27
TRUDY TACKETT HATED THE WORD privilege. It was tricky, loaded, another benign word that had been twisted into an insult. It now was some comfortable zone above the fray, life lived at an altitude so rarefied that one didn’t even know the fray existed.
But Trudy had always been aware that she was fortunate—in her family, in her family’s wealth. She was aware that she and Terry lived in a charmed universe, where there was little worry about money, even when they had to contemplate up to four college tuitions. But they were not extravagant or showy people, especially by the standards of Middleburg. She looked at price tags. Sometimes. And she had never taken their good fortune for granted. That was what galled her. She had been grateful in her prayers, aware of the luck in which her life was steeped. Even when she had the string of miscarriages, she had not railed against God, had not asked Why me? In the wake of Holly’s death, she had turned to the church for strength, praying for the courage to find some kind of meaning in it all. Father Trahearne had recommended the book of Job. Which, in retrospect, was the beginning of the end of Trudy’s life as a true Catholic.
But, no, she had never used money, and never expected special treatment because of it. Trudy had always felt vaguely embarrassed by the perks of money—boarding an airplane first because one was in business class, for example. That seemed a little gauche to her. But then she met a problem that all the money in the world couldn’t solve, and her ideas began to change. She and Terry didn’t pay for Walter Bowman’s prosecution, which meant they also had relatively little say. Oh, everyone was nice. It was the dawn—flowering?—of the victims’ rights movement, with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Parents of Murdered Children chapters. There was no doubt in Trudy’s mind that everyone, from the sheriff’s deputy who had found Holly’s body to the lowliest clerk in the prosecutor’s office, cared about Holly almost as much as if they had known her in life. That’s how amazing her daughter was. Not even death could vanquish her charisma. It helped that the Tackett family had been early adapters, in terms of video, and had hours of those old clunky VHS tapes of Holly. They had played an edited clip, during the closing arguments, and Walter Bowman’s attorney had barely objected. Even he, Trudy believed, understood how extraordinary Holly was. Later, the new attorney, the unfortunately super-capable Jefferson Blanding, had argued the videos were introduced improperly and should have been screened only during sentencing, not at the actual trial. In hindsight, it would have been better if Blanding had been Bowman’s attorney all along. The first one’s incompetence had caused them all sorts of problems and delays. In a state more lenient than Virginia, it might have resulted in the death penalty being vacated altogether.
So—privilege, money. They were not things of which Trudy had ever availed herself. Until the day that a young clerk at Sussex had called Terry out of the blue and said she was the person who read all of Walter’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, to make sure it met the prison’s standards.
“Is there something specific we should know?” Terry had asked.
“Oh no,” the woman had assured him. “He’s careful. He understands the rules and he wouldn’t violate them. But the women who write him—they’re all over the map. I mean, there’s nothing that interesting now. But there might be. You never know.”
“Interesting?”
“Who’s on his call list, for example. Whether he thinks he has a valid shot at an appeal. I mean, all the lawyer stuff—that’s in person or on the phone, strictly confidential. That’s a right that can’t be tampered with. But when Walter turns around and tells someone else what’s going on—that’s not protected.”
Trudy had picked up the extension at Terry’s invitation. It was hard for her not to break in, explain to Terry what was going on. She’s inside, she wants a bribe, she’ll tell us what we need to know. Since Holly’s murder, Trudy had learned that Terry, like his daughter, was dangerously trusting. She had to be the vigilant one, the mean one, the cynic.
“If you knew,” the woman continued, “how little they pay us to work here. It’s really kind of shocking.” The voice had a youthful twang, yet Trudy believed it had to be someone older, someone who had put in enough time in state government and was ready to play the angles. Did she make this offer to the victims of every man on death row? Granted, it wasn’t a large population, and as Trudy had learned, most victims were as poor as the perpetrators. But even if this clerk picked up ten, twenty dollars a month from five families, that would be quite the little stipend.
“We would appreciate,” Terry said carefully, “any help you could give us.”
“Same here,” the woman said. “Why don’t you write me? I’ll give you my PO box.”
The first month, Terry had sent twenty-five dollars, in cash, and they had received a rather perfunctory report back. The next month, he sent an American Express gift card of $100, and the report lengthened considerably. Yet, over the years, the information hadn’t amounted to much. Walter was not as loose with details about his legal situation as the clerk had led them to believe, although one of his correspondents, Barbara LaFortuny, was more reliably indiscreet. And it was distressing to be told of the women who wrote him what could only be called love letters. What was wrong with people? With women? Trudy couldn’t imagine men writing lovelorn letters to female murderers.
It was more distressing still to hear that Walter and Elizabeth had corresponded and that it had somehow slipped through their source’s net. “We spot-check,” she had defended herself, when called on this oversight. “And her letter might have arrived on a day when I wasn’t working. But I can swear to you up and down that he did not send any letters to Elizabeth Lerner from this facility. We would have been on that like white on rice.”
“But she’s not Elizabeth Lerner,” Terry had pointed out to their source, careful not to offend, but also perturbed at what thousands of dollars had failed to buy. “She’s Eliza Benedict.”
“Right, and how do you know that? Because of me. You also have her phone number, which you can drop into any online reverse directory and get an address. That’s more important than any ol’ letter she sent.”
Trudy did not agree. But now she found herself studying the ten digits. What would she say, if she dared to dial them. (Trudy was still old enough to think “dial,” even if she was modern enough to use a cell phone.) The words How dare you came to mind. Those would cover a multitude of sins.
That phrase jolted her and she pulled out her Bible, tried to find the reference, but she had to cheat and use the Internet to narrow it down. Various things covered a multitude of sins, apparently. Love and charity. In Peter, it was written: Love covers a multitude of sins. That was not a passage that interested Trudy today, or any day. She kept clicking until she found a Web site whose interpretation worked better for her. From James 5:20. Remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Love could help a sinner repent, the Web site instructed, but it must not turn a blind eye. That was not justice. Perhaps Trudy had been affiliated with the wrong church all these years, perhaps she should have embraced the hard-core fundamentalists. Her parents, both descended from Charleston’s French Huguenots, had been scandalized enough by her conversion to Catholicism upon her marriage to Terry. If Trudy had joined a church where people rolled on the floor and spoke in tongues, they would have been just as mortified by the sheer tackiness of it all. Her parents were alive, distressingly healthy. Distressing because it meant that Trudy was genetically predisposed to live a long time.
How dare you? What are you thinking? What are you up to? She found herself dialing—okay, furiously poking—the ten numbers that she had managed to commit to memory without even trying, this at a time when she could barely remember an errand from room to room. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang. She imagined the house in which it rang, a house with a husband, maybe children. A happy house. That was privilege.
How dar
e she. How dare she.
28
ISO WAS GROUNDED. GIVEN THAT this was a first for her, it was also a first for Eliza and Peter, who were still trying to work out how to define the punishment. They allowed her to play soccer, because they had rationalized that Iso’s transgressions should not punish the entire team. (Although her team was quite good, its bench was a little thin, and Iso’s nonparticipation could force them into forfeits.) She was permitted to watch television, but only programs that other family members chose. Eliza hoped that this would at least lure Iso out of her bedroom, force her to interact with her family. Finally, they had taken her phone away and limited her computer time, but Iso said she needed to use the Internet for some of her homework, and she appeared to be telling the truth.
Appeared to be was the key phrase. For Iso, while now an exemplary citizen at North Bethesda Middle School, had been caught lying about her after-school activities. She had told Eliza that she and a classmate needed to go to the library on a Saturday to research a project; the other girl’s mother would pick them up and bring them home. Eliza had checked with the other mother, not out of suspicion but caution. If Iso had garbled the message in any way, two young girls might be left waiting in front of the library at dusk. Granted, they would be in supersafe Bethesda, almost within walking distance of the Benedicts’ house. But Eliza wanted to be sure she wasn’t imposing on the other mother.
“The library?” The mother, Carol DeNadio, had a warm, throaty voice and laugh. “I wish Caitlin wanted to spend Saturday afternoon at the library. No, I was going to drop them off at Montgomery Mall.”
Eliza, caught off guard, embarrassed and humiliated that Iso had set her up this way, blurted out: “Is that safe?”
“The Montgomery Mall? Safe as anywhere, I suppose. Especially when the girls are together in their gaggle. Iso has lovely manners, by the way. I wouldn’t mind if that rubbed off on Caitlin.”
“Th-th-th-thank you.”
“I suppose that’s from living in England? Or maybe you’re just a better mother than I am.” The latter was said with breezy self-deprecation. “But, seriously, I’ve been dropping Caitlin off there since she was eleven. I give her three hours and strict instructions. She’s not allowed to leave the mall, and there will be hell to pay if she’s not at our meeting point. Also, her phone has to be on, and she has to take my calls. Screen me, and she loses the privilege.”
It certainly sounded harmless enough. So why had Iso lied about it?
“I didn’t think you would give me permission,” Iso said, her eyes focused on a spot on her bedroom wall, somewhere between her parents’ heads. The wall, by Iso’s choice, was a pale, pale lavender.
“We certainly won’t now,” Peter said. “You know how we feel about lying, Iso.”
She sighed. “Yes, it’s the one thing we must never do.” Parroted back in a tone that bordered on mockery, as if it were ridiculous, this mania for truthfulness.
“Why did you think we would prohibit it?” Eliza was genuinely puzzled.
“Because you’re always blah, blah, blah, shopping is evil, the more stuff you buy, the bigger your carbon footprint, blah, blah, blah. And when I want to go to McDonald’s, I have to hear the whole Fast Food Nation thing, E. coli and worms in my stomach, whatever.”
“It’s true, shopping for shopping’s sake is a bad habit,” Peter said. “As for hamburgers, I think if you’re going to eat one, you should eat a really good one.”
“The really good ones, the ones you like, are at restaurants and cost eight dollars. At McDonald’s, I can get a full meal for less than five dollars.”
Eliza did find this amusing, father and daughter in a discussion over relative economics, the cost of values. Peter was willing to pay for taste. Iso wanted quantity. It wasn’t that far removed from Peter’s work at his firm, where they were banking on the idea that people with certain values would be drawn to their investment tools, even if they could get faster, better results through other companies.
“Let’s not get derailed by hamburgers,” she said. “The fact is that you lied to me, Iso, and we can’t have that. You have to be punished. By the way, if you had asked me, I probably would have been okay with you going to the mall. My own parents were very strict about that when I was young. They had a lot of blanket rules about how I was allowed to spend my time, and I resented it. You couldn’t pay me to go to a mall now for recreation. But when I was fourteen, it was all I wanted to do.”
“Really? Granny I and Grampy M were strict?” Eliza no longer remembered how her parents’ initials had become affixed to their names, or why.
“Not about most things. They merely hated the idea of the mall.”
“But things were safer when you were young, right? You had a lot more freedom.”
Iso’s comment wasn’t meant to provoke. She was just repeating something she had heard or intuited. The world used to be so safe. No, that wasn’t a sentiment she was likely to have picked up at home. Eliza found the current culture of paranoia a good cover for her. She could be careful about her children without anyone thinking she was odd or strict.
“Iso, you’re grounded,” Peter declared. “For two weeks.”
“What does that mean?”
Several days in, they were still trying to figure that out. Could Iso walk Reba? That was a tricky one. It was nice to see Iso taking an interest in the dog and volunteering to do an essential task, but also unusual. “If you take Albie,” Eliza had decreed. Iso decided she didn’t want to walk Reba after all. Could she call a friend about homework? Only if she did it from the kitchen telephone, within earshot. If Albie was watching television and Iso joined him in the family room, could Iso at least mention to him that there was probably a better program? No. Because Albie would give Iso anything she wanted.
It was true, Albie was a completely indiscriminating television watcher. Today was Sunday, a gray, drizzly one that managed to be at once humid and chilly. Peter had gone into the office, and Eliza was trapped in the house with Albie and Iso. That was the problem with having a child under house arrest. One had to stay with her. Early in the afternoon, the three found themselves in the family room, regarding one another warily. A game? They couldn’t agree on one. A jigsaw puzzle? Iso couldn’t be bothered with anything that uncool. Books? Even Albie seemed to find this appalling. Eliza grabbed the remote and turned it to the only channel she really liked, TCM. If she could design her perfect cable system, it would have only TCM and maybe AMC, although she hated the way the second network edited films and inserted commercials.
Mist-shrouded mountains, clearly a set, rose into view. Gene Kelly, Van Johnson—“Oh, it’s Brigadoon,” Eliza said. “That’s a wonderful movie.”
Albie, who probably would have watched a test pattern without complaint, crawled onto the sofa and nestled into Eliza’s side, and she tried not to show how overwhelmingly happy this made her. Iso lay on the floor, chanting, “BOR-ing.” But eventually Gene Kelly caught her attention.
“I don’t get it,” Albie said. “How does the town sleep for a hundred years?”
“It’s magic,” Eliza said.
“But that funny man said they worked out a promise with God. Is God magic?”
Big question. Eliza and Peter had not given their children much of a religious education. Part of her, the reflexively honest part, wanted to say, “Yes, religion and magic are pretty much the same thing.” But she imagined Albie carrying that wisdom to school, the hell to pay later. Instead she said, “God is always seen as an all-powerful entity, whatever religion you believe.”
“That doesn’t really look like Scotland,” Iso complained. She spoke on some authority. The family had taken a driving trip through the Highlands the summer before last. “It doesn’t look real.”
It didn’t, and Eliza missed Gene Kelly’s usual archness, that slight smirk of ego he brought to most roles. Here, he was just a straight-up romantic, while Van Johnson got to be the dissolute wisecracker. Still the movi
e was marvelous and so romantic. Except, of course, for the character of Harry Beaton, who had to watch his true love marry someone else, knowing all the while that he must stay in Brigadoon or the village would perish. Brigadoon’s bargain with God was fine, if your true love happened to be there already. But what was a Harry Beaton to do? He really had drawn a tough hand.
Eliza’s sympathy for Harry vanished when he attacked his true love at her wedding, lashing out: “All I ever did was want you too much.”
Of course it ended happily—at least for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. But what of the other Brigadooners—Brigadoonites?—who might not meet their true loves in the small village, or who might not love with a ferocity that awakens a town that otherwise would slumber for a century? What would happen over the years, as the town’s residents became more connected by blood?
A phone rang. A single phone, up in her bedroom.
“The security phone!” Albie sang out, thrilled to be here to witness the mysterious instrument in action. Her instinct had been to ignore it, but now she would have to go answer it, refuse Walter’s charges, and tell the children that it was just a test, like the test of the Emergency Broadcast System. In the case of a real emergency…
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