Malice

by Danielle Steel

  They were led into the attorneys’ room, with the two separate doors, and the table and four chairs. It was where Molly had met Grace before and at least it would be familiar to her.

  They sat down for a few minutes and waited for her. David lit a cigarette and offered one to Molly but she declined it. It was a full five minutes before the guard appeared at the window in the door to the jail, as the heavy door was unlocked, and Grace stood looking at them hesitantly. She was wearing the same jeans and T-shirt. There was no one to bring her clothes, and she had nothing else with her. All she had was what she had worn the night she had killed her father and been arrested.

  He watched her carefully as she entered the room, she was tall and thin and graceful, and in some ways she looked young and shy, but when she turned to look at him, he saw that her eyes were a dozen years older. There was something so sad and defeated there, and she moved like a doe about to dash away into the forest. She stood staring at them, not sure what to make of their visit. She had spent four hours with the police that day, answering questions, and she was exhausted. They had advised her that she had the right to have an attorney present at the questioning but she had already admitted to shooting her father, and didn't think there was any harm in answering their questions.

  She had gotten the message that David Glass was going to be her attorney, and he would be over to see her later. She had heard nothing from Frank Wills, and she still hadn't called him. There was no one to call, no one she could have turned to. She had read the papers that day, the front page and several articles were devoted to stories about the murder, about her father's admirable life, his law practice, and what he had meant to so many. It said relatively little about her, except that she was seventeen, went to Jefferson High, and had killed him. Several theories had been offered as to what must have occurred, but no one ever came close to what had really happened.

  “Grace, this is David Glass.” Molly broke the silence by introducing them. “He's from the public defenders’ office, and he's going to represent you.”

  “Hello, Grace,” he said quietly. He was watching her face, he hadn't taken his eyes off hers since she'd entered the room, and it was easy to see that she was desperately frightened. But in spite of it, she was polite and gracious when she shook his hand. He could feel her hand shaking in his own as soon as he touched her fingers. And when she spoke, he could see that she was a little breathless, and he remembered Molly's comment about her asthma. “We've got some work to do here.” She only nodded in answer. “I read your files this afternoon. It's not looking so good for the moment. And mostly what I'm going to need from you is information. What happened and why, whatever you can remember. Afterwards, we'll get an investigator to check things out. We'll do whatever we have to.” He tried to sound encouraging, and hoped she wasn't too frightened to listen.

  “There's nothing to check out,” she said quietly, sitting very straight in one of the four chairs. “I killed my father.” She looked him right in the eye as she said it.

  “I know you did,” he said, seeming unimpressed by the admission, and watching her intently. He knew what Molly had seen in her. She looked like a nice girl, and she looked as though someone had beaten the life out of her. She was so remote, one almost wondered if one could touch her. She was more like an apparition than a real person. There was nothing ordinary about her. Nothing to suggest that she was a seventeen-year-old girl, a teenager, none of the life or ebullience one would have expected. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked her quietly.

  “Most of it,” she admitted. There were parts of it that were still vague, like exactly when she had taken the gun out of her mother's night table. But she remembered feeling it in her hand, and then squeezing the trigger. “I shot him.”

  “Where did you get the gun?” His questions seemed very matter-of-fact, and oddly unthreatening as they sat there. He had an easy style, and Molly thanked her lucky stars again that he had gotten the case assigned to him. She just hoped he could help her.

  “It was in my mother's nightstand.”

  “How did you get it? Did you just reach over and take it?”

  “Sort of. I just kind of took it out.”

  “Was your father surprised when you did that?” He made it sound like the most mundane question, and she nodded.

  “He didn't see it at first, but he was surprised when he did … and then he tried to grab it and it went off.” Her eyes glazed as she remembered, and then she closed them.

  “You must have been standing pretty close to him, huh? About like this?” He indicated the three feet between them. He knew she had been closer than that, but he wanted to hear her answer.

  “No … uh … kind of … closer. …” He nodded, as though her answer were ordinary too, and Molly tried to feign disinterest, but she was fascinated by how quickly Grace had started talking to him, and how much she seemed to trust him. It was as though she knew that she could. She was much less defensive than she had been with Molly.

  “How close do you think? Like a foot maybe? Maybe closer?”

  “Pretty close … closer …” she said softly, and then looked away from him, knowing what he must be thinking. Molly must have told him her suspicions. “Very close.”

  “How come? What were you doing?”

  “We were talking,” she said hoarsely, sounding breathless again, and he knew she was lying.

  “What were you talking about?”

  His question and the ease of it caught her off guard and she stammered as she answered. “I … uh … I guess, my mother.” He nodded as though that were the most natural thing, and then leaned back in his chair pensively and looked at the ceiling. He spoke to her then, without looking at her, and he could feel his heart pound in his ears as he addressed her.

  “Did your mom know what he'd been doing to you, Grace?” He said it so gently, it brought tears to Molly's eyes, and then slowly he looked at Grace, and there were tears in her eyes too. “It's okay to tell me, Grace. No one's ever going to know, except us, but I have to know the truth if I'm going to help you. Did she know?”

  Grace stared at him, wanting to deny it again, wanting to hide from them, but she couldn't anymore, she just couldn't. She nodded, and the tears spilled from her eyes, and ran slowly down her cheeks. As he watched her, he took her hand and squeezed it. “It's okay, Grace. It's okay. You couldn't do anything to stop it.” And then she nodded again, and an anguished sob escaped her. She wanted to have the courage not to tell them anything, but they were all hounding her, the doctor, the police, now him, and they asked so many questions. And for some reason she herself didn't know, she trusted David. She liked Molly too, but it was David whom she wanted to turn to.

  “She knew.” They were the saddest words he had ever heard, and without knowing John Adams, he wanted to kill him.

  “Was she very angry at him? Was she angry at you?”

  But Grace stunned both of them when she shook her head again. “She wanted me to … she said I had to …” she choked on the words and had to battle her asthma,“… had to take care of him, and be nice to him … and … she wanted me to,” she said again, her eyes brimming with tears, and pleading with them to believe her. They both did, and their hearts went out to her as they watched her.

  “How long did it go on?” he said softly.

  “A long time.” She looked drained as she glanced back at him. She looked so tired and frail, he almost wondered if she would survive it. “Four years … she made me do it the first time.”

  “What was different that night?”

  “I don't know … I just couldn't anymore … she was gone. I didn't have to do it for her anymore … he wanted me to do it in her bed … I'd never done that before … and … he … he hit me … and did other things.” She didn't want to tell them all that he'd done to her, but they knew it anyway from the exam and the photos. “I remembered the gun … I just wanted him to stop … to get off of me … I didn't really mean to shoot him … I d
on't know. I just wanted to stop him.” And she had. Forever. “I didn't know I'd kill him.” But she had told them what had happened at least. And in a way, she felt relieved. And exhausted. It was different from telling the police. She knew that Molly and David wouldn't tell anyone, and they believed her. She knew that the police never would. They thought her father was perfect. They all knew him professionally and some even played golf with him at his club. It seemed like everyone in town knew him and loved him.

  “You're a brave girl,” David said quietly, “and I'm glad you told me.” It all added up exactly the way Molly had said, only it was even worse, the mother had made her do it. At thirteen, when it started. It made him feel sick to think of it. The guy was a real sick bastard. He deserved to be shot. But now the big question was if he could convince a jury that Grace had been defending herself after four years of hell at her father's hands. Molly hadn't been able to convince the police, they were too sold on John Adams's public image, He couldn't help wondering if a jury would suffer from the same delusions.

  “Would you tell the police what you told me?” David asked her calmly, but she was quick to shake her head that she wouldn't.

  “Why not?”

  “They won't believe me anyway, and … I can't do that to my parents.”

  “Your parents are dead, Grace,” he said firmly, and she would be too if she didn't help herself and tell the truth. Self-defense was her only chance. They had to prove now that she had felt her life was in danger. And even if they didn't believe that, the worst they could make of it was manslaughter, not murder. “We're going to have to talk about this. You're going to have to tell someone, other than me, or the doctor here, what really happened.”

  “I can't. What'll they think of me? It's so awful.” She started to cry again, and Molly got up and put her arms around her.

  “It makes them look awful, not you, Grace. It shows you as you are, a victim. You can't pay for their sins by staying silent. You have to speak up, David's right.” They talked about it for a long time, and she said she'd think about it, but she still didn't look convinced that telling the whole truth was the best solution. And when they finally left her at the jail, Molly was still amazed that David had gotten her to open up so quickly.

  “Maybe we should switch jobs, except that I can't do what you do either,” Molly had said glumly. She felt like a failure for not getting Grace to trust her.

  “Don't be so hard on yourself. The only reason she talked to me is because you had softened her up first. She needed to get it off her chest. It's been festering for four years. It has to be a relief now.” Molly nodded in agreement, and then David shook his head ruefully. “Of course, killing him had to be a relief too. Damn shame she didn't do it sooner. What a sick son-ofabitch he was, while the whole town thinks he's a saint, the perfect husband and father. Makes you retch, doesn't it? It's a wonder she's as sane as she is.” She was damaged and scarred, but she was still there, and she hadn't lost her grip yet. He didn't want to think though of what it would be like for her for twenty years in prison. But the next morning, when David saw her before the arraignment, Grace still refused to tell the police what had happened. The best he could do was convince her to plead not guilty at the arraignment. The charges were murder, with intent to kill, which would carry the maximum sentence, possibly even the death penalty if the jury imposed it.

  The judge refused to set bail, which was irrelevant anyway, because there would have been no one to pay it. And David became the attorney of record.

  And for the next several days, David did everything he could to try to convince her to tell the police that her father had raped her, had been for years. But she just wouldn't. And after two incredibly frustrating weeks, he threatened to throw in the towel. Molly was still visiting her frequently, on her own time now. Her report for the court had already been completed. She had judged Grace to be sane, and fully competent to stand trial, in her opinion.

  David took her through the preliminary hearing, and he had his one lone investigator talking to everyone in town, hoping that someone, anyone, had suspected what John Adams was doing to his daughter. People's reactions ranged from mild surprise to total outrage at the suggestion, and absolutely no one thought him capable of it, and they said so. Instead they thought it was a crazy theory invented by the defense to justify what many of them referred to as Grace's cold-blooded killing of her father.

  David himself went to talk to teachers at her school, to see if they had suspected anything, but they had seen nothing either. They described Grace as awkward and shy, very withdrawn, even as a young child, to the point of being antisocial, and she had virtually had no friends at all. Ever since her father had started having sex with her, she had been afraid that everyone would know, so she shunned them all. It was obvious that teachers thought she was a little strange, but she was polite and a good student. Most of them had been aware of how ill her mother was and thought that had affected her too, which it had, but not as much as her father's sexual demands on her. Several of them had mentioned the severe asthma that had only begun to affect her at the onset of her mother's illness.

  Oddly enough, it didn't surprise any of them that she had done something so outrageous. They thought she was strange, and she had obviously “snapped,” as they put it, when her mom died.

  It was easy to construct it that way, and to think what the police did, that she had been after an inheritance, or that she had some kind of a temper tantrum, or a fight with him. It was difficult for anyone to believe that John Adams had led a life of utter perversion for four years, at the expense of his wife and daughter. And even more impossible for anyone to believe that he had beaten his wife for years before that. But no matter how little corroborating evidence there was, David never doubted her for a moment. Her story had the ring of truth, and throughout the summer he worked with her, trying to find evidence, and build a case to defend her. She had finally agreed to tell her story to the police, but they had refused to believe her. They thought it was a clever defense fashioned by her attorney and attempts to plea bargain with the prosecution on her behalf had gotten him nowhere. Like the police, the prosecution wouldn't buy it. In a moment of desperation, David had gone to the D.A., fearing a life sentence or the death penalty for her, but the D.A. wouldn't budge. He didn't believe her story either. There was nothing left to do now except take the same story to the jury. The trial was set for the first week in September.

  She turned eighteen in jail.

  She was in a cell by herself by then, and the newspapers had been hounding her all summer. They would show up at the jail, and ask for interviews. And now and then the guards would let them in to take her picture. The reporters would slip them a crisp bill or two and the next thing she knew they were outside her cell, with their flashbulbs. Once they even got a picture of her on the toilet. And the whole story she'd told the police had long since come out in the papers. It was everything she hadn't wanted. She felt she had betrayed herself, and her parents, but David had convinced her it was her only hope to stay out of prison or worse, the death penalty. And even that hadn't worked. She was resigning herself to a life in prison by then, and she still wondered if she would get the death sentence in the end. It was possible, even David admitted, though he didn't like to. It would be up to the jury. He was still sure he could convince a jury that she killed her father to stop him from raping her, or even killing her. She was young, she was beautiful, she was vulnerable, and she was telling the truth, which had an undeniable ring to it. To David and Molly, there was absolutely no doubt about her story.

  But the first real blow came when they were denied a change of venue. David had petitioned on the basis that there was no way she could get a fair trial in Wat-seka, people were just too prejudiced in favor of her father. The papers had been hanging her for months, embellishing the story wherever possible, and enhancing each new twist they could invent. By September, she sounded like a sex-crazed teenage monster who had spent months plott
ing her father's death, so she could get his money. The fact that there seemed to be almost no money there seemed to have escaped everyone's notice. They also referred to her as promiscuous, and implied that she had had sexual designs on her father, and killed him in a jealous fit. The story had been told a thousand ways, but none of them true, and all of them damaging to Grace. David couldn't imagine how they would ever get a fair shake from a jury, certainly in this town, or maybe in any other.

  The selection of the jurors took a full week, and because of the seriousness of the case, and based on an impassioned petition from David, the judge agreed to sequester the jury. The judge himself was a crusty old man, who shouted at everyone from the bench, and had frequently played golf with her father. But he refused to disqualify himself on the grounds that they hadn't been close friends, and he felt he could be impartial. The only thing that encouraged David was that if they didn't get a fair trial, or a favorable verdict, he could try to get a mistrial. Or it might help them on appeal. He was already planning ahead, and he was seriously worried.

  The prosecution presented their case, and it was powerfully damning. According to them, she had planned to kill her father the night of her mother's funeral, to inherit what little they had left before he could spend it, or remarry. She had had no idea that she could never inherit from him if she killed him. Photographs presented as evidence showed her father to be an attractive man, and the prosecution implied repeatedly that Grace was in love with him, her very own father. So much so that she had not only tried to seduce him that night, by tearing her nightgown in half and exposing herself to him, now that her mother was gone, but she had also gone so far as to accuse him of rape after she killed him. There was evidence that she had had intercourse that night, they explained, but nothing supported the theory that it had been with her father. And what they suspected was that she had snuck off to meet someone that night, and when her father scolded her, she had tried to seduce him, and when he turned her down, Grace then killed him.