by Jack Todd
“You mean Miranda?”
“Yes. Miranda Thorne. We’re trying to reach her father, but he hasn’t been answering his phone.”
“Poe’s known that little girl since she came up to his knee. I cleaned house for her folks when her mama was still alive, and after she was gone I kept at it until Miranda got big enough to do it herself. Poe is like an uncle to her. He wouldn’t harm a hair on that girl’s head.”
“Well, I hope you’re right, Rose. But somebody hurt her bad.”
“What does Poe have to say about it?”
“He hasn’t said anything that makes much sense, and I can’t question him without a lawyer present. He’s out of his head a bit, keeps saying get help, get help.”
“Then I expect he was trying to get help for her. Let me take him home now, and I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“I can’t do that, Rose. The only person who can turn him loose is the district judge.”
“Then get the judge in here. Poe ain’t guilty. There’s got to be some explanation for this.”
“The judge is only in Belle Coeur County one day a week. He’ll be here Wednesday morning for the arraignment. I called the public defender’s office. They’ll send somebody over to meet with you tonight. You’ll want a lawyer there when we question Poe, and you’ll need help to enter a plea.”
“The plea is not guilty.”
“That’s fine, Rose, but you’re going to have to tell it to the judge. And Poe has to do the telling himself, you can’t do it for him. When that girl comes to, if she does, maybe she’ll sort things out. If she says Poe isn’t the one who attacked her, your boy is free to go. Right now, he’s the only suspect we’ve got. He’s in a clean, dry place, and I’ll see to it he gets plenty to eat.”
Dunn sees something go out of Rose then, sees her taking in how bad this could be. She takes a deep breath and lets it out before she speaks, so softly he can barely hear. “That’s kind of you, Sheriff. Can I see my boy now?”
“Sure thing. I’ll take you down the hall there, and they’ll bring Poe out in a minute.”
Sheriff Dunn leads her down a long corridor and into a drab, windowless room with puke-green walls. Poe shuffles in, escorted by two deputies. At the sight of him in handcuffs and leg irons, Rose bites her lower lip so hard she draws a pearl of bright red blood. The deputies guide him to a chair at a square table, facing her. He sits down heavily, unable to use his hands to brace himself. Rose remains standing, resting her knuckles on the table. She points to the leg irons.
“Do you have to do that to him?” she asks a deputy whose name tag says Travis Proulx. “Wrap him up like some kind of beast?”
“Regulations, ma’am. Poe is likely to be charged with a felony offense. We can’t bring him out unless he’s fully shackled.”
She waits until the deputies close the door, then she wraps her arms around Poe and hugs him. When she has just about squeezed the life out of him, she sits and holds his big hands. “Such beautiful hands you got, Poe. Even when you was a baby, you had such beautiful hands. I was always so happy you had six fingers and six toes and you was so big, ’cause there was more of you to look at.”
Poe’s head swivels on his neck and his eyes roll back in his head. He gnashes his teeth and he’s drooling more than usual. “Get help, Ma,” he says. “Got to get help.”
“Do you mean get help for Miranda, son? They got help for the girl. She’s at the hospital now. I’ll say a prayer that she’s gonna be alright.”
Poe strains against the handcuffs. His wrists are already chafed.
Rose looks him in the eye. “Be honest with your mama now, Poe. Did you do this thing? Did you hurt this girl? Did you hurt Miranda? Even if it was an accident, you got to tell the truth.”
Poe shakes his head frantically. “No, Mama. No. I doesn’t hurt Miranda. Sonofabitch fella hurts her. I tries to get help.”
“Who? Do you know who hurt her?”
“Sonofabitch fella.”
“Had you seen him before?”
Poe shakes his head. “Sonofabitch fella.”
There’s a knock at the door and a weedy little man in a sports jacket and blue jeans enters the room. He’s carrying a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee and a dripping half-broken umbrella. He puts out a hand and introduces himself to Rose. “I’m Gerald B. Nye, ma’am. Public defender. The sheriff called me. I assume you don’t have a lawyer?”
Rose ignores the hand. “Don’t have no lawyer, Mr. Gerald B. Nye, and we don’t need one. Poe didn’t do nothing except help a poor girl who was bad hurt.”
“I’m a public defender, ma’am. My services are free.”
“Don’t matter. We don’t need no lawyer.”
“That’s your right. But Sheriff Dunn plans to question Poe, and he has the right to have a lawyer present. My job is to represent Mr. Didelot.”
“Mr. Didelot was my daddy. Guy Didelot. Killed in a car wreck, alongside my mother. I guess you’re referring to Poe?”
“I am.”
“Then say so. Poe carried that girl out of the woods. He’s been her friend most of her life. They got to turn him loose.”
“They may release him, ma’am, but we have to go one step at a time. We need to figure out what’s best for Poe. I’m thinking that the best thing might be to clear the way so that Poe can live in an institution. That way he can’t hurt anyone and he won’t have to go to prison.”
“You mean send Poe to the nuthouse?”
“Well, that’s what people call it, but those places aren’t like they used to be. In this state, they’re quite civilized.”
“Son, you don’t know me. They tried to take my boy away from me before he was a week old. If I hadn’t fought the bastards, he would’ve spent his entire life in one of them institutions. If my Poe is in as much trouble as you seem to think, he’ll need a real lawyer. No offense, son, but any lawyer with a lick of sense would know better than to take an umbrella outdoors when it’s blowing a gale.”
~
She’s come undone
The storm rages on, a torrential, obliterating rain. The wind tears great oak and hackberry trees out by their roots, the rain washes out roads, the creeks flood over the bridges, and the remnants of the Split Rock Trailer Park swirl away down the river. The boys at the Kids Kamp are left to sit in their dismal cabins with nothing to do but watch the leaks drip into buckets on the floor. The phone lines are out, the power lines are down, and Belle Coeur County is an island, cut off from the world.
The hospital has switched to its emergency generator. The lights are dim and the corridors hushed. Nurses hurry back and forth on their soft-soled shoes. In room 413, Thorne sits at the bedside of his battered daughter, listening to the beep and ping of the instruments that surround her. The roar of the storm is muffled inside the hospital, but now and then a gust of wind causes the windows to ripple like the surface of a pond. When it does, he fears the glass will shatter and the wind and water will come howling in. Through the long, empty hours, Thorne watches Miranda’s face. Her nose is broken, her eyes are black, there are cuts on her forehead, her lips are swollen. With that corona of wild dark curly hair fanned out on the crisp white of the hospital pillow, she looks like a battered Madonna.
Watching her, a snippet of an old song drifts through his mind: she’s come undone . . . He can’t recall the band, the singer, or the name of the song, nothing at all but that single phrase, on endless replay, like a thirty-three-rpm record with the needle stuck. She’s come undone . . .
Miranda has come undone. His lovely, vital, athletic, brilliant Miranda is now simply a body that breathes. The list of her injuries is frightening. She has a damaged trachea, two broken ribs, three broken teeth, a broken nose, multiple contusions, vaginal bruising, some bleeding in the brain. She is unconscious and heavily sedated. For now, the doctors say, the only thing is to let h
er rest. They won’t say that she may never wake. They don’t have to.
When Thorne needs sleep, the hospital wheels in an extra cot and he curls up under a thin blanket, his jacket and shoes still on. He is startled awake a dozen times a night by the absence of her breathing. He sits up, panicked. Then he hears it again, a ragged, creaky sound like an old bellows. He waits for his heart rate to slow and drifts back to sleep, soothed by that rough sound. Breathe, Miranda, breathe. In and out, that’s a good girl. Breathe.
~ V ~
The New World Hotel
The man in the dark blue suit
Lambert Cain leans back in the vast leather chair that had been his father’s, watching the storm beat down on Main Street in Belle Coeur, a block from the courthouse. He has come to work as usual despite the storm, driving the six blocks to the office instead of walking the way he usually does, dodging fallen tree limbs all the way, to arrive at precisely five minutes before eight, even though he has no appointments with clients and no work that can’t be postponed. He’s been going to work every weekday morning for more than forty years, and in all that time he hasn’t missed more than a dozen days in the office. Lambert Cain III is the third and last in his line to practice law from this office. There is no Lambert Cain IV waiting to take over, nor a Lucille Cain nor a Linda Cain, because he and his beloved wife have no children. His partners have all retired or moved on to more lucrative practices, the young lawyers he trained have left for big cities, corporate clients, and thousand-dollar-an-hour fees. Most of what remains of his practice represents the old wealth of the county. They trust him and no one else. He takes care of their wills, their petty quarrels, and their infrequent arrests for impaired driving, but it’s hardly demanding work.
Lambert Cain is a long-limbed, courtly man, with long graying hair combed straight back. The suits he wears on his tall, angular frame are a uniform dark blue. He is considered a pillar of respectability in the community, although there are rumors of a dissolute past that he has never bothered to deny. For the present, Lambert is going nowhere, and he will never appear in a television ad. He plans to stay where he is until the last client has vanished or he’s too sick or feeble to carry on. Then he will pack up his desk and the objects on his walls, turn off the lights, say goodbye to Gladys, and go home to listen to opera and read Russian novels, the two great passions of his life apart from his wife, Martha. He walks home to have lunch with Martha every day at noon sharp, and he feels like the luckiest man alive.
Cain is still gazing out at the empty, rain-swept street, mulling the past and the present when, at two minutes past nine, he hears the bell that announces someone has arrived in the outer office. Gladys has called in to say she can’t make it, so he hoists himself out of his chair, noting the stiffness in every joint brought on by the rain, opens his door, and finds Rose Didelot standing uncertainly in the waiting room, clutching her handbag. Lambert hurries to the door and helps her to a chair in the waiting room, pours a glass of spring water from the five-gallon bottle next to Gladys’s desk, and sits facing her. He waits politely until she has drunk half the water and composed herself.
“They got Poe down at the jail, Lambert. They say he attacked the Thorne girl, Miranda. Poe has known that girl since she was an itty-bitty thing, used to take her fishing out at the gravel pit. Jim Dunn himself found ’em alongside the highway, close to the turnoff to the gravel pit. Poe was carrying the girl. Jim says she was half naked and beat up pretty bad.”
Cain reaches for a legal pad and a pencil and starts taking notes. “When did this happen, Rose?”
Rose dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Late yesterday afternoon, I believe. Poe went out there to fish, but he didn’t say nothin about Miranda coming along. I don’t know how they met up. You know my Poe. He wouldn’t hurt a living soul, big and strong as he is. I know he didn’t hurt that girl, only I can’t prove it. That’s where you come in.”
“I’d be happy to recommend someone, if you like. I don’t do much criminal law anymore, Rose. Never did, really. It’s been years since I argued a criminal case in court.”
“I know that, Lambert, but my boy’s in big trouble. Poe said something last night about a sonofabitch fellow that hurt Miranda, but I’ve got no idea who he’s talkin about. He’s not making a whole lot of sense right now, like he’s in shock. I want you to be his lawyer because everybody knows you’re the best in the county, maybe the best in the state. They sent some tomfool from the public defender’s office last night, said he was gonna defend Poe. The man came in with a busted-up umbrella. He had it open outdoors when it was blowing like a cyclone. Right off, I could see that he ain’t got common sense. I can’t do business with a man like that.”
“Who was the lawyer? Did you get his name?”
“Mr. Gerald B. Nye.”
Cain chuckles. “Well, poor Gerald is a good soul, Rose, but he isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I can see where you might have your reservations about him.”
“It’s worse than that. All he wants is for Poe to claim he’s insane, so they can stick him in one of them institutions for the rest of his natural life. But he ain’t crazy, he’s innocent. I’m not asking for your charity, Lambert. I don’t have a lot of money, but you can have what I’ve got. If the money runs out, I’ll sell the place. I’m getting too damned old to run the cheese business by myself, anyhow. All I want is to see my boy go free.”
Lambert Cain hesitates, watching the tempest rage outside, thinking it over. If he’s honest with himself, he has to admit that he’s bored with his practice. It’s been years since he took on a real challenge.
“Alright, Rose,” he says. “I’ll take the case. But you’re going to have to listen to me and take my advice. Don’t worry about the money, I’ll drop by for some of your fine cheese now and again, but you can pay me one U.S. dollar. That’s what we call a retainer. Then you have officially retained my services to represent your son, Poe.”
Rose digs around in her purse and comes up with a greasy dollar bill. Cain takes an empty file folder from a file cabinet, prints Poe’s name at the top, and clips the dollar bill to the inside of the folder. “Now, let’s pay a call on your son. I imagine he’d appreciate it.”
~
“I throws him away . . .”
Jim Dunn has just come in from checking on the storm. With bridges out, roads blocked, and power lines down, it’s as complete a mess as he’s ever seen. Then there’s a girl in a hospital bed, the daughter of a wealthy man who was once a prominent lawyer in Boston, and Poe in a jail cell. The storm has interfered with the flow of gossip, so the good citizens of Belle Coeur County haven’t heard of the attack on Miranda Thorne, but they will. They’ll expect him to have a suspect tried, found guilty, and, if possible, hung by the neck until dead, all by the end of next week, because that’s the way folks are.
The water is still pouring off his rain slicker when there’s a light knock on the door and Lambert Cain pokes his head in. “Time for a word, Jim?”
“Nothing much else I can do right now, Lambert. What brings you out on a day like this?”
“Rose Didelot came by this morning, asked if I could represent her boy.”
“And you agreed? Hell, Lambert, you haven’t done a criminal case in ten years.”
“More like twenty, maybe twenty-five. But I said I’d do it. Rose is the salt of the earth, and you know she won’t get much help from Gerald B. Nye.”
The sheriff nods. “I thought the same thing myself. Poe could be in trouble right up to his neck, and that’s a good deal higher than my head.”
Cain takes a seat in one of the comfortable old chairs in the office, chairs that have been there at least as long as he’s been a lawyer in Belle Coeur County, and probably a lot longer. “What can you tell me, Jim?”
“Right now, the Thorne girl is in critical condition. If she pulls through, we have aggravated assault and agg
ravated sexual assault. If she doesn’t, it’s murder in the second degree. Maybe first, if the prosecutor wants to try and prove that Poe tempted her out there some way or another.”
“You were the arresting officer?”
“I was. I was out checking the bridges yesterday afternoon when I found him staggering along the highway out by the old gravel pit, carrying this young woman who was half naked and half alive. Well, you know who she is, Lambert. Miranda Thorne, Prosper Thorne’s daughter. She took an awful beating, I suppose you know that. Poe is claiming there was some other fellow there. I had two deputies go back out and drive up that road to the gravel pit after we brought him in, but they didn’t see a thing, and in that storm we couldn’t do any kind of search. Given what I saw, it didn’t seem there was any reason for a search.”
Cain nods. “And if there was anyone else, he’s long gone by now. Probably was before your deputies went back out.”
“I suppose so, although it would have been hard to get out of the county. Depends if he got over one of the bridges before it flooded again. Assuming there is such a fellow, assuming Poe is telling the truth, or even that he knows what the truth might be. I was the quarterback on the football team when Poe tried to play all those years ago, you might remember. You could never make out how much he understood and how much he couldn’t soak up at all. Meanwhile, I don’t want to tell you your business, Lambert, but if I were you I wouldn’t try to get bail for Poe until this thing is settled. You know how folks are liable to react. He’s safer in here. I don’t want a lynching on my watch.”
Cain finds Rose waiting outside and asks her to accompany him to his first meeting with Poe. The giant looks smaller, somehow. Diminished. Maybe it’s the orange county jail suit he’s wearing, along with the handcuffs and leg irons. Or maybe it’s simply that he has shrunk into himself. The attorney has Rose with him to keep Poe calm, but the giant is still gnashing his teeth and rolling his eyes.