“Not the inmate’s. Yours.”
“Vivi Ann Grey Raintree.”
“Identification, please.”
Vivi Ann’s hands were shaking as she opened her purse and extracted her driver’s license from the wallet. The receptionist took it, wrote some things in a logbook, and handed it back.
“Fill out this form.”
As she stood there, Vivi Ann heard people come up behind her, forming a line of sorts. It forced her to write faster. “Here you go,” she said, handing the sheet back to the receptionist.
“Over there,” the receptionist said, tilting her chin without looking up. “Put all your personal items in one of those lockers. No purses, wallets, food, gum, keys, et cetera. The metal detector is at the end of the hallway. Next.”
Vivi Ann walked down the quiet corridor. At the end of the steel-gray lockers, she stowed her purse, and then headed toward the metal detector. A huge uniformed guard stood by the entrance, with his booted feet planted apart and his arms loose at his sides. He wore a gun on each hip.
She handed him the locker key and moved cautiously through the detector. Since she’d never flown anywhere, this was the first time she’d ever been through one of these devices and she wasn’t quite sure how it should be done. Slowly made sense, so she inched forward. A high beeping alarm sounded; Vivi Ann’s heartbeat kicked into high gear. She looked around; now there were three uniformed guards around her. “I—I don’t have anything on me.”
A woman guard came forward. “Over here. Spread your legs.”
Vivi Ann did as she was told. Even though she knew she was fine—had to be—she was afraid. Sweat broke out on her forehead.
The guard passed a flat black paddle in front of her. It beeped again at her bra and at the buckle on her shoe.
“You’re fine,” the guard said. “That way.”
Vivi Ann moved forward again, to another desk, where her hand was stamped and a
VISITOR
tag was hung around her neck. She followed another uniformed guard down another hallway to a door marked
VISITATION
.
“You got one hour,” he said, opening the door.
Vivi Ann nodded and walked into the long, low-ceilinged room. A row of Plexiglas cut the space in half; on either side were cubicles. Each one had a black telephone receiver and a chair.
She went to the last cubicle on the left and sat down. The fake glass was clouded with thousands of fingerprint smudges.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, alone, but the wait felt endless. At one point another woman came in, took a seat at the opposite wall. Through the distorting series of Plexiglas cubicles, their gazes met and then looked away.
Finally, the door opened and Dallas was there, wearing an orange jumpsuit and flip-flops, his long hair falling lank across his bruised face.
He came over to the cubicle, sat down on his side of the dirty Plexiglas. Slowly, he reached for the receiver.
She did the same. “What happened to your face?”
“They call it resisting arrest.”
“And did you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said, “I’m looking for a good defense attorney. It takes so much money, though. I’ll keep trying. I can’t—”
“I’ve already signed the pauper’s affidavit and met with the lawyer assigned to my case. You’re not going into debt to save me.”
“But you’re innocent.”
The look he gave her was so cold that for a second he was someone she didn’t know. “And that’s what I’m going to teach you in the end. Cynicism. When this thing is over you won’t know what to believe so you’ll believe in nothing. That will have been my gift to you.”
“I love you, Dallas. That’s what matters. We have to stay strong. Love will get us through.”
“My mom loved my dad until the day he killed her.”
“Don’t even
think
about comparing yourself to him.”
“You’re going to hear all about it before this thing is over, how he abused me, burned me with cigarettes, locked me up. They’re going to say it made me mean. They’re going to say I had sex with Cat, that I—”
Vivi Ann pressed her hand to the glass. “Touch me, Dallas.”
“I can’t,” he said, and she could see how that admission ate him up inside and made him angry. “Love isn’t a shield, Vivi. It’s time you saw that.”
“Touch my hand.”
Slowly he brought his hand up, pressed his palm against hers. All she could feel was the slickness of the Plexiglas, but she closed her eyes and tried to remember the heat of his skin against hers. When she had the memory close, and could hold it to her chest, she opened her eyes. “I’m your wife,” she said into the receiver. “I don’t know who taught you to run, but it’s too late for that now. We stand and fight. And then you come home. That’s how it’s going to be. You get me?”
“It makes me sick to see you in here, touching this dirty glass, talking into that phone, trying not to cry.”
“Just don’t pull away. I can take anything but that.”
“I’m scared,” he said quietly.
“So am I. But I want you to remember that you’re
not
alone. You’ve got a wife and a son who adore you.”
“It’s hard to believe that in here.”
“Believe it, Dallas,” she said, swallowing the tears she refused to shed. “I won’t ever give up on you.”
All that winter and for the following spring, the upcoming trial of Dallas Raintree dominated town gossip. It was such a juicy bit of steak, with lots of fatty flavor. There was the big question: Did he do it? But in truth that didn’t get much play. Most folks had made up their minds when he was arrested. Respect for the law ran high in Oyster Shores, and they figured a mistake was unlikely. Besides, they’d known from the minute he walked into the Outlaw Tavern, with his inked-up bicep and shoulder-length hair, and his looking-for-a-fight gaze, that he was trouble. The fact that he’d gone after Vivi Ann was proof enough he didn’t know his place. She’d been suckered in by him, pure and simple. That was the talk anyway.
Winona had spent the last five months in a holding pattern. It was obvious to everyone that her sisters were no longer speaking to her. Dallas’s arrest had broken the once-solid Grey family into two camps: Aurora and Vivi Ann vs. Winona and Henry. Sympathy ran high for all of them. The general consensus was that Dad and Winona had made an uncharacteristic mistake in hiring Dallas in the first place. While no one believed Dad should have paid for a private lawyer (
Why throw good money after bad
being the most common expression of this point), they believed he was wrong to let his family break up over it.
Winona had carefully planted the seeds of her own defense: that she wasn’t a criminal defense attorney and couldn’t represent Dallas; that she longed to reconcile with Vivi Ann and waited for the day when her baby sister would return to the fold; and most convincingly, that Vivi Ann had always been headstrong and would learn in time that she’d made a terrible mistake in believing in Dallas. On that day, Winona always said, “I’ll be there to dry her tears.”
It was true, too. Every day of her estrangement with her sisters was a nearly unbearable burden on Winona. For the first few months she had tried to bridge the gap, repair the damage, but each of her attempts at reconciliation or explanation had been ignored. Vivi Ann and Aurora would neither speak to her nor listen. They didn’t even sit in the family pew at church anymore.
By mid-May, when the rhododendrons burst into plate-sized blooms and the azaleas in her yard were bright with flowers, she was hanging on by a thread, waiting for the trial to begin. When it was over, and Dallas was convicted, Vivi Ann would finally face the ugly truth. Then she would need her family again. And Winona would be there, arms open, waiting to take care of her.
On the first day of the trial, Winona woke up early, dressed in a suit, and was among the first spectators allowed into the gallery of the courtroom. As she watched the poor defense attorney enter the room, dragging his file boxes toward the defense table, she knew she’d done the right thing in declining to represent Dallas. She could never have handled a trial of this magnitude. Last week she’d watched voir dire and several of the pretrial motions and known without a doubt that she would have been in over her head with this trial. Although, to be honest, she had her doubts about the defense attorney’s competence, too. He’d allowed a couple of local residents on the jury, which didn’t seem smart to Winona.
She went to a place in the third row and sat down, hearing people file in behind her. The gallery filled up in no time. Everyone in town wanted to be here today. The whispering was as loud as a rising tide in the wood-paneled room.
On the right side of the courtroom, at the front table, sat the assistant prosecuting attorney, Sara Hamm, and her bright-faced young assistant. On the left side, at the defense table, sat Roy Lovejoy, the attorney assigned to Dallas’s case. Winona had tried her best to get information out of the prosecuting attorney’s office, but everyone had been closemouthed during the discovery process. All she knew was what everyone knew: that the rape charge had been dropped and the murder charge remained. The media hadn’t been much help, either. The murder of a single woman in a small town in a rural county didn’t warrant much in-depth coverage. Sensationalism about Dallas’s and Cat’s unsavory pasts abounded; true facts were harder to come by.
At eight forty-five, Vivi Ann and Aurora walked into the courtroom, holding hands.
In a loose-fitting black suit, Vivi Ann looked incredibly fragile. Light gilded her ponytailed hair, softened the thinness of her face. She looked like a piece of bone china that would crack at the slightest touch. Aurora looked as grim and determined as a bodyguard. They passed Winona without making eye contact, and took seats two rows in front of her.
Winona fought the urge to go to them. Instead she straightened, folded her cold hands in her lap.
And then two uniformed guards were bringing Dallas into the courtroom.
He wore a pair of creased black pants, a pressed white shirt, and a black tie. The months in jail had left their mark on him; he was thinner, sinewy, and when he looked at Winona, she froze, heart thumping.
Vivi Ann stood up, rising like a white rose from a messy garden, and tried to smile at Dallas.
Before Dallas was seated at the defense table, the guards removed his restraints.
Judge Debra Edwards entered the courtroom, wearing her flowing black robes. She took her place on the bench and looked at the attorneys. “Are the parties ready to proceed?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” the lawyers said in tandem.
The judge nodded. “Bring in the jury.”
The jurors filed into the courtroom in quiet order; all of them stared openly at Dallas. Several were already frowning.
Sara Hamm stood up. With that simple act, she commanded attention. An imposing woman in a crisp blue suit with a needle-thin white pinstripe, she looked professional and calm. She smiled at the jury and moved toward them confidently. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the facts in this case are simple and straightforward.” She had the voice of a fairy tale witch: smooth and honeyed on the surface but with a layer of steel beneath. Winona found herself leaning forward, hanging on every word.
“During the course of this trial, the state will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Dallas Raintree feigned an illness on Christmas Eve of last year to avoid having to attend church services with his family. While his wife and child were away, he went to Catherine Morgan’s home and he killed her.
“How do we know this beyond a reasonable doubt? The answer is evidence. Mr. Raintree left a trail behind him that investigators were able to follow. First and most obvious was his long-term association with the victim. Several eyewitnesses will testify as to Mr. Raintree’s regular weekend trysts with Ms. Morgan. These evenings have been described as ‘rowdy, drunken, lewd’ gatherings that went on long into the morning. But association doesn’t equal murder. For that we have to look to the physical and forensic evidence. Of which there is plenty.”
Sara held out a photograph of Cat Morgan; in it, she was sitting on her porch, smiling at the camera. In the next photograph, she was slumped against a bloody wall, naked, a torn dark bullet wound in her chest.
Several jurors flinched and looked away; others glared at Dallas. Sara Hamm strolled in front of the jury, pausing now and then in front of the female jurors as she went on, describing the crime in excruciating detail. When she was finished with that, she turned to the jury again.
“The state will introduce evidence that the gun used to kill Catherine Morgan was owned by Dallas Raintree. Experts lifted his fingerprints from the weapon. That alone could be enough to establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, ladies and gentlemen, but the state has even more proof. An expert from the Washington State Crime Lab will use hair samples gathered from the scene to place Dallas Raintree in Catherine Morgan’s bed that night, and an eyewitness will testify that he left her house at just past eight o’clock that evening. The medical examiner has placed Ms. Morgan’s death at somewhere between six and nine-thirty on the twenty-fourth. DNA samples from the crime scene will establish that Dallas Raintree is the same blood type as the man who had sex with Ms. Morgan just before her death.
“Coincidence? Hardly. When all this evidence is put together, the answer is inescapable. Dallas Raintree, who had a very public affair with Catherine Morgan before his marriage, went back to the affair sometime thereafter. After an argument of some kind, things went wrong for the lovers. Evidence will show that they fought for control of the gun. And Dallas Raintree won that fight. He shot her in the chest at point-blank range and then went home to his wife, celebrating a cozy Christmas while Catherine Morgan lay dead in her house. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a commonsense case. There is no doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Dallas Raintree murdered Catherine Morgan in cold blood, and at the conclusion of the evidence I am confident that you’ll find him guilty of this heinous crime. The mistake Ms. Morgan made on that dark Christmas Eve night was in believing that the defendant was her friend and letting him into her home. She died for that mistake, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s not compound it now. Let’s make sure that Dallas Raintree is never able to hurt anyone again.” She returned to her seat and sat down. “Thank you.”