by Brad Parks
He continued: “In any event, JMU was just this big dead end. And I thought about starting over somewhere else but . . . to make you move and find a new job, all while we had a new baby? It just felt too formidable. There aren’t a lot of good programs looking to take some other school’s dropout anyway. Plus, if not all of my classwork transferred, that would be . . . three, four, five more years of this? No way. So, in mid-October, I quit. I told Portman I was done, and he said some nasty things, and that was that.”
He placed his hands on the table, like the story was over. But, of course, it wasn’t. That was when his fabrications morphed from mere lies of omission into something much more.
“So what have you been doing with yourself?” I asked.
“I got a job.”
“Where?”
“Mattress Marketplace. I work noon to closing.”
“You’ve been selling mattresses,” I said, in disbelief. “Oh, Ben.”
There was nothing wrong with selling mattresses. For someone else. Not for Ben. It was such a waste of his talent.
“Seven twenty-five an hour, plus seven percent commission on whatever I sell,” he said, forcing a smile for half a second before he went back to staring at the table.
“So that quote-unquote ‘tutoring’ job was really mattress sales. Same with the picket fence. That’s why you had that extra money.”
“Yeah, I had some good weeks early on. The guy who hired me insisted he had salesmen making forty, fifty grand a year on commissions alone. And maybe at other locations he does. There? Not so much. I think that’s another reason I kept not telling you. My whole idea was that once I had saved up a nice little nest egg, I’d tell you, but by then I’d have ten or twenty thousand dollars in the bank, and that would sort of cushion the blow.”
He made a noise in his throat. “Truth is, I’m selling about one mattress a week. If that. I make four hundred in a good week. Sometimes less. I’ve been looking for another job. But it seems a degree from a liberal arts college in Vermont and three-quarters of a PhD doesn’t mean much to people down here. I know we scoff about what you make, but it’s damn tough out there to do any better. I mean, I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for Diamond Trucking.”
I didn’t bother blunting the news: “I got fired yesterday.”
He looked at me for a moment, then brought his eyes back down.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Not your fault.”
“And I’m sorry I lied. I’m sorry for letting you down. I’m sorry I’ve failed you in just about every way possible.”
My anger, my righteous indignation at having been lied to, had already given way to something else. Pity for him. Sadness over what he had lost.
Over what we had both lost. Ben’s dream had really been my dream too. How many times—before things got so complicated—had we split a box of wine on empty stomachs and allowed ourselves to get giddy about the thought of life as Mr. and Mrs. Professor Benjamin J. Barrick?
And now that was over. Or at least it was for me.
But maybe not for him. Looking at him, I was struck by how damaging it was for him to stay with me any longer. Ben was this beautiful bird, but he would have another feather plucked from him every day we were together. Soon he would lose the ability to take flight.
I couldn’t let that happen. I grabbed both his hands and lowered my head in an attempt to meet his gaze, which was still cast downward.
“Ben, why don’t you just go to Temple? Call Kremer. Beg and plead. Tell him you made an awful mistake and that you’ve had a big epiphany and you’re ready to make whatever sacrifices you need to make. He’ll take you back. He loves you. He’ll let you pick up right where you left off with your dissertation and you’ll be done in no time. From there, who knows? You’ll be right back to having your bright future again.”
He still wasn’t looking at me, so I kept going: “It’s what you want. It’s what I want for you. I’m in a huge mess here and . . . Look, I don’t have the time or the energy to be a wife right now. I’m going to be doing everything I can to beat this drug charge and get Alex back, and we’ve already heard about how little standing you have with Social Services. There’s nothing you can do to help me anyway. Don’t stick around and ruin your life trying. You can file for divorce on Monday. I won’t contest it. God knows we don’t really have any assets to split. Just take whatever you want from the house and get as far away from here as possible, okay? I can’t live with myself knowing I’m this anchor on your potential. Just go. Go and write me a letter someday and tell me how well it worked out for you. Maybe when you make tenure somewhere. That’s really the best thing you can do for me right now.”
And then, because I truly meant it, I added, “I’ll always love you. Goodbye.”
With that, I stood from the table and started fleeing toward the exit, before he could see the tears in my eyes.
“Mel, wait—”
But I was already through the door, heading back down the hallway toward the dormitory, going to a place where I couldn’t hear him calling for me; where I could be alone with my own torment; and where at least, no matter how bad things got, I wasn’t taking anyone else down with me.
Well, except for Alex.
But maybe it was too late for us anyway.
TWENTY-THREE
Amy Kaye felt the weight of time all through the weekend.
It had been four months since Warren Plotz had attacked a woman. By this point, he had to be a bundle of pent-up sexual energy, waiting to explode. Amy could practically hear the fuse sizzling.
And knowing she was so, so close to having the evidence she needed to bring him in—and bring him down—made waiting a special kind of torture. The slow-drip kind.
She actually thought about trying to tail him, to possibly catch him in the act and/or thwart another attack before it could happen. Then she dismissed that idea as some combination of foolish and reckless. She was a lawyer, not a police officer. She fought crime from the courtroom, not in the streets.
But still. He was out there. Surely already stalking his next victim.
Could she have him arrested? It was tempting. A long-ago victim sharing a hunch many years later . . . the fact that Plotz worked with another one of the victims . . . the way Plotz’s personal timeline seemed to match the pattern of the assaults . . .
It would all be great at trial. But Amy had to be honest with herself that it didn’t really add up to probable cause. The danger was that if she arrested him and a judge later ruled she didn’t have probable cause, she could blow the whole conviction. People bemoaned when criminals got off on a technicality, ignoring the simple truth that the law was nothing but technicalities.
She would just have to be patient.
It made for a nervous weekend. Ordinarily, Amy didn’t have much contact with the Sheriff’s Office on Saturday or Sunday. Jason Powers called her if something big happened. Otherwise, they had the understanding that things could wait until Monday.
This weekend, she called in to the dispatcher four times, just to ask if any major crimes had occurred. In between, she was so keyed up, she kept taking Butch on long walks, trying to calm herself down. The dog was now exhausted.
Her first check-in of the new week came just after she woke up Monday morning.
Nothing doing, she was told each time.
It was slow going to work that morning. A fog had rolled into the Shenandoah valley overnight, thick and low, and it was looking like one of those days when it might take a while to clear up. If ever.
Normally, Amy loved mornings like this. It was the kind of weather that made life in the valley interesting, unpredictable. And it heightened her appreciation of the mountains, whenever it was they came back out of hiding.
Now it just felt ominous.
If there was any reprieve from the worry, it
was that daytime was safe. Plotz preferred the darkness of early morning.
With that thought, Amy looked forward to a day of trying to bury herself in the other work she had to do. Instead, when she arrived at her office inside the commonwealth’s attorney’s, she was surprised to find a handwritten note waiting for her, from Aaron Dansby.
Amy—
Would you please come see me ASAP? It’s important.
Thanks,
AHD
It was unusual for Dansby to be in the office first thing Monday morning. Dansby often commemorated Monday morning on Wednesday afternoon.
Wanting to get it over with, she set her things down and went to his nicely appointed corner office, which his wife, Claire, had decorated for him, making it look like something out of Southern Living magazine.
“Hey,” she said, sticking her head through his open door. “You were looking for me?”
“Yeah, come on in.”
He had dark smudges under his eyes. He still had that slight resemblance to Matthew McConaughey, except now it was more like Matthew McConaughey coming off a bender.
“You okay?” Amy asked, showing atypical concern for her boss’s well-being. “You look tired.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, waving it away as Amy walked to the front of his desk. “I need to talk with you about Coke Mom.”
“She has a name, you know. Melanie Barrick.”
“Whatever.”
Amy frowned. “Anyway, what about her?”
“You saw it made the paper on Saturday.”
“Yes. And?”
“The party saw it too.”
When Aaron talked about “the party,” he meant the local political party to which he belonged. It was always a little unclear to Amy who, exactly, this party consisted of; whether it was a large group of upstanding citizens, or just a boss and a few sniveling sycophants in a proverbial smoke-filled room. Whatever the case, there was no questioning the importance of party support. She understood that without it, Dansby would never have won the election in the first place. He was just as dependent on it for his impending reelection effort.
“Okaaaay,” Amy said. “And?”
“And they mentioned it early on at the meeting last night. Then they went on to talk about the slate for November. It was mostly the statehouse offices, but they did discuss commonwealth’s attorney a little. To be honest, they were sort of vague about it.”
“Vague about . . . what?”
“The line!” Dansby burst. “No one said for sure I’d get it.”
Amy suddenly understood why Dansby looked so tired. He had been up all night worrying. Augusta County politics had been a one-party system for generations now. If someone else got the party line, chances were good Dansby would be out of a job. And that wouldn’t exactly do much for the career narrative he was trying to build. Wunderkinds didn’t lose their first bids for reelection.
“Sorry, you’re going to have to connect some dots for me here,” Amy said. “What does the party’s endorsement have to do with Melanie Barrick?”
“Nothing directly. But it’s clearly on their radar screen. I had thought that after Mookie Myers, I had showed them I could do this job. But you should have heard them going on about the Coke Mom thing. I mean, a woman and a mother, dealing drugs like that? It represents a . . . a moral degradation . . . a breakdown of law and order.”
Save it for the jury, Amy thought.
“What kind of commonwealth’s attorney allows that to happen on his watch?” Dansby continued. “When we nailed Mookie, we got him good”—Myers was spending at least the next ten years as a guest of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and it was unlikely his recent appeal would change that—“and I think it’s real important we nail Coke Mom good too. It’ll show the party I’m for real. When’s the trial? Can we move up the date?”
“She doesn’t have a date yet. She hasn’t even been arraigned.”
“Let’s make sure it happens sooner rather than later. The party usually finalizes the slate by mid-April. I’d like to have Coke Mom convicted by then.”
“Aaron, today is March”—she paused to look at her phone—“twelfth. I doubt we’ll even be able to find a judge with an open date on his calendar for a trial like this by mid-April.”
“Oh, come on,” he said breezily. “I thought the Fourth Amendment guarantees her the right to a speedy trial.”
“That’s the Sixth Amendment, Aaron.”
“Whatever. You get the point.”
“She’s already got a trial set for May eighteenth for assaulting a police officer. There’s no way the drug charges would be scheduled before that.”
“Assaulting an officer?” he said. “When did she do that?”
“There was an incident in Social Services last week. It got a little out of hand.”
He peered at her thoughtfully. “How long could we put her away for that?”
“It’s a Class Six felony. But she doesn’t have a record, and from what I understand the cop wasn’t really hurt. To be honest, it’s overcharged at the moment. I’d never take it to a jury, because they could decide we overplayed our hand. I was going to plead it down and then let her do PTI. Even if we kept it at this level, the judge would probably order her to take an anger management class, then give her six months suspended and tell her to behave herself. Something like that. Whatever she did end up getting, she’d probably be allowed to serve it concurrently with whatever she got for the drug charges.”
Dansby didn’t hesitate: “Nolle pros it.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
A nolle prosequi is an entry into the legal record signifying the prosecution does not intend to proceed any further with a charge. It was something Amy did all the time, but usually as part of a deal—she agreed to nolle pros one charge in exchange for a guilty plea on another.
“Yeah. I don’t want anything slowing up these drug charges. That’s all the party is interested in anyway,” he said. “As a matter of fact . . . She has the same attorney for both charges, right?”
“She hasn’t had counsel determination for the drug thing yet. But yeah, that’s usually how it happens.”
“Who is it for the assault charge?”
“Bill Honeywell.”
“That’s the guy with the buggy eyes, right?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“He’s basically a hack, right?”
He’s more of a lawyer than you’ll ever be, Amy thought. “I wouldn’t underestimate him.”
“Still, he’ll deal, right?”
“If it’s the right deal, I assume.”
“Okay, then here’s what we’re going to do. Why don’t you offer to nolle pros the assault charges in exchange for going to trial really quickly on the drug thing. Think that would work?”
Amy’s mouth twisted. “I don’t know. Maybe. First, we have to find a judge who has an open date.”
“You’ll make it work,” Dansby said, bobbing his head emphatically. “I mean, just think of how lost you’d be around here without me.”
He threw her a winsome smile. Amy did her best not to roll her eyes at him. “You’re ridiculous,” she said.
He grinned wider. For as lousy a lawyer as he may have been, he was not without skills as a politician.
“Thanks for helping me out,” he said. “Let me know, okay?”
“Sure,” she said.
In truth, for all of Dansby’s shortcomings and annoyances, Amy didn’t really want a new boss. Right now, she had the perfect job. She got to be commonwealth’s attorney in the ways that mattered to her, trying cases and administering justice the way she saw fit, without having to put up with the political nonsense.
Dansby’s replacement might be some micromanaging control freak who had very differing ideas about how she should go about t
hings. She’d wind up having to ask permission to go to the bathroom.
Better the devil you know.
TWENTY-FOUR
In what felt like a bad spin cycle on repeat, I was awakened early Monday morning and made to answer the same questions from Blue Ridge Court Services about how likely I was to run away from all my problems.
If only it were that easy.
By Monday afternoon, I was back on that hard bench, wearing the orange jumpsuit that eliminated any doubt about my criminality, waiting along with other inmates to appear in front of the camera that would beam my image to the judge.
When it was finally my turn, the judge looked even more bored than he had been the previous week. In the time it took me to enter the room and get settled into my chair, he yawned twice.
He told me I had been charged with possession with intent to distribute a Schedule II drug, then ran me through the same questions about whether I understood the charges, and whether I had an attorney. He then told me that since Mr. Honeywell was representing me on my other charges, he was going to represent me in this case as well.
Do I have a choice? I wanted to ask. Instead I just said, “Thank you, Your Honor.”
Mr. Honeywell shambled into the bottom of the screen, wearing what appeared to be the same rumpled gray suit he had worn last time—or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
“Your Honor, if I may, I’d like to consult with my client for a moment or two before we begin our bond hearing?”
“Go ahead.”
“Good morning, Ms. Barrick,” he said, turning toward me. “We’ve had something of an unusual offer from Ms. Kaye, the prosecutor, and I’d like to discuss it with you before I accept it on your behalf.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting up a little.
“The Commonwealth has agreed to drop your assault charges. But in exchange, they’ve asked to go to trial on the drug issue much sooner than I otherwise might be comfortable with.”
“How soon?”
“We’ve checked with Judge Robbins’s chambers in Circuit Court, and he has an opening for a one-day trial on April ninth.”