by Rich Foster
As he let himself into his house, Lucas thought how Robert Goodman and he were not so different. Yet, when tempted to violence, they had traveled different paths.
*
Dr. Urvadi was pleased by Kevin Daniels response to medication. He was alert and conversant, though still moderately medicated. Jamal had cut back the dosage that morning, and now a slight nervousness ran though the boy, like an occasional electric current shooting through him.
They sat in his office, a room the doctor often found too constraining for the thoughts that were shared therein. At times, it helped to physically retreat from his patients. He thought being physically close could cramp the sharing of intimacies.
“How would you describe yourself, Kevin?”
“Young, white, educated. Brown hair and brown eyes. Medium build.” His voice was flat. It was an accurate but lifeless assessment.
“What about emotionally? What are you feeling?”
Kevin looked at the blank canvas on the doctor’s wall. “Empty, numb, a little anxious, I guess.”
Sub-consciously his hands began to work. He wiped the palms on his pants without noticing.
“What makes you feel anxious?”
“I don’t know. I’m waiting for something to happen, but I don’t know what it is.”
“This thing that might happen is it good or bad?”
“It’s bad! I don’t know what it is, but it is really bad.” Kevin became agitated. His leg bounced as his feelings worked themselves past the medication.
“Do you fear it?”
“Yes. I’m afraid I won’t be able to avoid it. No matter what I do it’s coming.”
“What do you think this “it” wants?”
“I don’t know? I guess it wants me!”
“How does that make you feel?”
Kevin’s eyes darted around the room. They kept returning to the shrink-wrapped canvas on the wall. “It, it, it…” he stumbled on the words. And then when he looked at the canvass again, he lunged out of his seat and smacked the frame off the wall. It sailed across the room, the shrink-wrap tearing on the corner of a file cabinet. Kevin stood immobile. His fists were tightly clenched. “He makes me angry.”
Dr. Urvadi wondered who the “he” was that Kevin saw on the canvass. It might be Goodman. It might be Kevin himself. It was possible it was his father, but Dr. Urvadi suspected it might well be Death hunting the young man. Kevin breathed heavily. Dr. Urvadi waited. Nothing more was forthcoming.
“I think that is enough for today Kevin. Why don’t stop?”
Kevin looked at Dr. Urvadi. “You’re leaving me?”
It was an odd way to phrase their break.
“No Kevin, I will be here. We can continue this tomorrow.”
Kevin left the office. He walked slowly down the polished linoleum floors of the ward. Behind his back he could hear himself being stalked by soft footsteps. He whirled around, his fists raised in a defensive block. A startled nurse dropped the tray of medications she held. Pills scattered across the floor. Kevin ran away, down the hall, scurrying to the safety of his room.
*
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary School re-opened the last week of August. At one time, Labor Day marked the end of summer. With the increase of two parents working, the school schedule evolved toward more time off at the Christmas and Easter. This enabled people to flee winter by flying to warmer climates or to embrace the winter by skiing. Summer became truncated between the middle of June and the third week of August.
The Rural District School was first organized one hundred years before. It was originally named the Herbert Porter School, funded by the descendent of an early settler whose major life accomplishment was killing off Indians, including women and children. He thereby acquired a broad tract of land that proved rich in mineral deposits. He left behind a pacified territory and a lucrative inheritance to his progeny.
The original wooden school burned to the ground during a wild fire in the early sixties. When it was rebuilt, the school board re-named it for the country’s thirty-fourth president, thereby repudiating the two greatest threats to the American way of life, the godless Russians, who had launched Sputnik, and President Jack Kennedy who threatened to overrun the government with Papists. Local Catholics complained. They were quickly silenced by accusations of being, “Red sympathizers.”
On opening day, Calley drove her children to the school, five miles away. She faced a dilemma with childcare; Jacob was starting kindergarten. His school day ended at lunch. Sarah’s day went until three o’clock. A bus could take him home but she would need to pay more money, to cajole Mrs. Deitz into walking to the bus stop to meet him.
It was a cloudless morning. Calley took a snap-shop of Jacob standing by the flagpole, where the flag hung limp in the still air. Sarah, seeing friends she had not seen over the summer, ran off and was gone. Calley walked her son to his classroom and took more photos of him beside his teacher. Soon Jacob was playing with the other children. Unlike those who cried despairingly and clung to their mother, Calley had to walk over and demand a good-bye hug from her son. Jacob hugged her, then immediately returned to the tower of blocks he and a new friend were constructing.
Calley left with emptiness burning inside. Jason was not here to see this day. Ruthie was not here. Neither of them ever would be again. And now Sarah and Jacob did not seem to need. As she walked to her car, anxiety and loneliness overwhelmed her. In the safety of her car she took a couple pills. It was a little soon, but felt, she needed them.
She cried in her car until the pills clouded over the pain. When she pulled out onto the highway, she found she had to work to concentrate on her driving. Yet, against her will, her mind kept drifting away.
Sheriff Gaines was heading out Route 12 to Corbet Mills. Eco-raiders had struck three of the companies logging tracts, vandalizing a million dollars worth of heavy equipment. Trees were also spiked. The first being discovered when a logger’s saw hit the spike, causing it to kick, and almost severing his leg.
His deputies went out after the first vandalism reports came in shortly after first light. Now Gaines was on his way to make an appearance. The office of sheriff was an elected one. The extended Corbet family was a heavy hitter and donors in Canaan County politics.
He cruised around a long easy bend. A half-mile ahead he saw a jeep Cherokee tag the shoulder. The car drifted toward the yellow center line and then drifted back. Long before it reached the next curve the brake lights lit up. Driving sixty-five, he rapidly closed the gap with the other car, which was doing only twenty-five miles per hour. Again, the car drifted wide on the road. Gaines hit the flashing lights on his cruiser. Oblivious, the car continued on. Following close, he turned on his siren. The jeep’s brake lights lit up. With a jerk, the car stopped in the middle of the road. Gaines depressed the thumb switch on the hailer,
“Please pull your vehicle off the road.” He thought to himself how much he hated the carnage left behind by drunk drivers. During his forty years on the force he had seen too many bodies pried out of twisted wrecks.
The jeep rolled forward onto the gravel and grass that abutted the pavement. Gaines parked his cruiser. When he approached the driver’s window he saw a blond woman who looked familiar. But, he could not place the face. Leaning down to the open window, he didn’t smell booze. It must be drugs, he thought. The driver’s pupils were dilated, like large black buttons, rimmed by a narrow band of blue. In the back, a toddler slept in a car seat.
“May I see your registration and license?”
The woman fumbled in the glove box and extricated a registration card. Then she searched through her purse for her wallet. Sheriff Gaines could easily see the plastic bottle with the prescription label. At least she wasn’t jacked on speed he thought. An epidemic of amphetamine abuse was sweeping rural America; Canaan County was no exception. Commonly, women took the pills to keep up with life. Then, to keep up with their habit, they began selling to their friends. Men gen
erally stuck to being drunk.
She found her license and pressed it into his hand. Before he really looked at it he said, “Are you trying to kill your child ma’am? Because it sure seems you’re under the influence of a controlled substance. The way your driving is sure gonna get that boy killed.”
He hit her hard with it, DUI offenders made him angry. The woman disintegrated into hysteria, repeatedly shouting, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Oh God I’m sorry. I didn’t want her to die.”
The toddler awoke and began to bawl in the backseat, but the woman seemed oblivious to the sound. He looked in the rear because he was sure the child was a boy, yet she repeatedly said, “I didn’t want her to die.” He set the registration on the hood of the car and opened the door.
“Please step out of the vehicle, ma’am.”
She did not respond, instead continued to cry about “her” dying. Reaching in, he pulled her out of the car. The woman neither struggled nor helped. She stumbled, falling to her knees. Her face struck the side of the vehicle. She seemed insensitive to the blow. Gaines pulled her wrists behind her back and snapped handcuffs on her. He helped her up. She staggered as he guided her to his patrol car, where he secured her in the back seat. The woman continued to cry hysterically. Strangely her face was somehow more familiar contorted in tears.
Gaines returned to the jeep where he plucked the crying child from his car seat. He bounced the boy in one arm like he did to his grandchildren. A breeze stirred. The driver’s license slid off the hood and fluttered to the ground. He picked it up and read, “Calley Haskell.”
Both the name and the town Mason Forks leaped out at him. The face connected in his memory. He had seen her dragged away from two bloodied bodies, her dead husband after the bus accident, and a second time when Robert Goodman executed her daughter. What a mistake, he thought, recalling his first words to her.
As a lawman, Gaines believed in the law; he was sworn to uphold it. But after forty years on the job he believed that sometimes the law and justice went separate ways.
“Would you like to go for a ride in a police car?” he asked the boy on his arm.
“Yea!” the child shouted gleefully. “Can I play the siren?”
He removed the child seat from the jeep and carried it back to his car. Calley was calmer though sobs continued to shake her body. He strapped the car seat into the back of the cruiser and snapped the child in. Gaines took the keys from the Cherokee and locked it up. He then walked back to his squad car, where he slid in behind the wheel. By radio he reported that he would be detained. He asked that the Corbet family be told he would get there as soon as possible.
From the back seat, Jacob made siren sounds.
Calley asked, “Am I going to jail?”
Gaines turned his body to look at her through the grate that separated the front from the back.
“By all rights you should.” He picked the pill bottle up out of her purse. “You’ve taken too many of these for driving, or for your own good.”
Calley stared at the floor of the car.
“Then again, by all that’s right you shouldn’t have suffered what you have.” He was silent for a minute. “I’m in a tough spot. I can’t let you go and maybe kill somebody on the road, but jail isn’t going to do anything for you. Do you have anyone I can call?”
Calley tried to focus on whom she might call. Certainly not Mrs. Deitz. Friends were in short supply. With only a name standing between her and jail she finally blurted out, “Lucas James. He’s my pastor.”
Gaines nodded. He remembered the man. Retired Army. The man could be trusted.
“His number is on a piece of paper in my purse. He said to call him if I needed anything.”
Gaines thumbed through her purse. Carelessly dropped pills tumbled around inside it. He found a piece of paper with James’s name and number in neat printing. He stepped out of the squad car, calling on his personal cell phone. As Sheriff, he had a lot of latitude in is job, but some things where best if they never got into the system.
Lucas and Gaines spoke for several minutes. Calley could see his lips moving, but could not hear the words. At last, the sheriff flipped the phone closed and climbed back into the car.
“Lets go for a ride.”
He pulled onto the highway. At the boy’s urging he turned on the siren for a brief time. Soon they glided silently through Mason Forks. Outside of town Gaines turned into a drive, rolling past a mailbox marked James. He stopped in front of the house. Gaines opened the rear car door. As he removed the handcuffs from Calley’s wrists he said, “I’m turning you over to this preacher. Don’t make me sorry I didn’t run you in!”
Calley nodded her head. Lucas came out on the porch. Gaines pointed to the open car door. “Get your boy Ma’am,”
He walked away to speak with Lucas. The men shook hands.
“Like I told you, this woman needs help. But I can’t have her driving around stoned.”
“Thanks, she’s needing a little mercy.”
“Mercy’s for the gods to give, I’m only trying to do what seems right,” Gaines pushed the pill bottle into Lucas’s hand. “Try to keep her away from these. If she’s really been using, she’s going to need professional help.”
As the Sheriff rolled down the drive Jacob cavorted on the green grass. He waved bye-bye. Calley waited sheepishly beside Lucas. Then, they went into his house.
Chapter Nineteen
At the motions hearing, Brent Carlson asked for a change of venue. Judge Mannering denied it, stating she would entertain the motion again, if they found it difficult to impanel a jury.
Carlson asked for a discovery motion ordering the prosecution to turn over all evidence related to the case. The prosecution willingly complied providing a copy of the investigation book, which to six three-ring binders.
Finally, he requested that psychiatric professionals evaluate his client.
The prosecution made a single motion. The assistant district attorney asked that Dr. Urvadi, the Canaan County staff psychiatrist, assess Robert Goodman. He made no other motions, comfortable with his long list of eyewitnesses and forensic evidence of Goodman’s guilt.
Any hope Brent had of finding exculpatory evidence for his client proved futile as he read the file. The County Sheriff observed the killings himself. Brent wished Goodman would plead guilty. He now hoped to disassociate his name from the case as quickly as possible.
A few days later, Robert was brought from his cell to see the doctor.
“You’re the shrink huh?”
Dr. Urvadi nodded. “Do you know why you are here?”
“Well, you’re here to see if I am crazy.”
“I am here to make an assessment. Would you care to talk?”
“If I talk it can be used against me. So a sane man wouldn’t talk, right doc?”
“It would seem logical.”
“Then if I talk I must be insane. Lets talk.”
A week later the report from Dr. Urvadi arrived. Buried behind long technical terms was his conclusion,
It is my professional opinion that Robert Goodman, though a troubled personality, was sane at the time he committed the alleged crimes. Furthermore, he is shrewd, highly verbal when he chooses to be, and is certainly mentally capable of participating in his own defense.
Brent flipped the folder closed. If only his client would “participate” he thought.
When Carlson read the summation from the defense psychologist it was even worse. Goodman admitted to the killings. He said the people of the church deserved it, besides how could they call it murder when his victims had all volunteered to die? Brent noticed that Goodman did not even say “alleged” victims. He imagined himself trying to claim that his client was only guilty of assisted suicide.
The psychologist concluded.
Robert Goodman is a narcissistic personality, prone to violence. He suffers poor impulse control and is likely an alcoholic. He lives behind a wall of denial and blame, wherein he is the vic
tim. As to the critical question, “Did Robert Goodman know right from wrong when he allegedly executed four people and wounded a fifth?” the answer is, “Yes.” He just did not think it was wrong.
*
Lucas settled into the office at the church. He sorted through the books left by the late Reverend Leeds. The man’s reading proved to be fairly narrow in nature. The theology was further to the right than his thinking. A portion of Jonathan Edward’s sermon, “Sinner’s in the hands of an angry God,” hung on the wall. Lucas doubted the old Puritan would approve of the ornate gold frame that held it.
There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." -- By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty.
Jonathan Edward
Lucas, surprisingly, found himself agreeing with the sentiments. To him, Edwards always seemed too Puritanical. But if one assented there was a God, then that God must by definition be sovereign. There was no higher court of appeal. If God created everything, then any complaint by his creation was without merit, no more than a sand castle at the beach, had a right to complain that the child who made it could not destroy it. Was any child troubled by guilt, as he stamped down the castle he created?
Lucas knew those who said, “I cannot believe in a God who would let that happen.” The “that” being any of the innumerable sufferings life entails. However, what they believed did not alter the existence or non-existence of God. Their beliefs would only change how they might live.
Either there was a God or there wasn’t. If there was, then a man had to choose his beliefs from the world’s religions. If not, then he had to figure out how to give meaning to seventy years of life, followed by the oblivion that would eradicate that meaning.