Black-Eyed Susans (2 page)

“TV says the execution is in a couple
of months.” I jump. This is exactly where my mind is traveling. The scratchy male
voice behind me is Mr. Wermuth’s, full of cigarette smoke.

I pause, swallowing the knot in my throat as
I wait for him to ask whether I plan to sit front row and watch my attacker suck in his
last breath. Instead, he pats my shoulder awkwardly. “I wouldn’t go.
Don’t give him another damn second.”

I am wrong about Herb. It wouldn’t be
the first time I’ve been wrong, or the last.

My head knocks into an abrupt curve in the
wall because I’m still turned toward Herb. “I’m fine,” I tell
Mrs. Wermuth quickly. She lifts her hand but hesitates to touch my stinging cheek,
because it is just a little too close to the scar, the permanent mark from a garnet ring
dangling off a skeletal finger. A gift from a Susan who didn’t want me to forget
her, ever. I push Mrs. Wermuth’s hand away gently. “I forgot that turn was
coming up so soon.”

“Crazy damn house,” Herb says
under his breath. “What in the hell is wrong with living in St. Pete?” He
doesn’t seem to expect an answer. The spot on my cheek begins to complain and my
scar echoes, a tiny
ping, ping, ping.

The hallway has settled into a straight
line. At the end, an ordinary door. Mrs. Wermuth pulls out a skeleton key from her apron
pocket and twists it in the lock easily. There used to be twenty-five of those keys, all
exactly the same, which could open any door in the place. An odd bit of practicality
from my grandfather.

A chilly draft rushes at us. I smell things
both dying and growing. I have my first moment of real doubt since I left home an hour
ago. Mrs. Wermuth reaches up and yanks on a piece of kite string dancing above her head.
The bare, dusty lightbulb flickers on.

“Take this.” Mr. Wermuth prods
me with the small Maglite from
his pocket. “I carry it around for
reading. You know where the main light switch is?”

“Yes,” I say automatically.
“Right at the bottom.”

“Watch the sixteenth step,” Mrs.
Wermuth warns. “Some critter chewed a hole in it. I always count when I go down.
You take as long as you like. I think I’ll make all of us a cup of tea and you can
tell a bit of the history of the house after. We’d both find that fascinating.
Right, Herb?” Herb grunts. He’s thinking of driving a little white ball two
hundred yards into Florida’s deep blue sea.

I hesitate on the second step, and turn my
head, unsure. If anyone shuts this door, I won’t be found for a hundred years.
I’ve never had any doubt that death is still eager to catch up with a certain
sixteen-year-old girl.

Mrs. Wermuth offers a tiny, silly wave.
“I hope you find what you are looking for. It must be important.”

If this is an opening, I don’t take
it.

I descend noisily, like a kid, jumping over
step sixteen. At the bottom, I pull another dangling string, instantly washing the room
with a harsh fluorescent glow.

It lights an empty tomb. This used to be a
place where things were born, where easels stood with half-finished paintings, and
strange, frightening tools hung on pegboards, where a curtained darkroom off to the side
waited to bring photos to life, and dress mannequins held parties in the corners. Bobby
and I would swear we had seen them move more than once.

A stack of old chests held ridiculous
antique dress-up hats wrapped in tissue paper and my grandmother’s wedding dress
with exactly 3,002 seed pearls and my grandfather’s World War II uniform with the
brown spot on the sleeve that Bobby and I were sure was blood. My grandfather was a
welder, a farmer, a historian, an artist, an Eagle Scout leader, a morgue photographer,
a rifleman, a woodworker, a Republican, a yellow dog Democrat. A poet. He could never
make up his mind, which is exactly what people say about me.

He ordered us never to come
down here alone, and he never knew we did. But the temptation was too great. We were
especially fascinated with a forbidden, dusty black album that held Granddaddy’s
crime scene photographs from his brief career with the county morgue. A wide-eyed
housewife with her brains splattered across her linoleum kitchen floor. A drowned, naked
judge pulled to shore by his dog.

I stare at the mold greedily traveling up
the brick walls on every side. The black lichen flourishing in a large crack zigzagging
across the filthy concrete floor.

No one has loved this place since
Granddaddy died.
I quickly cross over to the far corner, sliding between the
wall and the coal furnace that years ago had been abandoned as a bad idea. Something
travels lightly across my ankle. A scorpion, a roach. I don’t flinch. Worse things
have crawled across my face.

Behind the furnace, it is harder to see. I
sweep the light down the wall until I find the grimy brick with the red heart, painted
there to fool my brother. He had spied on me one day when I was exploring my options. I
run my finger lightly around the edges of the heart three times.

Then I count ten bricks up from the red
heart, and five bricks over. Too high for little Bobby to reach. I jam the screwdriver
from my pocket into the crumbling mortar, and begin to pry. The first brick topples out,
and clatters onto the floor. I work at three other bricks, tugging them out one at a
time.

I flash the light into the hole.

Stringy cobwebs, like spin art. At the back,
a gray, square lump.

Waiting, for seventeen years, in the crypt I
made for it.

“Tessie. Are you listening?”

He is asking stupid questions, like the
others.

I glance up from the magazine, open in my
lap, that I had conveniently found beside me on the couch. “I don’t see the
point.”

I flip a page, just to irritate him. Of
course he knows I’m not reading.

“Then why are you here?”

I let the air hang with thick silence.
Silence is my only instrument of control in this parade of therapy sessions. Then I say,
“You know why. I am here because my father wants me to be here.”
Because
I hated all the others. Because Daddy is so sad, and I can’t stand it.
“My brother says I’ve changed.”
Too much information.
You’d think I’d learn.

His chair legs squeak on the hardwood floor,
as he shifts positions. Ready to pounce. “Do
you
think you’ve
changed?”

So
obvious.
Disgusted, I flip back
to the magazine. The pages are cold and slick and stiff. They smell of cloying perfume.
It’s the kind of magazine that I suspect is filled with bony, angry girls. I
wonder:
Is that what this man sees when he stares at me?
I’d lost twenty
pounds in the last year. Most of my track star muscle tone, gone. My right foot is
wrapped in a new leaden cast, from the third surgery.
Bitterness rises
in my lungs like hot steam. I suck in a deep breath. My goal is to feel nothing.

“OK,” he says. “Dumb
question.” I know that he’s watching me intently. “How about this one:
Why did you pick me this time?”

I toss the magazine down. I try to remember
that he is making an exception, probably doing the district attorney a favor. He rarely
treats teen-age girls.

“You signed a legal document that said
you will not prescribe drugs, that you will not ever, ever publish anything about our
sessions or use me for research without my knowledge, that you will not tell a living
soul you are treating the surviving Black-Eyed Susan. You told me you won’t use
hypnosis.”

“Do you trust that I will not do any
of those things?”

“No,” I snap back. “But at
least I’ll be a millionaire if you do.”

“We have fifteen minutes left,”
he says. “We can use the time however you like.”

“Great.” I pick up the magazine
full of bony, angry girls.

Two hours after I leave Granddaddy’s,
William James Hastings III arrives at my house, a 1920s bungalow in Fort Worth with
somber black shutters and not a single curve or frill. A jungle of color and life
thrives behind my front door, but outside, I choose anonymity.

I’ve never met the man with the
baronial name settling in on my couch. He can’t be older than twenty-eight, and he
is at least 6’3”, with long, loose arms and big hands. His knees bang up
against the coffee table. William James Hastings III reminds me more of a professional
pitcher in his prime than a lawyer, like his body’s awkwardness would disappear
the second he picked up a ball. Boyish. Cute. Big nose that makes him just short of
handsome. He has brought along a woman in a tailored white jacket, white-collared shirt,
and black pants. The type who cares only vaguely about fashion, as professional utility.
Short, natural blond hair. Ring-free fingers. Flat, clipped, unpolished nails. Her only
adornment is a glittering gold chain with an expensive-looking charm, a familiar
squiggly doodle, but I don’t have time to think about what it means. She’s a
cop, maybe, although that doesn’t make sense.

The gray lump, still covered in dust and
ancient spider threads, sits between us on the coffee table.

“I’m Bill,” he says.
“Not William. And definitely not Willie.” He
smiles. I
wonder if he’s used this line on a jury. I think he needs a better one.
“Tessa, as I said on the phone, we’re thrilled that you called. Surprised,
but thrilled. I hope you don’t mind that Dr. Seger—Joanna—tagged
along. We don’t have any time to waste. Joanna is the forensic scientist
excavating the bones of the … Susans tomorrow. She’d like to take a quick
sample of your saliva. For DNA. Because of the issues we face with lost evidence and
junk science, she wants to do the swab herself. That is, if you’re really serious.
Angie never thought—”

I clear my throat. “I’m
serious.” I feel a sudden pang for Angela Rothschild. The tidy silver-haired woman
hounded me for the past six years, insisting that Terrell Darcy Goodwin was an innocent
man. Picking at each doubt until I was no longer sure.

Angie was a saint, a bulldog, a little bit
of a martyr. She’d spent the last half of her life and most of her parents’
inheritance freeing prisoners who’d been bullied by the state of Texas into
wrongful convictions. More than 1,500 convicted rapists and murderers begged for her
services every year, so Angie had to be choosy. She told me that playing God with those
calls and letters was the only thing that ever made her consider quitting. I’d
been to her office once, the first time she contacted me. It was housed in an old church
basement located on an unpleasant side of Dallas known best for its high fatality rate
for cops. If her clients couldn’t see the light of day or catch a quick Starbucks,
she said, then neither could she. Her company in that basement was a coffeepot, three
more attorneys who also worked other paying jobs, and as many law students as would sign
on.

Angie sat in the same spot on my couch nine
months ago, in jeans and scuffed black cowboy boots, with one of Terrell’s letters
in her hand. She begged me to read it. She had begged me to do a lot of things, like
give one of her expert gurus a shot at retrieving my memory. Now she was dead of a heart
attack, found facedown in a pile of documents about Goodwin’s case. The reporter
who wrote her obituary found that poetic. My guilt in the week since she died has been
almost unbearable. Angie, I realized too late, was one of my
tethers. One of the few who never gave up on me.

“Is this … what you have for
us?” Bill stares at the filthy plastic grocery bag from Granddaddy’s
basement like it is stuffed with gold. It has left a trail of pebbly mortar across the
glass, right beside a pink hair band twisted with a strand of my daughter
Charlie’s auburn hair.

“You said on the phone that you had to
go … find it,” he says. “That you’d told Angie about this
… project … but you weren’t sure where it was.”

It isn’t really a question, and I
don’t answer.

His eyes wander the living room, strewn with
the detritus of an artist and a teen-ager. “I’d like to set up a meeting at
the office in a few days. After I’ve … examined it. You and I will have to
go over all of the old ground for the appeal.” For such a large guy, there is a
gentleness about him. I wonder about his courtroom style, if gentleness is his
weapon.

“Ready for the swab?” Dr. Seger
interrupts abruptly, all business, already stretching on latex gloves. Maybe worried
that I’ll change my mind.

“Sure.” We both stand up. She
tickles the inside of my cheek and seals microscopic bits of me in a tube. I know she
plans to add my DNA to the collection provided by three other Susans, two of whom still
go by the more formal name of Jane Doe. I feel heat emanating from her.
Anticipation.

I return my attention to the bag on the
table, and Bill. “This was kind of an experiment suggested by one of my
psychiatrists. It might be more valuable for what isn’t there than what is.”
In other words, I didn’t draw a black man who looked like Terrell Darcy
Goodwin.

My voice is calm, but my heart is lurching.
I am giving Tessie to this man. I hope it is not a mistake.

“Angie … she would be so
grateful. Is grateful.” Bill crooks a finger up, the Michelangelo kind of gesture
that travels up to the sky. I find this comforting: a man who is bombarded by people
blocking
his path every day—half-decent people clinging
stubbornly to their lies and deadly mistakes—and yet he still believes in God. Or,
at least, still believes in something.

Dr. Seger’s phone buzzes in her
pocket. She glances at the screen. “I’ve got to take this. One of my Ph.D.
students. I’ll meet you in the car, Bill. Good job, girl. You’re doing the
right thing.”
Gurrl.
A slight twang. Oklahoma, maybe. I smile
automatically.

“Right behind you, Jo.” Bill is
moving deliberately, shutting his briefcase, gingerly picking up the bag, in no apparent
hurry. His hands grow still when she shuts the door. “You’ve just met
greatness. Joanna is a mitochondrial DNA genius. She can work goddamn miracles with
degraded bones. She rushed to 9/11 and didn’t leave for four years. Made history,
helping identify thousands of victims out of charred bits. Lived at the YMCA at first.
Took communal showers with the homeless. Worked fourteen-hour days. She didn’t
have to, it wasn’t her job, but whenever she could, she sat down and explained the
science to grieving families so they could be as sure as she was. She learned a
smattering of Spanish so she could try to talk to the families of the Mexican
dishwashers and waiters who worked in restaurants in the North Tower. She is one of the
best forensic scientists on the planet, who happens to be one of the kindest human
beings I’ve ever met, and she is giving Terrell a chance. I want you to understand
the kind of people on our side. Tell me, Tessa, why are you? Why are you suddenly on our
side?”