Injustice (13 page)

I walked into Upton's office. Cicely was at her desk doing a jigsaw puzzle. I looked at the box. It was a picture of kittens. “You like cats, Sis?” I said.

“I'm allergic.”

“You like puzzles, though, don't you?”

She didn't answer.

Upton said, “She's a woman of few words today, aren't you, Sis?”

She didn't answer, just kept working.

“She gets engrossed,” Upton said.

“Jimmy Mailing,” I said to Upton.

“I'm ready for him.” Upton took a legal pad from his desk and thumbed through page after page of questions. Jimmy Mailing was scheduled to appear before the grand jury in about twenty minutes. We'd given up trying to convict him of something; now we were hoping he could tell us who arranged the payoffs, who made them, and who received them. Jimmy would be given immunity for his testimony, so he couldn't plead the Fifth. The info Calvin Dunbar had provided was fine as far as it went, but Calvin's knowledge of the facts was narrow. He was just a legislator who'd taken a bribe; he knew little about the larger workings of the scandal. With Bud Billman gone, Jimmy Mailing probably knew more than anyone.

Upton packed his briefcase. “You stay here, Sis,” he said. “Mom is going to pick you up in a little while. Okay?”

“Bye, Dad. Bye, Nickel-pickle.”

In the elevator, Upton said, “I think she's doing better. Just, you know, bit by bit.”

“That's wonderful.”

“I mean, you know, nobody expects miracles. Right?”

“She's so sweet,” I said. “Have you guys had any luck finding a group home yet?”

He shrugged. “She's such an easy keeper. I hate to.”

I couldn't tell whether he didn't want to talk about Cicely or was focused on getting ready for questioning Jimmy Mailing.

Upton's footsteps and mine echoed down the courthouse hallway. It was stark but for several benches along one wall, and I saw there a familiar solitary figure: Kendall Vance, Jimmy Mailing's lawyer. Kendall stood. He smiled pleasantly and said, “Mr. Mailing has been held up.”

“For how long?”

“Difficult to say.”

“Do you expect him at all?”

“I have no reason to think Mr. Mailing will fail to appear.”

Upton said, “You have no idea where Mailing is, do you?”

Kendall ran a hand over his knobby head. “Mr. Mailing has not been in touch this morning. But it's probably just traffic.”

“I'm sure that's it,” I said. I went into the courtroom, followed by the other two. The eighteen grand jurors sat waiting for something to happen, and they waited another hour until the judge released them for the day. A warrant was issued to pick up Jimmy Mailing and detain him for contempt.

“Golly darn,” Upton said on our way back up in the elevator. He fanned the pages of his yellow legal pad—all his questions there in tidy penmanship and arranged by subject. “I was so friggin' prepared.”

Tina, Barn, and I went to the lake for the weekend. We had planned to go the weekend following July 4, but there was the murder and
everything in its wake, and then Tina and I were struggling to catch up on all the details of work and life that had gotten brushed aside. Now, mid-October, we were finally getting away.

Flora and I had bought the property at the lake when we were first married. We lived in the little cabin there for a few years. Flora was a full-time mom to our son, Toby, and I was the assistant DA, soon to become acting DA, in that small rural county. We moved to the city after Toby died and Flo and I split up. We built a second cabin for Flora, and I kept the original one.

Tina was quiet for most of the drive. Usually, she and I would chatter through the two hour trip, but not this time. I kept thinking she was asleep, but every time the music ended, she'd pop out the CD and put in a new one.

Barnaby slept the whole way. It was after eleven at night when we arrived. Barn woke up when Tina carried him into the cabin. I unloaded the car while Tina snuggled Barnaby in the bed until he fell back asleep. I fed ZZ, then he and I walked out for a quick look at the lake in moonlight, then back inside and into bed. I'd hoped to lure Tina over for some snuggling of our own, but she was apparently asleep, too. ZZ jumped onto the bed, turned some circles on the quilt, and curled up beside me for the night.

In the morning I made a fire in the woodstove. Tina made coffee while Barn and I went outside. He was on my shoulders, ordering me this way and that way. We walked out on the dock and peered into the water to see if we could spot any trout. The air was cold and smelled like fall, that combination of sodden leaves and wood smoke. It was the time in autumn—that psychological moment—when the lake goes from looking cool and inviting to seeming cold and thick and concealing.

Tina called us for breakfast. Barn zoomed inside, legs and arms pumping.

Lizzy and Ethan arrived in early afternoon. Henry showed up a bit later. They all put their overnight stuff in Flora's cabin. Hers had
two bedrooms separate from the main room, while mine was one common space.

Ethan, Henry, and I went to pick up supplies in town. It's a small town where a dingy consignment shop occupies the plate-glass storefront that Woolworth's vacated several decades ago. The grocery store has changed owners and names half a dozen times. But the hardware and “dry goods” store has been a constant. The rural hub—the bigger town where you go if you need anything more than bare essentials—is forty miles to the south.

Henry and Ethan went to get beer and a few extra groceries while I went to the hardware store; some of the boards in our dock needed replacing. I collected what I needed and waited at the checkout behind a sixtyish woman with a cart full of painting supplies. She didn't look rural. Her clothes were stylish, her hair and makeup neither wholly ignored nor overly exuberant. She surveyed the store and her fellow shoppers with the inquisitive eye of a tourist.

“Are you a visitor?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” she said. “Born here, but I moved away years ago. My husband and I just bought a summer place over on Tamarack Lake.”

I knew Tamarack Lake. Pricy homes. Some developer had bought up lakeshore, put in a road lined with faux-colonial gas lamps, and built a handful of vacation homes. There were rumors of a golf course coming soon.

“Nick Davis,” I said, offering my hand.

She shook but didn't let go of my hand. She peered at me over her half-frames, puzzling about something. She seemed to have gotten stuck in a cerebral cul-de-sac.

“And you are . . . ?” I said. I slid my hand out of hers.

“Yes, I see it now,” she said. “Older and grayer, like all of us, but I see you. I, I recognize you. You were the lawyer. DA. Prosecutor. Whatever.”

“Should I know . . .”

She laughed. It was a confident laugh. “No, you and I didn't have business directly. My business was with your son. I was a nurse. Retired now, but a nurse down at the hospital. Pediatrics.”

A tingle traveled my spine.

“Such a beautiful boy,” she said. “And so happy. So stoic.” She was talking about Toby. He'd had hemophilia. Flora and I would rush him those forty miles to the hospital whenever he started hemorrhaging. “It was my first real job out of nursing school,” the woman said. “Probably that's why I remember so well.”

Toby had been gone for almost thirty years. I think of him as existing nowhere but in my memory, and in Flora's. But here was someone who actually remembered him. It made him real. I found her hand in mine again—my doing, I think, holding it in both my hands while I tried to figure out how to respond. I wanted to know her. I didn't want to let go.

We made a big dinner. Everyone pitched in. I grilled fish outdoors on the barbecue, but it was too cold to eat out there, so we all sat around the big pine-slab table in the cabin. I sat beside Barnaby's booster chair.

“Dad,” Lizzy said, “where are you? You seem, like, far away.”

“Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About?”

“Family,” I said. “How great it is to have us all here.” This was true and false. It
was
great to have us all together, but that wasn't why I was quiet. I was still moved by my encounter at the hardware store. It was more of a feeling than a thought. It was the feeling of something having happened. It was the sense of awakening from a good dream that you can't remember but want to get back to; the feeling of being lighter in the literal world, having slipped a foot across the line into another kind of place.

Liz smiled at me. Conversation was going on around us. I don't think anyone else had heard her comment or noticed my spaciness. I would tell her about Toby's nurse when I had a chance: a story for Lizzy and me to share about her brother. I knew she would like that.

“This must be the peak of foliage,” Henry said. And just that simple comment made me feel fond of him. I could see he was struggling.
He'd spent a couple of weekends here with Lydia in May and June. He must have missed her terribly, but he was making an effort.

Barnaby yelled, “I want to get down,” and before I got up, Henry stood and lifted Barn from his booster. Instead of putting Barnaby down on the floor, he said, “Hey, Barnstormer, how about some fresh air? I'll teach you to skip stones on the lake.”

Henry walked outside with Barnaby in his arms. I watched them through the cabin window. I knew Henry needed to get away from us for a bit, to calm the mental chaos of being back here without Lydia. That he took Barnaby with him was touching: finding solace in the companionship of a child. He held Barn tentatively, lacking the self-assurance Tina and I had with our son. But that scene—the two of them together as Henry carried him to the lakeshore—elicited something. I was full of magical thoughts about Toby at that moment, my encounter with the nurse having somehow brought Toby back toward the threshold of existence, and the two boys blended in my mind. For an instant it was Toby in Henry's arms, and I got up and went out to join them. I had the thought of throwing my arms around the two of them—the wounded and fragile Henry, and the boy who was both my sons at once—but it was only an impulse.