‘Mag, Mag, what?’ Caleb screamed, already crying, stricken with fear.
‘Baby!’ Maggie cried out, to him, to Anna, to her tiny baby girl, it couldn’t be true, Anna couldn’t be dead, Noah couldn’t do such a thing, how could she tell Caleb that his father had killed Anna, it couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t.
Maggie collapsed to the floor with Caleb, hugging him tight as they cried together, clinging to each other until the police officers finally left, shaken and disturbed.
Chapter Sixty-one
Noah, After
TRIAL, DAY 10
Noah faced front at counsel table, and the jury returned to the courtroom, entered the jury box, and filed into their seats. The foreman was carrying a piece of paper, the verdict slip. He handed the slip to Judge Gardner, who read it, then looked up.
‘Will the defendant please rise?’ asked the judge.
Noah stood up, his knees weak. His heart hammered. His mouth had gone dry. He was in a waking nightmare. He was about to hear the jury’s verdict for a crime he hadn’t committed.
Judge Gardner peered at the spectators. ‘Ladies and gentlemen in the gallery, members of the media, I admonish you that there will be no outbursts, conversation, or discussion of any kind after I read this verdict. I will hold anyone who violates this order in contempt. In addition, please remain in your seats after the verdict is read. You may not leave your seats until I adjourn Court and we are no longer in session.’
Noah felt pressure building in his jaw. He clenched and unclenched it, but it didn’t help. It had been a long trial and an even longer incarceration, and earlier, he’d told himself that the verdict didn’t matter because he’d already lost everything he loved. Now, he realized he’d been wrong. In fact, the opposite was true. The verdict mattered more than anything else. His life was on the line, right this minute, and for him, time stood still.
Judge Gardner cleared his throat, reading from the slip, ‘We, the jury in the matter of Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Noah Alderman, Docket Number 18-3277, find the defendant Dr Noah Alderman guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Anna Ippoliti Desroches.’
Noah reeled from the impact, as if he’d been hit by a truck. Thomas stood beside him, rock-solid. The courtroom fell deathly silent except for some coughing.
Judge Gardner set the verdict slip down. ‘Dr Alderman, would you like to make a brief statement?’
Noah hadn’t discussed that with Thomas, so he was on his own. ‘Yes, Your Honor, I would,’ he answered, finding his voice.
‘Please do so, Dr Alderman.’
‘I didn’t kill Anna,’ Noah stated simply. He said it for Maggie. She wasn’t here, but she would read it in the newspapers. His beloved audience of one.
He would never know if she believed him, but it was the truth.
Chapter Sixty-two
Maggie, After
That very night, Maggie and Kathy left in stricken silence for the county morgue, after leaving a heartbroken Caleb with Kathy’s husband, Steve. Kathy did the driving, and Maggie kept all of the possibilities alive in her mind because she wouldn’t believe that Anna was dead until she had seen her body. There could have been some mistake, there must have been some mistake, a giant and colossal mistake, it happens in the world, it could be somebody else’s daughter, not my daughter, though it shouldn’t be anybody’s daughter, a life ended at seventeen.
The sight of Anna’s body reduced Maggie to her knees. Her only daughter was gone, her skin gray and cold, her eyes closed, and her body covered by a sheet. One of the morgue employees had said strangulation, and Maggie almost fainted on the spot, though she didn’t need to be told. Purplish bruises encircled Anna’s neck, a sight so grotesque that Maggie could barely look. An odd darkness covered the back of Anna’s neck and shoulders, which Maggie realized was her daughter’s lifeblood, pooling inside her very body.
Maggie felt an uncontrollable fury aflame inside her, a rising rage that Noah had done this to her baby girl, her only one. She covered her mouth not to cry out, but sobbed against Kathy, new tears of agony and grief. She couldn’t do anything to get Anna back. She couldn’t understand what had happened. She hadn’t dreamed Noah was capable of such violence, such cruelty.
Maggie let Kathy guide her from the morgue and back home, and after that, Kathy had practically moved in, taking care of Maggie and Caleb and fending off reporters. Noah was charged with murder the next day, and Caleb kept asking for his father and crying. Maggie tried to explain everything to him, then let him stay home from school. She didn’t want him bullied, now that their family was in the papers, LOCAL DOC CHARGED IN MURDER.
Kathy babysat while Maggie made Anna’s funeral arrangements, chose the casket, the flowers, and Anna’s boho dress for her to be buried in. They held a brief memorial service at the funeral home, and Maggie and Caleb sat in the front row next to Kathy and her family. Behind them were their circle of friends, who had just been at the barbecue, stunned and stricken by the unthinkable turn of events. A pastor gave a generic eulogy, but Maggie crawled into a mental shell to avoid feeling the worst pain of her life.
At the end of the service, a woman in a navy-blue dress approached her. ‘Excuse me, are you Maggie Alderman?’
‘Ippoliti,’ Maggie corrected her, though she never had before.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you,’ Maggie answered, guarded. She suspected the woman was a reporter. ‘And you are?’
‘You don’t know me, I’m Chris Silas, Samantha Silas’s mother. Our daughters were friends.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Maggie remembered Samantha, with the MINI Cooper and the tattoos.
‘This must be so difficult for you.’
Maggie couldn’t begin to respond, so she didn’t try. ‘How’s Samantha? It must be hard for her, too.’
‘She ran away.’ Chris’s face fell.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s gone. She’s run away before. This time I think it was because of Anna, you know, her death.’
Maggie felt a stab of sympathy. She hadn’t even thought of the ripple effects of Anna’s murder. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that. Samantha’s a very nice girl.’
‘You met her?’
‘Yes, when she dropped Anna off, and she came to our barbecue, too.’ Maggie couldn’t begin to remember that night. The powder room. Anna crying. Noah’s lies. The photo from Jordan’s hotel room.
‘Thanks. Appreciate it.’ Chris smiled, sadly.
‘Did you tell the police?’
‘Yes, but no luck. I’m hoping she’ll come back soon.’ Chris patted Maggie’s shoulder. ‘You take care. I have to get to work.’
‘Thanks,’ Maggie said, withdrawing to the comfort of her shell.
Chapter Sixty-three
Noah, After
Noah sat hunched over on the bus seat, shackled at the wrists and ankles, which rendered it impossible to sit up straight. His back ached after the long ride in that position, but he ignored it. The Department of Corrections bus was unheated, and a few windows were stuck open, letting in frigid air and smoky exhaust. It was dark by the time they’d left SCI Camp Hill, which served as the Classification and Evaluation Center for the Pennsylvania prison system. He’d been bused there from the courtroom, and now he’d been shaved, deloused, classified, processed with an inmate ID number, and given a wristband with a barcode and a GPS tracker. He’d been assigned to SCI Graterford, which was Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security facility, housing four thousand convicted felons, like him.
Except that he was innocent.
Graterford was located on a thousand-acre parcel about thirty miles from Philadelphia, and it had been built in the 1920s, one of the older prisons in the system. It was at 105 percent overcrowding, second-highest in the state, but its replacement, SCI Phoenix, was already under construction on the same parcel, behind schedule and overbudget at a cost of $400 million. Noah knew the statistics because he’d read the inmate ma
nual in the library at SCI Camp Hill, undoubtedly the only inmate to have done so.
His only goal was to survive, though for how long he didn’t know. He hadn’t been sentenced yet, and he was just trying to survive another day, though he wasn’t sure why. He was fine not knowing why, for now. It was instinct. Every living thing fought to stay alive. People. Animals. Plants. Cells. Viruses. Allergens. He felt reduced to his primal self, following his only reflex. Survival.
He inhaled, and the exhaust fumes nauseated him, but he ignored that, too. He kept his head to the glass, which was covered by a wire lattice, and he looked out as they rumbled along the highway. Families in SUVs and minivans passed them, and he could see the kids buckled into their car seats and watching videos, the fathers straight-arming the wheel, and the mothers in the passenger seats, reading Facebook on their phones. He didn’t permit himself to think of Maggie or Caleb. Or Anna. Or even Wreck-It Ralph.
Inmates filled the bus, all hunched over in shackles, sitting nearest the window like he was, spread out to avoid contact with each other. None of them appeared to be first-timers, since nobody was crying or talking. They all knew the unwritten rules, which they made and communicated by actions. Stay in your lane. Mind your own business. Don’t discuss your case with another inmate or they’ll use the information against you or trade it to reduce their own sentence. Above all, find your kind. There was safety in numbers.
Noah knew that would be his immediate problem, since he doubted there were other pediatric allergists at Graterford. He had no group to join. He was a generic white guy, but not a white nationalist. He wasn’t black, Hispanic, or Asian, which were automatic groups. He wasn’t a gang member of any stripe, another automatic group. He wasn’t a Jesus freak or a ‘girlfriend,’ inmate slang nobody needed to spell out. He was on his own, which made him vulnerable.
Noah kept his eye out the window. His bid at Montgomery County Correctional Facility hadn’t prepared him for what lay ahead because MCCF was a minimum-security facility. That was kindergarten compared to Graterford, with its general population of murderers, drug-dealers, arsonists, rapists, burglars, robbers, addicts, schizophrenics, and psychopaths. Graterford would be ‘hard time,’ not ‘smooth time’ like MCCF. And Graterford housed the only Death Row in the state.
The bus crossed the border into Skippack Township, signified by a small green sign, and in time, they turned off of Route 73 onto an unmarked single-lane road that traveled downhill. It led to Graterford, and massive lights made a white halo as bright as a major-league baseball stadium. Noah shifted up in his seat to see the prison, and so did the others, blinking from the sudden brightness after the long, dark drive. He wondered if they were all thinking the same thing.
This is the last time I’ll see it from the outside.
Graterford was a massive conglomeration of buildings, and Noah could see only the lit office complex in front because the entire prison was encircled by a thirty-five-foot high concrete wall, barbed concertina wire, and guard towers with smoked-glass windows.
They traveled to the prison and were hustled out of the bus, shuffling along like a line of hunchbacks because of the shackles. They were ordered into an intake area, where they were unshackled, stripped, showered, and examined, then changed into a reddish-brown shirt with yellow trim and baggy pants with white prison slippers. They were photographed, cuffed up, and given a toilet kit, mattress, blanket, sheets, and towels, then split up by cellblock.
Noah was ordered to go with a burly CO, or corrections officer, in a black uniform with a name tag that read EVESHAM. They walked through dull white cinder-block corridors. The fluorescent lights flickered dully, and the floors were of worn concrete. The overheated air smelled antiseptic and dirty, both at once. The only sounds were the crackling of the walkie-talkie holstered on CO Evesham’s black utility belt and the jingling of his keys. The long hallway ended in a locked sally port, and stenciled letters above it read, CELLBLOCK C.
CO Evesham detached his key ring. ‘Stand back, Dr Alderman,’ he ordered, getting ready to unlock the door.
Noah obeyed.
CO Evesham turned to him, then said under his breath, ‘They’re expecting you.’
Noah blinked, surprised. ‘What do you mean?’
CO Evesham didn’t reply, unlocking the door.
Chapter Sixty-four
Maggie, After
Maggie sat hunched at the kitchen island, her mail spread out and her laptop open to the bank’s website. She was supposed to be paying bills, but the task seemed overwhelming. Everything seemed overwhelming since Anna’s death, and Maggie knew she was stuck in the familiar mire of depression. She felt herself going under, being sucked down, the muck clogging her nostrils and filling her mouth. She wondered if she deserved to die that way, suffocated like Anna.
Maggie’s gaze strayed to the window, and she watched raindrops batter the glass. She couldn’t bear to think that Anna was under the ground, and cold rainy days like this made her regret leaving her there. She had visited Anna’s grave often before the trial, but then reporters had started following her. Now, three days after the guilty verdict against Noah, the media was finally losing interest and only one news van sat parked at her curb. Her neighbors probably hated her, for that and everything else, and she was considering moving, but Caleb didn’t want to.
Maggie had made him her priority since Noah’s arrest, trying to keep the house running as normally as possible, drilling him with his target words, and getting him to his appointments with his speech pathologist, as well as weekly sessions with a child psychologist, to help him cope. He’d wanted to visit Noah in jail, and his therapist thought it would be better if Kathy took him, which was fine with Maggie. She’d kept him home during the trial, with Kathy babysitting the time Maggie had gone to court. He was going back to school next week and was upstairs reading with Wreck-It Ralph.
Maggie missed Anna so badly, feeling the loss of everything her daughter could have been, could have had, and could have grown up to be. She agonized over the fact that not only was Anna dead, but Noah had killed her. Still, sometimes at night, alone in bed, Maggie admitted to herself that there was a tiny part of her that just couldn’t believe Noah had done it. It just didn’t seem like something he could do, despite his conviction and the evidence against him. And he’d said he hadn’t done it, in court. She’d read it in the newspaper. She knew that Caleb had some doubts, too, though his therapist and Kathy thought that was denial.
Maggie didn’t know if she loved Noah anymore. She loved the Noah she used to know, but she didn’t know if he was real or fantasy. She’d been working part-time doing billing for a law firm, and one of the lawyers had helped her prepare divorce papers, which she had yet to file.
Suddenly her phone rang, and the screen lit up with a number from an area code she remembered. Congreve’s. Maggie knew it wasn’t James because she had emailed him about Anna’s death. He had emailed back, saying that he would deal with the trust and the estate, since Anna had been killed before Florian’s will had even been probated. By the terms of Anna’s will, her money went to a variety of charitable causes, which would take months to distribute.
The phone rang again, and Maggie answered it, out of curiosity. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is this Maggie Ippoliti?’ a woman asked, her voice vaguely familiar.
‘Yes, who’s calling?’
‘This is Ellen Salvich from the Graham Center at Congreve Academy. We met last year. I was Anna’s therapist.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Maggie felt guilty she’d never contacted Ellen. She’d been too embarrassed and ashamed. She hadn’t known how to explain. I’m sorry, but my husband killed my daughter, whom I told you I would take wonderful care of.
‘I just saw in the newspaper, online, what happened –’
‘I’m so sorry, I should have called you.’
‘I was away until recently. I took a leave from school. My father was in hospice in Scottsdale and he passed last week. I??
?m just now getting back.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Maggie felt an instant kinship with anybody who had lost anybody.
‘Thank you. Are you in a position to talk? It’s important, and you might find it shocking.’
‘Yes, go ahead,’ Maggie said, though nothing could shock her anymore.
‘When I came home, I saw a newspaper story online about your husband’s conviction for murder. They have his picture, next to Anna’s. Anna’s name is under the caption. I’m looking at it right now.’
‘Yes.’ Maggie sighed, pained. ‘He was convicted of her murder. I really should’ve called you, I thought about it so many times.’
‘No, that’s not why I’m calling. This picture in the newspaper, which says Anna Desroches in the caption, is not a picture of Anna Desroches. This is not the Anna I knew and treated. She looks like Anna, but it’s not Anna.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘I’m texting you the photo that’s in the newspaper, which reads Anna Desroches.’ Ellen finished the sentence, and Maggie’s text alert chimed.
‘Hold on a sec, okay?’ Maggie put Ellen on speaker, then scrolled to her texts. On her phone screen was a photo of Anna, slightly pixelated. Just looking at it hurt Maggie’s heart. ‘Yes, that’s Anna.’
‘No, it’s not. That’s my point. The girl identified as Anna Desroches in the newspaper is not the girl that I know as Anna Desroches. Or that we know as Anna Desroches at Congreve. As I say, she looks similar, but it’s not Anna.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Maggie couldn’t understand what she was being told.