed it to a single litigant or lawyer who appeared before her, and she never recused herself from hearing a single case because of her affair,” he wrote. “Similarly, the district attorney never disclosed the romantic relationship to any of his adversaries, nor did he recuse himself or his office from prosecuting the case because of his affair with Judge Groundtree.”

  “We filed a motion about the situation before, but the charges were never taken seriously, nor were the allegations ever properly investigated,” Pearl said in the letter.

  Governor Kopecky called for just such an investigation and granted Blackwell a thirty-day reprieve.

  When the announcement was made that there would be no execution, pandemonium broke out among the estimated 2,000 death-penalty protesters and supporters who were gathered outside the Walls Unit.

  Bernadette Baker, mother of the murdered girl, was in the viewing room to witness the execution when it was unexpectedly halted. She could not be reached for comment.

  “So that’s it,” Marty said as Fin lowered the paper. “But it doesn’t say what Raelynn Blackwell’s last words were.”

  “Maybe that’s what Mom is so mad about. I’ve never seen her like this.”

  “She’s not making any sense.”

  “Tell me about it. She wouldn’t even talk to me most of the way home.” Fin took a sip of coffee. “Ewww, did you make this stuff?”

  “She’s not herself.” Marty shook his head. He’d never known Bernie to get mad at Fin for anything, much less stop talking to him.

  “I think I know how she feels, though,” Fin said. “I’d feel deceived, too, if I believed Raelynn Blackwell knew this was going to happen.”

  “Delusional thinking,” Marty said.

  Fin didn’t say anything. He seemed deep in thought. “Remember Timmy Lee Brown?” he finally asked.

  Marty nodded. He remembered Bernie telling the story about the two things Timmy Lee, a mentally retarded man on death row, loved most: bird coloring books and a parakeet named Tipper that some sympathetic guards had given him. The poor guy was so deficient in mental capacity that when they escorted him to the death chamber, he asked if he could color in his book after the execution was over.

  “Remember,” Fi
n went on, “how no one seemed to care about Timmy Lee dying, but people were so worried about Tipper that offers to take the parakeet poured in from all over Texas?”

  “What are you getting at, Fin?”

  “Well, I keep thinking maybe we’re worrying about Mom like people worried about the parakeet instead of worrying about Timmy Lee. It’s not that I don’t feel for her. I do. But it’s just that, well, she’s not the one they’re trying to kill, is she?”

  Just then, the phone rang. “Good thing I thought to turn it off in the bedroom,” Marty said as he picked up the receiver.

  “Can you believe she pulled it off again, Dad? Give me Mom.”

  He held the receiver a few inches away to protect his eardrum from Annamaria’s piercing voice. “She’s asleep,” he said. “She had a rough night.”

  “Well, of course she did. She’s upset. How did that bitch manage this, anyway?

  He sighed, promised Annamaria he’d have Bernie call her back, and hung up.

  “So we now have consensus that Raelynn Blackwell is in control of the world,” Fin said with a sarcastic snort.

  “Since with your mom someone has to be responsible for everything that happens, she apparently thinks that this time it’s Raelynn Blackwell.”

  “At least for once maybe she doesn’t feel that she’s responsible.”

  “It’s the way she was raised,” Marty said with a sigh. He knew only too well how Bernie had struggled with her overdeveloped sense of responsibility, rooted deep as it was in her mother’s addiction and early death and her father’s unrealistic expectations of her as the oldest of six kids. Dealing with it hadn’t been easy on her or on their relationship over the years.

  “Maybe that’s what makes Mom so good at everything,” Fin said, just as the doorbell rang. “That’s Chuck to give me a ride home. Show Mom the article. Maybe it’ll help.”

  Good idea. Fin left, and Marty looked at his watch. Maybe Bernie would be awake by now. He poured her a cup of coffee, tucked the newspaper under his arm, and went upstairs. He opened the bedroom door and saw a pile of rumpled covers on the bed but no Bernie, so he knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Bernie? Hon?”

  No answer. “Bernie?”

  He pushed the door open and found her lying in the tub with her eyes closed, her arms at her sides, an inflatable pillow under her head. He fell to his knees and put his fingers on her neck to feel for a pulse. It was steady. Thank God. She started shivering then. No wonder. The water was cold, meaning she’d been in here a long time. He should have checked on her earlier. He touched her cheek, and her eyes opened.

  “It’s never going to end,” she whispered, staring up at the ceiling.

  He pulled her from the tub. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t help, either, so it was a challenge for him to hold her up and dry her off while trying to warm her with the soft, thick bath towel at the same time. He half carried her to the bed with her feet dragging along behind, her head pressed against his chest. He laid her down and pulled the sheet over her. She sighed and he felt the warmth of her breath in his ear.

  “It’s not over,” she said.

  He kissed her cheeks and her eyelids, then caressed her head until a change in her breathing assured him that she had fallen asleep. He ached to have her back as his lifelong companion, the one person in the world he had always been able to count on. He felt as desperate as if he’d lost her for good—until he reminded himself that she had reached her limits like this once before, but that the day had come when he arrived home from the university to a house that no longer reeked of disinfectant. Just as she had come to her senses then, she would come to her senses now, too, once she got some rest. He tucked the covers up around her neck and tiptoed from the room.

  TEN

  Annamaria was beside herself. Dad kept telling her to call back later, but now their phone didn’t even ring when she tried. Probably disconnected. She could just see the newspaper reporters all over this, pestering her folks to death. But what the hell was she supposed to do? She had to talk to someone, now, someone in the family. Fin would have to do. He wouldn’t see things her way—he never did—but at least she could count on him to listen.

  “You are not to talk to strangers under any circumstances,” she said to Patty after a heated argument over whether Patty should come with her to Fin’s house or go to the mall with her friend Kitty instead. “Call me every hour, do you understand? Every hour.”

  With a final warning, she dropped Patty off at the mall and then headed for the freeway.

  “God, I hate this road,” she grumbled as she steered her car around the broken pieces of asphalt in the merge lane.

  I-35 was notorious for its confusing exits and entrances and its poor condition, but mostly Annamaria hated it for what it symbolized: the duplicity of the politicos who built it right down the middle of Austin to avoid the 1960s’ school-desegregation mandates. Now, four decades later, the neighborhoods east of the freeway—where most of the black, Hispanic, and poor people still lived—served as receptacles for the city’s growing pollution and waste. Because she and Fin agreed about this, it was unfathomable to her why he—or anyone else, for that matter, with the means and any common sense—would choose the east side’s untended potholes and dusty streets over the west side’s prolific live oak and pecan trees.

  But that was just what Fin insisted on doing. Two years ago, when he first came up with the harebrained idea of buying a small fixer-upper on the east side, she’d done her best to talk him out of it. But, of course, he wouldn’t listen.

  “People should live near their jobs,” he had said. “I can walk to school this way, see the kids I work with around the neighborhood, play soccer with them, watch out for them, talk to their parents at the corner grocery store.”

  Well, that’s my brother, she said to herself as she navigated the confusing exit off the freeway. She did give him credit for choosing to live near the Eastside Café, the upscale restaurant popular with westsiders like her who enjoyed strolling through the prolific organic gardens out back after a gourmet lunch before heading back to their cushy jobs on the other side of the freeway.

  Also to his credit, Fin had transformed the ramshackle house into an elegant home, all done on the cheap with the help of flea markets and friends’ cast-offs. The outside, royal blue with rust-red trim, was too garish for Annamaria’s taste. But she had to admit that his little house, right down to the name Casa Azul—painted above the front door, in honor of his favorite artist, Frida Kahlo—suited Fin to a T.

  She pulled into his unpaved driveway and parked alongside his front yard, which was filled with blooming red and pink bougainvillea and Hill Country penstemon. The two pink flamingos watching over his xeriscaped garden oasis looked as out of place next to the neighbor’s rusty cars and parched crabgrass as did her BMW and pale yellow linen shorts suit. Every time she came here, she marveled at how it could be just a ten-minute drive from this little bungalow to the Victorian house in the historic Enfield neighborhood where they grew up, when the two places were worlds apart.

  Fin waved to her from his front porch swing, shirtless and handsome in faded cutoff jean shorts and looking very much like he belonged right where he was. Ordinarily, his warm smile and those blue eyes of his melted her heart, at least initially. But today they served only to make Annamaria pause and wonder, and then only for a minute, if last night’s development had helped him to understand what she’d been trying to tell him all along. He was, after all, more complex than most people realized. Yes, he was the kind, down-to-earth social worker who didn’t own a car, loved working with kids in the Communities in Schools program even though God knew it paid next to nothing, and walked the two blocks to his job at East Austin Middle School at the same time every morning in his worn and patched (though impeccably pressed) jeans and political tee shirts.

  But there was another Fin, a man of refined tastes with a diverse collection of white, black, and Hispanic male fri
ends who were connoisseurs of fine art and wine, who listened to classical music and had season tickets to the opera. All his friends were gay and—to Annamaria’s great amusement—seemed to fit every stereotype. When it came down to it, she loved her brother to death. His political proclivities were the opposite of hers, that was true, but he wasn’t one of those strident, self-righteous leftists. At his core, Fin was more compassionate than ideological, for which she thanked her lucky stars.

  “I just knew something was going to screw it up again,” she said as she breezed past him into the living room, waving the morning newspaper in the air. “What the hell was O’Grady thinking, to mess around with a judge? I thought he knew better. Geez!”

  “I knew you’d be pissed,” Fin said.

  “And that damn Groundtree!” Annamaria poked her finger at the face of the judge in the photograph. “I’ve been in her court a few times, and anyone can see she’s not the brightest light on the porch. I never would have guessed that old hag had a sexy bone left in her body. She’s a grandmother, for Christ sake! Shit, she’s old enough to be a great-grandmother. Old enough to have a little bit of sense, anyway.”

  “Want some coffee, Sis? Better yet, how about some Calming Yogi tea?” Fin’s grin expanded into a smile.

  “Don’t be funny. You got something stronger?” She followed him into the kitchen and headed for the sink to wash the newsprint from her hands.

  “Never in a million years would I have expected Governor Kopecky to do the right thing,” Fin said as he opened the refrigerator. “People can sure fool you sometimes.”

  Annamaria stared at her brother. He was so naïve, as bad as their mom. “Can’t you see Kopecky’s just covering her ass?” she said. “You know she’s as solid a Republican as they come. Hell, that’s why I voted for her.”

  “So you don’t think there’ll be an investigation?”

  ”Oh, there will be an investigation, all right. Many investigations. Every case that O’Grady brought to Groundtree’s court will be called into question now. Wait until you see how many appeals there will be. Believe me, attorneys all over Austin are going nuts right now, poring through the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedures like vultures in search of anything they can find in the carcasses of the all the cases they lost. It’s more than just a scandal. It’s a legal nightmare, you’ll see.”