In an ideal world, Carl would be an undiminished man who could withstand a blistering castigation from me, something I used to dream about giving him when I was younger and hamstrung by my own inexperience. But that’s an urge that, over time, has diminished for me as the years reordered the rungs on my priority ladder. Carl’s comeuppance moved lower and lower until it was succeeded by something more sophisticated than vengeance.
“She won’t bother you anymore,” I promise him, and I don’t even have to feign kindness. Tina told him to go to hell, and all these years later, that’s exactly where he is.
PAMELA
Miami, 1979
Day 541
Judge Lambert was copying something out of the case file when his secretary escorted me into his chambers, five minutes past our scheduled meeting time.
“Good morning, Your Honor,” I said, bowing my head and standing a respectful distance from his vast desk, the way I do now when someone enters their pin at the ATM. Mr. Pearl warned me not to sit until I was invited to, to which I shot back, I know that. Though I didn’t, not really. That wasn’t standard courtroom etiquette, that was just Judge Lambert.
Judge Lambert did not acknowledge me. His secretary gave me a maternal smile, as though to infuse the place with some human warmth, before shutting the door quietly behind her, cowing slightly at a squeak emitted from the hinge pins. It was the expression I would one day make while trying to get out of my daughter’s room noiselessly after hours of rocking her to sleep.
I stood there for a good minute, watching Judge Lambert annotate key phrases from yesterday’s late-breaking motion. I’d expected his office to look like some old English tavern—low ceiling and reddish walnut walls, scarred leather furniture, brown drink on a brass tray—but the room had a mumsy feel to it, the furniture upholstered in metallic brocade, yellowed sets of French botanicals framed on the walls. Judge Lambert closed the case file and looked up at me, performatively startling. “You’re so quiet I didn’t even know you were here,” he said with a vibrational chuckle. “Please, sit. You’re making me nervous.” It was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had said as much to me.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, and as I sank into the stiff cushion of the rose-patterned chair, I thought about that weaving hanging on Denise’s bedroom wall in Jacksonville. The very one Carl had been admiring the day I first met him. It was a scrap from a Navajo wearing blanket, and you could tell that the woman who made it had done so under duress, Denise once explained to me. See the radio pattern of the lines? She’d pointed them out, rising and falling hard and horizontally, creating a chaotic diamond series. The shapes only started to appear in the mid–nineteenth century, when Hispanic families in the Southwest captured and enslaved Navajo women and children. The textiles were valuable, and the women were forced to create them for their captive family’s profit. In a show of defiance, they invented a new loom sequencing meant to communicate that these weavings were not made by choice.
I would show respect for Judge Lambert in his chambers not because I respected him but because I had no choice but to get on the stand.
“It appears,” he said in jokey castigation, “you’ve been keeping some questionable company.” He wagged his finger at me, tsking. What a grand old time he was having while I sat there clinging to the crumbling edges of my sanity. “Filling your head with all kinds of fabrications, if I am to believe the affidavit.”
I stared at him with doe eyes.
“Miss Schumacher,” he said, suddenly impatient. “Am I to believe it?”
“Absolutely not, Your Honor.”
“Absolutely not?” His eyebrows jolted upward. “Nothing in life is absolute, Miss Schumacher.”
“No, Your Honor,” I agreed quickly.
He reclined, soft broad hands draped across his hard old-man belly, the Florida flag on one side of his silvering sideburns, Stars and Stripes on the other, looking so much like a human toad that I half expected him to ribbit at me. “Tell me how you came to be acquainted with Martina Cannon.”
“I met her at the hospital, Your Honor. Tallahassee Memorial. The Monday morning following the attack.”
“And how did that meeting go?”
“How do you mean, Your Honor?”
He turned one hand over on his gut irritably. “What did you talk about? When did you learn that she was from Seattle and that she was connected to an alleged missing girl out there?”
“That day.” I realized my short answer could be construed as defensive. “She gave me a ride home and told me who she was and that she believed the person responsible for what happened at my sorority house was the same person responsible for her friend’s disappearance.”