“Martha forbade it.”
I weighed my options now that this condition had been removed from the scales. Tina and I had talked about going, about not going, about going, every night for the last week. Tina said by not going, I was refusing to participate in my family’s cover-up of my so-called crimes. I took an important first step, not like I had any idea where I was going next.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to work for me.”
“You don’t think it’s going to work for you,” my mother repeated tonelessly. “Well, then,” she said with what I imagined was a lethal smile. “Goodbye, Ruth.”
“Bye,” I said, though she’d already hung up on me.
I turned to find Tina stirring the cold dregs of the bouillabaisse broth with her spoon, smiling to herself with raised eyebrows, like she was expecting a thank-you from me.
“That must have felt great, huh?” She laughed in a way that assumed the answer went without saying and began clearing our plates, humming the new Fleetwood Mac song and swaying her hips.
I gave her a capitulating smile and pitched in, though a queasy awareness was building in me. If this was what great was supposed to feel like, I was doomed.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 1979
Day 467
The morning of the deposition, I woke jittery and tearful, repentant for every wrong thing I’d ever done in my life. It must be the way people feel when going into risky surgery. This will either save me or kill me, and it can’t kill me, because I don’t know that I was a good enough person to get into heaven. I lay staring up at the popcorn ceiling, paralyzed by every violent and degrading possibility the day held, until Tina said she was going to her hotel room to shower and recommended I do the same. I pulled myself into a seated position, where I sat immobilized for a long time. Eventually, I summoned the strength to drag the phone into my lap.
“You are the kind of witness who keeps a defense attorney up at night,” Dad said from his office on Park Avenue, where, on his first day, they gave him a choice of view—the East River or the Hudson. “Let’s look at the data, okay?”
I licked away the tears on my lips. “Okay.”
“Your story has remained consistent, no matter the environment.”
I gripped the phone tighter, nodding to myself. This was true.
“Your character is unimpeachable, which means your testimony will be viewed as unimpeachable too.”
“How do you know?”
There was a surprised, proud-father laugh. Dad was the one who’d taught me that the most effective response to any argument is the question How do you know? Shift the burden of proof to your opponent and force them to back up their position with mountains of evidence.
“All right,” he obliged. “You’re an Ivy League law student who graduated summa cum laude. Your senior year, you led your sorority chapter to complete more service hours than any other Panhellenic organization in the South. And remind me of The House’s cumulative GPA again?”
“High enough to drive the opposing counsel to murder,” I replied with acid in my veins.
“Mmmm,” Dad said in a teasing, adversarial way. “And yet, how do you know?”
I snorted. “That he’s an idiot or that he’s a killer?”
“Both.”
“The DA unearthed his academic transcripts. His grades were in the bottom fifth percentile at Tacoma Narrows, and he only got in to the University of Utah because his application was embellished and falsified.”
“And?” Dad said over the creak of his office chair. I imagined him stretching and taking in the Hudson at the window. No less brown than the East River, but if you looked north, the cherry trees in Central Park were telling you it was spring. “How do you know he’s the one who killed Robbie and Denise?”
“Because I saw him with my own two eyes.”
* * *
Henry Pearl met me in the parking lot at the Leon County Jail. He was younger than I’d pictured over the phone, with a blond mustache and a peaches-and-cream complexion that was splotchy in the Florida humidity. He thanked me loudly for being on time, almost as if he wanted someone else to hear. A quick survey of my surroundings revealed a young woman smoking on the curb wearing heavy tortoiseshell sunglasses that would leave purplish indents on either side of her nose for the next few hours. She had black, ironed-straight hair and a tiny hourglass figure buttoned up snugly in a plaid suit. This was Veronica Ramira, thirty-two, the sole strategic female on The Defendant’s defense team. I despised her and wanted her to like me on the spot.