by Moriah Jovan
“Knox, this young lady says she has something for you.”
Mr. Hilliard raised his head and looked first at the man, then at her. She tried to hide how afraid she was but knew she couldn’t. Then the most amazing thing happened.
He smiled. And it was a nice smile.
“Hi. What’s your name?”
“Vanessa,” she whispered. She didn’t want to tell him her last name because his smile might go away and then he might not be nice to her anymore. Her mother badgered him enough as it was and she was sure he was sorry he’d ever heard the Whittaker name.
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“I have to give you something. It’s very important.”
He looked up at Richard and nodded, which she figured meant he was to go away. Mr. Hilliard reached behind himself and pulled a wooden chair toward Vanessa, setting it next to his desk. He patted it. “Have a seat, Vanessa. What do you have for me?”
She approached warily because of what he’d done. It was wrong and bad and horrible. Yet . . . Vanessa felt safer at home because of what he had done (honestly, she was secretly glad, which Laura would say made her as evil as Mr. Hilliard) so she bit her lip again as she sat down on the chair. She slowly drew the book from under her shirt, making sure not to show any skin, and without a word, she handed it to him.
He took it from her gently, turning it over and over again. She knew that book by heart: pink plastic with a small lock that didn’t seem to work very well. The key had been lost—she didn’t know when. The book was decorated in pink, red, and white hearts, glitter, and silver flowers. She also knew every word in it, which was why she had come.
He opened it and looked at the beginning of it, where its owner’s name was written, the “i”s dotted with hearts. Then his mouth tightened and he looked at her from the corners of his eyes. She didn’t think that was a nice look.
Thankfully, he began to read. It wouldn’t take him long to get to the important part, so she decided to make herself as small as she could. She curled into herself then, hooking her heels on the edge of the seat. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
Her stomach rumbled loudly, earning her another, longer, glance.
She knew that look.
More than a few people had been mean enough to say it.
When was the last time you ate?
Then he tipped back his chair and, putting one foot on the edge of his desk, he read page after page with what seemed to Vanessa to be lightning speed.
Then he was done and he looked at her for a long time. He was chewing on the inside of his mouth. She didn’t know what that meant, either.
He threw the book on his desk and linked his fingers behind his head. “Why did you bring me that?” he asked. She still couldn’t tell if he was mad or not.
“Because it’s the truth,” she whispered. “People were burned at the stake because no one told the truth.”
Mr. Hilliard got a funny look on his face. “What people?”
“The witches. In Salem. A long time ago. People died because mean girls told a lie. I read about it.”
“I see,” he said slowly and looked down at the book. He pointed to it. “How do I know this is the truth?”
She hadn’t thought about that. To her, it was so clear. Her forehead crinkled. “I guess— Well, I don’t know.”
“Now, you know I’m going to have to ask about this and that I’ll have to say how I got it, right?”
Vanessa nodded. “Yes,” she said, and gulped again. She began to tremble because now that Mr. Hilliard hadn’t shot her in the head like he did Tom Parley, she knew her mother and her sister would make her wish he had.
He wiped a hand down his face and didn’t talk for a long time. Finally, he handed her a pen and paper. “Write down your grade and teacher’s name, Vanessa.” She did, and then he took a business card, turned it over, and wrote on it. When he handed it to her, he said, “If anything happens to you, if you’re afraid at home for any reason, you call me and I’ll come get you, even if it’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Where would you take me?”
“To my cousin Giselle’s house until social services could come get you.”
Foster people. That sounded worse than home, if that was possible. She bit her lip yet again in indecision.
“Well, okay. I can see that might not seem fun. Right now, I’m going to take you to school. Have you had anything to eat this morning?”
She shook her head again, understanding what he intended and that it would mean a ride in a car with a strange adult man, yet she was too hungry to let the possibility of a free meal pass her by.
So she went with him and she stood by his pretty dark green car while he unlocked and opened the door for her, then closed it once she had climbed in. She didn’t think much of it until he parked at McDonald’s and murmured, “Stay there.” Now simply curious, she watched him get out of the car, walk around to her side, and open her door for her. He offered her his hand as if she were an adult! A real lady! And then he opened the door of McDonald’s for her!
He let her pick whatever she wanted and eat at the picnic table (he didn’t say much because he seemed to be busy thinking), bought her more (enough for dinner tonight, breakfast tomorrow, and possibly lunch too, if she hid it well enough), then took her to school. The high school girls were outside because it was their lunchtime and they could go off campus if they wanted. She was very conscious of them because they thought Mr. Hilliard was handsome and dangerous, and they had stopped to stare when they heard, then saw, his car.
What would Laura do?
Laura would hold her head high and ignore the people who stared.
They parked and she reached for the door handle. “Stay there,” he reminded her, and again she waited, feeling very grown up and sophisticated. The senior girls watched Mr. Hilliard open her door for her and help her out the same way he had at McDonald’s. A strange, nice feeling went through her, like how the word “dignity” might feel. They watched him walk her across the lawn away from the lunch quad to the entrance of the elementary school. They watched him hold the front door open for her, again, as if she were an adult and a lady.
The school secretaries gasped when they saw him walk in behind Vanessa and they shrank away from him. He seemed not to notice.
“Vanessa Whittaker’s been at the courthouse for an interview,” he said to the principal, who came out of his office to see what the commotion was all about. “I’m sure you won’t put her down as tardy for today.”
“Oh, of course not, Mr. Hilliard. Of course not.”
Wow. She had never thought Mr. Roberg could be afraid of anything.
Mr. Hilliard stepped away from her then. He looked down at her and smiled again that really nice smile. “Thank you, Vanessa. You’re probably the bravest person I’ve ever met.”
Vanessa grinned back at him then, big enough she felt her eyes crinkle at the corners. Now she knew that everything would be okay. Her mother wouldn’t dare do anything to her as long as everyone knew that Knox Hilliard was Vanessa’s friend. He patted her shoulder before he left.
She was walking down the street toward her mobile home after school when the cop car whizzed by and stopped at her trailer. By the time she got there, her sister was being hauled out in handcuffs.
“You little bitch!” she screamed when she saw Vanessa. “You lying little bitch!” She lurched toward Vanessa and Vanessa instinctively stepped back, but the deputy hauled her back toward him, then shoved her in the back seat of the squad car, a hand on her head.
Her mother came out on the deck and looked straight at Vanessa, taking a puff of her cigarette. “So what’d that bastard do to you to get you to lie for that sonofabitch who raped your sister?”
“I didn’t lie,” she murmured as she climbed the steps, the deputy’s car pulling away from the curb and disappearing dow
n the street. She pulled out Mr. Hilliard’s business card and showed her the back, where he had written the word “home” and his phone number. “Mr. Hilliard is my friend. He thinks I’m brave.”
Laura was brave.
Her mother stiffened, and after a long pause, she went back in the house without a word.
* * * * *
3: Blackstone’s Formulation
Eric heard Hilliard’s voice in his head now, in his dreams—and he had nothing better to do but sleep—accusing him of things he hadn’t done, presenting evidence so clearly, so indubitably that now even Eric believed he’d done it. The clang of jail cell doors, ever present, didn’t disturb his sleep
until he awoke in a panic, Hilliard standing over him in his cot . . .
Looking at him completely differently.
“What,” Eric snapped, deeply offended that the asshole had invaded his meager space.
“You’re free to go.”
“Uh—” He looked at his attorney, who had a pleased smile on her face.
“Eric, we couldn’t have asked for better.”
He sat up slowly, looking back up at Hilliard suspiciously, certain this was a trick, some cruel thing Hilliard would do because Hilliard was cruel.
Perhaps he was just dreaming. There was nothing of the rage, the hatred in Hilliard’s face now. A smile that bordered on—relieved?—threatened to ruin Eric’s image of him, then he turned.
“Bring him to my office when he’s ready to go,” he finally said over his shoulder. “Make everything official. He doesn’t belong here.”
“Thanks, Knox.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said as he maneuvered his way around Eric’s attorney to leave the cell. “Thank one brave little girl.”
Eric waited until Hilliard left, then looked up at his attorney. He knew his confusion showed and he didn’t care. He was broken. At seventeen.
“Simone confessed?”
She smiled and shook her head, but would say nothing until Eric was attired in the suit she’d provided for him to wear for the trial. They were the only clothes he had that weren’t neon orange.
“Don’t worry about your hair now.”
Eric knew he was vain. Vain enough to want to keep his hair long, vain enough to risk tucking it down his shirt collar for his trial so as not to give off the stink of half-breed-bastard-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks, vain enough to fight for it.
When he was ushered into the Chouteau County prosecutor’s private office, he was shocked to see its six other occupants. He stopped and looked around, obeying his hard-won instincts for suspicion. Nocek, the head prosecutor, had disappeared. That really shook him up. Nocek ran the office and the county with an iron—albeit crooked—fist and without ever leaving his office. Was it possible Nocek himself was afraid of Hilliard?
His mother, tears in her eyes. Eric hadn’t seen her since before he was arrested four months ago.
Jenkins, his boss, the owner of Chouteau County Feed and Tack. He hadn’t bothered to show up at the courthouse, even to tell Eric he was fired.
Rayburn, the principal of Chouteau County High School.
Two of his advanced placement teachers, science and English.
Hilliard, leaning back against Nocek’s desk relaxed, as relaxed and at ease in his boss’s office as if it were his, his ankles crossed, his hands in his pockets. He had that same strange expression on his face that Eric didn’t trust for a minute.
“I thought you said I was free to go,” Eric finally muttered when no one seemed inclined to stop staring at him or to speak.
Hilliard inclined his head. “You are. But. I have a proposition for you.”
Eric cast a wary glance at his attorney whose mouth crooked in a relieved smile, then back at Hilliard. “I’m not fucking you.”
Hilliard laughed then—roared—his laugh no less deafening than his most enraged bellow. He finally wound down to a chuckle and wiped his mouth. “Ah, no. That’s not what I had in mind. I want to send you to college.”
Eric’s mouth dropped open. College!
A vague hope before his arrest, one he had worked toward in spite of his unwillingness to let the hope gel into a dream or, even worse, a goal—the one he hadn’t dared think about while he was in jail, on trial.
But Hilliard kept talking. “I’ve been watching you, looking through your record, wondering how a smart kid like you managed to fuck up so badly when what you want is crystal clear.”
“Why am I here?” Eric demanded. “What happened? Something happened and I want to know what it was.”
Hilliard’s mouth pressed a bit, but not, apparently, in anger. In thought. As if he didn’t know whether to say or not.
“We found proof of your innocence,” he finally said. “Someone who knew something came forward.”
Thank one brave little girl.
For the life of him, Eric couldn’t figure out who could do that other than Simone, and his attorney had already said she hadn’t done so.
“College,” Hilliard said, jerking Eric’s attention back. “Mr. Rayburn and your teachers have vouched for your willingness to work, to improve your station in life. Mr. Jenkins has told me how you’ve managed his store for the last year, part-time, taking a heavy course load and getting straight A’s. So. I’m willing to pay for your education provided you work as hard during your senior year as you have in the past and provided you go where I send you and obey their rules.”
“Anything,” Eric breathed, willing to go to all the way across the other side of the northland to William Jewell in Liberty, at least twenty-five miles.
“Don’t you want to know what the rules are?”
“I don’t care.”
“Mmmm, you might. No drinking, no smoking, no drugs. No fucking around. At all. You’ll have to get rid of the earrings, cut your hair. Short. Your course load will include religion classes.” Eric blinked. “Those are their rules. You need an attitude adjustment and you need to learn some propriety. I don’t have time to kick your ass constantly, so the deal is, you spend this year working on getting into Brigham Young University.”
Eric had no idea what or where that was, and apparently his face showed it.
“Mormons. Utah. You go there, you do a good job, you follow their rules. You stay there until you graduate—and I don’t give a shit what you study—then you stay another three years for grad school, because I think you can do it. That’s the deal and I’ll give you a free ride all the way through. Any scholarship money you come up with is fine, but your job is school and don’t even think about working during the school year. I’ll give you what you need.”
Eric knew nothing about Mormons, though he knew where Utah was on a map. It was a long way away, but he sure as hell was not going to pass up this opportunity.
“Yes, sir,” he breathed, wondering how his nemesis had turned into his mentor in the blink of an eye.
“We’ll help you, Eric,” said his science teacher. Eric turned to the man who’d spent the last year torturing him with physics and who’d spend next year torturing him with chemistry. “BYU is a prestigious university and difficult to get into, especially for a non-Mormon who’s not an athlete.”
“But,” Hilliard murmured, “you’re half American Indian and that trumps everything else in that admissions office. With your grades and ACT score, there won’t be a question.”
“You’ll need an ecclesiastical endorsement,” added his English teacher, who was also his guidance counselor, “but I don’t think we’ll have a problem rounding up a preacher somewhere. Do you have a church?”
“He is Osage,” his mother said, her tone sharp, “as Mr. Hilliard just said. He doesn’t go to any white man’s church.”
“He won’t have to,” Jenkins said gruffly, the way he said everything. “My pastor owes me a favor. He’ll do it.”
Hilliard nodded then, satisfied. “Thank you, everyone,” he said, and Eric knew it was settled. Had settled. All around him. Like the snow in a
snow globe. Eric felt as if he’d been inside it and gotten his head rattled around. “Eric, you stay.”
Everyone took this as their cue to file out. The door closed quietly after them.
Eric swallowed, not sure how to treat this man, only barely able to look at him, wondering what obeisance would be required, willing to walk away from the deal if Hilliard wanted . . .
“The Whittakers,” he said, low, and Eric snapped to attention, looking Hilliard square in the face. “You know the family?”
“I told you everything I know,” Eric replied, still wary, still suspicious of a trap. “Simone dresses up older than her age and puts out to anybody who’ll have her. I’ve seen her sister. Seen their mother here and there, shootin’ her mouth off, slappin’ the little girl around.” That woman was plain evil.
Hilliard nodded slowly, looking at the floor, his tongue stuck in his cheek. Eric knew that look by now. Thinking. Eric waited long moments before Hilliard decided to speak again; even so, it startled him.
“Simone had planned it to the last detail and was stupid enough to write it down. I don’t know if her mother was in on it, but I suspect so. Simone seems to get vindictive when she doesn’t get what she wants and what she wanted was you.”
Eric swallowed. For once in his life, he’d done the right thing, and it had nearly destroyed him.
“Vanessa. The little girl. Simone’s sister. She brought me Simone’s diary. It was all there. Not only did Simone not get you, she lost the rest of her playmates, too. She named names. I’m rounding them up right now.”
Eric’s breath stuck in his throat.
“Tell me something. Would you want to go back home to LaVon Whittaker, knowing you’d gone against her? Go back to school knowing that half a dozen male juniors and seniors, a teacher, and a couple other grown men with their own families are going to prison because you coughed up the evidence?”