Light from a Distant Star (26 page)

S
HE PUT IN
two hours with Jessica. Two rather pleasant hours, in the beginning. She knew the drill, with Nellie’s arrival, Jessica would hand her a can of Cherry Coke and the remote. All Jessica wanted to talk about was the murder, but having again declared herself the star witness, she felt buffered, protected. It was the official legal moat no one could cross, though Jessica would keep trying.

“Well, tell me about him then, that guy, the one that killed her,” she said, when the next commercial came on. They were downstairs, catching up on
Survivor
episodes.

“I told you, I can’t.”

“I remember him. He was that guy, right, the one that saved Henry?”

“Yeah.” Safe enough. Unwilling to forfeit control of the TV, Nellie would have to answer
some
questions. She aimed the remote, ready to click back to the show. She’d been scrolling through the ads.

“They’re probably gonna electrocute him, right?”

“I don’t know.” A chill ripped through her.

“That’s what they usually do. Or an injection. I saw that once. Or gas. They, like, seep it into this, like, box thingie with him in it.” She hit the button and the show resumed.

“Or poison. Like in his food or something.”

She’d stopped listening.

Off on one of her riffs, Jessica leaned close. “Wanna know a secret?” she whispered. She got up and closed the door, then hurried back to the sofa. “Well? Do you or don’t you?”

“What?” She tilted her head, trying not to miss any of the show.

“I did that. I mixed all these powders from my mother’s pills. So now I have my own supply.”

“Of what?”

“Poison. Wanna see it?”

“That’s weird. Stop being so weird, will you?”

She laughed. “You don’t know, maybe I put some in your soda.”

“Jesus, Jessica, here.” She stood up and flipped the remote onto the sofa.

“I’m only kidding. Don’t go, c’mon!”

Nellie sat back down, but couldn’t help feeling Jessica had meant it.

They watched the show in silence, while beside her Jessica twisted her hand backward to better gnaw on a hangnail.

“What if he didn’t do it though,” she mused, and Nellie hit the pause button. “You ever think about that? Like, how, maybe people just thought he did because he said things or did things, or maybe they just didn’t like him, so they just blame things on him? Like sometimes the way people treat me. I mean, like, my own family even. It’s, like, always my fault. Everything. I’m just one of those people, you know what I mean?”

“No,” Nellie said. But she did know. It was the same in school, too. Jessica was like a magnet for negative feelings. And so, in a way, had been Max. “You just think about that stuff too much,” she said.

“Yeah.” Jessica settled back with her chubby arms behind her head and her feet up on the coffee table. “Like about how to kill people. Put them out of my misery.”

“That’s it!” Nellie jumped up and hurried upstairs.

“Is everything all right?” Mrs. Cooper called after her.

“I have to go pick Henry up,” she called back from the door.

For days after, she kept thinking of Mr. Cooper trying to convince her that she’d probably been in some addled state of shock the day Dolly was murdered. And she was beginning to understand why. In a way, he’d been right. Sometimes, the most important facts aren’t the ones you’ve forgotten but the ones you just don’t know what to do with.

I
N HIS LETTER TO
C
HARLIE
, M
AX
D
EVANEY SAID HE’D ONLY LAID
a hurting hand on one woman, a long time ago, and he’d always been ashamed of that. He swore he hadn’t killed Dolly. Maybe no one else believed that, but he wanted Charlie to know the truth so he wouldn’t think he’d taken advantage of his kindness and generosity. He was grateful that Charlie had given him work and a place to stay. And if anything should happen to him, would he please see to it that Boone was taken care of. He understood that Charlie didn’t care too much for dogs. Lots of people don’t, he wrote. Especially an old fleabag like him—Charlie chuckled reading her that line. So if it looked like he wasn’t going to get out, then he wanted Charlie to do him a really big favor. He couldn’t stand the thought of Boone having to go back to the pound.

“Every time I think of him squeezed into one of them tight metal cages again, it just about kills me inside.” So would Charlie see to it that Boone got put to sleep. As peacefully and painlessly as possible. And to cover the cost Charlie should open the metal box in the trunk by Max’s bed. Should be enough there to pay for it.

“Which I already did,” Charlie said, folding the sheet of loose leaf back into the envelope.

“What?” She looked around feeling sick inside. She hadn’t seen Boone since she’d been here. She found it chilling that Max could so easily request the death of his closest companion.

“Took it. More mine, I figured, than any cop’s. That’s what they do, just slip it in the back pocket, and who the hell’s gonna call ’em on it?”

“So where’s Boone then?”

“Down back—that’s where I keep him now. No way the Shelbys’re getting by him there.”

Boone was tied up to a junked truck, Charlie explained. The rope was long enough for roaming and still being able to jump up onto the truck bed come nightfall.

“That’s not right,” she said, and Charlie assured her the animal had plenty of water and food.

“A lot better’n the alternative, don’t you think?” He waved the envelope.

T
HINKING, THAT’S ALL
she was doing. Especially now after Max’s letter. If he had killed Dolly, then he could be sentenced to death, which also meant Boone’s death. Everyone she knew thought he’d done it. Even Max’s own lawyer, or so it seemed. Eggleston Jay Wright. His name made her expect a neat and slender man, like her father. Wasn’t a public defender a man of principle and tempered appetites, eager to save the less fortunate from any injustice? Well, not this one—at least, this was her first disappointing impression. His office was a mess, and so was he. The unmanned reception desk in the outer office was covered with legal boxes. Every time the phone rang, Attorney Wright answered it himself, seizing it midsentence, hungrily, desperately. His thin, reddish hair was parted just above one ear in a sad attempt to cover his shiny, freckled pate. His short-sleeved white shirt was wrinkled and there was a soil line rimming his sweaty collar above his loosened tie.

Her father had brought her here. Attorney Wright had offered to come to the house, but her mother couldn’t bear the thought of it, everyone knowing, all the neighbors. As it was, Patty and Kirk Lane-Bush, the young couple from across the street, had gone public with their displeasure. They had sent a letter to the zoning board complaining about the apartment in the Pecks’ house. They said when they bought their house last year, they’d been told it was zoned an A-1 neighborhood, for “residence only.” And now this, “a murdered stripper in an illegal apartment,” the letter went on to say, which devastated
Nellie’s mother, even though Benjamin insisted the apartment had long ago been “grandfathered in.”

Nellie was beginning to see just how complicated life could be. Nothing stood alone. Every action had a reaction, and every reaction had multiple reactions, on and on, in a chain of insidious combustion they couldn’t quite pin down, much less prevent, and now was everywhere. Their own nuclear fallout, for here they sat, right in the center of the blast radius, still trying to seem normal, she and her father, across the desk from the pasty-faced lawyer. He had a copy of her statement to the detective. He kept looking at different pages and rephrasing the questions, or he’d repeat her answers, then ask if that’s what she’d told the police.

“So the whole time he was in the cellar, you were there, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then how come he says you left a couple times?” Squinting, he wet his finger and flipped the page. “ ‘To mind Boone,’ he says.” He looked up.

“I don’t know, maybe he didn’t see me, that’s all.” So that’s why the police kept returning to that same question. Her answer was harmless, not so much a lie as the only way to prove Max’s innocence without turning this into a bigger mess than it already was.

“See you where?”

“Down there, in the cellar.” She’d twisted the drawstring on her shirt tightly around her thumb.

“So Mr. Devaney’d already been in the apartment, then, before you got there, right?” He kept reading.

“I never said that.”

“Well, he knew she was in there.” He sounded exasperated. “Dead.”

“He didn’t say that.” She unwound the drawstring and examined the ridges it had left on her finger.

“Well, what did he say?”

“Just that I should open the door.”

“And he wasn’t surprised that it was unlocked, right?”

“Why would he be? I was the one that told him.” She rewound the drawstring again.

Her father’s feet scraped. She knew by his look he didn’t like her tone.

“All right,” the attorney sighed. “But then he tells
you
to open the door. He tells
you
to go inside. That’s what it says here, anyway.”

“Because it was
my
house. He was like that. You know, polite.”

He glanced at her father with raised eyebrows. “Polite,” he repeated with a caustic snort. “So how’d he know she was dead then?”

“Because she was?”
Such a dumb question
. “I mean, there she was. On the floor. You could tell. We just knew.” Her fingertip was turning purple. It felt numb.

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “All right.” His chair kept creaking. The office was getting hotter. The air-conditioning was temperamental, he had already told them twice. He was reading again, clucking his tongue as he ran his finger from line to line, his nails bitten to the quick. Like Jessica’s, which always sickened her. But an adult doing it seemed like a real character flaw.

“Well, I guess that about does it,” he said after a moment. He closed the file and tapped it on the desk. “I think we’ve covered everything.” He pushed back his chair and got up.

Her father stood then. She undid the drawstring, checking for marks again. The two men shook hands and talked about another lawyer, some long-ago, mutual friend who’d gotten caught embezzling from his client. Apparently, they knew each other from another time, which whenever adults did that, seemed to shunt her aside, as if their earlier attention had been merely to humor her. Her father asked Attorney Wright how his wife was doing.

“Good as can be expected,” Wright said. “After enough zaps, there’s not much left.”

She could see that made her father uncomfortable. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Anyway, tell her I was asking for her.”

For all the good it’ll do
, Wright’s listless harrumph seemed to say.

“And thank you, Ellen—”

“Nellie,” she corrected, and his eyes flashed. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like her.

“Well now, in the courtroom, I will be calling you by your given
name. If that’s all right with you.” He winked. And that’s when she understood. This wasn’t even for real. The questions were routine, the answers didn’t really matter.

“Are you going to ask me those same questions?” She pointed to the folder.

Fleshy lips pursed, he nodded with a slightly amused shrug. “I should imagine so.” He smiled at her father.

“Well, what’s the point then? I mean, they already know all that.” Still seated, she looked between the two men.

“Nellie,” her father gently warned.

“No. No, Ben. That’s what I’m here for. And besides, what does she know? I mean, think of it. Young girl like her caught up in something like this. Of course she’s going to be nervous.” He eased back down into his creaking chair and stared into her unblinking eyes. “Now, listen to me. There’s nothing for you to worry about. Nothing at all. No surprises, no questions you can’t answer. It’s not gonna be like some crazy TV thing with people yelling and browbeating you. It’s all pretty cut-and-dried. So don’t give it a second thought. You’ll be fine.” He looked up at her father. “I’ll take good care, Ben, don’t you worry.”

“I know you will, Egg.”

“So you think he’s guilty too?” she asked the attorney. Seemed like a fair enough question, though she’d never seen a grown man’s face burn so red so fast.

Unmoving, he seemed to stretch across the desk. “Of course not,” he said through clenched teeth.

The car door had barely closed, and even though her father spoke sternly, she didn’t think he was angry, at least not at her. “Nothing about this is going to be easy. Nothing.” He was straining to see over his shoulder as he backed out of the narrow parking space. “And as much as I wish it had never happened, the fact is that it did, and now everyone’s got to do the right thing and see it through to the end. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that your mother’s all right and that you’re all right, and that this isn’t any uglier for any of us than it has to be.” They both jerked forward a little as he braked in the middle of the lot. He turned to her. “But, if you think for one minute this
somehow entitles you to say whatever you please anytime you want, then you’re in for a very rude awakening, young lady.”