But she couldn't.
He had touched the throbbing nerve that had been torturing her since word of the death warrant had reached her, and the pain had blossomed into an all-consuming agony. None of the words she so easily tossed about had really expressed what it was that was hurting her.
She had helped sentence a man to death, and she hadn't done one little thing to prevent it. She hadn't once spoken up where it might have counted. She hadn't even refused to be a party to the case. Instead she had gone along in cowardly cooperation, always reassuring herself that at some point the system would see what she saw, and John Otis would not be sent to death. For the last five years, she had promised herself that one of his appeals would triumph.
Instead, his death warrant had been signed, and now, when it was too late to save him, she didn't think she was going to be able to live with herself ever again. She was guilty of the worst possible crime of conscience, the crime of silence. The crime of going along. The crime of expecting others to do what she didn't have the gumption to do herself.
And there was no way to make it better.
“You can't blame yourself,” Seamus said. He lifted a hand and stroked her hair gently. “Sweetie, even if you'd shot off your mouth until you got fired, the case would have gone forward. You're right, it was a political hot potato. No amount of protest would have kept it from going to trial. What you did or didn't do had no effect on the outcome.”
She sucked in a large gasp of air and pulled her head away from his shoulder. She couldn't stand him right now. Rationalization was an ugly thing, and no matter how he rationalized for her, there was no escaping the fact that she had failed in her ethical duty as a lawyer and her moral responsibility as a human being.
She turned away and tossed the French toast onto the plates, then switched off the stove. When she turned again to face him, with a plate in each hand, her face was as composed as a stone sculpture. “You like syrup, don't you?”
He nodded, watched her closely, as if he were afraid she was going to explode into a million pieces of screaming, deadly shrapnel.
She carried the plates to the table, set them down, then moved briskly to get silverware and more coffee for them. When at last she sat facing him, she spread her napkin on her lap and kept her eyes fixed on her plate.
“Delicious,” Seamus remarked several mouthfuls later.
“Thank you.”
He used the edge of the fork to slice off another piece of toast. “So,” he said slowly, “what was the
last
straw?”
She looked up. “What do you mean?”
“You said the verdict was the next-to-last straw.”
“Oh.” She turned her head to the side, looking at the bow window, wishing it weren't night so she could see the small garden that always gave her a sense of peace. “Well, it was nothing, really. I was assigned a felony case. The charge was battery on a law enforcement officer.”
She glanced his way, giving him a wry smile. “Around the courthouse, do you know what the conventional wisdom is about Batt-LEO? They say it means the cop used excessive force and is trying to cover it up.”
He grimaced. “I won't say it never happens.”
“Oh, it happens all right. And I had a case of it. The defendant was covered with bruises that competent medical authority said could only have happened if he'd been hit by a heavy, blunt instrument or dropped from a height of six feet. The cops said they never touched him, that all they did was wrestle him to the ground. They said the bruises were already there, and that the defendant complained about them when he got out of the car, even though a half dozen witnesses testified he'd been just fine a couple of hours before. After the beating the guy couldn't even walk. It was so bad they took him to the emergency room.
“What's more, the defendant's companion backed up his story that the cop just started whaling on him. Nor were the cops trying to arrest the guy. He'd merely been a passenger in a vehicle stopped for speeding. So why would this guy get in a fight with the cops?”
“It happens.”
“Maybe. But it also turns out the cop and the defendant have a long, unpleasant social history.”
He nodded. “Not so good.”
“That's what I thought. Anyway, the cop was adamant the guy was drunk and hit him, but insisted he never hit back. The cop's partner was so vague on what happened that it was downright suspicious. So I refused to prosecute the case.”
“And then?”
“They turned it over to someone else and the guy got four years for hitting the cop. So I quit. I couldn't stomach it anymore. Cops lie and juries believe them. I've seen it time and again.”
“It happens,” he said. “I won't deny it. Cops are just people, and some are more ethical than others.”
“Yeah.” She shook her head. “The problem is, they're supposed to be
better.
They're supposed to be upholding the law.”
“I won't argue with that.” He stirred a piece of French toast around in a puddle of syrup, then put his fork down. “I can see why you got disillusioned.”
She shrugged a shoulder and pushed her own plate aside. Her appetite had died somewhere during her discourse on the Otis case. “My fault. I was too damn idealistic when I got out of law school. I should have known that human nature would get in the way. So how's your dad? Did he get into treatment?”
“By eleven o'clock this morning. He actually seemed glad to go.”
“Maybe he was. Living with your disapproval isn't easy.”
He winced, and the look he gave her was pained.” I suppose you know all about that.”
“I suppose I do.”
He sighed and shoved his plate away. “I guess I deserve that.”
She shrugged again.
“So you see me as a self-righteous son of a bitch?”
“I wouldn't say self-righteous. But you are always
right.”
“Same difference.”
She shook her head and lifted her coffee mug, cradling it in both hands.
“Look, I was wrong, the way I reacted to your doubts about Otis. I'm not saying the guy wasn't guilty as sin. I'm just saying that I was wrong how I responded to you. I assumed you were making all those arguments at work, for one thing. And I assumed the reason you were making them to me was that you wanted me to bolster your belief that the guy was guilty. I thought I was being
supportive.”
She looked at him in disbelief.
He held up a hand, as if to say,
I know it sounds stupid.
All of a sudden she gave him a sad smile. “I wonder how many other times one of us was guilty of bad assumptions.”
“Damned if I know.”
Carey continued to look at him, feeling a terrible ache for what might have been. Too late. So many things in life came too late. “I'm sorry, but I didn't get through to the IRS today.”
“Doesn't matter. Whenever is probably soon enough. The old man is so deep in shit right now, he needs a snorkel.”
“Why are you so angry with him, Seamus? Just because of his drinking?”
“Isn't that enough?”
She cocked her head. “I wouldn't have thought so. I'd have expected you to feel pity for him, not this kind of anger.”
He looked down, visibly hesitating. Then he said, “Well, he was driving the car when my daughter was killed.”
Carey felt a current of shock run down her spine. It was as if the world suddenly went still and cold. “I thought—I thought there was a drunk driver. I thought your wife was driving when they were hit.”
He shook his head. “Danny was driving. He was visiting for the weekend, and she asked him to drive because Seana was having convulsions from a high fever. Mary didn't want to be driving because she couldn't watch the baby in case she stopped breathing.”
She nodded. “It makes sense.” She waited for him to say what he always said:
I should have been there.
But Seamus had been on a stakeout, and matters had apparently happened so rapidly that Mary hadn't even tried to get ahold of him. He blamed himself for that, and had never stopped blaming himself for it. His constant, heavy burden of guilt had been one of the things to come between them.
But he didn't say he should have been there. Not this time. Instead he continued. “Danny had had a couple of beers earlier. He always had a couple after he finished work. The blood test showed he wasn't legally drunk at the time of the accident but …” He looked away.
“But maybe he could have reacted faster,” she supplied for him. She could understand how that might plague him.
“Mary didn't put Seana in her car seat,” Seamus continued. “I guess she was in too much of a hurry to go, and didn't want to pull it out of her car. I don't know.”
And suddenly, for the first time, Carey understood why Mary Rourke had hanged herself a few short weeks after the accident. The woman had blamed herself. The baby had probably died only because she hadn't been in the car seat when the drunk driver had hit them. The child had probably been flung violently around in the car, ripped right out of her mother's arms, most likely. Maybe even thrown through the windshield. Danny and Mary had walked away with minor injuries, but the baby had died. And then Mary had killed herself.
She reached out suddenly, covering Seamus's hand with hers and squeezing, trying to convey her sympathy. For the first time she understood the full magnitude of the load he was carrying. It was far more complicated than Seamus's previous explanation that his child had died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, and that his wife had hanged herself from grief. And all of it might have been avoided if Seamus had been home that night. No wonder he felt so guilty.
And now
she
felt guilty, too. How different might things have been if she had just once asked him for details about what had happened to his family? But she hadn't dared ask, because she had feared treading in places where she wasn't welcome. Because she had feared raking up the cooling ashes of his grief. Because she had feared causing him more pain. Because she had known him to be reserved about things he felt deeply, and she had feared his reaction to her curiosity. God, what a fool and a coward she had been!
So she had never really understood what he was suffering, and because she hadn't understood, she had come to resent it.
“I'm so sorry,” she said, speaking the inadequate words because there was nothing else she
could
say.
His face had taken on a tension she recognized. He was struggling with strong emotion. “It was bad enough about the baby,” he said, his voice thick. “Bad enough. But I didn't realize—I was so wrapped up in my own grief—if I had just known—” He shook his head. “I should have realized she was suicidal.”
“Did she tell you she was? Did she say anything at all about it?”
“I don't know. That's what's so goddamn awful about it, Carey! I don't know. I was in a fog, and I just don't know!” He stood up suddenly.
“I'd better go. You'll be okay, won't your?”
Yes, of course …” She rose with him and followed him to the door, feeling a desperate need to do something to help him, but she didn't know what. “Seamus? Will you be all right?”
He paused at the door and looked down at her. “I'll never be all right again. But I've survived these seven years, so I guess I'll just continue surviving.”
He opened the door and stepped out. “I'll pick you up on Sunday morning to go to Starke, okay?”
“Okay.”
She watched him walk to his car, then closed the door, locking the night out. It was a symbolic gesture, and it didn't do a damn bit of good.
16 Days
T
here were times when John William Otis was convinced that he was the only sane person in the world. He'd felt that way throughout most of his childhood, a period he refused to remember because it only brought pain. He had lived in an insane world where he had been tortured and starved by the man who had given him life. He figured no amount of thinking was ever going to make him understand that irony, so he just left it alone.
He also figured one of the sanest things he'd ever done in his life was kill his father. As he'd approached manhood, as his body had started to change, he'd seen the way his father was beginning to look at his baby brother.
He'd worried about it, trying to figure out what he could do to protect Jamie, but after all the abuse he'd suffered, he hadn't grown strong or big, and there was no way he could have bested the man in a fight. So he'd thought and thought, and no answers had come to him. It had never occurred to him that he might turn to a teacher or a neighbor for help. At some point in his childhood, he'd begun to believe that all the adults in the world knew exactly what his father was doing to him and to Jamie, and that they approved. It had seemed the whole world was on his father's side.
Of course, he knew better now, but by the time he had learned that he was wrong, it had been too late. He'd already killed the man, and he had never once regretted it because he had saved Jamie once and for all. Never again had he needed to throw himself between his father and brother to spare Jamie the blows of the fists and belt. Never again would he have to draw his father's wrath onto his own head to save his baby brother. For that he would gladly have gone to the chair.
Nobody had been more surprised than young John Otis when he had been acquitted of murdering his father.
For a while, during the years that he had lived with Harvey and Linda Kline, the rest of the world had seemed to become sane. For the very first time in his life, he had had someone to look after
him,
someone who really seemed to care about him.
Then they had been killed, and the world had gone insane again. Not that he thought his conviction had been crazy. No, if the jury really believed he had done it, then the death penalty was the sanest choice they could have made.
It didn't even strike him as insane that he'd been convicted of a crime he didn't commit. It was his own fault he'd been convicted, anyway. He could have placed the blame where it really belonged, but he refused to. He let them think what they would, and had no one to blame but himself.