TWO DAYS later, Sylvia Jackson's picture was on the front page of the
Globe
. The prosecution's star witness was on the stand, listening intently, her mouth drooping ever so slightly on one side. In grainy black-and-white, she was an ordinary middle-aged woman. The photograph did nothing to convey her sensuality and quirky appeal.
According to the article, when the D.A. asked her, “And who did this to you?” she hesitated only a moment before pointing to the defendant and pronouncing his name, “Stuart Jackson.”
I wondered how the jury imagined that this man, whom Annie so aptly described as “a hundred twenty pounds dripping wet,” forced two-hundred-forty-pound Tony Ruggiero to submit as he strapped a pillowcase over his head and then inflicted forty-six bruises and fifteen stab wounds before shooting him. It was a beating so severe that the pathologist speculated it might have been administered by two assailants.
Chip had to be pleased with his cross-examination. He'd questioned Sylvia about the days before the murder. He asked her what she'd done, whom she'd talked to. She could remember very little. She couldn't remember what gift she'd given to
Stuart the day before the killing â those paper butterflies that kept showing up in the inkblots.
Chip hammered at the contradictions between her testimony and her earlier statements. Had she driven to the cemetery or had her assailant? Had she watched the beating from the stairs or from the living room? Hadn't she said at first that Tony was in the trunk of the car? When Chip pressed her to explain why she changed her mind, she'd snapped at him, “I know he wasn't in the trunk.” When he asked her how she knew, her reply was all he could have hoped for: “I've read enough articles in the paper to find out what happened to him.”
Chip must have let the remark hang there, hoping the point was not lost on the jury. If one memory had been shaped by information she'd picked up from the newspaper, then how many others had been molded the same way?
Chip walked Sylvia Jackson painstakingly through the interviews she'd had with Sergeant MacRae in the weeks after she woke up. He quoted the questions that had become more and more specific, more and more leading each day, tracing the shift from “Who did this to you?” to “Stuart did this to you, didn't he?”
He asked her if it was true that she'd wondered why Stuart didn't visit her in the hospital. Hadn't she confided her concerns to a nurse at the hospital? Chip put the question directly: “Did that nurse suggest a reason why Stuart wasn't coming to visit you at the hospital?”
“She told me why he wasn't coming to visit me at the hospital,” she answered. “It was because he was a suspect.”
And yet, despite all of the discrepancies that Chip exposed, despite the evidence that Sylvia Jackson had been reading the newspapers and talking to friends, gathering information that could then be incorporated into her memories, she'd been the star witness the prosecution had hoped she'd be. The newspaper described jurors in rapt attention, straining in their seats to catch
her words, weeping openly when she described the murder. Could any amount of memory theory and test results offset the emotional power of her testimony?
I was so absorbed in the news of the trial, I nearly forgot we'd scheduled Maria's family meeting for nine that morning. Gloria was still out. I was parking my wounded Beemer in the lot down the hill from the unit when a black Lexus pulled up beside me. I introduced myself to the distinguished-looking couple who got out. “You must be Maria Whitson's parents. I'm Dr. Peter Zak.”
“My daughter â how is she?” Mrs. Whitson asked. She was a tall, handsome woman with shoulder-length, white-blond hair. Her face was wrinkle-free and her eyebrows arched in an expression of surprise. Her eyes radiated anxiety.
“She's better,” I said cautiously. “Let's go inside and talk.”
I led the Whitsons up the hill and into the unit. They hung back, checking out the place like a couple deciding whether to take a room in a fleabag motel.
When we reached the conference room, Mrs. Whitson removed her black cape. Underneath, she wore a skinny black dress that buttoned up the front. When she sat and crossed her legs, the bottom slit rode up to reveal a shapely leg. With her long neck, prominent nose, and full mouth painted a brilliant scarlet, she was like some great exotic bird beside the pale, colorless Mr. Whitson. He sat down stiffly beside her, resting his hands uneasily in his lap. He was tall and lean, with a head of thinning, gray hair. A peacock and Ichabod Crane. They were an odd pair. And Maria seemed nothing like either one of them. She must have grown up feeling like a chick whose mother had left her in a stranger's nest.
Despite his colorless appearance, it was Mr. Whitson who asked the forthright question, “When can we see Maria?”
“I wanted to spend some more time talking to you first. Then, if everything works out, Maria will join us.”
Reddening, Maria's father straightened in his seat and said,
“If what works out? We're her parents. We have every right to see her.” There was a pause that filled the room. “It's that incest crap again, isn't it?”
Mrs. Whitson had placed her hand on her husband's arm and was whispering, “Shhh.”
The hostility didn't surprise me. And after what they'd been through, it seemed entirely appropriate. “I know you're concerned about your daughter. I can tell you how she's doing now. We've gotten her off most of her medications. As you know, she came in here in a state of delirium.”
“Delirium? What exactly do you mean?” Mr. Whitson asked.
“That's when a person looks confused, has fluctuating moods. One minute she's elated and the next she's crying. She has trouble remembering.” By now Maria's mother and father had exchanged knowing nods. “Often she doesn't know where she is, when she is. Most often, delirium is either drug-induced or caused by some kind of physical condition.”
“Drug-induced,” Mr. Whitson repeated the words.
“That's right. Your daughter was on a variety of prescription drugs, the combination of which could have caused that kind of altered state.”
“I knew that asshole doctor was no good,” Maria's father muttered as his wife gently squeezed his arm.
“She's doing much better, now that the drugs are nearly out of her system. She's settling into the routine of the unit. I was hoping to get some background information from you so that we can plan the best course of treatment for Maria.” I hurried ahead into the relatively uncharged territory of medical history. “You're both how old?”
Mrs. Whitson answered, “My husband is sixty-eight. I'm fifty.” I didn't argue, though I suspected that Mrs. Whitson was in her sixties, too. Her plastic surgeon hadn't touched the backs of her hands where the skin was loose and speckled with age spots.
“And Maria is your only child?”
She nodded
I continued asking the standard questions about birth, development, childhood illnesses. According to Maria's parents, she'd had an idyllic childhood. She'd been a tomboy, very athletic. No bumps in the road until she started school.
“Tantrums,” Mr. Whitson explained. “She had tantrums at school. Then she starting having them at home, too. When she didn't get what she wanted, she'd lie on the floor, screaming and crying.”
“We tried ignoring her,” Mrs. Whitson said, “but how can you ignore a six-year-old banging her head against a hard floor? As you might imagine, we went through a lot of nannies. My little brother Nino was the only one who could control her. She was his pet.”
“He was around a lot? Alone with Maria?” I asked.
Mrs. Whitson's eyes widened as she grasped the implication. “We didn't know, Dr. Zak. She was an only child and he was like a brother to her. And having him there seemed to help. She adored him. She'd do whatever” â Mrs. Whitson stared into her tap â “she'd do what he told her to.”
Mr. Whitson placed his arm around his wife's shoulder. He glared at me. “You've no right It wasn't until years later that Maria told us what Nino did to her. She said I abused her, too.” He looked me in the eye. “Now you listen to me.” He was stony with anger. “Let's get this straight right here and now. I have never, ever touched my daughter in any” â his mouth hung open as he searched for the word â “inappropriate way.”
“I hear you, Mr. Whitson, I know it's painful for you both, going over these old accusations. Let me just assure you, what I'm interested in is how we're going to move forward. Maria needs a support system in place when she gets out of here, and right now, I'm just trying to understand what's possible.”
Mr. Whitson was still glaring at me but his expression had softened. “Believe me, Doctor, that's why we're here. We want our daughter back. But if we thought that never seeing her again was best for Maria, then that's what we'd do.”
“Excellent. Then as far as that goes, we're on the same page. But we're not quite there yet. There's just a couple more questions I need to ask. I was wondering when you became aware of Maria's issues around food?”
Mrs. Whitson shifted uncomfortably. “In junior high. She had trouble keeping her weight down. We tried all kinds of diets.” We? I wondered if Mrs. Whitson had always been as stick thin as she was now. “And exercise.”
“She ran,” Mr. Whitson said tersely.
“Yes,” his wife agreed. “In high school, she ran every day.”
I noted this down. Typical pattern. Girl who already has an assortment of family issues hits adolescence, becomes acutely aware of her body. Her desire to be perfect translates into a compulsion to be thin. She exercises. And exercises some more. Until she's addicted to exercises. And then, when that doesn't do enough, the dieting and hyper-interest in food begins.
“That's the trouble with her,” Mr. Whitson commented. “Never goes at anything half-assed. Couldn't run one mile. It had to be ten. And when she started to sell houses, she had to be the best. Had to sell more, bigger, faster. Ambition and nerve,” Mr. Whitson said, brushing away a tear that had leaked from one eye, “that's my little girl.”
Ambition and nerve. I wouldn't have associated those words with Maria Whitson. I wondered if the car accident had changed her personality that profoundly. Or was the Maria Whitson I'd gotten to know a temporary aberration?
“Were there any other significant traumas?” I asked.
“You mean other than â ?” Mrs. Whitson asked. I nodded. Mrs. Whitson pondered. “Not really,” she said slowly. “Though there was the time her friend Marjorie got hurt.”
“I'd forgotten about that,” Mr. Whitson said.
“Marjorie was Maria's best friend,” Mrs. Whitson explained.
“Attached at the hip all through junior high,” Mr. Whitson remarked.
“Marjorie had an accident. She slipped and fell down her cellar stairs. She was pretty badly hurt.”
“So why was that so traumatic for Maria?” I asked.
“Maria found her lying unconscious,” Mrs. Whitson explained. “I'd dropped her off at Marjorie's house on our way back from a dentist appointment. Maria came running out of the house before I even had a chance to pull away.”
“Maria was completely thrown by it,” Mr. Whitson said. “Wouldn't eat a thing for days after. Kept insisting that it was her fault. If only she'd gotten there earlier, that sort of thing.”
“I kept telling her, we couldn't have gotten there any earlier,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“And were there any lasting effects?”
“After Marjorie recovered, the girls were never close,” Mrs. Whitson recalled. “In fact, months later I asked her about Marjorie and she practically snapped my head off.”
“Wasn't that around the time she started refusing to go down into our basement?” Mr. Whitson asked.
“I think you're right. We had a big rumpus room where the kids used to hang out. Then, Maria refuses to go down there. I never connected it, but maybe it was because of the way she found Marjorie at the bottom of her basement stairs.”
“I understand Maria confronted you with her accusations. That must have been difficult.”
Mr. Whitson stiffened and looked away. Mrs. Whitson shook her head. “We were stunned,” she said simply. “As far as I was concerned, it came out of nowhere. Nino and Maria were so close.” She stared down into her lap. “If I loved her, she asked me, then how could I love him, too?” Mrs. Whitson choked. “How could I answer such a question?”
Mr. Whitson reached for his wife's hand. “My wife's younger brother was killed earlier this year,” he explained.
Killed? If he died suddenly or violently, that certainly could have put an additional strain on Maria's already fragile state. I
put a box of tissues on the table between us. Mrs. Whitson took one and blew her nose. “How did â” I started to ask, but Mrs. Whitson had already started down another path. “Everything changed after Maria was hit by the car,” she said.