“Yes, Ji—” She cleared her throat. “Jimmy?”
“There’s a three-quarter moon tonight.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. So at eight-thirty, right before bedtime? I’ll look out my window at the moon, and you can look at it at the same time.”
She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. Her jaw ached from holding back tears.
“That’ll be cool, right?” Jimmy said.
“Right.”
Chapter 36
A crowd of reporters, photographers, and cameramen had assembled outside the courthouse. They shouted questions at her as she was led out a side door and into a white van.
“…Planned the kidnapping before coming to Sohegan?”
“…Intend to kill Priscilla, or was that an accident, Mrs…”
“…A sexual relationship, Mrs. Amiel?”
She prayed silently that Jimmy wasn’t watching the news.
The Ondaiga County Corrections Facility was about a half hour from Whitesville. The ride in the backseat of a police car, handcuffed behind a metal grille, seemed endless. Her sense of isolation only intensified once she reached the place. She was passed from one stern-faced corrections officer to another. After her clothes were taken from her, she showered in a curtainless stall using a toxic-smelling soap for her body and hair, doing her best to ignore the unblinking gaze of a stocky guard whose name tag identified her only as Martinson. She dried off with a dingy towel that had the texture of a sisal rug, and was handed an orange jumpsuit, which she had to sign for.
“Afraid I won’t return it?” she said, hearing a new toughness in her voice, and hating it.
Her cell was about ten feet square, with one small window, located near the ceiling, a narrow cot suspended from one wall, a lidless toilet, and a sink. She remembered little of the long walk from the shower to the cell; she felt queasily disoriented, as if she’d been spun around blindfolded.
The cell was clean, modern, and she had it to herself, thank God. Yet every time she thought of spending a second night there a constricting fear would seize her heart; she couldn’t even imagine a longer stay, wouldn’t imagine it.
She’d arrived too late for dinner. No one had offered her food, not that she had much of an appetite. At eight-thirty precisely she stood on her cot and peered up through the narrow, barred window. She couldn’t find the three-quarter moon, though the night was crystal clear and white moon glow blanketed the sky. She tried every angle, and still couldn’t find it. She stared at the window for close to an hour, hoping that the moon would orbit into view. It never did.
The Ondaiga Corrections Facility might be in the middle of nowhere, but the sounds she heard that night were strangely urban: sporadic shouts, the clanging of metal on metal, car doors slamming somewhere beyond her window. Throughout a mostly sleepless night she traced the path that had led her to this place. And she found that as much as she tried to blame her situation on others—on Barry, or Nick, or even Priscilla—it was she, Gwen Amiel, no one else, who had cleared the path to this place.
No one had forced her to take the job looking after Tess Lawrence. What had she been thinking? Better pay and a health plan, yes, but wasn’t she also just a little bit attracted to the glamour of Penaquoit, not to mention Nick himself?
No one had forced her to follow the family to the Devil’s Ravine that day. Her own vanity had sent her there, the baseless conviction that only she could save Tess Lawrence, the way she’d already saved Jimmy.
Nick hadn’t raped her that first night in her house, he’d seduced her. And every seduction was a pas de deux, after all.
Her eyes skittered around the blackened cell, searching in vain for something discernible, some glimpse of light on which to focus. But the cell was a black, formless void. And the rage blazed and blistered until dawn.
Breakfast was delivered to her cell the next morning at seven-thirty: cereal, milk, watery coffee. She asked the female guard who brought the food when visiting hours began.
“Visiting hours?” she said as she continued down the aisle to the next cell. “You think this is a fucking hospital?” A chorus of cackles erupted.
Gwen swallowed a few sips of coffee and ignored the gray oatmeal and soft banana. She spent two hours pacing the small cell, one thought tormenting her above all others: what if she had to stay in there until the trial? How would she survive? Who would take care of Jimmy?
Just before ten o’clock a guard called her name and slipped Gwen’s jeans and shirt through the bars.
“Get dressed,” she said as the clothes fell to the floor. “You made bail.”
She expected to find Kevin Gargano in the visitors’ lobby once she’d signed out. But at ten-thirty in the morning the large, sparsely furnished room was eerily quiet. She found a pay phone and called Gargano’s office. A secretary answered and put her right through.
“It’s Gwen. How am I supposed to get home from here?”
“Home?”
“From jail?”
“Wait a minute, you made bail?”
“You mean you didn’t—”
Nick. She felt a surge of something like happiness. “You must have a fairy godmother,” Gargano said. “What name was on the release form?”
“I didn’t look. I just assumed it was you. They showed me where to sign, I couldn’t wait to get out.”
“Attorneys do not make bail for their clients, at least not the ones I know. I’ll call around, find out who posted bail. Meantime, sit tight. I’ll be there in twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
She hung up, dropped another quarter in the slot, and dialed Nick’s number. Rosa Piacevic answered.
“Mr. Lawrence, please.” She lowered her voice an octave to disguise her identity.
“Not home.”
“Okay, Rosa,” she said in her own voice. “Put him on.”
“How do I put him on when he is not here?”
“When will he be back?”
“He didn’t tell me nothing. I can’t…”
She could hear Rosa breathing hard, as if from the effort of trying to finish the sentence. Then the line went dead.
She asked Gargano to drop her off at the Pearsons. He was fairly quiet during the half-hour drive, and she felt too anxious to talk much. First she needed to see Jimmy; then she’d deal with the future.
“One question,” he said as he sailed through a yellow light near the Pearsons’ street. “Yesterday, when Rudolph said something about your, uh, sleeping with Nick Lawrence?”
She’d been wondering when he’d get to that. “Yes.”
“Is it true?”
“Does it matter?”
He glanced at her with reproachful eyes. “To me, no. To a jury, you bet.”
“I don’t see—”
“Not only did you kill Priscilla Lawrence, you had an affair with her husband. I don’t suppose you’ve been desecrating her grave for good measure?”
“Go to hell.”
He shifted noisily on the vinyl seat. The floor of his battered Oldsmobile was littered with gum wrappers, yellow sticky notes, and pink phone messages.
“Without this, we might have argued that you killed Priscilla accidentally, though granted, you killed her—allegedly killed her in the course of another crime. But if the jury finds out you’re sleeping with the widower, it gives you a motive for killing her deliberately. Which makes the prosecution’s premeditation argument even stronger.”
She clenched her teeth to keep from protesting her innocence. She’d done that yesterday, in front of the judge. She’d never do it again.
“Our relationship began after the murder,” she said quietly.
“Even so, once the jury finds out you slept with the widower, just one month after his wife’s murder, you’re fucked, Mrs. Amiel.”
“It wasn’t like that. The marriage…they weren’t exactly close.”
“And who will testify to that fact?” He almost passed the Pearsons’ street, turned sharply left
, and cursed as legal papers, candy wrappers, and a not-quite-empty cardboard coffee cup cascaded from the dashboard onto his lap.
“Nick Lawrence.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“He paid my bail,” she said.
“Think so? I haven’t heard back from the bailiff’s office yet.” He parked in front of the Pearsons’. “You want a ride home?”
“No, I’ll ask Henry Pearson to take me.” She got out of the car, closed the door, and leaned in through the passenger window.
“What happens now?”
“We find out exactly what the prosecution has on you; then we start planning our defense.”
She hated to leave with him looking so grim and disapproving. But Jimmy was just a few yards away…
“I’ll call you later.” She turned and headed up the Pearsons’ front walk.
“Mrs. Amiel?”
She walked back to the car.
“No more surprises, Mrs. Amiel. You can’t afford secrets from me, okay?”
She watched him pull away from the curb, black smoke swirling from the tailpipe of the Olds, then turned and saw Jimmy running toward her. The haunted look in his eyes, the shadows above his cheeks, the way he squeezed her when she knelt down and took him in her arms, as if he feared she’d drift up into the sky and leave him again if he relaxed one iota…
Something shifted inside her as she held him. All the fear and confusion of the past few days withered and died. She wouldn’t wait for the trial to exonerate her, and she wouldn’t count on Gargano to find the truth. She’d find it herself. Because she was all Jimmy had, and she’d already let him down once.
“I’m not leaving, Jimbo, not ever,” she whispered.
He nodded into her shoulder, but his arms, still wrapped around her, didn’t relax one bit.
Chapter 37
More goddamn reporters. She might have expected them—why should her house be sacred? But somehow the sight of all those people in the street outside her house was as shocking as anything that had happened to her in the past twenty-four hours.
“Don’t talk to them,” she told Jimmy as Henry Pearson parked in the driveway. “Just pretend they aren’t here.”
She got out of the car first, opened Jimmy’s door, and picked him up. Cameras clicked furiously as she carried him to the front door. Questions were hurled at them in desperate voices that grew angrier as she approached the front door without answering.
“Is it true you turned down a plea bargain, Gwen?”
“What is your relationship with Nick Lawrence?”
“When did you first plan to kidnap the little girl?”
“Did you intend to kill Priscilla all along, Gwen?”
Only one day since her arrest and already she was just plain “Gwen” to them.
She fumbled for her key, the questions still coming at her, and finally managed to open the door. When she slammed it shut she realized that Jimmy was shivering. She held him until he was still.
“Are you hungry?” she said softly when she found her voice. “Want some lunch?”
He shook his head as his eyes drifted to the front window.
“Can I go somewhere else?”
“We just got home.”
He nodded and stared at the floor and she marveled that after all she’d been through she had enough heart left to be broken. Who could blame him for wanting to be away from there? So what if she needed him then, needed the solace of comforting him?
She called Martha Hillman from the kitchen and arranged to drop him off.
Reporters and cameramen chased them halfway down Glendale Street as they drove off, banging on the closed windows and shouting muffled questions. She saw tears on Jimmy’s face as she made a left onto Union Avenue. He opened his door the moment the car stopped in front of Andrew Hillman’s house. She had to call him back for a good-bye hug.
She headed straight for Penaquoit. At the entrance to the estate she punched in the access code and put her foot on the accelerator, slamming on the brakes just before crashing into the closed gates. Cursing, she backed up and tried the code again. The gates didn’t budge.
She pounded the steering wheel until the heel of her hand hurt, then backed out of the driveway and headed next door. She parked to the side of the Cunninghams’ house and jostled her way through the row of hemlock trees to the back lawn of Penaquoit, then walked quickly toward the house.
“He is not home.”
She stopped and turned to the voice. Mett Piacevic was watering the small rose garden about twenty yards from the house.
“So I’ve been told.”
“It’s not a good idea, coming here.” Piacevic put down the hose and plucked a cicada shell from inside the bloom of a perfect yellow rose. He shook his head and ground it in his fist, scattering the pulverized husk on the ground.
“You can’t go inside.”
“Watch me.”
She was about fifteen feet from the house when a man stepped from under the wide awning that shaded the south-facing terrace. Though the day was quite warm, he had on a long-sleeved white shirt and black pants. He was tall and heavyset, with some sort of hearing device in his right ear.
“You’re trespassing,” he said. “Kindly leave the property or I’ll have to escort you.”
“I work here,” she said.
“My instructions are to keep you out.”
“Your instructions?” She stepped toward the patio but he blocked her path, arms folded across his chest. “Get the hell out of my way,” she said.
“You don’t want any more trouble than you’re already in, miss.” He flaunted a condescending sneer.
“Who hired you?”
“That’s none of your concern, miss. Kindly leave the property or I’ll have to escort you off the grounds.”
She stood facing him for a few seconds, alternately calculating the odds of doing an end run around him and fuming at being kept out like some sort of…pariah.
“Where is Mr. Lawrence?” she said.
He just stared at her with that superior smirk.
“Fuck you,” she said, looking right at him, then turned and retraced her steps across the back lawn.
“How is Tess?” she asked Mett Piacevic when she reached the rose garden.
He glanced away from her, continued watering the roses.
“How is Tess?”
“She cry a lot.” He shook his head and frowned. “Rosa, she is having hard time making her quiet.”
He shut off the nozzle, dropped it, and walked toward the big house.
“Would Rosa let me see her, just for a minute?” she called after him. He continued walking. “She misses me and…” Mett Piacevic shrugged as he walked away.
Gwen looked up at the house and saw a figure in the nursery window. She stepped into the shadow of a nearby oak tree and looked up again.
Nick Lawrence held Tess, both of them staring out the window, motionless. At first she assumed they didn’t see her. Then Tess waved a hand and rapped on the window. She moved toward the house, but almost at once they vanished. She waited, hoping he’d emerge onto the patio or from the kitchen door. After several minutes she turned and walked away, one thought on her mind: Nick Lawrence hadn’t made her bail, she knew that now. Nick Lawrence wanted nothing to do with her.
She intended to return straight to her car but headed instead for the privet hedge at the south end of the property. She ducked through the opening and followed the overgrown path to Priscilla’s secret garden.
The flowers were as lush as ever, despite the lack of rain. No surprise, really: these were the hardiest specimens in the county. They’d proven their mettle elsewhere, then survived transplantation. Perhaps Priscilla wanted the place to outlive her, perhaps she knew it would.
Her head felt suddenly heavy. Nick had seen her on the lawn and made no effort to reach her. The garden was beginning to cloy.
Where were the purple thistles? She stepped into the crowded flower bed
and began combing through the various plants. The thistles were gone. After a few minutes she managed to find the small index card with Scotch thistle written in Priscilla’s fastidious hand. Could the blooms have fallen off so quickly, and without a trace? A foot or so from the card she noticed a crushed cigarette butt. She flipped it over with her shoe and looked closer: no filter. Then she slowly followed the tall, silvery-leaved stems up from the index card and felt a shiver of fear. The tops of the thistle stems had been cut—no, ripped, severing the purple blossoms. Glistening drops of pale green sap clung to the uneven necks of the stems.
She glanced again at Russell Cunningham’s cigarette butt, then got the hell out of there.
Sheila Stewart smiled uncomfortably and stood up when Gwen entered her office just off the main banking floor of the Sohegan Savings & Loan Society building.
“Relax, Sheila, I’m not armed,” Gwen said from the doorway. After the briefest hesitation Sheila circled her desk and walked over to her, arms spread. She kicked the door shut as Gwen all but collapsed into her.
“How the fuck did you get into this mess?” Sheila said after a long embrace.
“Not by killing anyone, you have to—”
“Stop it!” Sheila looked utterly serious. “Don’t insult me.”
Gwen closed her eyes for a moment and thanked God for Sheila Stewart.
“Sheila, did you make bail for me?”
“No.”
“Then who the hell did? I thought it might be Nick, but he won’t even speak to me.”
“Have you seen the local rag this morning?” Sheila got the Gazette from the floor behind her desk and handed it to her. The headline spanned the entire front page. BABY-SITTER ARRESTED IN KIDNAP/MURDER. There was no photo of her, thank God—but only because no one in Sohegan had taken her picture.
“You know what hurts the most?” Gwen said, staring at the headline.
Sheila nodded, frowning. “The ‘baby-sitter’ part.”
“God, I love you. Can I have this for my scrapbook?”
“Are you sure you want it?” Sheila took the paper, flipped it over, and handed it back. Below the fold was a second, smaller headline. ACCUSED AND WIDOW WERE LOVERS.
Disillusions Page 26