Family ties. Even as distant as these are, Sarah must feel them. How odd! Yet, is it? She must have a hundred questions about her own racial past. Now, she has a connection however slight, right on campus.
“I still believe him, too,” I say, encouragingly.
“I take it you heard this from another cheerleader.” If I can get someone to testify, this case might be back in business.
“Dad,” Sarah blurts, “I’m sworn to secrecy! I’ve violated a confidence telling you this.”
“The rest of Dade’s life is at stake,” I press her.
“This may be crucial evidence in the case. It would be horribly unfair to Dade if the case turned on this point and it never got presented to the jury.”
“Don’t make me do this!” Sarah says, her voice anguished.
“You have to, babe,” I scold her. I have no qualms about leaning on my own daughter. She should have told me weeks ago.
“I need the names of everybody you’ve talked to.”
Sarah, her voice now choked with tears, says, “I’ve got to talk to them first.”
Her tears always get to me. I know I’m putting her in a bind. Yet, it is wrong for her to sit on this information.
“I understand,” I say.
“Just let me know as soon as possible.
I’ll be in Fayetteville tomorrow afternoon.”
I make her promise to call me back as soon as she can, and then I go in to Dan’s office to talk this over with him.
For the last month Clan has been disappearing during the day. I know he is still seeing Gina, but today, it appears, he is actually doing some work for a change. He puts down his Dictaphone as soon as I mention I have some juicy gossip about the case.
“What would be the possible relevance to Robin’s allegation that she was raped by Dade?” I ask, after going through Sarah’s story.
As he thinks, Dan’s right forefinger wanders up his face but fortunately misses his nose and comes to rest be-low his eye.
“Maybe she was trying to make her professor jealous,” he muses, “and she went to the hottest guy she knew.”
“With a black athlete on a southern campus?” I ask, unable to accept this scenario. I sit down across from him.
“Maybe this professor knocked her up, and she wanted to get an abortion but needed an excuse, so she claimed Dade raped her.”
Clan shakes his head.
“Why wouldn’t she just get one?” he scoffs.
“It’s no big deal.”
“It is,” I say, “if you’re raised to think abortion is a sin, and the only thing that justifies it would be rape or saving the mother’s life. Robin’s parents are big Baptists. She wouldn’t be able to admit to them she got pregnant.
That’s too big a scandal. But if they knew, they’d make her have the baby. So she lets herself get into a situation with Dade and convinces herself that he has raped her, which justifies an abortion.”
Clan rocks back and forth in his chair like a child.
“You’ve got a vivid imagination,” he says, tacitly admitting I may be onto something.
“Do you have any proof?”
“Not a shred,” I admit, realizing that up until now Robin has been able to create an image of herself that has been nauseatingly pristine. I still know almost nothing about her. That’s going to change. I need to get back up to Fayetteville and start to work on this case again.
I go back to my office and call Dade and, for a change, get him in his room.
“I understand Sarah called you today,” I begin, not at all sure how he will react.
“I didn’t know she was going to. She’s kind of impulsive sometimes.”
“She’s all right,” Dade says.
“At least she told me you went to Bear Creek. Of course, I already knew.”
“I figured you did” I say awkwardly. In the two conversations I’ve had with him since we came back, I never quite knew how to bring it up.
“Mama said she had told you, but you didn’t believe her!” he says.
I should have had this conversation with him long be fore now, but I kept putting it off.
“All my life I had been told it wasn’t true,” I say weakly.
“I needed to find out for myself whether it was or not.”
“Your daughter says it was her idea to go over there.”
I shift uncomfortably in my chair. They had a longer conversation than Sarah led me to believe.
“That’s true.”
“You see why I don’t want to take a lie detector test? I can’t trust white people.”
Who does he think will be on the jury? We have been over this a dozen times.
“Then trust the polygraph: it’s a machine; it just records changes in your body as you answer questions.”
“You’ve said that it’s not what the machine does that’s important; it’s what the man says the answers mean.”
The Man. How do we get past that? I switch subjects and tell him I am coming up tomorrow.
“Have you heard anything about Robin in the last few days that you haven’t already told me?” I ask, determined not to put words in his mouth. I will save Sarah’s story until I’ve talked to her again.
“Anything that could give us a motive as to why she would say you raped her?”
“Not really,” Dade says, sounding genuinely perplexed
“I keep asking, but nobody I talked to knows her that good.”
Dade and his sources are out of the loop. The only black faces in the Chi Omega House are the ones who clean up after the whites. I tell him to call me at the Ozark tomorrow if he hears anything. His last exam is not until Friday. Sometimes, it is hard to forget these kids are really in school.
My first stop the next afternoon is Jefferson Memorial Hospital. My sophomore year I broke my arm playing touch football one fall and spent a long afternoon in its emergency room. Things are relatively slow this afternoon, and after only a half hour of searching and waiting, I sit down with the nurse who talked with Robin Perry the morning she came in to be examined.
She had been out of town the day of the administrative hearing conducted by the university, and I am eager to check her out. A tall, gangly, dishwater blonde in her early forties, wearing blue hospital scrubs, Joan Chestnut isn’t particularly eager to talk to me, but does so after I show her the release on the state crime lab report form that Robin had signed. In the corner of a break room shared by two other employees who are watching a daytime soap, I whisper, “Do you remember how Robin Perry seemed to you the morning she came in and reported she had been raped?”
Ms. Chestnut gives me the patient smile of a woman used to dealing with attorneys.
“Her reactions were quite consistent for a rape victim,” she says, slowly and deliberately as if she already sees herself being cross examined
“She was very articulate besides being angry. I remember her in particular because even with all that she had been through she was a beautiful girl.”
I hand her the section of the nurse’s notes. In it she has noted that the patient was “calm.”
“Why wouldn’t she be upset?”
She flips through the entire document and hands it back to me.
“I’ve done ER over twenty years, and I’ve seen scores of rape victims. I’ve seen women numb, in shock, and then some who were relatively composed even minutes after an attack had occurred. It depends entirely on the individual. If she was raped the night before, she’d had time to work through the initial shock.”
“So you have no doubt Robin Perry was coerced into having sex?” I ask, over a commercial for breath mints.
“That’s not something you can ever know with any certainty, but just because she wasn’t hysterical doesn’t mean anything,” Ms. Chestnut responds, remaining un ruffled.
“The girl said she had been crying the entire night, and I believed her. I could look at her and tell she hadn’t had any sleep.”
Even though she isn’t saying anything particularly damaging, this woman, unlike the Rape Crisis counselor, is going to be helpful to the prosecution. She radiates such competence that a jury is going to believe anything that comes out of her mouth.