Dresden’s curly black hair was trimmed shorter now than it had been during my first trial, but he still had the raisin-sized wart below his eye. A lesser man might have had it removed just for vanity, but I’d heard Dresden tell an associate in the courtroom once that the mark was his own version of the prison-inked teardrop denoting a kill. “I’m tougher than any of these bastards,” he’d said. “My ink is three-D.”
“I see your point, Mr. Dresden,” the judge said, bringing me back to my current dilemma. “The defendant is remanded to the custody of the Pima County Sheriff’s Office.” The gavel rang down. “The trial is set for”—she flipped through a poster-sized calendar—“December thirteenth.”
It was over that quick, and the bailiff shooed me back toward the prisoner’s door.
“Nice to see you again, Miss Gammage,” Dresden whispered as I passed by. He wiped at the spot where the wart met his eye. “Second time’s the charm.”
Deke and Raisa were both in the small interview room at the Detention Center the next morning as promised, but so was Detective Sabin.
“What’s he doing here?”
“We’re working this together,” Deke said. “If you know anything pertinent about these killings, we both need to hear it.”
I rolled my eyes. Sabin had never been open-minded to anything I had to say.
“I’m not going to let her testify against herself here, gentlemen,” Raisa said, then nodded to me. “Go ahead, Jessie.”
I swallowed hard and took the last remaining chair. “I saw Ricky Lamas and two other Braceros in the desert south of town. They were trying to take a small child from a family that had just crossed illegally—”
“What family?” Sabin asked. “Where are they?”
I ignored him. “He said the Braceros were taking children from illegals when they cross, and that Carlos Ochoa had taken a little girl that they were holding. He said some big shots in Tucson were involved.”
“And you believe him because Ochoa had a child’s seat in his car?” Sabin said, as if that belief stretched credulity.
I replied to Deke instead. “Children are being stolen.”
“Do you know any other specifics?” he asked. “Any names, or where they take them?”
I shook my head.
Deke and Raisa both gave me a hug on the way out. Sabin was the last to leave, and he turned back to me at the conference-room door.
“I’m never going to be on your side, Ms. Gammage. I know you’ve killed before, and this time I’m not going to let some jury let you get away with it. But what you did here—coming forward with this—thank you. If it helps us get that child back even one hour faster…well, it was the right thing to do.”
I took the offered butterscotch from his hand.
I settled back into jail life as if I’d never left. Up at six to stand in line for powdered eggs and cereal. Work in the laundry until twelve-thirty, then back in line for bologna on white bread. One hour outside, trying to counteract the carb-and-calorie-heavy diet. Six p.m., pressed turkey with skin-colored gravy and mashed potatoes.
The nights were long without my old friend Lisa to talk to. I became an expert on Tyra Banks and American Idol. No visitors. No calls. No hope. Maybe Raisa had told Guillermo and my father there was no need to come. It was more likely that Guillermo stayed away for fear of bringing police attention to himself, and my father didn’t come back out of respect for my mother’s wrath.
I’d become so used to other names being called during visiting hours that I didn’t hear my own when it was announced.
“Gammage? You want to see this visitor?” Delta asked for a second time.
“Who is it?” Like I was going to turn down anybody at this point.
“A woman named Racine.”
Catherine’s aunt, Elizabeth Racine, waited in the same visitor’s chair my father had taken. A pastel pantsuit, hair coiffed into that nonstyle favored by plain women in their sixties, knuckles swollen to the size of shooter marbles.
I remained standing behind the chair on my side of the glass. “I have nothing to say to you.”
We glared in a mutual standoff.
“That’s okay. I don’t want to hear anything from you.” She fingered a half-inch-thick stack of papers in front of her. “I came across this last year, in a trunk with Catherine’s things.” She waited a beat and then answered her own unspoken question. “I couldn’t go through it before. It was…it hurt too much.”
I waited her out.
“But then I read about your arrest in the papers. You always think you’re right, don’t you? Think that God gave you the right to decide who lives and dies?”
“You didn’t protect Catherine. And you weren’t going to protect Katie.” What kind of woman would put her own flesh and blood in the way of a monster, and then defend that monster after he’d acted?
Elizabeth raised her glance to the guard leaning against the wall behind me and held up the stack of papers in her hand. “May I give her these?”
The guard reached over the glass barrier to take the papers. He thumbed through them and shrugged, placing them on the table in front of me. It was a stack of Xeroxes, in a handwriting I knew as well as my own. I kept my hands at my sides.
“They’re notes from Catherine. Kind of a diary, I guess, that she was keeping for her therapist. Read it.”
“If you expect me to say I’m sorry, I’m not.” The killing was lodged in my heart like a stone, but I’d had to do it, no matter what the price to me. “I’m glad your husband is dead.”
“I’m not.” She turned and walked away.
I took the papers out to the yard and squatted down next to the post at an unused basketball court. Catherine’s notebook had been small, maybe five-by-eight, with a spiral bind on the side. It was lined paper that showed up in the Xerox as a pearl gray; it might have been pink or eggshell in the original.
Elizabeth Racine could have trusted me with the real notebook. I would have protected and cherished anything of Catherine’s. I wondered if it still smelled like her. I raised the loose papers to my nose. Nothing, of course. Too many degrees of separation. Too many copies of copies of heartbreak.
I slid off the rubber band.
Day one: September 19, it said. Cambria says that it’s important to tell the truth someplace, even if I can’t say it out loud. It won’t go any further. I don’t even have to show it to her.
Catherine had been seeing this therapist, Cambria Styles, since the beginning of the year, but that September date would have been only three weeks before she died, and three weeks after that, Walter Racine would be dead, too.
I’d been glad Catherine was getting help, at first because the divorce had taken such a toll on her, then those last weeks because I thought the therapist could help her come to terms with the abuse I now knew about.
I flipped to the next page. I always wanted the middle name Eloise. Maybe be if I just start using it, it will become real. Catherine Eloise Chandliss.
At first, Catherine had been quiet after a visit to Cambria. Later she came back from her appointments giddy with strength and fortitude. I thought the therapy was helping.
The next entry said: I have mother’s nipples. Not MY mother’s nipples, just breasts that announce I’ve had a child. Huge. Brown. Thumb shaped. A baby’s chew toy. Not that I’d trade Katie for anything. But it would be nice to have the body I had ten years ago. The body Glen fell in love with. Now, if I meet someone new, I can’t lie about who I am. My breasts betray me.
I’d never understood why Glen had left her. I’d heard three different versions from Catherine—all of them blaming him—and was sure there were many more that both sides could have come up with.
As I finished each page, I turned it facedown on the asphalt beside me. The air was still and heavy, no breeze to disturb the pile.
Later pages were a tirade against her aunt and uncle for having taken Glen’s side in the divorce. At least that’s the way she saw it. I hadn’t thought the rest of the family was siding with him as much as they were telling her to learn to get along with him from a distance, for Katie’s sake.
Uncle Walter said that I brought it on myself, she wrote. That I wished Glen away. I’ll show him. I’ll show them all.
Three pages on, I tripped over my own name. Have to tell Jessie, it said. I’ve imagined it for so long that it seems real to me now. All the details. The fear. The anger. Well, the anger was real enough, although not quite the way I told her.
What was not quite the way she’d told me? Did she think that somehow she’d seduced her Uncle Walter, coerced him into molestation? The therapist could have helped her with that. There was no way that Walter Racine would have been able to blame the victim for his crime.
I flipped through more pages. She’d used the diary for any kind of note taking: to-do lists (brownies for Katie’s playdate), appointments (Jessie/12:30 at El Charro) and short bad poems. The last entry was two days before Catherine’s car had plunged into the flooded arroyo.
It’s gone too far. I have to stop it. Jessica, dear friend who believes in me, has taken my cause in hand. She’s stronger than I am. I know she’ll succeed. And then what? I’ll have to live with this lie for the rest of my life. I’m going to show this to Cambria. She’s right. I can’t stop lying to the rest of the world until I stop lying to myself.
Poor Catherine. She had felt somehow responsible for her abuse. What might she have done, if that wall of water in a normally dry arroyo hadn’t taken her life that night? Tell me to back off my campaign against her uncle? Leave town with Katie? The diary made it sound like she’d come to some decision.
I wiped away a tear, and returned to the last page. It was dated the day before Catherine died, and said simply, “I’m going to do it right this time. No more stories. No more lies. I’m going to live in the real world starting now. I wanted to get Uncle Walter in trouble because of how mean he was about Glen. I hope he can forgive me.”
I jumped to my feet—every nerve end on fire, the breath frozen in my chest—and charged the razor-wire fence in front of me. A siren shrieked, angry voices sputtered and cawed through a loudspeaker, but I climbed, fingers clawing at the diamond grids in the wire, higher, higher, to reach enough air so that I could breathe. My vision dimmed until there was just a pinprick of light ahead of me. Suddenly, strong hands grabbed my legs and I was thrown backward to the ground, then tackled—face pressed into the asphalt—and handcuffed.
Dear God, what had I done? I’d killed a man for no good reason at all. And then, God help me, I’d set about getting away with it.
My legs wouldn’t hold me, so four Corrections Officers dragged me across the yard by my manacled arms. I watched, struck dumb with regret and shame, as a fifth officer gathered the loose pages of the diary and tamped them back into a pile.
My sin, written out in longhand.