With his back to the door, he didn’t hear Poncho’s return, didn’t anticipate the fist that seemed to explode the right side of his head and knocked him to the concrete floor.
Poncho pinned Bryce’s arms to his sides, then plastered them against his crumpled body with knees as powerful as a vice. “It’s plum pitiful, ain’t it, Shame? Grown man like you killin’ a little bitty baby. A cryin’ shame, I tell ya.”
Bryce felt his lower lip split against his front teeth and one of the blows to his chest sent out a pain so sharp he believed Poncho had stabbed him in the heart. Despite the rules Radhauser delivered through Kendra, Bryce didn’t fight back. He closed his eyes, half unconscious, the taste of blood rising in the back of his throat while Poncho hurled his rage into Bryce’s face until his battered head tottered on his neck like a punching bag.
Somewhere inside his confusion, Bryce acknowledged that, guilty or not, he had begun to pay his debt for the death of Skyler Sterling.
When he awakened, many hours later, he lay on clean, white sheets in the prison infirmary, limp and lifeless as a rag.
A nurse, tucked into the corner of the room, stuffed salad into her mouth with a plastic fork.
Bryce moaned, but she continued eating as though he wasn’t there. He struggled to raise himself up on an elbow, but the throbbing in his head blinded him and he was violently ill, vomiting onto the floor.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” The nurse leaped to her feet, lettuce and carrot slices scattering across the white, tile floor. “Couldn’t you have felt that coming?”
Chapter Nineteen
When Bryce opened his eyes again, he stared down the length of the prison infirmary bed and into the concerned face of his attorney.
“Good God,” Kendra said, moving alongside the bed. She touched his cheek. “That thug Poncho really did a job on your face.” She paused and smiled at him. “You used to be handsome.”
For a moment, Bryce, baffled and confused over his whereabouts, rode the dizzy ship of whatever painkillers they’d administered intravenously. He glided along, his sense of time and locality hazy.
When he stared into the mirror Kendra held up for him, Bryce scarcely recognized the man staring back. Encircled in black that faded into blue and yellow at the edges, his dark eyes sank into his skull, barely more than slits. His nose was splinted and packed with gauze and three inches of stitches crisscrossed the space above his right eyebrow. “I’m sure no beauty queen now,” he said.
“Look, I’m furious about what happened to you. I screamed at a couple guards. And if I could, I’d kick Poncho where it would hurt the most.”
He tried to smile through his busted lip. “You’re braver than I am.”
“I think you should file charges.”
“What’s the point? It’s over now.”
Kendra tucked the mirror back into her purse. “I know it’s a little late, but my screaming got you a private cell. It’s not exactly isolation, but you’ll take your meals in there from now on and leave only when a guard accompanies you. Got that? And we’ll have our meetings in there from now on, too.”
Bryce nodded, and with the movement the ache in his head arched in an enormous V from the base of his neck, over his skull, and into each eye.
“When you feel up to it, I still need you to write out the things we talked about before Poncho beat the crap out of you.” The set of her jaw told him she was madder than the proverbial hornet. “You sure you don’t want him punished? Thrown in some dark hole with no food or water?”
“As you’ve mentioned before,” he said, attempting another smile, “I have more important things to think about right now. And a writing assignment to complete for my attorney.”
Kendra started to leave, then turned back. “One more thing. The press is all over this. Even the local tabloids have picked it up. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask for a temporary restraining order and see if we can block further coverage.”
“I want to know what they’re saying.” Bryce heard the deadness in his own voice.
“No, you don’t.” Kendra moved to the edge of the bed and dropped her right hand onto his shoulder. “The truth is I need you to concentrate all your energy on your defense—on remembering that night. I don’t want a bunch of newspaper hype distracting you.”
“Don’t I have a right to know what’s being said about me?” Bryce tried to sit, but the pain in his head thrust him back against the pillow.
“Of course you do, but please...trust me now. I’ll save everything and you can read it all you want once we get you through this. Now we need to concentrate on your preliminary.”
“You might not believe this,” he said. “But I don’t even know what a preliminary is.”
“A preliminary hearing. They listen to the prosecution’s evidence and decide whether or not to indict and hold you over for trial. You don’t have to be present for the preliminary.”
He asked the next two questions with his aching eyes closed. “What will happen? What are they going to do to me?” He opened his eyes.
Kendra sat on the edge of the bed and positioned herself so he could read her lips. “First, there’s the arraignment,” she explained. “You’ll go before a judge or a magistrate, or maybe a justice of the peace. The charges against you will be read, and then they’ll ask how you plead to both charges. Your plea will be officially entered.”
“After that?”
“The DA’s office will turn the prosecution’s evidence, a list of witnesses, and any depositions they’ve taken over to me after the hearing. Radhauser already gave me copies of his reports, but they may have other things I don’t know about yet.”
“I want to be there. I’d really like to know what evidence they have against me.” Bryce lifted his hand to his head, then grimaced as he accidentally brushed the line of stitches above his eye. “When do I show up in court?”
“They postponed the arraignment because of your beating, but it’s rescheduled for tomorrow morning at nine. There’s not much to it, really. The charges against you will be read, and when asked how you plead to both charges,” Kendra paused, tapped Bryce on the forearm as if to make certain he was paying attention, “I want you to look straight into the eyes of the judge or magistrate and say, ‘not guilty,’ with as much confidence as you can muster.”
Later that afternoon, Bryce was accompanied by a prison guard to his private cell. In the corridor, as he passed the cubicle they’d shared, Poncho hissed, “If it ain’t the Cryin’ Shame. Feelin’ better, Shame? Where they takin’ ya, tough guy? To the nursery so you can suck on yo mama’s titty?”
“Shut your fat mouth, Poncho.” The guard jerked his baton from his waistband and waved it in front of Poncho’s face, then shifted Bryce to his other side and continued until they stopped in front of a dim, gray room. After unlocking the door, the guard prodded Bryce inside and released him from his shackles and handcuffs.
A toilet stood exposed in the right corner. Moss-colored stains encrusted the bowl. To the left, a concrete table and stool-like chair—the words Jackson County Jail stenciled on the backrest. The table was piled with a stack of legal pads and a new paper cup full of fat pencils with dull points.
Next to the table, in the room’s left corner, a gray-striped mattress, dusty and stained, hung partially off the bed’s concrete frame. Tucked in the sagging center was a makeshift tinfoil ashtray stuffed with crushed-out cigarette butts. No maid or cleaning service in this place.
The smell from the old ashes turned his stomach.
“Sheets will be passed out after supper.” The guard slammed and locked the door behind him, then disappeared.
Bryce flushed the cigarette butts down the toilet, then sat on the concrete chair in front of a blank yellow pad. He wondered what information about that night he could provide Kendra that she didn’t already have access to through Detective Radhauser. He stared around the cell again, trying to find something to hold his attention, something to postpone the inevit
able.
Through a small, wire-meshed window near the ceiling, the final rays of the sun fell in a patchwork pattern across his forearms. It was amazing how few details infiltrated a jail cell, a place pared down to the barest of necessities, a place with virtually no color, just concrete, steel, a dull, striped mattress, and a thin blue blanket. A place where a single beam of sunlight or the vibrant color of the yellow-lined pads stacked on the table in front of him suddenly loomed up as extraordinary.
Bryce stood, shook his head, determined to settle his thoughts, to clear the way for Kendra’s assignment. He paced the five steps from one end of his cell to the other, again and again, until he finally sat, slumped with his eyes clamped shut and focused his thoughts on the day Skyler died.
He needed to stop beating himself up over the things he hadn’t done. No precaution he might have taken would have saved Skyler. Not if the medical examiner was right and he died because of a drug overdose. The only thing he might have done differently was to keep a closer watch on Skyler’s bottle. Who had access to that bottle? He tried to remember if there was any fluid in the bottle when he took it down from the overhead cabinet and poured in the apple juice.
When Bryce picked up a pencil and began to write out events, he hoped the words would gush out in a trance-like unconscious torrent, but it didn’t happen that way. They came slowly, and again and again, his thoughts trailed off from the assignment in front of him.
If there was anything in the bottle, Bryce hadn’t noticed. But there must have been. Somehow that drug got into Skyler’s bottle, and there was one thing Bryce was certain of—he didn’t put it there.
Henry had delivered the bottle to Skyler. Could he have tampered with it before giving it to Skyler? Henry was nothing but a big kid himself. But maybe someone else instructed him. Reggie was in the bedroom reading to Scott. Could he stoop so low as to poison a toddler—a child he claimed was a bastard? Bryce made a note on his pad. And how about Scott? When Dana called and talked to him, she asked that he take care of Skyler and make sure he drank his apple juice. But Scott wouldn’t have access to drugs. Again, Bryce wrote it down.
Could Dana have tampered with the bottle, knowing he wouldn’t notice? Was she so enamored with Reggie that she would kill her own child to be with him again? And leave Bryce to take the blame? Dana was an immature kid, but he couldn’t imagine her doing something that horrific. But Reggie? That man was a totally different story and capable of anything. Bryce jotted down his suspicions.
One memory arrived and before he could write it all out, another followed, until there was a dense accumulation of details inside his head.
When a guard shoved a set of dingy sheets and a dinner tray through the pie hole in the door, Bryce didn’t bother to pick either of them up. He wasn’t hungry. And he wasn’t in the mood to make his bed.
For the remainder of the evening, one false start after another plagued Bryce. When he finally gave up and stumbled across the room to pick up the sheets and make his bunk, the concrete floor was strewn with mounds of crumpled yellow paper.
After breakfast the following morning, Bryce gathered up his efforts, tossed them into the garbage can next to the toilet, and started over again. But in spite of his attempts to accommodate his attorney’s request, when, an hour before the arraignment, one of the guards escorted Kendra to his cell, Bryce handed her a single sheet of paper with the words: Forget it. I’m guilty. I was the responsible adult and if I’d kept better watch over him, Skyler Sterling would still be living. And that’s the only truth, the only words, the only details that really matter.
He gave her the sheet of paper.
She read it, wadded it up, threw it back at him, then took him by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Bryce. I know what’s happening here. My father always said guilt hangs on to no one the way it does the innocent. I know how shocked you must be. If you’d committed a crime and were caught, you wouldn’t be surprised. But when you know you didn’t poison Skyler, when you would never have thought of doing something so terrible, it starts to eat you alive. You think no one believes anything you say. It erodes away at you until you begin to wonder if you should stop believing in yourself.”
Bryce remained silent. She’d nailed it. That was exactly how he felt.
After a few seconds, Kendra squatted beside his bunk, her face pushed so close to his that the tips of their noses nearly touched. “I believe with all my heart you are innocent. I’m fighting for justice for you, Bryce. Not for myself. I’ve been up half the night, spending every spare minute I can extract from my life for you. I need to know you’re going to fight as hard as I am on this case. Or I’m going to walk away. Do you hear me?” She waited for his answer.
“I hear you,” he finally said. “But do you really think I have any hope of beating this?”
“Not if you give up. It’s way too early to make any prediction as to how this will go. I have no idea what kind of evidence the state has against you. But from my education, what I’ve learned from my father, and my own experience with the DA’s office, they don’t arrest someone unless they have a pretty good case—or at least believe they do.”
“No matter what anyone thinks. I didn’t put drugs in Skyler’s baby bottle.”
She seized his hand and squeezed. “I know. First-degree murder is unlawfully taking the life of another with malice aforethought. Think about that for a minute. Your actions, trying to reach the phone for help, to get Skyler to breathe again, in no way contributed to his death. If you deliberately gave him that drug, if you wanted him to die, why would you have tried so hard to save him?” The attorney’s voice softened a little. “The prosecution will make it sound like you felt remorse after the fact.”
“If that were the case,” Bryce said. “And I knew I’d poisoned him, I would have tried to induce vomiting.”
“Exactly. That would have been the logical and intelligent thing to do. But here’s the truth as I see it. You’ve got no time to wallow in your passive self-pity. We need to find out who put that Haloperidol in Skyler’s bottle. This is the rest of your life we’re talking about here, Bryce. Possibly your death.”
He stood.
Kendra took his shoulders and held firm as they faced each other, her breath raking across Bryce’s neck. “And if you’re not willing to fight for your life, why should I?”
“I’ll fight. I’ll give it everything I have.”
She grinned, a smile that lit her blue eyes. “Now you’re talking.”
Chapter Twenty
As the sun rose, golden, pink, and a little hazy over the Siskiyou Mountains, Radhauser headed up the gravel drive toward their barn. There was a bounce in his steps. Gracie had come home from the hospital yesterday. And, so far, the prognosis looked good.
It was a brisk autumn morning, the kind that made him want to leap into the air and celebrate his life. He reached down, picked up a small rock, and heaved it high into the sky over one of the big-leaf maple trees that lined their driveway. A few seconds passed before he heard it rustle through the tree top and come back to earth.
Fallen leaves covered the ground in shades of rust, yellow and orange. A brown oak leaf clung to the top of one of his black rubber boots as he slid open the double barn doors and greeted their horses. Though he often helped Gracie in the barn on his days off, the morning feedings had always been her job and he wondered if the horses missed her. He reached into the first stall and stroked Mercedes’ neck. She nipped at his hand. “I know. You expected someone prettier, but you’re going to have to put up with me a while longer.”
Radhauser would probably never think of himself as a genuine rancher. He was a detective first and foremost. But he loved starting the day in the barn with its smells of sawdust, alfalfa, leather, and sweaty horse blankets. Just as Gracie had taught him, he poured two cups of grain topped off with a little sweet feed and molasses into their feeders, ran fresh water in their troughs and forked a two-inch flake of alfalfa into each stall.
> After Bryce’s arraignment, he planned to return and release the horses into the back pasture so he could muck out the stalls. Gracie was fussy about her barn. And taking good care of it for her was his job while she recovered from the mastectomy. Maybe that was the secret to love. Sometimes it carries you and other times it’s your turn to carry it.
Gracie’s mother, Cynthia, felt guilty about not being with her daughter during surgery. But Gracie said she needed childcare for Lizzie more than her mom’s presence at the hospital. Yesterday morning, Nana Cynthia moved into the guest room to help take care of Gracie and Lizzie. Radhauser was grateful. Lizzie adored her nana and he didn’t know how they’d manage right now without her.
After Bryce’s arrest, Murphy had eased up and Radhauser was able to take some time off to be with Gracie, but he also wanted to help Kendra Palmer free Bryce. Having Cynthia here would enable him to offer more support.
When he returned to the house, Lizzie was dressed in her favorite cowgirl outfit—a denim skirt with fringe, and a red and white checked blouse with tiny white buttons. She had on her red cowgirl boots and her nana had pulled her hair into two ponytails, each one tied with a red ribbon.
He patted her on the head. “You look very pretty this morning, Lizzie. Your nana is an excellent hairdresser.”
She grinned up at him, her baby teeth stained slightly blue from the berries in her oatmeal.
Cynthia was making a breakfast tray for Gracie. “Are you hungry? I’ve made enough for both of you.” She nodded toward a plate heaped with scrambled eggs and thick slices of bacon. A smaller plate held a stack of toast. And if that wasn’t enough, she included a salad bowl of fresh fruit. Enough food for a family of five. “I thought you might like to have breakfast together.”
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