Triptych2

  Kathy drove a black Porsche, the kind of car John could only see from his hands and knees as he cleaned the trash out of it. She had driven him straight up Piedmont Road, taking a right on Sidney Marcus and ending up parked in front of a small building on Lenox Road right up from the interstate. The sign outside read Keener, Rose and Shelley in fancy gold script. The car beside them, a graphite gray BMW, was parked in the space reserved for Joyce Shelley.

  Joyce worked less than two miles from the Gorilla. She might have even passed him every day on her drive in.

  "She's handling a closing right now," Kathy said. "She won't be long."

  John's knees popped as he rolled himself out of the low-lying car. Time and again, he had to remind himself that he was almost forty years old. For some reason, he still felt fifteen, like Coastal had happened to another John, his mind going there while his body stayed on the outside, not aging, waiting for him to come back and claim it.

  "We'll wait in her office," Kathy suggested, leading him through the building. The receptionist's eyes followed John as he walked past her desk, and he imagined that but for the janitor, she wasn't used to seeing his kind strolling through these pristine corridors.

  "Back here." Kathy had grabbed some notes from a cubbyhole with her name on it, and she read through these as they walked down the hall.

  Joyce's office was nice, exactly as John would have imagined if he let himself think about his sister and her life outside of him. The Persian carpet on the floor had deep blues and burgundies and the curtains were a thin linen that let in the sunlight. The paint on the wall was a kind of chocolate beige. The colors were masculine, but there was something really feminine to the way Joyce had used them. Or maybe a designer had done the office, some pricey chick from Buckhead who got paid to spend rich people's money. There were a couple of Oriental-looking paintings that weren't to John's taste, but the pictures on the credenza under the windows made his heart hurt in his chest.

  A young Joyce and John on the log ride at Six Flags. Baby John in Richard's lap as he gave him a bottle. Ten-year-old Joyce on the beach in her two-piece bathing suit, a Popsicle in each hand. There were more recent photographs, too. Kathy and Joyce at the zoo. Kathy on a horse with a mountain view behind her. Two Labrador retrievers rolling around on the grass.

  The photo that stopped him was of his mother. Emily with a scarf around her head, her eyes sunken, cheeks hollow. She was smiling, though. His mother had always had the most beautiful smile. John had gotten through so many nights thinking about that smile, the easy way she bestowed it, the genuine kindness behind it. Tears fell from his eyes at the sight of her, and he felt a physical ache knowing he would never see her again.

  Kathy said, "Emily was a wonderful person."

  John made himself put the frame back where it belonged. He used the back of his hand to wipe his eyes. "You knew her?"

  "Yes," Kathy said. "She was very close to Joyce. It was hard on all of us when she got sick."

  "I don't..." John didn't know how to say this. "I don't remember seeing you at the funeral."

  "I was there," she said, and he saw tension around her eyes. "Your father isn't very accepting of Joyce's relationship with me."

  "No," John said. "He wouldn't be." Richard had always been certain that he knew the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Whoever crossed that line was as easily cut out of his life as the cancerous tumors he removed in the operating room.

  John felt the need to say, "I'm sorry about that. He's always loved Joyce."

  Kathy gave him a careful look. "Are you trying to defend your father?"

  "I guess it helps me if I try to understand his side of things, why he thinks the way he does."

  She walked across the room and opened a door. John assumed it led to the bathroom, but he could see now that it was a walk-in closet lined with three filing cabinets. Spiral notebooks, probably fifty in all, were stacked in neat piles on top of each one.

  "These are all your court transcripts from your preliminary hearing, to the change of venue denial, to the last appeal." She had pointed to different drawers as she said this. "This is your medical stuff." She rested her hand on the top drawer of the cabinet nearest John. "Your first overdose in the ER, your admit after they arrested you, and..." Her mouth opened, but she had stopped. She still looked him in the eye, though. "Information from the Coastal infirmary."

  John swallowed. Zebra. They knew about Zebra.

  "This is mostly parole board reports," Kathy said, opening a drawer that contained six or seven thick files. "Joyce got the copy of your last one about a month ago."

  "Why?" John said, thinking about the volumes of files Joyce had kept for over twenty years. "Why would she have this?"

  "It was your mother's," Kathy told him. "These notebooks." She took one off the pile. "These are all her notes. She knew your case backward and forward."

  John opened the notebook, stared at his mother's neat cursive without really seeing it. When Emily was growing up, penmanship had mattered. Her writing was beautiful, flowing across the page like perfect flowers.

  The words, however, weren't so pretty.

  Speedball = heroin + cocaine + ??? Why the bradycardia? Why the apnea? John turned the page. Bite marks around breasts match dental impressions? And, No semen recovered. Where is condom???

  Kathy said, "She was trying to get the physical evidence from the county at the end."

  "Why?"

  "She wanted to do a DNA test on the knife to prove that it was her blood, but the sample was so small they could only do a mitochondria! panel." When he shook his head, Kathy explained, "Mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother, so even if it was Emily's blood, there's no way to rule out that it couldn't be yours, too. Or Joyce's for that matter, but that still wouldn't have helped the case."

  " 'Bite marks'?" he read.

  "She thought they could show your teeth didn't match the bite marks, but there was a case, a Supreme Court case, where bite-mark evidence was ruled inadmissible." She added, "But she thought that might help with the... the severing." "What?"

  "The state's odontologist was never called to the stand. About three years before she died, Emily petitioned for all your evidence, all the files. She was determined to start over, see if she missed anything. She found a report where the state's dental expert said that he thought the tongue was... that it was bitten, off, not cut off."

  "Bitten off?" John echoed. His mind flashed on Cynthia Barrett, the sickening slickness of her tongue when he'd gripped it between his thumb and forefinger. Cutting was hard enough, but biting? What kind of monster bit off a girl's tongue? "John?"

  He cleared his throat, made himself speak. "The knife was their key piece of evidence. They had an expert who said it was used to cut out her tongue. It proved premeditation."

  "Right. Emily was going for prosecutorial misconduct. They claim they handed over the doctor's report about the bite to Lydia during pre-trial discovery, but Emily couldn't find any record of it. It could have been grounds for an appeal."

  He fanned through the pages, looked at the dates. "Mom was working on this when she was sick."

  "She couldn't stop," Kathy told him. "She wanted to get you out." He couldn't get over the volume of notes she had taken. Pages and pages filled with all sorts of horrible details his mother should have never even heard about. For the second time that day, he was crying in front of his sister's lover. "Why?" he asked. "Why did she do this? The appeals were over."

  "There was still a slim chance," Kathy answered. "She didn't want to give that up."

  "She was too sick," he said, flipping to the back of the notebook, seeing that the last entry was a week before she went into the hospital for the last time. "She shouldn't have been doing this. She should've been focusing on getting stronger, getting better."

  "Emily knew she wasn't going to get better," Kathy told him. "She spent the last days of her life doing exactly what she wanted to do."

  He was rea
lly crying now—big, fat tears as he thought about his mother poring over all this information every night, trying to find something, anything, that would get him out.

  "She never told me," John said. "She never told me she was doing this."

  "She didn't want to get your hopes up," Joyce said.

  He swung around, wondering how long his sister had been standing behind him.

  Joyce didn't look angry when she said, "Kathy, what are you doing?"

  "Interfering," the other woman answered, smiling the way someone smiles when they've done something wrong but they know you'll forgive them.

  Kathy said, "I'll leave you two alone." She squeezed Joyce's hand as she walked past her, then pulled the door closed.

  John was still holding the notebook, Emily's life's work. "Your office is nice," he said. "And Kathy..."

  "How about that?" she said, wryly. "A bona fide homo in the Shelley clan."

  "I bet Dad was proud."

  She snorted a laugh. "Yeah. So happy that he changed his will."

  John clenched his jaw. He didn't know what he was supposed to say.

  "Mama made me promise not to throw those out," Joyce told him, waving her hand toward the closet. "I wanted to. I wanted to dump them all out in the yard and have a big bonfire. I almost did." She gave a humorless bark of a laugh, as if she was still surprised she hadn't torched everything. "I should have. I should have at least put them in a storage place or buried them somewhere." She let out a heavy sigh. "But I didn't."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's her. All of those files, all of those stupid notebooks. Did you know she never went anywhere without one?" Joyce added wryly, "Of course you didn't. She never took them inside when she visited you, but she worked on them, thought about them, the whole way down and the whole way back. Sometimes she'd call me in the middle of the night and ask me to look into some obscure law she found, something she thought might wrangle a new trial for you." Joyce looked back at the filing cabinets, the notebooks. "It's like they're tiny little pieces of her heart, her soul, and if I throw them out now, then I'm throwing her out, too."

  John smoothed his hand along the cover of the notebook. His mother had given her life to him, dedicated her every waking moment to getting him out of Coastal.

  All because of Michael Ormewood.

  Michael might as well have killed Emily after he finished with Mary Alice. He should have reached into Joyce's chest and squeezed the life out of her heart. Oh, God, John wanted to kill him. He wanted to beat him senseless, then wrap his hands around Michael's neck and watch the other man's eyes as he realized he was going to die. John would loosen his hands, taking him to the edge then bringing him back just to watch the fear, the absolute fucking terror, as Michael realized he was completely helpless. Then, John would just leave him. He'd leave him alone in the middle of nowhere and let him die all by himself.

  "John?" Joyce said. She had always been intuitive, always known when something was bothering him.

  He opened the notebook again, skimmed his mother's writing. "What's this?" he asked. "Bradycardia. What does that mean?"

  Joyce walked over to the closet and opened one of the file drawers. "When they arrested you," she said, "you were too weak to stand on your own."

  "Yeah." He had been terrified.

  "They took you to the hospital. Mom kept insisting something was wrong with you." She searched through the files. "She made them do an EKG, an EEG, bloodwork, MRI."

  John had a vague recollection of this. "Why?"

  "Because she knew that something was wrong." Joyce finally found what she was looking for. "Here."

  He took the medical report, carefully reading the words while Joyce waited. The numbers on the tests made no sense to him, but John had worked at the prison infirmary. He knew the section to look for. He read aloud from the handwritten doctor's notes under the box labeled "conclusions."

  " 'Resting heart rate below sixty, ataxic breathing and general physical condition indicate drug toxicity.' " He looked back at Joyce. "I took drugs, Joyce. I never said I didn't."

  "No." She shook her head. "Read the rest."

  John read to himself this time. The doctor had indicated that John's symptoms were not consistent with an overdose of cocaine and heroin. He suspected another drug was involved. Further blood tests were inconclusive, but testing was recommended on the powdered substance found at the scene.

  The powdered substance. Michael had given him the baggie. John had never done heroin in his life. He had assumed good old Woody was trying to do him a favor, when in fact he had been trying to knock him out. Not just knock him out. Maybe there had been something else in that bag besides cocaine and heroin. John knew from prison talk that the labs could only find what they were specifically looking for. Michael could have spiked the speedball with something even more potent, something that would finish the job in case the volatile mixture didn't.

  "What?" Joyce asked.

  John's surprise must have registered on his face. He had been focusing on Mary Alice all this time. Had Michael meant to kill John, too? Had he thought to make it easier for himself to do whatever he wanted with Mary Alice and leave the blame at the foot of John's grave?

  Two days after Mary Alice's body had been found, Michael and his mother had come by to visit. John was laid up in his room, feeling like shit, hiding behind a story he told to his mother about having a bad cold when in fact he could barely breathe every time he thought about Mary Alice's body lying beside him in her bed.

  Michael had been the same as always, at least as far as John could recall. His cousin had stayed with him in his room, talking about— what?—John couldn't remember now. Something stupid, he was sure. John had fallen asleep. Was it then that Michael had planted the knife in his closet? Was it then that Michael had formed his plan? Or had somebody else worked it out from the beginning, sent Michael upstairs with the knife, told him to put it in John's closet so that there would be something concrete that tied him to Mary Alice's bedroom?

  "Johnny?" Joyce said. She hadn't called him that since they were kids. "What is it?"

  He closed the folder. "What do you remember about Aunt Lydia?"

  "She was your lawyer." Joyce added, "She quit criminal law and went over to corporate after what happened to you. She said she lost her stomach for it. She never forgave herself for not being able to help you."

  "I'll bet."

  Joyce was obviously taken aback by the hatred in his tone. "I'm serious, John. She came to see Mom at the hospital."

  "When was this?"

  "I guess it was the day before Mom passed away. They had just put the tube down her throat so she could breathe." Joyce paused, collecting herself. "She was in a lot of pain. They had her on a morphine drip. I'm not even sure she knew Kathy and I were there, let alone Lydia."

  "What did Lydia say to her?"

  "I have no idea. We left them alone." She added, "She looked really bad. Aunt Lydia, I mean. She hadn't seen Mom in years but she couldn't stop crying. I never thought they were close, but maybe during the trial... I don't know. I was so upset back then that I wasn't paying much attention to anybody."

  "You didn't hear anything?"

  "No," Joyce said. "Well, just at the end. I came back too soon, I guess. Lydia was holding Mom's hand. We'd told her the doctors said she didn't have long, maybe a day at the most." Joyce paused, probably thinking back on the scene. "Mom's eyes were closed—I don't even think she was aware that Lydia was there." She tilted her head. "But Lydia was sobbing. Really sobbing, John, like her heart was broken. She was shaking, and she kept saying, 'I'm so sorry, Emily. I'm so sorry' " Joyce concluded, "She never forgave herself. She never got over losing your case."

  Right, John thought. Aunt Lydia was probably plenty over it now. Nothing like unburdening your sins to someone who wouldn't live to tell them.

  He asked, "How was Mom after she left?"

  "Still out of it," Joyce answered. "She slept all of the time. It was ha
rd for her to keep her eyes open."

  "Did she say anything?"

  "She couldn't, John. She had the tube down her throat."

  John nodded. It was all making sense now. The first thing Aunt Lydia had done as his lawyer was sit John down and make him tell her everything about that night, everything that had happened. John had been terrified. He had told her the absolute truth, fuck whatever code of honor you were supposed to have about ratting out other kids. He told her about Michael tossing him the bag of what John thought was coke, about walking Mary Alice home and climbing through the window into her bedroom. He told her about the kiss, the way his brain had exploded like a rocket had gone off in his head. He told her about waking up the next morning lying in a pool of Mary Alice's blood.