“I know her better than you do,” Walter had said, which was infuriating. He seemed to think he was closer, in some ways, to this woman than he was to Barbara. You don’t know Eliza Benedict, she wanted to tell him. You know a girl, one who hasn’t existed for years. And you might not even have known her, as it turns out. Barbara didn’t like Eliza Benedict and would give anything if they didn’t need her. She had disliked her the first time she saw her, walking down the street with that ugly dog. She had resented her…calm. This was a woman who clearly had no problem relaxing. Barbara had wanted to yell at her from the car: “A man’s going to die because of your testimony. But he’s not the same man who committed those crimes. You are killing a ghost, a phantom. How do you sleep at night? How can you live with yourself? You probably want him to die, but no court would give him death for what he did to you.”
She muttered “Namaste” but didn’t bow her head to the teacher. Barbara rolled up her mat and rushed out into the world, her muscles supple and stretched, her mind seething. Forty-seven days. They had forty-seven days to get to the governor and petition for a commutation. Forty-seven days to break down a shoddy little story that had somehow managed to stand, all these years, a child’s rickety tree house that should have fallen to ruin long ago. Forty-seven days to pry something out of Elizabeth Lerner that she might not even realize she had. It was like that child in that movie wandering around with stamps worth millions while grown-ups died. What if they had to hire a hypnotist, or some other professional? Barbara needed to go online, she needed another cup of coffee, she needed to see if Jared Garrett had returned her latest e-mail.
27
TRUDY TACKETT HATED THE WORD privilege. It was tricky, loaded, another benign word that had been twisted into an insult. It now was some comfortable zone above the fray, life lived at an altitude so rarefied that one didn’t even know the fray existed.
But Trudy had always been aware that she was fortunate-in her family, in her family’s wealth. She was aware that she and Terry lived in a charmed universe, where there was little worry about money, even when they had to contemplate up to four college tuitions. But they were not extravagant or showy people, especially by the standards of Middleburg. She looked at price tags. Sometimes. And she had never taken their good fortune for granted. That was what galled her. She had been grateful in her prayers, aware of the luck in which her life was steeped. Even when she had the string of miscarriages, she had not railed against God, had not asked Why me? In the wake of Holly’s death, she had turned to the church for strength, praying for the courage to find some kind of meaning in it all. Father Trahearne had recommended the book of Job. Which, in retrospect, was the beginning of the end of Trudy’s life as a true Catholic.
But, no, she had never used money, and never expected special treatment because of it. Trudy had always felt vaguely embarrassed by the perks of money-boarding an airplane first because one was in business class, for example. That seemed a little gauche to her. But then she met a problem that all the money in the world couldn’t solve, and her ideas began to change. She and Terry didn’t pay for Walter Bowman’s prosecution, which meant they also had relatively little say. Oh, everyone was nice. It was the dawn-flowering?-of the victims’ rights movement, with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Parents of Murdered Children chapters. There was no doubt in Trudy’s mind that everyone, from the sheriff’s deputy who had found Holly’s body to the lowliest clerk in the prosecutor’s office, cared about Holly almost as much as if they had known her in life. That’s how amazing her daughter was. Not even death could vanquish her charisma. It helped that the Tackett family had been early adapters, in terms of video, and had hours of those old clunky VHS tapes of Holly. They had played an edited clip, during the closing arguments, and Walter Bowman’s attorney had barely objected. Even he, Trudy believed, understood how extraordinary Holly was. Later, the new attorney, the unfortunately super-capable Jefferson Blanding, had argued the videos were introduced improperly and should have been screened only during sentencing, not at the actual trial. In hindsight, it would have been better if Blanding had been Bowman’s attorney all along. The first one’s incompetence had caused them all sorts of problems and delays. In a state more lenient than Virginia, it might have resulted in the death penalty being vacated altogether.
So-privilege, money. They were not things of which Trudy had ever availed herself. Until the day that a young clerk at Sussex had called Terry out of the blue and said she was the person who read all of Walter’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, to make sure it met the prison’s standards.
“Is there something specific we should know?” Terry had asked.
“Oh no,” the woman had assured him. “He’s careful. He understands the rules and he wouldn’t violate them. But the women who write him-they’re all over the map. I mean, there’s nothing that interesting now. But there might be. You never know.”
“Interesting?”
“Who’s on his call list, for example. Whether he thinks he has a valid shot at an appeal. I mean, all the lawyer stuff-that’s in person or on the phone, strictly confidential. That’s a right that can’t be tampered with. But when Walter turns around and tells someone else what’s going on-that’s not protected.”
Trudy had picked up the extension at Terry’s invitation. It was hard for her not to break in, explain to Terry what was going on. She’s inside, she wants a bribe, she’ll tell us what we need to know. Since Holly’s murder, Trudy had learned that Terry, like his daughter, was dangerously trusting. She had to be the vigilant one, the mean one, the cynic.
“If you knew,” the woman continued, “how little they pay us to work here. It’s really kind of shocking.” The voice had a youthful twang, yet Trudy believed it had to be someone older, someone who had put in enough time in state government and was ready to play the angles. Did she make this offer to the victims of every man on death row? Granted, it wasn’t a large population, and as Trudy had learned, most victims were as poor as the perpetrators. But even if this clerk picked up ten, twenty dollars a month from five families, that would be quite the little stipend.
“We would appreciate,” Terry said carefully, “any help you could give us.”
“Same here,” the woman said. “Why don’t you write me? I’ll give you my PO box.”
The first month, Terry had sent twenty-five dollars, in cash, and they had received a rather perfunctory report back. The next month, he sent an American Express gift card of $100, and the report lengthened considerably. Yet, over the years, the information hadn’t amounted to much. Walter was not as loose with details about his legal situation as the clerk had led them to believe, although one of his correspondents, Barbara LaFortuny, was more reliably indiscreet. And it was distressing to be told of the women who wrote him what could only be called love letters. What was wrong with people? With women? Trudy couldn’t imagine men writing lovelorn letters to female murderers.
It was more distressing still to hear that Walter and Elizabeth had corresponded and that it had somehow slipped through their source’s net. “We spot-check,” she had defended herself, when called on this oversight. “And her letter might have arrived on a day when I wasn’t working. But I can swear to you up and down that he did not send any letters to Elizabeth Lerner from this facility. We would have been on that like white on rice.”
“But she’s not Elizabeth Lerner,” Terry had pointed out to their source, careful not to offend, but also perturbed at what thousands of dollars had failed to buy. “She’s Eliza Benedict.”