“I should have taken Dallas’s case in the first place, Vivi,” she said. She’d been waiting for a chance to say it.
“That’s old news, Win.”
“I’m sorry at how much the new petition has upset you, you have to know that.”
“But not sorry you took the case on?”
“How can I be sorry for that?”
Vivi Ann turned at last. “How is it that you’re always so damned certain of yourself? Even when you’re wrong.”
“Me, certain?” Winona laughed. “You must be kidding.”
“You go into the china shop like a bull every time.”
Winona looked at her sister, seeing the vulnerability in her eyes, the pain. “And I break everything. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“No,” Vivi Ann said, but it wasn’t the answer in her eyes.
Before Winona could reply, her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her coat pocket and saw that it was her office. “This is Winona.”
The cottage door burst open and Noah ran inside, his clothes splattered with rain, his hair wet, his backpack dragging on the floor beside him. “Aunt Winona’s car—”
“Shoes,” Vivi Ann said tiredly.
Noah dropped his backpack and kicked his big shoes off; they flew into the dining room, hit the wall, and thudded to the floor. “Did we hear something?”
Winona held up her hand for silence, listening to Lisa on the phone. “Thanks,” she said finally, and hung up.
“Well?” Noah demanded.
Winona’s heart was beating so fast she felt light-headed. “They granted our motion,” she said, rising in anticipation. “They’re going to test the DNA sample found at the crime scene.”
Noah let out a whoop of joy. “I knew it! You did it, Aunt Win.”
“We did it,” she said, still a little unable to believe it.
“Tell him,” Vivi Ann said in a voice as cold and brittle as a sheet of ice. She was clutching the sofa table tightly.
“Tell him what?” Winona asked, frowning.
“The thousand things that can go wrong from here. Don’t you
dare
let him go to bed thinking this was easy and dreaming of what he’ll say to Dallas when he’s free.”
Winona wanted to take her wounded sister in her arms and comfort her the way she used to, so long ago. Instead, she gentled her voice. “Let him enjoy his victory.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. But congratulations,” she said. “Dallas is lucky to have you.” Then she walked past them, went into her bedroom, and slammed the door.
“Ignore her,” Noah said. “Everything either pisses her off or makes her cry these days. It’s pathetic. So if the DNA isn’t Dad’s, they’ll let him come home, right?”
“It’s not certain like that. Just a chance.”
“You mean he could still end up staying in prison for life? Even if it’s not his DNA?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking at her sister’s door. The whole landscape had changed with this ruling. A denied petition would have moved them all back to Start; in time, they would have reconciled and moved on, as they’d done before. This, though, was something else. This was the beginning of a new and specific hope. And suddenly she understood every word Vivi Ann had said to her.
She hadn’t been fully listening before: her twin flaws, ambition and certainty, had deafened her. She’d focused on undoing a wrong, righting her own mistake; redemption. Now she saw how Vivi Ann had been trying to protect her son. Her sister had understood all along that they could win the battle and lose the war.
Winona often wondered in the next few months how Dallas was holding up in prison. Waiting for the test results was like having a faucet drip constantly in the back of your mind. She knew Noah was as unnerved by it as she was. As Vivi Ann had predicted, he was falling apart a little more each day: getting in trouble, skipping class, failing tests.
But it was Dallas she really worried about. She made a point of visiting him every other week; more and more often, they sat there with nothing to say. April faded into May, which blended into June. The tourists came back to Oyster Shores, bringing noise and money and traffic with them, but here at the prison, nothing ever changed. Life could be vibrant and bright outside of these walls. It was always gray and dark within.
“You need to get some sleep,” she’d said to him on her last visit. It had been the only time he’d smiled that day.
“I guess I should have thought of that before we started this thing.”
“Are you scared?” she’d asked.
“Scared is a fact of life for me,” he’d answered, flicking the dirty hair from his eyes.
Winona had had nothing to say in response. So she’d changed the conversation, adding hope to the list of topics to steer away from.
How much the landscape could change in a week and a half. That was what she thought on this Wednesday afternoon as she followed the guard down to her meeting with Dallas.
Once in the room, she waited impatiently for his arrival, moving from one foot to the other, too excited to sit down.
Finally the door opened and Dallas was there. His hair was dirty and lank, his face was pale, and he moved awkwardly, as if his whole body hurt. As always his ankles and wrists were shackled. “Hey, Winona,” he said.
“You sound sick. Do you need a doctor?”
He laughed at that. The sound dissolved into a cough. “It’s just June. I’m allergic to something around here. Razor wire, maybe.”
“Sit down, Dallas.”
He stopped moving and lifted his chin to move the hair from his eyes. She knew he hated to do it with his hands—the shackles rattling in front of his face, the obvious awkwardness of the movement. Once he’d asked her to do it, and she’d found herself almost trembling as she reached forward. It had been the one and only time she’d looked into Dallas’s steely gray eyes and seen a glimpse of the abused boy he’d once been. The way she’d put his hair behind his ear was perhaps the gentlest she’d ever been with a man. “I’ll stand,” he said.
“We got the test results back. The semen isn’t yours.” She smiled, waited for him to do the same, but he just stood there. “Did you hear me? The DNA found at the scene wasn’t yours.”
“Now what?”
“You don’t look very happy.”
“You forget, Winona. I always knew it wasn’t my DNA.”
The power behind those few words struck her hard, and for a moment, she truly imagined what life had been like for him all these years. An innocent man in prison. Her voice softened when she said, “I’ve already called the prosecuting attorney’s office. I’ve asked them to join me in vacating the judgment and dismissing the case.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Winona frowned. “I know I could make the motion myself, but they’ll fight me on it. If we can get them to see the evidence, agree with our argument, and believe in a miscarriage of justice, we could do a joint recommendation for release. That would be a slam dunk.”
“You’re as naïve as Vivi Ann. Here’s what’s going to happen: they’ll admit I didn’t have sex with Cat, but maintain that I killed her. Maybe they’ll say suddenly that I had an accomplice. What they won’t say is,
Gee, Winona, good save
.”
She sat down on the hard chair. “If you believed all that, why did you let me start this?”
“For Noah,” he said simply. “He’s like his mom, I guess. I knew he couldn’t let go without trying.”
“So you let Noah and me start this thing, believing in your innocence, and then you say
hasta la vista
and go back into your cell until you die?
That’s
your plan?”
“That’s the way it is, Win. If you’d bothered to ask Vivi Ann, she could have told you what would happen. We’ve been here before, remember?”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t accept it. You’re wrong.”
“Later,” he said softly, “when you’ve figured this whole thing out, do me a favor, okay?”
“What?”
“Tell Noah I did it. Otherwise he’ll drag me around in his head. He doesn’t need that.”
“I will not. I
won’t
.”
He nodded, said, “Thanks, Win. I mean it. If it was redemption you needed, you’ve earned it. Now go home and take care of my family.” Then he left the room.
She stared after him, feeling a hot, impotent rage bubbling up.
“He’s wrong,” she said to the guard, who didn’t respond at all. “I didn’t go through all of this to have it mean nothing.”
She left the prison and went to her car, muttering. “He’s a cynic. Of course he thinks the worst, with what he’s been through.” Already she was figuring how to prove what good news this was.
Noah would be thrilled.
She’d concentrate on that: the good. Optimism was always a choice, and her will would not fail her now when she needed it so much.
She was halfway home when her cell phone rang. It was Lisa, calling to tell her that the prosecuting attorney had just called to say that she’d seen the DNA results and was willing to concede that Dallas had not had sexual relations with the decedent that night, but reaffirmed her certainty that he’d murdered her. They’d be filing their motion to uphold the conviction this week.
Perhaps, the prosecuting attorney had opined to Lisa, Dallas had had an accomplice.
Vivi Ann was in the farmhouse’s kitchen, making a casserole for dinner, when the story came on TV. She wasn’t really listening, was humming along to a song in her head (“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” but it was best not to think too much about the song itself), when she heard Dallas’s name.
She turned slowly, bumping the oven door shut with her hip. As she walked through the living room, she told herself it was her imagination, running like a colt through new grass, but when she stepped into the family room and saw the look on her father’s face, she knew it had been real.
Saying nothing, Vivi Ann picked up the remote and hit the back button, thankful for the first time that Winona had talked her father into getting a DVR.
When she hit play again, a local newscaster was on-screen, standing in front of the forbidding gray prison walls. A snapshot of Dallas—his mug shot—hung suspended in the corner.
“. . . DNA test results indicate that Dallas Raintree was not the last man to have sexual relations with the victim, Catherine Morgan. Defense Attorney Winona Grey was unavailable for comment, but Prosecuting Attorney Sara Hamm is here with us now.”
Sara Hamm filled the screen, looking older and even more regal. “This is all just legal wranglings. Mr. Raintree’s conviction was the result of a great deal of physical and circumstantial evidence. The DNA evidence wasn’t even used at trial, so it could hardly have convicted him. Thus, this test result changes nothing. Except that local law enforcement is actively investigating the chance that Mr. Raintree did not work alone the night he killed Ms. Morgan.”
The newscaster came back on. “That was Sara Hamm—”
Vivi Ann flicked the off button and the screen went black.
Her father went back to drinking. Ice rattled in his glass as he lifted it to his lips.
“I guess that’s that,” she said, feeling as if something were draining out of her, leaving her smaller. But that was ridiculous. She’d expected this. Prepared for it.
“Thank God. He done nothing but ruin us.”
“What if we ruined him?”
Dad waved his gnarled hand impatiently. “He killed that woman, plain and simple. And his son ain’t much better.”
Vivi Ann felt as shocked by that as when he’d slapped her all those years ago. She stared at this man whom she’d once loved as much as Dallas, as much as Noah, and felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. Had she imagined him once or had he changed, been twisted into who he’d become by loss or disappointment? She knew how that could happen, how emptiness could reshape you. “That’s my son you’re talking about. Your grandson.” She moved toward her father, studying him. The lines on his face had become deep valleys; heavy lids hooded his dark eyes. “When Mom died, I saw you crying,” she said quietly, feeling the memory of that night all around her. “You were by her bed.”
He said nothing, didn’t admit or deny, and suddenly Vivi Ann questioned the validity of a memory she’d always taken for granted.
“All these years I thought it was romantic, but the truth was right in front of me all the time. Aurora saw it first. Winona tries not to believe it. And airheaded Vivi never saw it until now. If you
were
crying, it wasn’t for the reason I thought. You don’t know a damn thing about love, do you?”
“If you’re talkin’ about that Indian—”
“Enough,” Vivi Ann snapped at him, surprised to see him recoil at the force of her voice. “I won’t let you talk about him.”
Before Dad could answer, the door burst open. She heard footsteps thundering through the house and a voice calling out her name.
Aurora came into the family room. “Vivi Ann,” she said. “I just saw the news. Are you okay?”
Vivi Ann looked at her father, and in that last, quick glimpse, she felt the final brick in her childhood wall tumble free. For the first time, she wasn’t just looking at him; she was seeing him. “I feel sorry for you,” she said, noticing how he flinched.
Walking past him, she linked arms with Aurora. Together they walked through the house and out into the salmony-pink early evening.
“What the hell was that about?”
“He’s an asshole,” Vivi Ann said.
Aurora grinned. “It’s about time you figured that out.”
“How did I miss it?”
“We see what we want to see.”
Vivi Ann hugged her sister, whispering, “Thanks for coming over.”
“How are you?”
“I knew this would happen. Hoped otherwise, maybe, but I knew.”
“And Noah?”
Vivi Ann sighed. “He won’t handle the news well. He let himself believe.”
“What will you say to him?”
The idea of the conversation was overwhelming. “I don’t know. Words are cheap when you’re waiting.” She cut herself off, unable to finish that thought. “I guess I’ll tell him I love him. What else is there?”
I hardly had time to get amped up over the news that my dad’s DNA didn’t match the sample from the crime scene when Aunt Winona tore the shit out of everything by saying that the prosecutors were fighting to keep him in prison
.