Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  Before long, Amy was driving under the railroad tracks, past a trailer belonging to a Confederate history enthusiast, and to the driveway for 104 Desper Hollow Road.

  The best-case scenario would have been a nice, full garbage can—brimming with discarded bank and credit-card statements—that had been put out on the curb. Courts had ruled that defendants had no reasonable expectation of privacy when it came to their garbage, which was considered abandoned property. And if it was on the curb, that meant Amy wouldn’t be trespassing when she accessed it. She’d be completely in the clear.

  Except, of course, Melanie Barrick had been in jail for the past two weeks. So Amy didn’t think she’d find any garbage.

  There was, however, the second-best-case scenario.

  A mailbox.

  Tampering with a person’s mail was a federal crime. Likewise, removing the contents of a defendant’s mailbox was a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

  But if the mailbox happened to be open? Well. Accidents happen.

  And if Amy happened to be walking by, on a public street, and be able to see a bank statement lying there in plain sight? Well. That would just make her observant.

  Amy stopped the car and got out. With her toes still firmly planted on Augusta County–owned Desper Hollow Road, she pulled a pen out of her pocket, inserted it into the hooked handle for the mailbox, and pulled.

  “Oops,” she said as the lid opened.

  She peered inside. The box was stuffed almost to the top. Again using the pen—so, if it came up, she could truthfully testify she had touched nothing—she started sifting through the pile. A lot of it was junk. Or bills.

  But about midway through, she came across a half-letter-size envelope from Shenandoah Community Credit Union, addressed to Melanie A. Barrick. Amy recognized a monthly statement when she saw one.

  She kept going, all the way to the bottom of the pile. But that was it.

  It was entirely possible there were other accounts, of course—a bank that didn’t mail monthly statements, or an account whose statements had yet to mail out this month. But this was a start.

  Amy drove back to the office and was soon typing up a subpoena duces tecum to Shenandoah Community Credit Union, whose corporate offices were in Staunton—and whose in-house counsel Amy knew.

  By two o’clock, she was hitting Send on the email. At precisely 3:17, her phone rang. It was the Shenandoah Community Credit Union lawyer, ribbing Amy about dumping this on him on a Friday afternoon.

  By 4:36, Amy was looking at four months’ worth of bank statements for the account belonging to Melanie A. Barrick.

  There was currently $733.28 in her account. The last transaction was a deposit for $278.17 the previous Thursday, from Hokie Associates. Amy Googled the name. It was the local Waffle House franchisee.

  Waffle House? The Shenandoah valley’s most notorious cocaine dealer had been working at Waffle House? That was a twist.

  There were no substantial withdrawals or transfers. The largest deposits were a series of weekly additions from Diamond Trucking, Inc., but those were below $600, and they had stopped in early March. The largest withdrawals were the monthly mortgage payment and a weekly check for $250 to an Ida Ferncliff, but that also stopped a month ago. Childcare, Amy could guess.

  Otherwise? Electric company. Phone company. Insurance company. The usual suspects in what appeared to be a paycheck-to-paycheck existence.

  Barrick used her debit card to buy groceries. But from the amounts, it didn’t seem like she had been eating much lately. The largest cash withdrawal was $20, from a local ATM.

  If Barrick was leading the life of a freewheeling, free-spending drug kingpin, she wasn’t doing it through this bank account. Based on the evidence here, she was somewhere between living frugally and flat broke.

  There was obviously more to Melanie Barrick than Amy had yet discovered. She’d just have to keep looking.

  FIFTY-TWO

  I couldn’t say the previous week had flown by, because time in ad seg drags along in the most tedious way possible.

  Mr. Honeywell had gone disturbingly quiet, not visiting or calling. He had sent one note, saying preparations for the trial were going well, and that he had been in touch with Ben. About what, it didn’t say. I couldn’t think of what Ben could do to help my cause. Especially from New Jersey, or wherever he was now.

  The note ended with instructions to keep my spirits up.

  Right. Because that was so easy.

  With nothing better to do than play and replay past events, I thought back to my last interaction with Mr. Honeywell. The way he had looked at me in the Sheriff’s Office was different. Like I was now a lost cause. Like I was no longer the innocent he thought I was. Like I was back among that population of clients whose fate didn’t cause him to lose sleep at night.

  And there wasn’t much I could do about it. I couldn’t even write back to tell him that, for the sake of my mental health, I could really use a fuller update on my defense. I didn’t have a stamp. Again, no commissary. The guards weren’t allowed to loan me one either—it was against jail policy for guards to give inmates gifts of any kind.

  Sunday, April 8, the day before my trial, was like most others, except that it rained. Late in the afternoon, a guard asked me if I still wanted to exploit my constitutional rights by going outside. I surprised him by saying yes.

  We went through the whole routine with the cuffs and the cage. Once I was locked inside, I was uncuffed and left free—funny word, that: free—to explore my fifteen-by-fifteen confinement.

  The rain was warm, the kind that nourished crops and flowers and life, and it came down steadily. Not quite a torrent, but close. The water pooled on top of the concrete, forming puddles that danced with every drop that fell on them.

  Within a few minutes, I was drenched. It wasn’t all that uncomfortable, once there was no more dry on me to get wet. If anything, the rain felt glorious.

  My primary reason for going outside was that I wanted to sleep well that night. Fresh air, I thought, would help. So would exercise. I started by running little laps around my cage, then ripped off a set of push-ups.

  I was strong. Powerful, even. Now five pounds below my regular weight, my ribs were tight against my skin. When I moved, there was less of me for my muscles to push around. I could do anything. I leapt onto the chain-link fence, almost like I was flying.

  Then I dropped back to the ground. My feet hit with a satisfying splash. I did some planks, just because I could. Then some squats. Same reason.

  It was strangely exhilarating, working myself this way. Maybe because it reminded me that my body—which was denied to me in so many ways while I was incarcerated—was still mine.

  The air was pungent, earthy and alive despite all the concrete around me. The rain began falling harder. I increased my exertion accordingly, springing with manic ferocity from one movement to the next, sprinting and lunging and hurtling myself all over until my chest actually ached from sucking in so much oxygen.

  But that was what I wanted, of course.

  To feel alive.

  When I was done—when I had pushed myself beyond exhaustion—I lay in the middle of the cage, spread-eagle, and let the rain pound me while I thought about Alex.

  I didn’t go with one of my usual memories of him from the past. For the first time since this ordeal began, I permitted myself to think of the future. I visualized, of all places, Shenandoah Valley Social Services, and the day when Alex would be returned to me. I thought of the family services specialist, Tina Anderson, lowering my baby into my arms. I thought of his joy, of my relief, of seeing those beautiful eyes and the bright smile that beamed out from under them.

  It was dangerous, thinking this way.

  I clung to it all the same.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Rain always made for a tough day.


  Rain meant she couldn’t take the baby outside. Rain meant being cooped up in the house, trying to come up with new ways to entertain the child.

  And that wasn’t as easy as it used to be. When they first got the baby, he didn’t stay awake for more than an hour or two at a time. He was in that phase the books referred to as the “fourth trimester,” where he acted like he was still in the womb. When he wasn’t eating or pooping, he was sleeping.

  Not so anymore. The naps were fewer and further between. The child was waking up, wanting to explore the world.

  The woman was fine with that. During the day, anyway. She had gotten a Baby Bumbo, a marvelous foamy little chair that allowed him to sit up; a Johnny Jump-Up, which attached to a doorframe and let him work his little legs; an exercise mat with little animals dangling from a padded bar that looped overhead. He generally didn’t last more than about fifteen minutes with each activity, but she could keep him busy, because she had the energy to move him from thing to thing.

  Not so at night. By then, she was just done. Because unlike a biological mother, who had all sorts of hormones coursing through her body preparing her for just this purpose, her body had nothing extra in it. Just fatigue.

  It didn’t seem to matter to the baby. There were times at night—especially when he hadn’t been able to go outside during the day—when he woke up for a feeding, and then was just awake.

  This was one of those nights. A rainy day had led to a restless evening. The boy had woken up at eleven p.m. and stayed awake until one a.m., wanting to play and be entertained the whole time. Then it took the woman—who was so tired she couldn’t fall back to sleep right away—another hour to drift off.

  Now it was four a.m. and he was up again. The woman rolled over when she heard him. She thought about nudging her husband awake and saying, “Your turn.” But he was sleeping soundly, and she wasn’t, so . . .

  Off to the baby’s room she went. She would just feed him quickly and put him back down.

  Or so she thought. The baby was having none of it. He wanted more playtime. Thus began the battle of wills, a battle she wasn’t going to win. The more the woman tried to settle him and get him to sleep, the more revved up he became.

  Somewhere in the middle of this, as the woman’s frustration mounted, the man came into the nursery.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” he asked stupidly.

  “What does it look like?” she snapped, holding up a very wide-eyed baby for him to see.

  “Okay, okay. Why don’t you go back to sleep and I’ll take over?” he said, trying to take the child from her.

  “No,” she said, turning so he couldn’t get the baby. “I’m fine. Just go to bed.”

  “You’re not fine. You’re exhausted. It’s all right. Let me take him.”

  “I told you, I’m fine!” she yelled.

  That set the baby to wailing. The woman looked down at what she’d done. Then she started crying too.

  The man stepped in, gently wresting the baby from her, then giving his sleep-deprived wife a hug.

  “Shh. It’s going to be okay.”

  His comforting words came out in a whisper.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The night passed slowly. Despite my best effort to tire my body, my mind was still a boiling pot of anxiety. It made sleep nearly impossible.

  The drug trial was really just the first legal hurdle I had to clear, with a murder trial still to come—and a Social Services case peppered in between.

  But the fact was, if I couldn’t get over that first one, the rest of it became moot. Losing the drug case meant losing Alex. Whoever had taken him would have effectively won.

  At that point, what did anything else matter? What did I really have to live for? They might as well execute me.

  Maybe that sounds bleak. But at two o’clock in the morning, when you’re in administrative segregation, when your milk is failing and the whole world thinks you’re guilty, optimism is in pretty short supply.

  I had just barely nodded off when the overhead light came on. Six o’clock had arrived. I was up immediately, like a firecracker had gone off in my cell, my heartbeat already reverberating against my sternum. I went to the door and waited for a guard to pass by, which they were required to do every so often.

  “Hey, you guys know I have my trial today, right?” I asked.

  “We know, Barrick,” the guy said. “We’ll come get you later.”

  I was too nervous to eat breakfast, which was pretty grim anyway. Not long after the tray was cleared away, two corrections officers came and got me, eventually handing me off to two sheriff’s deputies, who drove me to the courthouse.

  When I reached the holding cell behind the courtroom, I was surprised to find a dress hanging for me from the bunk—courtesy of Mr. Honeywell, I assumed. It was my Kate Middleton dress, which he obviously liked. The heels I always wore with it were attached in a plastic bag. I wondered how he had gotten into my house to retrieve it.

  Pinned to the hanger was an envelope with my name on it. Inside I found a copy of an old picture. It showed a dashing young couple, a man and a woman who were clearly in love. From their hair and clothes—to say nothing of how faded the colors were—I’d say it was about 1975 when the photo was snapped. I could practically hear the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever playing in the background.

  Then I did a double-take. The striking young man in the photo was Mr. Honeywell: a much younger, much slimmer, much less stooped, much more hirsute Mr. Honeywell. He was wearing a wide-collar shirt and a plaid suit that looked positively debonair on him. His eyes weren’t buggy or baggy. They were, if anything, striking.

  He was handsome. And more than that, he was happy.

  And I could immediately see why. It was all about how the woman looked at him. She adored him. You could tell immediately. Any man who had a woman look at him like that—even once—could surely not have turned out like Mr. Honeywell.

  Was she a girlfriend or . . . ?

  No, a wife. They both had wedding bands on.

  Then I looked more carefully at her. Dark hair, cut almost exactly like mine. Dark eyes, set sort of like mine. Slender build, just like me. She was wearing a belted dress that was the forty-years-ago version of the one hanging in front of me.

  She looked like she could be my sister or my mother. I knew she wasn’t, of course. But the resemblance was uncanny enough that I held the photo and stared at her for a while longer.

  Then Mr. Honeywell’s voice came from the far end of the holding area.

  “Darn near knocked the wind out of me the first time I saw you,” he said. “Felt like I was seeing a ghost.”

  He had been sitting quietly on a bench, watching me study his past.

  “So she was . . . this is your wife?” I said, holding up the picture.

  “Her name was Barbara.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking: What happened?”

  He took a moment.

  “Bad luck, I guess you could say. Bad luck and bad driving. We had been married about a year. She was pregnant. Pretty far along too. We were happy as could be, just a couple kids launching their lives together. We were out for a drive in the country one night. Not going anywhere, just driving. I had a Pontiac GTO, a real muscle car. I was taking the turns pretty tight, gunning the engine. She was just laughing. She had a great laugh, Barbara did. Clear as a bell.”

  He reflected on that for a beat, then continued.

  “We went around this one corner and there was a farmer on a tractor, right in the middle of the damn road, going about five miles an hour, no lights on, nothing. What the hell was he doing out there after dark? I have no idea. I jerked the wheel to avoid hitting him and lost control of the car. We broadsided a tree. Passenger side. We weren’t wearing seat belts. No one really did back then.”

  He stopped.

&nb
sp; “Is that where you got your limp?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Busted up my insides a lot worse than it busted up my outsides.”

  “And Barbara?” I asked.

  He just shook his head.

  “You never remarried?”

  “Never even dated again. Spent too many years either hating myself or feeling sorry for myself to be much good to anyone.”

  He rose from the bench and walked over to my cell. Those sad, protuberant eyes locked on mine.

  “I let her down,” he said. “I’m not going to let you down.”

  I nodded solemnly. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Get dressed. I’ll see you in there.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Once he was gone, I set down the photo and changed into my dress. The belt cinched two holes tighter than the last time I had worn it.

  Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, a sheriff’s deputy came to retrieve me. He shackled my ankles—though not my wrists—then led me down the hallway, toward a door labeled COURTROOM NO. 2.

  The walking was difficult, between my too-short strides and my heels, and it took all my concentration not to trip. As such, I was still looking mostly downward as I entered the courtroom.

  In my peripheral vision, I could see Mr. Honeywell’s rounded form at the defense table. It wasn’t until I reached the table and was able to steady myself a little that I was able to lift my head.

  The first thing my eyes fell on was the prosecution table. Amy Kaye was on the far side of it, sitting ramrod straight. A man I didn’t recognize was talking to her, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. There was something about him that filled me with an immediate and visceral dislike for him. It must have been the bow tie.

  I moved on, scanning the gallery. Sitting in back were a man and a woman who looked bored and clutched notepads. Reporters, obviously.

  A little farther up, sitting in the third row, was Teddy, with Wendy faithfully by his side.