What Strange Creatures (22 page)

The black screen came on again, with the white block words:

“An innocent young man was jailed for more than a decade.”

Then Pamela Bolduc continued, “I am a registered Democrat, but I will not be voting for Donald Wallace in this election. I will never vote for Donald Wallace. Because I believe there is a difference between commitment to justice and commitment to one’s own ambition. Donald Wallace has the latter, and my cousin was the collateral damage.”

Then Donald Wallace appeared—this time in actual footage rather than still pictures. He was outdoors, on a city street.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

His low voice went nasal at “talking.” His thick brown-gray hair flopped out of place as he dashed away from the camera’s view. It was jumpy footage, probably taken from a phone.

Then a young man appeared, standing against a brick wall outdoors. His boyish brown bangs flew sideways in the wind.

“Everyone who was involved in the prosecution of Andrew Abbott should be ashamed of themselves. And yes, that includes Donald Wallace,” he said.

“Ryan Janik, New England Project for Justice,”
read the label below his head shot.

Ryan Janik dissolved, and new white letters appeared:

“Another troubling conviction”

Next was an elderly-looking man in a wing chair. He was quite wrinkled, but his hair was shiny and dark and sculpted. He reminded me of a rubber Ronald Reagan mask.

“I still believe that something went wrong in the Susan Halliday case. Justice was not served,” he said.

“Frank Boynton, Esq., Public defender (retired)”
was his label.

The jumpy footage of Donald Wallace appeared again.

“No.
No.
I don’t have a comment,” he said. Then his tall, black-suited frame disappeared behind a revolving glass door.

The white letters appeared after that, this time saying:

“A mother of two imprisoned. A family torn apart.”

“My mother probably won’t ever get out of prison. For a crime she didn’t commit,” said the next guy who appeared onscreen.

“Dustin Halliday, Susan’s son,”
read his subtitle.

I leaned in close to the screen, examining the young man’s features as he spoke. His eyes were a deep-set, transparent blue. His small nose and white coloring against chapped red lips made his face seem delicate. There was a skater-dude quality to his hair—though if such a thing as a skater dude even exists anymore, I don’t know. In any case he looked like a creepy old mannequin wearing entirely the wrong wig.

“There
was
an intruder in our house that night. I know. I was
there,
” he was saying. “And there was evidence of it, that the prosecutors chose to keep to themselves.”

The video ended abruptly there. It actually seemed like a decent start. A little hokey, but that was the nature of campaign ads. The beginning of Kim’s wasn’t much better or worse than any real ones I’d seen.

She had sort of danced around the edge of the topic of Andrew Abbott—hadn’t talked to anyone really close to Andrew himself. A cousin? Was that as close as she could get? I wondered if Kim had even told this cousin who she was. And that Ryan Janik character looked young enough to have been a toddler when the case was tried. Still, the draft was provocative enough to make a potential viewer want to look up the Abbott case himself. And I was interested to see that Kim had apparently approached Donald Wallace in the flesh.

The stuff about Susan Halliday was a little clunkier. Kim had convinced people closer to the case to talk to her, but a son and the lawyer of the convicted woman saying “she didn’t do it” wasn’t exactly compelling evidence of her innocence. It was a stretch to call it a “troubling conviction.” Perhaps Kim had had more planned.

I breathed carefully, straining to hear any movement in the hall. Then I clicked on the next video, labeled “Wallace stuff 1.”

The wrinkled lawyer who’d spoken in the second-to-last clip appeared again, in the wing chair as before.

“Look at the two brothers,” he was saying. “The younger one—he was the one who was awake when it happened. He’s never wavered on his story. He’s always maintained he saw two intruders. It’s the older one who turned against his mother. Wallace and his team worked on him for long enough. But that one never woke up, never left his bedroom.”

“A lot of people think Dustin was coached by his mother,” Kim said.

“If you were in that courtroom and heard both those kids testify, you’d know which one was coached. The older one. Whasisname?”

“Trenton?”

“Yes. Trenton.”

“Hold on a second,” Kim said. She appeared to be zooming out on Boynton. From the wider view, his shirt was visible: blue plaid and rumpled, with the sleeves rolled up tight at the elbows. He looked surprisingly buff for a guy so wrinkled.

“So you’re saying the prosecution team coached Trenton.”

“Can’t prove it. I’m just saying it seemed like it.”

“Do you think Trenton was hiding something?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. He was only a kid. I simply didn’t feel the version he was saying was real. It felt canned somehow. And I still believe that something went wrong in the Susan Halliday case. Justice was not served. That’s the bottom line for me.”

“Was there evidence that there was an intruder in the Halliday house the night of Todd Halliday’s death?” Kim asked.

“Evidence? Hell yes. Their living room was all ripped up, and their bedroom.”

“Why would intruders go in while the whole family was here?”

Go Kim,
I thought. Kim was surprisingly direct with her questions. What was a little old law degree and a lifetime of lawyering to be intimidated about?

“The Halliday family hadn’t been in the home for a while. They’d been staying with family for a couple of months because of the repairs after that house fire they had. Likely the two intruders thought no one was home. That’s why Todd died, you see. Because he surprised them.”

“And they shot him with a gun purchased by Mr. Halliday one year earlier.”

“You’ve read the court transcript. You read what happened. There were two of them and only one of him. They put their gun to his head and told him to hand his over. He tried to turn it on them, but there was a struggle and he got shot in the neck. Now, didn’t you say you wanted to focus on the kids in the case? Justin and Dustin?”

“Trenton and Dustin. Yes.”

Frank Boynton looked at his watch. “And you had this theory that Donald Wallace was like some kind of Svengali with the kiddies.”

“Well, I didn’t say that. But I think some of his methods in preparing his younger witnesses for trial were unethical.”

“You know what I think? I think it’s unethical to bring kids into the trial process, period. Unless it’s last-ditch, absolutely necessary. Granted, Wallace made his name prosecuting crimes against kids, so it’s hard to get around it there. But in this case I don’t know if it was really necessary.”

“You were the one who put Dustin on the stand, correct?”

“Yup. Like I said. Necessary. He was the only real witness besides his mother,” Kim said.

“Have you kept in touch with any of the family?” Kim sounded hopeful. “Like Dustin?”

“Kept in touch? No, dear.” The old lawyer harrumphed.

“How do you feel about Donald Wallace running for Senate now?”

“How do I feel about it?” Boynton shrugged and stuck out his lower lip. “I dunno. Doesn’t surprise me. He’s an ambitious guy.”

“Are you going to vote for him, can I ask?”

“Sure. Better than the alternative, put it that way.”

“Hold on a sec,” Kim said, and the picture jiggled.

“Surely,” Boynton said.

The video ended there.

When I clicked on “Wallace stuff 2,” Missy Bailey appeared, laughing.

“God!” she said. “You want me to say all that again? This is torture, you know.”

“Just the part about how they talked to us for like five hours,” Kim said.

“Well, more like two or three in my case,” Missy said. “But they were more interested in you than me.”

I thought I heard the groan of a shifting box spring. I hit
PAUSE
and listened. When I heard it again, I closed the file and tiptoed back to the bedroom. Nathan was awake in the bed—still lying down, still shirtless, but staring at his phone.

“Oh, hey.” He yawned and reached for a glass of water next to his bed. “What’re you up to?”

“You fell asleep,” I said. “I just went to look at Peaches and Cream some more. And check my texts.”

“I can take her out of the cage if you want to get a better look.”

Nathan’s gaze was fixed on the floor as he said this.

I looked down to where he was looking. Both of our sweaters—his stylishly grungy brown pullover and my nubbly cream hoodie—were piled there where we left them, arms tangled. My phone was half visible on top, falling sideways out of the sweater’s front pouch pocket.

“Oh. No, thanks.”

Nathan saw me looking in that direction.

“It buzzed while you were gone,” he said. “I think you got a text message or something.”

“Okay,” I said, sitting on the bed, holding my breath.

Nathan tossed his own phone on his bedside table, next to an Eckhart Tolle book with a shiny orange cover.

“Who texts you at this hour?” he asked.

“Nobody, usually,” I said. “It’s probably one of those payment reminders or something.”

“Looks like you started to get dressed. Do you want to leave?”

I hesitated. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No. But it doesn’t need to be awkward if you want to leave.”

“I don’t,” I said.

But when I moved closer to him, he felt clammy to me. I wondered if I felt the same to him. It was as if he’d jinxed us by using the word “awkward.”

“Tell me about the farm,” I said softly.

“The farm?”

“The farm you grew up on.”

And he did. He told me about a couple of cows—Lalita and Rukmini. They were beautiful brown cows, and he learned how to massage their udders and milk them. He liked Lalita so much that sometimes he’d visit her even when it wasn’t chore time—in the kids’ brief free time—after classes but before the evening meal.

It didn’t sound quite real, but I didn’t care.

“It sounds beautiful,” I whispered.

“Some of it was,” he murmured, without opening his eyes.

“What wasn’t?”

“I don’t want to say right now. It’ll wake me up, talking like that. And then I won’t be able to get sleepy again. Tell me another story about that Margery lady instead.”

S
ince Nathan was almost asleep already, I told him a quickie—about the time there was a great fire in Marge’s town of King’s Lynn. The townspeople, normally exasperated with Marge, begged her to wail and weep to her heart’s content, on the off chance that God was in fact listening. She advised a priest to walk toward the fire holding Communion wafers, then followed him to the door of the church. When she saw the flames, she cried out for God to help. She went into the church, still weeping and begging. Soon three men also came into the church—all with snowflakes on their cloaks. A snowstorm had begun, and it would put out the fire. God had answered her prayers. At least that was how Marge saw it.

When I finished, I couldn’t tell if Nathan was asleep. I closed my eyes for a few minutes and tried to listen carefully for his breath. I must’ve dozed off with him, because when I opened my eyes, there was early daylight seeping through his bedroom blinds, a smell of coffee in the air. I inhaled it indulgently as I sat up and stretched. For a brief and groggy moment, I fancied my life a Folgers commercial.

Snake dude was not a bad lay,
I could hear the Folgers guy singing.
And she’s got her brother’s bail hearing later today. . . . The best part of waking up . . .

“Oh, shit!” I began fumbling for my cell phone.

“What is it?” Nathan popped in, shirtless and holding a mug. At his feet was a very old-looking greyhound, whom I hadn’t seen the night before. “This is Jasper, by the way. He was sleeping in the basement last night. He’s pretty much deaf, but he’s a sweetheart.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“A little after nine.”

“Oh, God.”

“I would’ve woken you up, but you said you had a couple of days off or something, right?”

“Oh. Yeah. But I have to be somewhere else. I didn’t think I’d sleep this late. Usually I wake up at six forty-five. Internal clock.”

“Maybe something in my house reset your clock,” Nathan said, scratch-pinched his chest hair, then sipped his coffee.

This struck me as a creepy thing to say. Something—like what? Snake charm? Sexual energy? A carbon monoxide leak?

“Can I pour you a cup of coffee?” he asked. “I have a travel mug you could take.”

I threw on my sweater, then my coat. I gathered my shoulder bag and phone. “No thanks. I don’t have time.”

“I’ll call you later?” Nathan said.

All at once I felt suffocated by the sweaty smell of Nathan’s sheets and itchy at the sight of his ample chest hair. Marge’s hair shirts came to mind. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to call me later. But then I still had a few more of Kim’s files to look at.

“Oh. Sure. Yeah.”

I didn’t mean to sound so casual. But there was Jeff’s hearing to worry about. I could still possibly make it.

“Talk to you later!” I called as I headed out of the house.

“Okay!” Nathan called after me.

I only had a moment to assess whether this was mockery or exaggerated enthusiasm. Probably not. The Hare Krishnas were likely not a sarcastic people. I was admittedly pretty ignorant on the subject, but it seemed a fair guess.

Once I hopped onto the highway, it was only three exits to the courthouse. I revved the engine to seventy-five after I got onto the highway ramp. Ten seconds later I had to slow it down to a stop. There was a backup of cars, and I couldn’t see what was happening. Even if this cleared up soon, I was going to miss the first few minutes of the hearing.

“Damn it,” I muttered. While I waited, I checked my phone.

I’d forgotten about the text message that had come in in the wee hours. I’d expected spam and didn’t recognize the number. But it said,
SORRY, I DON’T KNOW WHERE MY BROTHER IS. HOW DO U KNOW HIM
?
TRENT H.