Black-Eyed Susans, page 18
There was sturdy silence before he said: “We didn’t touch the wine. And you’re pretty apt.”
Later, Charlie and I had swept the aisles at Walmart in search of blue hair gel, peppercorns, licorice, and lima beans for her 3-D re-creation of an animal cell. She chattered about turning Fruit Roll-Ups into a Golgi body. I listened to soothing snatches of nearby conversation that floated in the fluorescent light like a country western song. My brother just lost his house in frozen foods and God will find a way by the potato chips and Daddy’s going to kill him in front of the boxed wine. Soothing, because it seems like very few people at Walmart are pretending that things are OK, or that the world is going to end just because they aren’t OK. I wheeled my cart through this stew of misfortune and daily kicks-in-the-ass and plain old tenacity. No one at Walmart cared a whit who I was. I arrived home with ten potatoes for $1.99 and churned out my mother’s recipe for corn chowder. All of this effort at ordinary seemed to work: Charlie slipped under her fluffy comforter at the end of the night, full of starch and bacon bits and her belief that our bad guy was just a coward of a sign-maker with bad grammar.
Now it’s Monday morning, and I want to say no to meeting up with Jo, but I can’t. As soon as Charlie leaves for school, I strap on ASICS and yank my hair into a ponytail, every movement angry. I woke up with a deep, persistent need to run, to sweat out every bit of poison. Running is the one thing that always works. I can still manage four miles before my ankle begins to ache, and then two more miles to spite him. But, first, Jo.
The south side of the park is almost deserted when I swing the Jeep beside a shiny silver BMW. It’s the only other car in this lot, which serves a small picnic area. I glance inside the BMW as I slam my door shut. A Taco Bell bag and an empty Dr Pepper can are tossed on the floor. A handful of change is mingled in the console with a movie ticket stub. Innocent enough. As I circle behind the car, heading for the path, I glance down at the BMW’s license plate: DNA 4N6.
OK, so definitely Jo’s car. I say it out loud, “DNA 4N6.”
4N6? I try again. DNA Foreign Sex. Um, probably not, but it’s taking my mind off the gun riding at my hip and what things a bone doc might store in the trunk of her car.
On the horizon, a straight black line. The predicted cold front and 30-degree temperature drop by nightfall. A sixtyish woman in pink fast-walks past me, pumping her arms, hurrying away from it. I stop at a homeless man curled into a fetal position, asleep on a concrete picnic table near a shopping cart crammed with useful trash. I stick a $10 bill deep into the empty coffee cup he’s clutching. He doesn’t move.
I do that whenever I can. For Roosevelt. I made Lydia go visit Roosevelt on his street corner after they found me, because I knew he’d be worried. I never got to say goodbye myself. He was found dead leaning against a tree, like he fell asleep there, a week before the trial.
DNA 4N6. Four-en-six. Forensics! I’m an idiot.
I pick up the pace once I see Jo, who is right where she said she’d be—under a landmark live oak rumored to have once been a hanging tree. She’s cross-legged on a bench, sipping out of a green neoprene water bottle with a red biohazard sticker. Her black North Face windbreaker bears a CSI Texas logo. I’m figuring the bottle and the jacket are high-end graft from a forensic science conference.
“Thanks for meeting me here.” She unfolds her lean legs and pats the bench for me to sit beside her. “I worked in the lab all weekend and needed some air. I heard about what happened at your house. Have the police caught him?”
“No. I didn’t get a good look. There’s an anti-death-penalty newsletter that mentions me on a regular basis, so the cops are checking that email list. The editor posted my street address in her last blog that ranted about Terrell’s case. I’m not hopeful, though. I’ve been through this before.”
“It’s odd and scary … that these people would target you.” She doesn’t say it, but I know what she’s thinking. The victim.
I shrug, used to it. “The trial was a trigger for a lot of anger. And the jury foreman was very public in saying the case turned on my testimony.” Even though I was just painting in the scenery.
She nods sympathetically. I don’t really want to talk about what happened Saturday night. It’s bad enough that it’s rolling on an endless loop in my head: Charlie crouching in the shed under a compulsive array of garden diggers. The police, at my insistence, breaking down Effie’s back door. She had drifted off in her La-Z-Boy wearing noise-canceling headphones that she’d ordered off eBay. “You know, to maybe quiet the voices,” she had told me conspiratorially while a policeman searched her house. For a brief second, I thought she was also hinting at the ones in my own head, but her eyes had been darting around like a feral cat. It seems most likely that Miss Effie’s digger snatcher lives under her own roof. So I didn’t tell the cops, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to bring it up to Effie.
“I thought maybe you could use some good news,” Jo says. “The red hair on the jacket found near the field? The mitochondrial DNA analysis proves there is a 99.75 percent chance it didn’t come off your head. And there is no evidence of Terrell’s DNA on the jacket itself.”
“Is it enough to get Terrell a new trial?” I wonder if she’s told Bill.
“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a relatively new law in Texas that allows prisoners to successfully appeal a case when scientific technology can shed light on old evidence. But I talked to Bill this morning. He’s been through this wringer before with Death Row clients and he’s pretty adamant that a single red hair and a sloppy expert who used junk science aren’t going to be enough to convince an appeals court to overturn anything. He wants to throw more than that at the judge. Unfortunately, Terrell only has his mom and sister as alibis for the time Hannah Stein disappeared. And the cops have been unable to draw a line between Merry Sullivan and Hannah. Of course, the cops aren’t exactly on Terrell’s side—they are mostly focused on getting the girls identified for the families and getting the media off their backs every time the anniversary rolls around. Working at the behest of the district attorney who wants a little TV time. Did you happen to catch his press conference on Hannah?” I can tell she’s not expecting an answer. “Ferreting out the real killer … well, that would just be a bonus for us.”
The bitterness from her surprises me. “Sorry.” She grimaces. “I’m usually the one assuming everyone’s doing the best they can. I wish Bill and Angie had pulled me in much sooner.” Her face turns more pensive. “I’m trying something else in an effort to identify the other two girls. I just don’t know if there’s time to do it.”
Despite my resolve to pull back from the case, I feel that relentless tug in my gut. I’m the one with the answers, a Susan had insisted that day in the lab. Was it the Susan who belonged to the chattering skull? Or the new girl, lost and found in the pile of bones?
“A forensic geologist I know in Galveston is examining the bone evidence,” Jo continues. “He might—a big might—be able to narrow down the area or areas where they lived. Then we could check out the cases of missing girls in those places.”
“I’ve seen websites where you can send in a sample of your DNA and they will decipher your ancestry. Is this anything like that?”
“It is nothing, nothing like that. My geologist will use isotope analysis to examine the elements in her bone and try to match it to a region. It’s a tool kind of in its infancy stages when it comes to forensic identification. It was first used on a boy whose torso was found floating in the Thames over a decade ago. Scientists were able to trace his origin to Nigeria.”
“And it helped them identify the boy? Catch his killer?”
“No. Not yet. It’s a process. When you’re trying out new technology, each case is a single step on a million-mile road.” Her voice is softening. “We are so much a part of the earth, Tessa. Of the ancient past. We store strontium isotopes in our bones, in the same ratio as in the rocks and soil and water and plants and animals where we live. Animals eat the plants and drink the water. Humans eat the animals and plants. The strontium is passed along, all stored in our bones in the same ratio unique to the region.” The simplicity of her explanations always astounds me, and I think what a good professor she must be. “The problem is, it’s a big world. And there is a relatively small database at this point when it comes to identifying geological regions. It’s another long shot.”
Jo has fallen silent. It still isn’t clear exactly why she’s asked me to the park.
“Tell me again how you deal with all of the dead ends,” I finally say. “There’s just so much futility. Don’t you ever think you can’t take it anymore?”
“I could ask you the same.”
“But you choose this.”
“I’d say it chose me. I’ve known since I was fourteen this is what I was supposed to do. That’s why, when a kid tells me he’s going to be a third baseman for the Yankees, I don’t doubt him. Did you ever hear about the Girl Scout Murders in Oklahoma?”
“No,” I say, although it stirs a vague memory. Lydia would know.
“Every scientist has a cold case that pulls at them for years. This Girl Scout case is mine. I was in high school when three Girl Scouts were pulled out of their tent in the middle of the night on a campout near Tulsa. They were raped and murdered and left out for show. A local man—who’d been a popular high school football player—was accused, tried, and declared not guilty. DNA evidence was collected at the time, but there was zero technology to examine it. And before you ask, the evidence is now too degraded to be useful. I’ve used my connections to see every single crime scene photo and read every single word on the police reports and forensic testing. The point is, if I could beam myself back to 1977, I could give those parents some answers. And it’s all because scientists in labs keep trying to do futile things. My work is as much in the future as the present.”
“I understand,” I say. “It’s possible there won’t be answers in my case. For years. Why exactly did you ask me to the park? Just to update me?” It comes out rudely, which I didn’t intend. I’m just so tired.
“No. I wanted to say … to make sure that you know that you can always come to me. I don’t want you to ever feel alone.”
She’s really saying, Don’t dig without me. Not at this park. Not anywhere.
“Tessa, have you ever thought that maybe I need you, too? That I’m not as tough as you think I am?”
The first whisper of the cold front is stirring the trees.
“Lori, Doris, Michele,” she says softly. “The names of the dead Girl Scouts. My Susans.”
Tessie, 1995
“I’m thinking of not testifying.”
It sounded way more defiant when I practiced in front of the mirror this morning with the toothbrush in my hand and aqua bubbles drizzling out of the corner of my mouth.
I’m NOT testifying, Mr. Vega.
There. That’s better.
I open my mouth again to say it more emphatically but the district attorney is on his tiger prowl around the office, not the slightest bit interested in what I think. The doc is bent over his desk with a pile of folders, certainly listening to every word. He’s the master of staying still.
“Did you hear me? I don’t think I have anything of value to add. I don’t have anything to add.” I’m stammering.
Benita offers a sympathetic smile that pretty much says I’m doomed. Both she and Mr. Vega are here to review my testimony. This is the first time they want to rehearse the gory details. They’ve waited this long because Mr. Vega wants me to sound as spontaneous as possible. The trial is less than two weeks away, so that’s pretty spontaneous.
“Tessie, I know this is hard,” Mr. Vega says. “What we need to do is put the jury in that grave with you. Even if you don’t remember details about the killer, you add context. You make it real. For instance, what did it smell like when you were lying there?”
My gag reflex is so strong that even he, the calloused prosecutor, reacts. I’m sure he did this on purpose, calibrating how this melodrama would play to the jury. I still think he’s the good guy. I’ve just changed my mind. I don’t want to testify for him. Cannot, will not, sit across from my monster.
“OK, we’ll come back to that. Close your eyes. You’re in the grave. Turn your head to the left. What do you see?”
I reluctantly turn my head, and there she is. “Merry.”
“Is she dead?”
I open my eyes and cast them to the doctor for help, but he’s busily tapping away on his computer at his desk. Do I lie? Or tell the prosecutor that dead Merry talked to me? Surely, that would hurt the case.
If I testify. Which I won’t.
“I don’t know whether she’s dead.” The truth. “Her lips are bluish gray … but some girls wear blue lipstick. It’s Goth.” I don’t know why I said that. Nothing about clarinet-playing, churchgoing Merry was Goth, except when she was lying next to me in a grave like a prop for a horror movie.
“What else?”
“Her eyes are open.” Things were eating her, except when they weren’t.
“What do you smell?”
I swallow hard. “Something spoiled.”
“Is it hard to breathe?”
“It’s like … breathing in a port-a-potty.”
“Are you cold? Hot? As best you can, narrative answers.”
“Sweating. My ankle hurts. I wonder if he chopped off my foot. I want to look but every time I lift my head up, things kind of explode in my head, you know? I’m scared I will faint.”
“Do you call out?”
“I can’t. There’s dirt in my throat.”
“Keep your eyes closed. Turn your head to the right. What do you see?”
It hurts to turn my head. But it’s easier to breathe. “I see … bones. My Pink Lemonade Lip Smacker. The lid is off. I don’t know where it is. A Snickers bar. A quarter. From 1978. Three pennies.”
The photograph in my head suddenly animates. Ants crawl in a delirious, sugar-fired frenzy on my lip gloss. A hand stretches out for the Snickers bar. I know it’s my hand because it’s sprinkled with pink freckles and the nails are short, trimmed, painted neatly blue with Hard Candy Sky polish. The color almost matches Merry’s lips. I taste blood and dirt, peanut butter and bile, when I rip open the wrapper with my teeth. The bones of the other Susans chatter encouragement. Keep up your strength. Stay strong.
“I remember eating the Snickers bar,” I say. “I didn’t want to.” But the Susans insisted.
“I don’t remember you mentioning some of this before. Are you recalling other details? Anything about him? His face? Hair color? Anything?” I can’t tell by Mr. Vega’s voice if he thinks this would be good or bad.
Why is this stuff coming back now? No one tells me to, but I shut my eyes again. Turn my face up to the night sky, except there are no stars. The sun is shining. I’m out of the grave. I’m somewhere else, in a light-filled space with Merry and the Susans. Merry sleeps, while the others are whispering, chattering excitedly, making a plan. One of them is bending over me. A ring dangles off her skeleton finger, but the stone is missing. She takes the gold prongs and carves a half-moon on my cheek, and it doesn’t hurt at all. There is no blood.
Get him, she says. Never forget us.
I know this isn’t real, although the lab found my blood type, not Merry’s, on the prongs of the ring locked on a Susan’s finger bone. They figure, with utmost logic, that I fell on it when I was dumped into the hole.
I have to stop this before I tumble into that hole again and can’t ever climb out.
“I’m not testifying. Not for you. Or them.”
Mr. Vega tilts his head, ready to fire his next question.
“You heard Tessie.” The doctor has raised his head from the desk. “This session is over.”
Tessa, present day
I watched until Jo vanished on the path and I was sure she was not coming back. I jogged past the sleeping homeless man curled with his back to the refrigerating wind. Fumbled my way into the Jeep. Locked it. Folded myself forward against the steering wheel and stunned myself by bursting into tears. Here’s what kindness and sympathy and an offer of partnership do to me.
I have driven to this office on autopilot, the last place I would have pictured myself this morning. The room is small, white-walled, and slightly chilly. A nervous woman in her thirties sits across from me, eager to start a conversation as soon as I stop pretending to read this magazine and finally make eye contact.
“It’s hard, isn’t it? When your kid is hurting? My kid is in there right now.” The woman needs something from me. I reluctantly lift my gaze and watch her take it all in. My eyes, red and swollen. The scar. I nod with agreement and empathy, hope that will be it, and return to the headline: Is it wrong to pay kids to eat their veggies?
“Dr. Giles is terrific … if you’re here for a first consult for your kid.” She’s not going to give up. “Lily’s been going to her for six months. I highly recommend her.”
I carefully close the magazine and tuck it back into the neat arc of reading material on the coffee table. “I’m the kid,” I say.
The woman’s face twists in confusion.
The girl who must be Lily pops out of the closed door, wearing a dizzying array of crayon-esque colors. The right side of her head is attached to a giant sparkly bow. Even with all the effort at distraction, I am drawn to the plain brown innocent eyes.
And the smile. I know that smile because I’ve worn it, the one that pulls at thirteen muscles and strikes a match for all the other smiles in the room and makes you appear perfectly normal and happy. Except I know Lily’s terrified.
