Zachary might never have argued a case before a jury, but he did it well. He was careful to stay out of their way, to do nothing to draw their attention from the boy to himself. His questions were unobtrusive, simply tools to prompt Tyler's story when necessary, and they were carefully phrased to draw the exact answers he wanted from the boy.
He guided Tyler through his recitation of his parents' last fight, including a description of his own injuries. Tyler was particularly graphic in describing Carrie's injuries, speaking in a flat, blank tone that was all the more effective for its lack of emotion. The jurors couldn't help but be impressed by his story, by the details of the life he'd lived, by the horrors he'd witnessed for as long as he could remember.
Zachary finished with one last question. "Do you miss your father, Tyler?"
He looked at his mother, then sought out someone among the spectators—his grandfather, Beth suspected. Then he turned his ancient gaze on Zachary and answered simply.
"No. I don't."
The impact of his three words was visible on every juror's face. Beth looked at each one, then settled back in her chair and silently applauded Zachary. There wasn't an attorney in Nashville who could have handled it better.
Softly, in the seat beside her, shoulders hunched, hands over her face, Carrie Lewis started to cry.
* * *
Misner's cross-examination of Tyler didn't take long. He emphasized the fact that Del had been asleep when Carrie had killed him, that it had happened several hours after the fight, that she had appeared calm when she'd gone to awaken Tyler to tell him what she'd done. He left the rest of the boy's testimony alone—wisely, Zachary thought. Del's violent behavior was documented fact. Trying to challenge it now would be an amateur's mistake.
Now it was Carrie's turn to testify. She rose from her chair at Zachary's urging and crossed the few feet to the witness stand with shuffling steps. She kept her gaze down while she was sworn in, and her hand when she raised it for the oath trembled visibly. She was scared half to death. She had never spoken in front of so many people, and she had never spoken for so important a reason.
She was wearing a maternity dress that he'd picked up at her house last week, a shapeless brown garment that made her look drab and pale. It had deep pockets, and as she seated herself, she shoved her hands into them to hide their shaking.
Beth began the questioning much the same way he had with Tyler—with simple questions, unimportant ones. While that went on, he watched the jury, wondering what they thought, what they felt, how they would vote. Including the alternates, there were nine women and five men. For the most part they were young to middle-aged. There was one housewife; occupations for the rest ranged from school teacher to nurse to construction foreman to accountant. They had watched the scenes played out for their benefit, had listened to the testimony, had looked at photographs of Carrie's injuries and of the walls at her house, splattered with her own blood.
Some part of him believed that they were sympathetic to Carrie. How could any human being not feel sorry for everything she had endured? But some other part wondered if they could possibly be sympathetic enough. Could any strong person truly understand what motivated a weak one? Could those women, with their careers and their jobs, their incomes and their independence—could they understand Carrie's helplessness? Could they—strong, rational women—adapt their way of thinking to match hers?
Beth led Carrie through a brief description of her life with Del, from the first beating to the last. Then she asked quietly, "What happened that first Sunday night in November, Carrie?"
Slowly Carrie forced her gaze to Beth's face. "He was drinking. He—he did that a lot. When he got drunk, he got mean, so we always tried extra hard not to upset him. But…" She sighed softly, a lost little sound. "He got upset, anyway."
"What upset him, Carrie?"
"We were out of beer, and he was mad 'cause he said I hadn't got enough when I went to the grocery store. I tried to calm him down, but he just got madder, and then he slapped me with the back of his hand."
Zachary was still watching the jurors, and he saw one of the women grimace. It wasn't a pretty image—Del, over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds, backhanding his thin little pregnant wife.
"I got up then," Carrie continued, "and went into the kitchen to get the kids some supper. I was feeling kind of tired because of the baby, and so I was just fixing sandwiches and potato chips and soup. Del came in, and he started in again. He said his kids wasn't eating bologna sandwiches and soup out of a can, and he told me to cook a real meal for them. I told him that it would take a long time for anything out of the freezer to thaw, and the kids were hungry now. I promised that I'd cook a big meal the next night, but he didn't want to hear that. He picked up the pan of soup off the stove and threw it all over the floor.
"Where were the children when this happened?" Beth asked softly.
"At the kitchen table watching."
"All four of them? Including the little ones?"
"Yes."
"How did they react?"
"The three-year-old and the six-year-old both started to cry sort of—you know, whimpering and sniffling. Becky was holding both of them, trying to calm them down, because she knew their crying would just make their daddy even madder."
"What happened next?"
Carrie sat silently for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "Del pushed me down to the floor on my knees and told me to clean up the soup. When I bent over to do that, he kicked me right here." She touched her hip gingerly, as if feeling again the pain that had long since faded. "I fell and got soup in my face and hair, but he wouldn't let me wash it out. He was making fun of me, about how clumsy I was, how dirty I was. When I finished cleaning the floor, he grabbed my hair and lifted me to my feet. Then he shoved everything off the table—the sandwiches, the chips, the milk—and he ground it all into the floor. Then he shoved me down again and told me to clean it up."
Zachary had heard these details before. Each time he listened to them, he despised Del Lewis even more. Wasn't it enough that he'd beaten her nearly half her life, that he'd beaten her into the same kind of cowering, helpless submission that you got from an abused dog? Did he have to humiliate her in front of her children? Did he have to degrade her?
Carrie went on with her story, telling how she had cleaned the ruined dinner from the floor. She had taken a package of chicken from the freezer and placed it in a sink of cold water so it would thaw faster. Then she'd asked Del if she could get the kids, still seated around the table, a snack until dinner was ready—just a peanut butter sandwich or a cookie, she had pleaded.
Sure, he'd said, but when she had finished making the first sandwich, he pulled it apart and rubbed the peanut butter over her face before forcing it into her mouth, gagging her, choking her.
Then he'd gotten really angry.
Holding her by her hair, he'd slammed her face into the counter, then pushed her to the floor. He had kicked her, shoved her, hit her, and every time she fell, he lifted her up and knocked her down again. Then he'd begun hitting her face until she was bleeding from her mouth, her nose, her cheeks. Every time he hit her, the blood splattered onto the surrounding walls. And when her blood stained her dress and coated his hand, when she was standing simply because he was holding her up with his other hand, when he had beaten her almost into unconsciousness, Tyler had interfered.
And his father had turned his anger on him.
"Del hit him and knocked him clear across the room, but Tyler kept coming back," Carrie said, her voice so low that everyone in the courtroom strained to hear her. "The kids were crying, and I was screaming and trying to help Tyler, and finally Del stopped all of a sudden. He looked around at the mess in the kitchen—there were broken dishes, and things had been knocked off the cabinets and the stove, and there was blood on the walls—and then he just turned and walked out. He went into the front room and lay down on the couch and went to sleep."
"And wh
at did you do?"
"I made sure Tyler and the kids were all right, then I went into the bedroom and took a bath. And then I just sat there shaking. I was so afraid. It was like my heart was going to pound itself right out of my chest."
"But your husband was asleep," Beth pointed out gently. "Why were you afraid?"
"Because he would have killed me if Tyler hadn't stopped him. I knew it was only a matter of time until it would happen again, until Tyler wouldn't be able to stop him." She breathed deeply. "Until he did kill me."
Beth walked back to stand beside the defense table, only a few feet from Zachary. Slowly he shifted his gaze from the jury to her. "Was that the first time Del had ever hurt one of the children?" Beth asked.
"Yes. But I knew he would do it again, and—"
Misner objected that she couldn't possibly have known what her husband would do in the future. Carrie flinched at the sound of his voice, then drew her hands from her pockets and clenched them tightly together in her lap. After the judge upheld Misner's objection and the room was quiet again, she haltingly rephrased her reply.
"I—I was afraid he would do it again. That was how it started with me. He just hit me once or twice, then weeks would go by with nothing happening. Then he started hitting me more and more until it was happening a couple of times a week, sometimes even every day, and he broke my arm and my ribs, and I had to have stitches, and—" She broke off in an effort to control the rising hysteria evident in her voice. When she spoke again, she was quiet. Firm. Determined. "I wasn't going to let him do that to my kids. It was bad enough that they had to watch what he did to me, but I wasn't going to let him hurt my children."
Beth waited until the courtroom was perfectly still again before she asked her next question. "When did you decide to kill your husband, Carrie?"
She tilted her head to one side, a confused look on her face. The jurors were waiting stiffly, as were the prosecutor and the judge. If the answer she gave indicated a significant passage of time between the decision and the stabbing, Zachary knew their case would be irreparably harmed. That would be all Misner needed to show premeditation. Self-defense couldn't be planned in advance.
"I didn't," she said at last.
"Didn't what?"
"I didn't decide to kill him. It was just something that I had to do to protect my kids. To protect myself."
"All right. The fight ended, and Del went into the living room where he fell asleep on the couch. You went into the bedroom to clean up. What happened next?"
She had heard the children moving around in the kitchen. Tyler fixed sandwiches for them; then he bathed the kids and put them to bed. It was about eight-thirty when he went to bed. During that time, she'd sat huddled in the corner in her bedroom, trembling and crying.
She was tired and aching and wanted to just stay right there where she was, where she was safe, but she had known that Del would be furious if he woke up in the morning to the sight of that kitchen. Getting drunk the way he did always left him with bad hangovers, and he was almost as mean then as before. She'd known that she had to clean the kitchen before she could even think of getting any rest.
She had washed dishes, swept up broken glass and replaced everything that had fallen. She'd mopped the floor and tried to scrub the blood from the wall, but it had soaked into the porous paint. It had taken her more than an hour, but finally, except for the bloodstains on the white wall, the kitchen was neat and clean again, a stack of broken dishes waiting to be carried out to the garbage the only evidence of the fight.
Then she had sat down at the table, resting her head on her arms. She had vomited earlier and was worried now about the baby she carried. It wasn't due until next March, but she honestly didn't believe she would live that long. Del's outbursts had been increasing in both frequency and violence, and she had known as she'd sat there that night that soon he was going to kill her, and the baby would die with her.
And the other four kids would live with their father.
She couldn't remember how long she'd sat like that, all numb and empty. She did remember thinking that dying wouldn't be so bad. At least she wouldn't be afraid all the time. She wouldn't be hurting all the time. But how could she ever find peace when her children were with Del?
That was when she saw the knife. It had fallen from the counter when Del had shoved her and she'd grabbed frantically for something to stop her fall. Her fingers had closed around the dish drainer, pulling it to the floor with her. The few glass dishes had broken, the plastic ones had bounced and rolled, and the silverware had scattered everywhere. The knife had fallen into the crevice between the stove and the cabinets.
She had gotten up from the table and retrieved the knife, but instead of taking it to the sink, she had walked into the living room with it. She had gone to the sofa where Del was asleep on his back, his mouth open and snoring, and she had smelled the liquor on his breath, and she'd known that soon he would get drunk again and, unless she stopped him, he would kill her. Maybe not the next time or the one after that, but soon.
Soon.
And so she had stabbed him.
* * *
Chapter 12
« ^
The judge delayed the prosecution's cross-examination until Tuesday morning and dismissed court for the day. Zachary and Beth walked out side by side and silent, except for the occasional "No comment" she gave to the reporters gathered in the hall.
"Home or office?" Zachary asked as they started toward the car. He fully expected her to choose her office, but she surprised him, picking the condo instead. It wasn't an entirely pleasant surprise, either. It was hard being with her, but not really with her. It was for his own good—this distance he'd placed between them—but it ate away at him. In a few more days, at most, he would be out of her life and back in Sweetwater. It wouldn't be an easy adjustment to make—living alone, sleeping alone, facing a relentlessly long future alone. He needed to use these last few days together to start trying to get her out of his system.
Even if it was an impossible challenge.
"You did a good job," she told him as they got into the car. "You'd make a hell of a trial lawyer if you ever decided to go that route."
"No, thanks. I'm happy doing what I do." At least, he would be if she were there with him. But how could he ever expect someone who was already one hell of a trial lawyer to give it all up to be his wife? To trade respect and prestige and power and money for the only thing he could give her: love? "What do you think Carrie's chances are?"
"I don't know. Tyler was a good witness, and so was Carrie. It's a tough case, though. I'm sure the jury's sympathies lie with Carrie. I mean, here was this big, brutal, violent man who was beating this pathetic little woman half to death on a routine basis, who even gave his kid a few punches. The man deserved to die. Still, did he deserve to die like that? Did she have the right to be judge, jury and executioner?" She shrugged. "I wouldn't want to be making the decision that they're faced with."
Zachary didn't reply. He wouldn't have any problems acquitting Carrie if he were on the jury. She had suffered enough in the last fourteen years. She had paid the price long before she'd committed the crime.
When they reached the garage beneath Beth's condo, Zachary hesitated near the car. "Why don't you go on up?" he suggested. "I'd like to take a walk."
Beth opened her mouth, then closed it again. Had she been about to protest, to suggest another, much more satisfying form of exercise? He didn't wait to find out. Touching her shoulder as he passed, he said, "I'll be back soon." Then he disappeared down the steps that led outside.
He'd spent more hours than he could begin to count tramping through the woods up on Laurel Mountain. Whenever he had a problem, whenever he was simply tired or looking for peace, that was where he went. These city streets were a poor substitute. Still, the walk met his greatest need at this moment: it got him away from Beth.
He had prided himself on reaching the age of thirty-four without suffering a broken
heart. Now he was facing the granddaddy of all heartaches, and it just wasn't fair. People shouldn't be able to fall in love with people who were so different from them. It hadn't happened that way with his grandparents. They'd known each other all their lives, had loved each other all their lives. It had been that way for his parents, too. And even though Daniel had fallen in love with a woman from the city, Sarah had been willing, even eager, to take up country life. Even if she and Daniel hadn't gotten married, Zachary believed she never would have left the southeast Tennessee mountains.
Just as Beth would never leave her high-rise condo for high-rise mountain peaks, her congested city streets for lazy country roads, her sophisticated social life for backyard barbecues and picnics alongside babbling streams.
He walked until his dress shoes began to pinch his feet, then turned back toward the condo. Back to a long evening with Beth. To withdrawing from her when all he really wanted was to hold her close. To protecting himself from further heartache instead of loving her and storing up memories for the future.
He let himself in with his own key and went straight upstairs to the room he shared with Beth. There he changed into a plaid flannel shirt and jeans and thick sweat socks. Then he went downstairs again, took a can of soda from the refrigerator and started toward the living room. When he passed the office, where he knew she would be, he knocked on the door and called, "Hey, I'm back."
He was stretched out on the sofa, with the television cabinet open and using the remote control to flip through the channels, when Beth came into the living room. She started to sit at the end of the sofa near his feet, but on second thought went to a nearby chair. He'd made her uncomfortable, he realized with regret. Just when she'd started making a few unexpected overtures, he'd had to withdraw from her. Now she didn't quite know what to say or do around him.
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