Her article was on the subject of why women kill. She was now some three months into researching it. She'd seen good deal of courage. Some madness.
And a lot of desperation.
"So his bullet grazed your lung," she said. "Then passed through your back."
"That's right. They found it in the door behind me. I was lucky because the bullet was the kind with a metal jacket and that meant the exit wound was clean, not as bad as it might have been. I was in the hospital a couple of weeks. Then they transferred me."
"So your lawyer said they were asking for two hundred thousand dollars in bail?"
She nodded.
"And you didn't pay it."
"I was already incredibly in debt on legal fees as it was."
"In court you used Robert's videotaped confessions to contend that you had reason to believe that he was in danger at the time, at that very moment maybe, that you were afraid he'd be molested again, and that you went to the house to protect him."
"Yes."
"And the state asked for first-degree murder. The death penalty. I find that ... just incredible."
Her smile seemed to say, Believe me, you don't know the half of it. The reporter had yet to see the slightest sign that Lydia Danse was sitting here feeling sorry for herself. Even though it was death by hanging in this state. Even her occasional bout with tears had only spoken of sadness and waste and her son's emotional pain.
She thought that was incredible too.
"They didn't get it, though," she said.
"No, thank god. They gave me aggravated life."
The reporter took a breath. It was hard not to be furious—she was furious, what was hard was not to show her fury—at the whole damn justice system.
"I don't get it. Why not self-defense? He shot you first. Forensics proved it. He couldn't have fired after you did because he was dead the moment your bullet hit him."
"We couldn't get self-defense because I went to the house with the gun. Because I thought about it long enough to take the gun out of my closet and put it in the car and bring it there. That made me the aggressor. That's the way they saw it. There was even a big deal about my not having a carry permit."
"And the videotape?"
She shrugged. "Either they didn't believe the videotape or they chose to discount it. The jury, not the judge. The judge took it into consideration and that's what got me life. My lawyers and I never could figure it out, to tell the truth. One of the jurors came forward later and said that he believed the tape right from the beginning and another came forward and said he never did. I don't know why the ones who did believe Robert voted the way they did. Straight law and order, I guess. I suppose it was the gun."
"You're aware that Ralph Duggan and the State Police had been investigating a number of serial killings at the time. And that these murders apparently have stopped since?"
She nodded again. "I'm glad they've stopped. But it doesn't really matter in my case, does it? They never proved it was Arthur. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. But I don't know that it would have mattered to me in court or would even have been admissible even if they did."
The reporter glanced at the uniformed matron in the corner of the conference room to their left. The matron was making an elaborate show of not overhearing them. Gazing off into space, arms folded in her lap. It was like every prison she'd ever seen. Every sound echoed in there. Every scrape of a chair. The matron was hearing all of it.
The reporter felt strangely vulnerable knowing that. "And you haven't been out of prison since, have you?" she said.
"No."
"And you haven't seen Robert?"
"They won't let him visit. The court won't. Not until he's fourteen. If your article can do anything for me maybe it can at least do that. Get them to allow us to at least see each other now and then."
Secretly the reporter doubted that it would. She felt that Lydia Danse was still fighting a losing battle with the system. But she wasn't going to say so. This was a woman who had already failed in one appeal for clemency. She couldn't imagine how trapped she must feel. The reporter wasn't going to add to that.
"How many years before you're eligible for parole, Lydia?"
For the first time during the interview her eyes flashed bright with anger.
"Fifteen years," she said.
"Before parole is even possible?"
"Yes. Robert will be twenty-four. A man. I'll have lost the rest of his childhood. All of it."
Her eyes said she'd been cheated in a nasty game that was never of her making and that she knew it. What Lydia Danse had been through and was still going through seemed to press in on the reporter like an invisible heavy weight. A kind of push. It was personal.
What would I have done in the same situation? she thought. What would any woman have done?
The reporter had seen Robert's tape and knew he was telling the truth about his father. She believed the tape completely.
She thought that Lydia Danse had walked through fire and that the fire was still burning.
She felt suddenly ashamed at simply being able to leave this place. At being able to walk free on the outside while this woman whom she suspected was far stronger and braver than she was wasn't free and probably would not be free—not for a very long time. And for being part of a world that had put her here.
Fifteen years.
She didn't know what to say.
Unless something happened to change things Lydia Danse would be a woman approaching old age.
My god.
"How do you ... I don't know how to say this but ... God! How do you live with that? How do you possibly bear it?"
She watched Lydia draw herself up in the hard metal chair.
"Robert's with Ruth now," she said, "he's with his grandmother. The very same woman who raised his father. Who broke the law allowing Arthur to stay there in the first place. For some insane reason the courts decided Arthur forced that on her and would rather give custody to her than to my sister Barbara, basically because Barbara's single.
We're fighting that and I don't like it one damn bit but that's not the point. The important thing is that the men in that family are all dead. That nobody's pointing guns at anybody anymore. The important thing is that I know Robert isn't being abused by his father anymore, that he's safe. That's the one good thing I can see coming out of ... all of this. If it weren't for that I'd probably go crazy. But I have that much, anyway. He's safe."
Even the matron was looking at her openly now in what appeared to be a kind of stony empathy.
"I have that much," she said.
The reporter found that she could think of nothing more to say.
She's just fallen through the cracks, she thought. Another one the system's failed to protect. This one had fallen deeper and harder than any she'd met—yet look at her, she thought. She's refusing to be buried by it all. She wants out, yes. Badly. Of course she does. Yet something in her clearly remained uncircumscribed by dull gray walls and bars and empty looks and all the monotony of her days. Something which stood outside these walls, in the mind and body of her son—and grew there, with her and without her.
It was a waste. It was a goddamn crime.
The reporter could despair for her and feel for her and knew that she would do exactly that in anger and in cold print for the audience of a major national magazine just a couple of weeks from now. But Lydia Danse was not despairing.
She's done the right thing, the reporter thought. And she knows it. No matter what anybody thinks.
There's a nobility in that.
There's grace.
The reporter realized that Lydia Danse was gazing deeply into the reporter's own troubled eyes and knew that the interview was over.
Ruth watched him from her armchair in front of the television. He was working on his homework at the dining room table. Erasing with a pencil.
Persevere, she thought. That's right. Persevere.
He'd grown taller in the year since
it happened—taller and skinnier. She thought the skinniness suited him as it had suited Arthur at that age and didn't fuss when he left a bit of the food on his plate at dinnertime. Just so long as he ate a little something, she was happy.
In fact she was having no trouble at all with him these days. Oh, he was still too quiet, he still stumbled into furniture not looking where he was going sometimes, but the stuttering had stopped and she was thankful for that because the stuttering, to be honest, had always embarrassed her. His work was going well at school. He was diligent and respectful.
He was a good boy.
The same way Arthur was a good boy.
Most of the time he was.
The only problem she had with Robert was—and it didn't happen nearly so often now, but god knows at her age once a month was still quite enough to frazzle her—the only problem she had was this messing the bed at night. She'd wake up in the morning or even in the middle of the night sometimes to a smell like something had crawled up into her house and died. And there would be the boy, sleeping in his own shit or else stripping the sheets off the bed or else just sitting there looking sad and guilty.
She made him wash his sheets when it happened and kept plastic on to protect the mattress underneath at all times. But she wasn't buying any diapers for him. She wasn't spending money on diapers for a nine-year-old.
She'd have to find some way to break him of the habit. And soon.
She couldn't stand the god-awful stink when it happened. It wasn't correct.
It wasn't sanitary.
And it wasn't necessary.
He was far too old for dunking.
She'd have to find some other way.
Of course there was always what had worked with Arthur what helped to put him back in line when he was out of line—on those rare occasions. But the world was different now than it was when Arthur was a boy and people were a lot more nosy. Teachers were nosy and they had counselors at school who were nosy and even other parents got nosy a whole lot of the time. She'd heard stories. People who had their kids taken away from them by the goddamn county. She'd have to be careful.
She'd have to use it where it wouldn't show.
A thin peeled stick. Birch.
It had always worked for Arthur.
And then afterwards in the darkness of his bedroom she'd go to him and hold him close to her breast and feel his sweet warm tears soak through her housedress and she'd rock him and tell him that it was all right now, it was over, that he was her boy, her good boy, her one and only child and the love of her life, forever, never mind old Harry, never mind anybody because nobody else in the world mattered the way he mattered—they belonged to one another forever there in the sight of God and she would stroke him, stroke him, stroke him.
Jack Ketchum, Stranglehold
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