A Sister's Forgiveness (21 page)

Matt had given her a look of pity and frustration. “I have homework,” he’d said quietly and gone to his room.

Earlier that morning, he had come to the breakfast table, gobbled down his food without a word, and then headed out the door.

“Do you want me to tell Sadie anything for you?” Emma had asked.

Matt had hesitated but not turned around. “Tell her that…,” he began, but then he shook his head and left, closing the back door softly behind him.

Emma had gone after him, but by the time she reached the door, he had already mounted his bike and taken off for school. “Matt,” she had called.

“I’ll be late,” he shouted back as he turned a corner and rode out of sight.

She shook off the memory as a side door opened and a female guard escorted Sadie into the courtroom. She wore the faded blue jumpsuit and shackles on her ankles. Her hair was down and fell across her face as the guard led her to the defense table.

Sadie nervously tucked her hair behind her ear, and Emma sucked in a breath when she saw that Sadie’s cheek was bruised and she had a fresh cut over one eye. It took a moment for Emma to realize that Lars had gotten up out of his seat and moved to the railing. The bailiff started toward him just as Sadie said, “I’m okay, Dad. It’s okay.”

“Sir, please take your seat, or I’ll have to ask you to leave,” the bailiff instructed.

“Give us a minute,” Joseph said. The bailiff nodded. Joseph opened the swinging gate and took Lars’s arm as he escorted him back to his seat. The attorney sat in a chair next to Emma. “They tried calling you, and when they didn’t reach you, they called me. Sadie was attacked late yesterday at the center. She was treated in the infirmary. The girl responsible will be removed to another facility.”

“We need to take her home,” Emma pleaded. “Please, help us.”

“I’m working on it. Just promise me that you’ll stay calm, okay?” His eyes were on Lars.

“What kind of place is that?” he asked through clenched teeth. “I thought it was a place where children would be safe.”

Joseph looked down. “It’s a juvenile detention center, Mr. Keller. That means that there are going to be kids there who have problems. Some of them unfortunately believe that the only way to protect themselves is to lash out.”

“What happened?” Emma asked.

“I’m not clear on all the details, but the girls were at dinner, and Sadie had bowed her head to pray. For some reason that set another girl off. She grabbed Sadie by her hair, and when she did, I assume Sadie resisted.” He shrugged as if Emma should be able to figure out the rest for herself.

“Sadie would not have resisted,” Emma told him. “It is not our way. She would have given that girl anything she wanted.”

Joseph looked skeptical. “Perhaps you underestimate…”

Emma bit her lip. “I know my daughter. Will the other girl be punished?”

“I guarantee it,” Joseph replied, and Emma realized that he thought that this was exactly what she wanted to hear.

“Without discussion? Without a chance to explain herself, to apologize?”

“Apparently the whole thing was caught on video camera,” Joseph explained. “She hit Sadie in the face and then pinned her down and punched her repeatedly. She’ll be here later today and probably be sent to a more secure facility. She definitely won’t be back where Sadie is.”

Emma wondered if Joseph truly believed that somehow this news would comfort her. He was talking about another child in trouble. Surely there was a better way other than that of moving the girl from one locked facility to another. She glanced across the aisle at the two women she had overheard talking outside the courtroom and locked eyes with the woman she was certain was this girl’s grandmother. The two of them exchanged a look that spoke volumes before the other woman looked away.

“What happens now?” Lars was asking Joseph. “I mean, now that the judge knows that Sadie is not safe there.”

Emma saw the way that Joseph studied his scuffed loafers for a minute before answering, and she knew that he had no good news to offer them. Their nightmare was going to continue, and their only recourse was prayer.

“Go do your best,” she said softly as she touched the sleeve of Joseph’s suit jacket.

The bailiff tapped Joseph on the shoulder at the same moment and nodded toward the judge’s bench.

“The judge is coming in,” Joseph told them. “You’ll be all right?” Again he focused on Lars.

Lars took Emma’s arm as the two of them sat down and the bailiff called out, “All rise.” The judge entered the room and took his place in the high-backed chair that seemed to Emma suddenly to resemble a throne.

The judge studied some papers that the bailiff handed him and then looked at the state’s attorney and nodded. It struck Emma that he had not once so much as glanced at Sadie—had not seen her bruised face, had not noticed the way she sat with her hands folded and her head bowed.
Look at her
, Emma silently pleaded as she stared at the judge.

She was a good girl who had made a horrible error in judgment. There was no need to sentence her—she had already been sentenced by her actions. Every day for the rest of her life she would have to live with what she had caused. Wasn’t that enough? For this judge, this court? Wasn’t that enough for God?

Emma made a strangled sound as she tried to breathe around the fear that gripped her. The judge glanced her way and frowned, and Lars coughed loudly as he pulled out his handkerchief to blow his nose, drawing the judge’s attention to himself. The judge paused for just a moment as he glanced from Lars and Emma to Sadie and back again. A hint of surprise crossed his features as he returned his gaze to Emma, taking in her plain dress and prayer covering. Then he turned to Mr. Johnson and instructed him to present the case for the state.

Unexpectedly, Emma felt a fleeting shadow that she named hope. The man had seen them—had really looked at them and Sadie for the first time. Surely that was a sign—the first positive sign since that terrible rainy morning. Emma closed her eyes and sent up a silent prayer of thanks.

Chapter 23

Matthew

T
he world had gone crazy as far as Matt was concerned. How was it possible that his life had gone from boring and normal to crazy upside down? Stuff had been coming at him like the rocks hurled at him by a bully when he rode through his neighborhood after taking a shortcut on the way home one day.

Tessa was dead—as in
d-e-a-d
. Grasping that alone was beyond huge.

Then add in the fact that his sister was in jail—had been fingerprinted and everything, according to what a kid at school had told him. He’d actually gone to the main downtown post office one day and studied the wanted posters for any sign of Sadie’s face. One of the kids who had once been his friend had insisted he’d seen her mug shot there.

Add to that the fact that his parents barely talked anymore, at least not to him. They talked to each other, usually in whispers that stopped the minute he came into the room. Then they would give him these fake smiles that didn’t really reach their eyes, and his dad would ruffle his hair, and one of them would ask some dumb question like how football practice or school had gone that day.

They didn’t care about football—his dad didn’t even approve of contact sports. And neither one of them knew the first thing about how the game was played or about the plays that his uncle Geoff was truly brilliant at crafting to beat the opposing team.

Uncle Geoff
.

Matt rested his chin on his palm and stared out the window of the small schoolhouse. What had he done to make Uncle Geoff so mad? For the umpteenth time, he went over every move he’d made since the funeral. He’d at least been able to pinpoint the timeline to that being when his uncle had started to ignore him or turn away and pretend to be busy with his players or something else whenever Matt was around.

Before then they’d had a routine. After school, Matt rode his bike to the academy where he would stand on the sidelines while Geoff ran the team through their after-school practice. When that ended, the two of them would run laps around the quarter-mile track that surrounded the football field. On Saturdays, Matt always went over to his uncle’s house for lunch and to watch college games on TV—either football or basketball, depending on the season. Tessa often joined them, but Sadie never did.

Matt didn’t mind having Tessa there. Every once in a while, she would make a comment about a player or play that actually made sense. Sadie, on the other hand, would have wanted to chatter all the way through the game about the uniforms, the school colors, the fact that getting grass stains out of football uniforms had to be a real chore.

He missed Tessa.

He even missed Sadie. The house was too quiet without her. Meals were eaten in silence until he decided to start filling the silence with babble about sports. Never mind that any information that Matt had about how a college team or professional team was doing came from his reading the sports section of the Sarasota
Herald Tribune
instead of from conversations with his uncle.

Every day on his way home from school, Matt would ride his bike past a coffee shop where he knew he would find a used copy of the sports section. He would fold the paper and put it in his backpack and spend the time between finishing his after-school chores and supper reading up on the various teams. It amazed him that his folks never seemed to catch on that he was suddenly able to spout off statistics he’d never shared before. Clearly they either weren’t listening or they weren’t nearly as smart as he had always thought they were.

But, on the other hand, these were tough times for their family, and maybe his going on and on about sports was the one thing that he could do to help bring things back to normal again. Of course, that wasn’t likely to happen as long as Sadie was in jail. What if the judge sent her away for real? Right now she was in a place called a juvenile detention center in a town just a few miles away. His folks were allowed to visit her for half an hour at a time four days a week, and Sadie got one fifteen-minute phone call a week.

But he wasn’t allowed to go along for the visits. He was just a kid. It did help some when he’d heard his mom say that she didn’t like to think of either one of her children being in “a place like that,” and if he never had to see it, all the better. But he wanted to see it. He wanted to see Sadie. He wanted to ask her what it was like in there. And more to the point—now that his uncle Geoff wasn’t talking to him—he needed Sadie. She had always been the backup to Uncle Geoff—the one Matt could go to with his questions and problems when his uncle wasn’t available. She’d never laughed at him or made him feel dumb. In spite of the way she always seemed to be thinking about herself, Sadie was a good listener. He missed that.

But he was still mad at her. At school everybody—even the teachers—were talking about what Sadie had done. His friends had suddenly decided that they had other things to do whenever he asked about going somewhere with them or having them come to his house. She’d ruined everything for everybody.

Then there was Tessa. It was like after she was buried nobody wanted to talk about her. Were they supposed to pretend she never existed, or what? Is that the way grown-ups handled death? He tried to remember the times somebody old—like his grandparents’ age—had died. It seemed to him that people couldn’t stop talking about the dead person, telling stories about funny things that person had done or said.

Tessa had made them laugh plenty of times.

“Matt!”

Matt blinked and looked up at his teacher. Miss Kurtz did not look happy, but then she rarely did. “Ma’am?”

“I asked if you had completed your English assignment.”

Matt tried to cover his paper—the one he hadn’t yet started much less finished. “Almost,” he hedged.

Miss Kurtz held out her hand. “Time’s up.”

Reluctantly, Matt handed her the paper. She scanned it and frowned. “You only answered the first three questions, Matthew,” she said, and he didn’t think it was his imagination that her voice had gotten softer. “What’s going on?”