All for a Sister (13 page)

“Yes. But he never said anything like that.”

“So you had a trial?”

Dana nodded. “In the DuFranes’ parlor.”

Carrie’s eyes went wide. “In a
parlor
? You can’t have a trial in a parlor. It needs to be a courtroom, with a jury and—”

“How do you know all this?”

Her face beamed with pride. “I have a cousin who lives in Cleveland. We lived there for a year or so. Anyway, he’s going to be a lawyer, and he works running messages to the courthouse. And sometimes, last winter, he let me sit in and watch with him because it’s warm in there. They have balconies up top for when it’s a Negro on trial, but when it’s a white man, ain’t nobody up there. So I watched them all.”

“Maybe they just don’t know what to do with me. Maybe they haven’t figured out yet if I’m guilty or not.”

“How long have you been here?”

Dana thought. “Two Christmases.”

“Well, that’s plenty of time. You need to talk to the warden.”

“I tried, once.” Last spring, after waking from a nightmare in which her mother was being swept away in a raging river. Certainly, she thought, Mama had been trying to see her. “Mrs.
Karistin told me that when Mr. Webb wanted to see me, he would see me. And that’s the way it works here. ‘Two thousand souls under this roof, he don’t have time for none of your beans.’”

Carrie laughed. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny, but you sound just like her.”

Dana smiled. “I’ve had time to practice.” She motioned for Carrie to turn around, then finished the last braid. “There. Much better.”

When Carrie turned around again, her face was serious beyond her years. “I bet my cousin can help.”

It was the first bit of hope since the last visit with Mama. “Do you really think so?”

She nodded solemnly. “He’s the smartest person I know. I’m going to tell him all about you. But you have to tell me, true.” She leaned forward and held Dana’s gaze as if building a new wall around the two of them. “Did you kill that baby?”

“No.” Nothing else to add.

“But that baby died?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever tell that baby’s mama that you were sorry it died?”

“
She.
She died. A little girl. And no. They wouldn’t let me talk to her.”

“You have to do that. Write her a letter. Rip some pages from the copybook, or ask the teacher who read the story today. Ask her for paper and an envelope, and write to that lady. Do you know her name?”

“Mrs. DuFrane.”

She could hear her mother’s voice.
“Mrs. DuFrane needs me to work late tonight. Lock the door.”

“And you said there was a judge? Do you know his name?”

Dana started to shake her head, then recalled the smallest
snippet of a memory long buried, and she reached for Carrie’s hand, as if that grip would help her hold it. “The day they took me out of the cell at the police station, and the officer on duty didn’t want to let me go. He said . . .” She closed her eyes, trying to remember the exact words. He was an older man, and sweet. Like she’d always imagined a grandfather to be, and they’d sometimes played cards in the late afternoons. “He said, ‘This is highly unusual.’ And then the man who came to get me said, ‘It’s orders direct from Judge Stephens.’ And he had some piece of paper.”

“Then you need to write to that judge.”

Dana exclaimed, “I will!” and threw her arms around the girl who would be her friend for a whole month. Giddy with possibility, she bent her head to Carrie’s, and the two conspired as to what, exactly, she should say. Soon there was a third.

“Look at you two.” Mrs. Karistin’s face was close enough that Dana could smell the grayness of her breath. “Thick as thieves, as they say. Not that it applies to the two of you. Gotta change that, don’t we? If thieves is thick, what do we have when we got a cutter and a killer?”

Carrie kept her eyes focused on Dana and said, “Friends.”

THE WRITTEN CONFESSION OF MARGUERITE DUFRANE, PAGES 25–38

OH, MY DARLING GIRL,
do you have any memories at all of our house back home? By “home,” of course, I mean Highland Park, where the nicer houses—like ours—had such lovely architectural idiosyncrasies. It has taken me your lifetime to warm myself to the sprawling vanity of Los Angeles. Here, it seems, walls are but a nuisance to the sunshine, and all the rooms are vast and light, with no place at all to keep a secret.

I remember, once, when Calvin was a very young boy—no more than three—and he’d taken to hiding and waiting for your father and me to seek him. He was quite unsophisticated at first, huddling behind potted plants or lying wait in coat closets. Once he folded himself into the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and poor Mrs. Gibbons nearly died of fright when she opened the door to retrieve the box of soap flakes. Soon, though, he ventured further into the house. Deep into the coal bin, high into the attic, until one day he disappeared altogether.

I wish I could report that I’d been terrified, my heart stopped with fear, the house filled with my hysterical cries, or something more fitting of a mother. But I was exhausted that day. In fact, it might have been during the early stages of my pregnancy with
Mary, and insufferably hot. It was close to four o’clock, that difficult time between Calvin’s nap and your father’s coming home from work, and I was resting with a cool cloth covering my eyes when I felt his hot little breath against my cheek.

“I’m going hiding. Count to ten and come find me.”

I told him I’d be along, though I planned to dispatch your father to the task as soon as he arrived home, but I fell asleep and he, not wishing to disturb me, went directly to his library, looking over his papers or some such thing. I came downstairs having heard the bell for supper, and we were both halfway through the soup before remarking that Calvin was awfully late coming to the table. We sent Mrs. Gibbons to fetch him down, but she returned claiming not to have found him in his bedroom, or the playroom, or even outside.

I’ll never forget your father’s instant response. He tugged the napkin from his collar and stormed away from the table, bellowing our son’s name until I feared he’d shake the chandeliers. Then, and only then, did I remember that I was supposed to have found him.

I was quickly at Arthur’s heels, echoing his calls, and in between reassuring him that the boy was simply hiding, as he always did. I did not mention my own lapse, as your father already thought I greatly exaggerated the symptoms of my pregnancy. Understandable, perhaps, because he did not know the depths of my fragility.

High and low we searched, your father still clutching his dinner napkin, both of us shouting so loud we might not have heard Calvin if he did call out. Inside every closet, behind every door. Cabinets and wardrobes. Under beds, beneath the covers, until finally we came upon the linen closet at the very end of the hall. This was not an ordinary linen closet, as it had been constructed shortly after the death of my parents, when your father and I
became primary residents of the house. Behind it was a door, and behind that door a series of rooms that had been servants’ quarters back when families of privilege employed such persons to stoke fires and polish silver and curry horses. Every new invention, it seemed, made one more person unnecessary, and your father, quite frankly, was never comfortable with such displays of wealth, and so we learned to make do with a single live-in domestic. If I’d held my ground and convinced him to allow a permanent nanny, I might have been spared the devastation of Mary’s death. . . .

But I digress within my digression. We went to that closet, opened the door, and heard the faintest sound from the other side. It was clear the linens had been disturbed on the shelves, and Arthur began throwing them to the floor, calling Calvin’s name. Finally I spied a tiny finger poking out through a loose board at the back.

Calvin!

I fell to my knees and your father dropped beside me. We pushed on the board as the boy himself must have done earlier in the afternoon. Cheap particle stuff that it was—barely a step above cardboard—it gave way, and Arthur was able to push and bend it enough to allow our son to crawl out from underneath and join us, red-faced and sobbing, on the other side. I remember feeling a strange mix of anger and relief at having found him, and while he was still crying, I took him in my arms and praised him for being such a good hider.

“You didn’t come find me.” His words were wet with tears.

I buried his hot little face close to my heart and breathed hushes into his sweaty head, hoping his father hadn’t heard. I assured him that we’d found him now, hadn’t we? That was a very mousy place for him to go, and we were far too big to follow.

“I called and I called, but you didn’t hear me.”

“Enough of this,” Arthur said, throwing sheets and towels onto the shelves with no regard to folding or order. “Get downstairs for dinner, and we’ll have no more of hiding for quite some time.”

The next day, carpenters came in to make reparations, and I didn’t give the incident another thought for years, until the afternoon that woman stood in my parlor, pregnant, insisting I find some way to secure freedom for her daughter.

I sent her away that day with a promise to think and to pray about the best course of action to take. No sooner had the door shut against the evening streetlights than I was at my correspondence desk, searching my address book for the name of the carpenter who had repaired that linen closet. For the first time, I was truly grateful that Arthur chose to leave the lion’s share of the day-to-day operations of the house to me. The man himself hadn’t written a check or opened a bill for most of our marriage.

Two days later, knowing Arthur would be at a university faculty meeting well past the dinner hour, four strong Italians went to work on my project at the end of the upstairs hall. Leaving them to their labor, I stepped out—dressed in my blackest dress and finest hat—to take care of another matter entirely.

Judge Stephens and my father had been friends since the two met in law school before he even met my mother. Not that Father ever worked as a lawyer; it was just something young men did while they waited to be old enough to be trusted with their family businesses—my cousin Eugene has carried on that tradition brilliantly. Still, he and George Stephens had remained a fixture in my childhood—holiday outings and family dinners. He delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral, and before my mother died, he
oversaw the writing of her will, to ensure that every bit of my father’s money went to me and not the passel of worthless cousins who’d been waiting with bated breath for her passing.

For all I knew of Judge Stephens—and I carried a wealth of information that had seemed such a burden until this very afternoon—I did not know the extent of his power, or if his appointment would bring him anywhere near the case pending against the girl who had killed my daughter. I’d been too distraught to receive his visit in the days after Mary’s death, but I clutched a note written in his familiar hand on thick, official stationery assuring me he would do for me whatever I needed during this horrific time.

This was the evidentiary promise I took with me to the courthouse and presented to a series of secretaries, each less inclined than the previous to grant me access to my longtime family friend. Finally, the one separated from him by a mere wall bade me sit and wait while she consulted his schedule and then poked her head through a clouded-glass door. Then the man himself came out, taking me in a fatherly embrace I neither expected nor welcomed, and ushered me into his office, instructing his secretary to send word that he would be late to court.

“Our little Margi.” He’d always had the deep voice of an old man, giving me an idea of what my father might have become had he lived another decade. Indeed, he and Father were the only ones ever to call me by that nickname, and in that moment I cringed at the endearment as I tried to shrink away from his touch.

I said, Hello, George, as soon as I could politely extricate myself and take the seat offered to me opposite his impressive oak desk.

“I’m so sorry about the baby. I came to visit. Did your husband tell you?”