Ring of Truth

  “Spring break.”

  That’s right. I forget that our own children get a spring break, too,- it just seems like it’s only everybody else’s kids who do. Herb’s a teacher, so that explains his presence, too. When I start to tell her about the canvas bag—and George—she makes the children leave, and calls their father in to hear it.

  “You can take the sign down now,” I tell them, at the end.

  “My God,” Herb says, looking somberly at his wife. “It could have been one of us.”

  “It could have been you, Herb,” she says. “If you’d tried to stop her.”

  Like me, they’re assuming it was Artemis McGregor.

  “Mind if I talk to Jenny?” I ask them.

  “Tell her what happened,” Herb says, looking grim. “Maybe this will scare a little sense and honesty into that girl.”

  “No!” his wife objects. “She’ll blame herself, Herb. Jenny will think that if she hadn’t taken the bag and kept it a secret, that poor man might not have been killed. That’s a terrible thing for a child to think.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “She’s just a child! Jenny didn’t hurt anybody, Herb. That awful woman did, she’s the one to blame. Not our Jenny.”

  Herb may have a point in theory, but his wife’s got the right idea, in my opinion. And there’s no way I’m going to lay that burden of guilt on a ten-year-old. They can tell her what they agree to tell her, but I’m staying out of it.

  * * *

  I have a hard time getting Jenny off to myself, because wherever Jenny goes, a horde of other children follow. I don’t want to arouse her parent’s suspicions and get Jenny into even more trouble with the question I have to ask her. The only way I finally manage it is to exclaim, “Jenny! What have you got in your hair?” Then I grab her by an arm and pull her into the bathroom and lock the door behind us.

  “What’s in my hair?” she cries, racing to look in the mirror.

  I confess there’s nothing and sit down on the edge of the tub to talk to her.

  “Jenny, when you were at my house, you said something funny.”

  “What?”

  “You meant to say ’ring,’ but you said ’rings.’ ”

  She pulls her long red hair down over her face and picks through it as if looking for cooties there. It’s a very effective maneuver, since now I can’t see her face.

  “Jenny?” I reach over and brush her hair back. “Rings?”

  “I don’t know why I said that, I really don’t.”

  “But you remember saying it, do you? That’s interesting. Why would you even remember that unless there was something to it? Look, I’m not mad at you, Jenny, honest, I’m not. And I won’t try to get you in trouble, okay? It’s just that I really need to know why you said ’rings.’ It seemed like a funny kind of mistake.”

  She scratches her head with both hands in a show of frantic thought.

  “Are we locked in here forever unless I tell you?”

  That sounds to me like something somebody would say when they’re dying to confide or confess something and they’re looking for any good excuse to do so.

  “Yes,” I say, solemnly. “Forever. We’ll die in here. We’ll have water, so we’ll last for a while. But no food. And you’re going to get really tired of sleeping in the sink, because I’m taking the bathtub.”

  She giggles.

  “Jenny, please tell me.”

  I can see that this is a struggle for her. She agonizes over it for a few moments and then she says, “I can’t. I promised. I have to talk to Nikki first.”

  Great. Now how am I going to arrange that? Nikki’s mom wants nothing to do with this little terror.

  “Okay,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “Let’s go over there.”

  “Really?” Her eyes widen, and she looks half scared, half thrilled. “Right now? I get to go see Nikki?”

  “If your mom says we can.”

  “Are you going to tell her why?”

  “No, that’s our secret, yours and mine.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  I have no idea, but I unlock the bathroom door anyway.

  Three children are waiting outside. “What’d you have in your hair, Jen?”

  * * *

  We make our escape with a truth, since I wouldn’t want to be setting too horrible an example for the kid. “I need to see Nikki today,” I tell Anne Carmichael. “And I’d like to take Jenny in the car with me to see if they’ll let the girls see each other. Maybe if I’m there, her parents will loosen up a little bit.”

  Anne seems glad of the idea, but she’s afraid of Jenny getting hurt.

  “I won’t, Mom, I promise.”

  Anne gives me a stern look as though to say, “You promise.”

  * * *

  It turns out to be easier than I have any right to deserve.

  The Modestos aren’t meanies, after all; at least, they’re not mean enough to make Jenny sit out in the car and not come into their house. Mrs. Modesto even gives her a little hug, and says, “You look so grown-up!” I think I detect a note of hope in her voice. I tell her that I’m collecting a little more information for my book, which is true, and I promise not to upset the girls by making them relive the worst moments of that horrifying day.

  “May I talk to them by themselves?” I ask her.

  “Let’s go to my room!” Nikki offers.

  The girls are shy around each other for about ten seconds. Then intense giggling, hugging, and chattering breaks out. They happily lead me to Nikki’s cubbyhole of a bedroom while they catch up on each other’s toys, friends, lives. I feel happy just being around these two cutie-pies. Best friends reunited, it’s great. Maybe if I had kids I wouldn’t have done this, wouldn’t have sabotaged Nikki’s parents like this. But my excuse is that I don’t know any better, so I get to play God for a day.

  Jenny introduces the topic of our visit by busily whispering in Nikki’s ear. “Psst, psst, psst,” is all I hear as they madly whisper back and forth. Nikki, it seems, needs a bit of persuading.

  “Okay,” she says, at last, looking at me. “But you got to promise not to tell, Ms. Lightfoot, you’ve really really got to promise, and you’ve got to really mean it, because I’d be in really really big trouble if my mom finds out.”

  “Me, too,” Jenny asserts.

  There’s sure a lot of promising going on today.

  “Cross my heart,” I tell them, and demonstrate it.

  “It’s in my backpack,” Nikki says, wide-eyed and still whispering. “Do you want to see them now?”

  Them?

  “Please.”

  “Okay, but close your eyes first.”

  I obey, and as my eyes are closed I hear excited whisperings and the rasp of a zipper opening. Then I feel something soft plopped into my lap.

  “You can open your eyes now,” Nikki says.

  I do that, and then I look down and see a black velvet pouch bag.

  “May I open it?”

  “Yes!” They giggle and squeal and jump up and down in anticipation.

  I stick two fingers down in the bag and push the sides of it back and then I turn it upside down, dumping the contents into my lap.

  “Oh, my God,” I whisper.

  The girls are besides themselves with delight at my reaction.

  There are seven wedding and engagement rings in my lap.

  There are two sets of women’s engagement and wedding rings and three that look like wedding bands for a man. With the one that the crime scene unit found on the day of the murder and the one that Jenny gave me earlier, that makes nine rings found at the scene of a murder. I might have expected many things, but never this, not even after Jenny’s telltale slip of the tongue.

  “Where were they?” I ask the girls, letting them see how impressed I am.

  “In the tower” Jenny answers proudly. Then it sinks in that they’re not going to get to keep them. “Are you going to take them?”


  “I have to, girls. They may be evidence in a murder case.”

  They nod, sadly understanding. But their material loss is greatly ameliorated by the fact that each has got her best friend back.

  “Nikki,” I say, “I thought you didn’t go up into the tower.”

  “Oh, I didn’t! Jenny gave them to me.”

  What a generous gesture, I’m thinking, for Jenny to keep the boring old boat bag with its mundane contents and to give the glamorous, glittery rings to her pal. But canny Jenny quickly dashes any such idealization of herself.

  “Yeah. I was afraid my mom would find out.”

  “My mom would never search my room,” Nikki says.

  “She must trust you a lot,” I surmise.

  Nikki, the quiet, timid one, grins. “I don’t know. But I always keep it clean so she won’t have any excuse to mess with my stuff.”

  The girls giggle, and I am left with the impression that in my manuscript I made Nikki Modesto a little too good to be true. Like everybody else, I fell for those big brown innocent eyes that are now dancing with even more mischievous glee than Jenny Carmichael’s blue eyes are.

  “You two are a pair,” I inform them.

  They fling themselves at me, and I get sandwiched in a furious hug.

  “How did you end up with one ring, Jenny?” I ask her.

  “Oh, when I found them?” she says. “I took two of them out and put them on, but one of them dropped off my finger. Nikki let me keep the other one, since I let her have all the rest.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying this pouch was in the canvas bag?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she says, confidentially. “It was all there.”

  My heart gives a lurch at that moment, because I am thinking: What’s Artemis going to think when she opens the bag and her rings aren’t there? And, more urgently; what’s she going to do?

  * * *

  It’s great, it’s sweet that the girls are back together. But now I’m left with their strange and mysterious treasure. Nine rings. Just like in J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic trilogy of fantasy novels with its famous poem with that ominous last line . . . “One ring to find them all, and in the darkness bind them.”

  It strikes me that the rings provide me with the perfect bait to go fishing again, but not so carelessly as last time. In fact, forget fishing. This time I will set something more like a bear trap. And nobody’s going to get hurt. It’s just my reputation that may take a beating.

  “Deb?” Using my cell phone in my car, I catch her at work, at the Bahia Beach newspaper offices. “How would you like to have an exclusive story about a murder that happened in this city last Friday night?”

  Susanna

  14

  There are several interviews left on the tape in my car’s stereo, and so, on my way to meet Deb at the Sun-Journal, I play the next one. It begins with me asking defense attorney Tammi Golding the same question I asked her client, Bob Wing.

  “Why Steven Orbach, Tammi? Out of all the killers on death row, why would you and Bob and the church pick him to save?”

  Her answer is more practical, if not necessarily any more convincing than Bob Wing’s was. “Because it was a rush to judgment, Marie. Consider: a young woman gets killed. There’s a known murderer on the premises. The cops are over-eager, especially since the victim is related to one of their own. Voilà: they’ve got their man.”

  “Well, lord, they’d be remiss if they didn’t suspect him, Tammi,” I hear myself say on the tape. “Wouldn’t they?”

  “Sure, any reasonable person might have suspected Stevie, but strange things do happen, you know. It is possible to have a convicted murderer on the premises of a crime he didn’t do. And last I checked, in this country you still aren’t supposed to be convicted for a crime you didn’t do, no matter how numerous or heinous the previous ones you did do. And every citizen ought to be grateful for that. Or some time when they’re in Kmart they could find themselves arrested for a crime just because they happened to be standing there when one is committed, and the cops run them through the computer and find out they have a previous arrest on a parking ticket. ‘Ah-ha,’ the cops say, ‘here’s a proven criminal, let’s arrest her for this one, too.’ That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. There is, theoretically, a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.”

  “Didn’t they prove that Stevie killed her?”

  “They may think they did. We don’t.”

  “So, basically, you think Stevie Orbach is in jail because he killed his mother,” I say slowly, trying to understand what she’s telling me. “You think that because he did that, his guilt in Allison’s death was just assumed. And that since they couldn’t keep him in prison on the one murder, because he was a juvenile at the time, they’d just keep him on the other charge. Well, Tammi, a lot of people wouldn’t object to that very much; that’d be just fine with them. A guy kills his mother, he shouldn’t get out anyway. That’s how their thinking goes. He gets arrested and sentenced to death for a later murder he didn’t commit . . . so what?”

  “I hope these are rhetorical questions, Marie.” On the tape, I can hear a wry smile in her voice. “ ‘So what,’ you ask? So is this still America or not?”

  “I believe it is, even here in Florida. But, Tammi, it’s also true that in America, if you’ve got the evidence, you’ll likely win the case. Regardless of whether the cops rushed it . . . didn’t they prove it, ultimately?”

  “Reasonable people could disagree.”

  “Wasn’t it his semen?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “So he raped her.”

  “Not necessarily, Marie. I will stipulate that they certainly had sex.”

  “She was drunk, Tammi. You call that consent?”

  “I’m not calling it anything, including rape. We have semen, but no sign of struggle or injury.”

  “But his hair and fiber—”

  “All over her. Yes. That happens when people have sex,” she says, dryly. “But they never found any of his hair or any fiber in her apartment, and that’s where she died.”

  “Really? Not in his rooms?”

  “No. Really.”

  “How’d the prosecution get around that, Tammi?”

  “They didn’t have to. He had some screwy defense attorney who allowed Stevie to allude to his previous conviction, so then the prosecution could pounce on it.”

  “But he did it as a juvenile. Can that be revealed in court?”

  “That’s been one of our grounds for appeal, but we always get turned down on that, because the higher courts say it didn’t turn the verdict. They say the preponderance of the evidence would have convicted him anyway.”

  “Tammi, my mind registers what you’re saying, but I’m still snagged back there on the dead mother. Stevie is one hell of an unsympathetic cause célèbre.”

  “American justice is built on protecting the least among us.”

  “That’s what your minister told me, too, in his way.”

  Again, I hear a smile in her voice. “In his way, yes.”

  “But what about Allison’s poor parents, Tammi? They just want Stevie to get what they believe he justly has coming to him. This crusade of yours just kills them.”

  Her tone is acid. “I hear that crap all the time in death-penalty cases. People whine, ‘But what about the family? They’ll feel better when he’s dead.’ My answer to that is—okay, then let’s kill him today. And then we discover tomorrow that he didn’t do it. So how is that going to make the family feel, hm? Where’s their vaunted peace of mind then? Where’s the comfort in knowing that they pressed for the execution of an innocent man . . . and . . . that whoever really killed their loved one is still at large. I’d like somebody to explain to me how that will make a family feel better.”

  “Stevie’s no innocent, not really.”

  “Let me tell you something, Marie. I know of a study done of kids who’ve killed a parent. In the cases that were analyzed of kids up to
their late teens, they couldn’t find a single incident that wasn’t preceded by years of severe child abuse. Not one, unless there were drugs involved, or the kid was older. You think young kids kill their parents for fun? Casually? For no reason? Kids love their parents, in spite of everything; they’re dependent on their parents and they’ll defend their parents; they’ll fight to go back to bad parents, just because that’s the only mom or dad they’ve got. It has to be horrible at home before a kid will murder a parent, Marie. Listen, Stevie was fourteen when he killed his mother. She was a known abuser in a big way. Maybe he’s a monster as a result of that, although I personally don’t think so. I think he’s a young man who killed the sadistic guard of his own personal prison camp. Lots of prisoners of war might have killed their guards if they’d had a chance, and we’d throw them a ticker-tape parade. We know they’re not a danger to anybody else in society. So maybe Stevie didn’t kill Allison, and wouldn’t ever have killed anybody but his mother.”

  “But the sex . . .”

  “She was seventeen and drunk. Stevie was twenty-one, and he’d also been drinking that night. It makes them young and horny and stupid, but it doesn’t mean he killed her.”

  “Okay, then who killed her?”

  “That is what the cops were supposed to find out.”

  “What does Bob’s arrest do to your efforts on Stevie’s behalf?”

  She sighs, and it’s quite audible on the tape. It’s an uncharacteristic gesture of discouragement on the part of this normally indefatigable attorney. “It’s over. We haven’t quite exhausted all of our legal appeals, but we’re out of money in our defense fund. I’m working nearly for free, but there are a lot of other expenses. Artie would throw in some money, but her husband says they’ve got her legal defense to pay for. I can’t argue with that, since I’m one of the ones they’re paying. Plus, the death-penalty committee at the church voted to divert the funds away from Steve to Bob. Against Bob’s furious objections, I might add. Before this happened, Bob was supposed to see the governor to plead our case for Stevie, but that’s dead, too. Name me a governor—a politician—who would even be seen shaking his hand now and I’ll show you somebody who’ll lose his next election. Or hers.”